Do You Know Your Customers?

Ideally, totally understanding what your customers need is the ultimate goal of a business owners. Getting to the point where you can quickly identifying how to meet their needs may take time, research and effort but it is worth it in the end.

Image: SXC.hu

According to an article entitled, “Do You Know What Your Audience Wants?” by Lesley Spencer Pyle for Entreprenuer.com, “asking your audience whether you’re meeting their needs is an important step in determining whether you’re hitting the target.”

There are several ways that you can do this. Below are examples:

• Initial customer survey: ask potential and new customers about your services and how they feel their experience with your business with help them continue to come back to you.
• Website poll: add a key question with select answers that will help you conduct research regarding your services and your website.
• Customer feedback: ask your current and past customers to provide you feedback to a list of question that you give them.
• Targeted Internet research: either conduct your own targeted research project or hire a company to do it so that you can target specific customers and receive their feedback. The targeted customers may either be those who you have been able to repeatedly sell to or those who no longer purchase from you. It would be helpful to find out why you have been successful or not.

These are just a few of the different ways that you can apply to finding out what your customers need. Once you get the results, the next thing you should do is to determine if you need to make changes in how you do business according to the results that you receive.

Sometime all it may take is making a little change like adding a customer feedback form to your website or a larger change such as adding a way for your customers to chat with you via your website when they have questions. I would like to know additional ways that you would suggest how you can get customer feedback.