Companies desire to stay relevant and innovative and oftentimes wait at other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

Even so, a vital component to growth is at every business's fingertips — their customers.

Yep, customers are the ones with the ability to decide the longevity and progress of your business. Happy customers result in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and make reach equally they spread the word in their social circles.

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The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that result in happy customers is past understanding and meeting customer needs.

In this article, yous'll learn:

  • The Definition of Customer Needs
  • The Types of Customer Needs
  • How to Place Customer Needs
  • What a Client Needs Assay Is
  • How to Solve for Your Customers' Needs
  • Types of Customer Service

An example of customer demand takes place every day around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to experience hunger (need) and make up one's mind to purchase tiffin. The type of food, the location of the eating house, and the amount of time the service will take are all factors to how individuals make up one's mind to satisfy the need.

Customer-centric companies know that solving for client needs and exceeding expectations along the manner is how to bulldoze healthy business growth and foster practiced relationships with the people your company serves.

Although customer centricity is not a new concept, the right steps to achieve a customer service focus are still hazy.

HubSpot Culture Code Presentation Customer Lawmaking: Creating a Company Customers Love from HubSpot

Creating a customer-centric company that truly listens to customer needs can be daunting, and there's a steep learning curve if you haven't paid close attention to customers before.

So to steer you in the right direction, here's a beginner's guide that defines the types of client needs to look for, unpacks common barriers that prevent companies from fulfilling their customers' needs, and discloses solutions to starting time improving client service.

Below are the virtually common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one some other to drive a purchasing decision.

16 Most Common Types of Customer Needs

Production Needs

i. Functionality

Customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their trouble or desire.

ii. Price

Customers have unique budgets with which they tin purchase a product or service.

3. Convenience

Your product or service needs to be a user-friendly solution to the office your customers are trying to meet.

4. Experience

The experience using your production or service needs to be piece of cake — or at least clear — and then as non to create more work for your customers.

5. Design

Along the lines of feel, the product or service needs a slick design to make information technology relatively like shooting fish in a barrel and intuitive to use.

6. Reliability

The product or service needs to reliably part equally advertised every time the customer wants to employ it.

7. Functioning

The product or service needs to perform correctly and so the customer tin accomplish their goals.

8. Efficiency

The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer past streamlining an otherwise fourth dimension-consuming process.

9. Compatibility

The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.

Service Needs

10. Empathy

When your customers arrive bear on with client service, they want empathy and understanding from the people assisting them.

xi. Fairness

From pricing to terms of service to contract length, customers wait fairness from a visitor.

12. Transparency

Customers expect transparency from a company they're doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.

13. Command

Customers need to feel like they're in control of the business organisation interaction from start to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn't terminate with the sale. Brand it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, conform terms, etc.

fourteen. Options

Customers need options when they're getting ready to make a purchase from a visitor. Offering a diversity of product, subscription, and payment options to provide that liberty of pick.

15. Data

Customers need data, from the moment they first interacting with your brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication and so customers accept the information they need to successfully utilize a production or service.

sixteen. Accessibility

Customers demand to be able to access your service and support teams. This means providing multiple channels for customer service. We'll talk a footling more than most these options later.

If companies can brainstorm to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention. Notwithstanding, with many types of client needs, how do you sympathise which ones utilise to your customers specifically?

"You lot've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs notably stated. "You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it."

Whether y'all sell technology or some other production or service, the underlying bulletin he'south saying here rings true.

This means understanding where they're coming from when they've chosen to brand a purchase, what expectations they're bringing to the table, and what bumps they'll encounter along the way. You can gain more than noesis virtually what your customers want using a few unlike strategies.

1. Utilise Existing Information

Nearly likely yous have some customer data already, especially if yous're using a CRM. This is the best place to commencement your search. Are there pain points or issues y'all tin glean from but looking at this customer data? Are there any patterns you can place? Taking note of who your current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better idea of where customers are coming from and if you're meeting their needs.

two. Solicit Customer Feedback

When trying to identify consumer needs, go straight to the source. This can exist done using surveys that live on your site, or sent via email. Additionally you could comport focus groups to gain more in depth insight to customer needs and their overall experience with your production or service.

three. Client Journey Mapping

To better understand and assist customers, y'all'll need to first know what phase of the customer journey they are in and what they're looking for. This is where customer journeying mapping can assistance, giving a visual representation of how customers collaborate with your brand. This practise will assistance you lot create a more proactive customer service arroyo and meliorate retention.

Featured Resources: Customer Journey Map Templates

customer-journey-map-template

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4. Input from Service Squad

In add-on to getting client feedback, it's important to consult those who piece of work with them most — your service team. They'll frequently have insights yous may non be privy to and can help you anticipate the needs of your customers too equally solve existing issues. They'll likewise be able to explain how customers are currently using your production or service and can identify any hiccups in the process.

5. Study Competitors

It'south common to study competitors when conducting market inquiry, but you should besides consider them when identifying customer needs. There might be overlap in your target audition, pregnant your make could do good from reviewing any issues competitors are experiencing and gain insight on how they went nigh fixing it. You might notice that some of their strategies would be worth implementing at your company, or find gaps in service that your company tin fill.

6. Utilise Social Media

Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in their twenty-four hour period to day. Have advantage of that by using it every bit a way to listen in on what customers are proverb about your products and your competitors. Are people asking questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assistance, or do they want new features? Using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite volition assistance you identify trends, mentions, and hashtags relevant to your brand to amend inform your strategy.

seven. Keyword Research

People turn to the internet for most things, so Google is an excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How are customers finding your make online and what are they typing into the search box to detect information technology? Doing keyword research can give y'all a broad overview of what your customers demand based on search data. Keyword research will likewise help yous optimize your site for search engines by aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.

If you pattern your process with these things in listen, you lot'll be able to uncover consumer needs at any stage of their lifecycle. You can take a deeper dive into their needs past conducting a customer needs analysis.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you need to do the following:

1. Customer Needs Analysis Survey

The client needs analysis is typically conducted by running surveys that help companies figure out their position in their respective competitive markets and how they stack up in terms of meeting their target customers' needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions about your brand and competitors, equally well as customers' product sensation and brand attitudes in general.

Questions can include:

  • Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
  • Questions asking customers to grouping your brand in with similar and/or competing brands
  • Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences for usage

You can learn more about which questions to ask in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

2. Ways-Cease Analysis

Once y'all've conducted the client needs analysis survey, you can utilise the answers to become a fuller picture of the reasons why your customers purchase from y'all, and what makes your product or service stand autonomously from your competitors'.

A means-end analysis analyzes those answers to determine the chief reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those buyer reasons can be divided into three main groups:

1. Features: A customer buys a product or service considering of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were ownership a computer, for case, they might buy it because it'due south smaller and more lightweight than other options.

two. Benefits: A customer buys a product or service considering of a benefit, real or perceived, they believe it will offer them. The client might too buy the figurer because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.

iii. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, individual values, real or perceived, they believe information technology will help them fulfill. The customer might think the reckoner volition aid them to exist more artistic or creative and unlock other personal or professional person artistic opportunities.

Equally you might imagine, these reasons for purchasing something tin can vary from client to customer, then it'due south of import to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them into these iii categories. From in that location, you can identify which of those motivating factors you're solving for, and which you can amend on to make your product or service even more competitive in the market.

iii. Customer Feedback

If you want to know what your customers think about the experience of working with your company, inquire them. Interviewing your customers and members of your service team can contribute to a customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer lifecycle.

As you gather information from your customer needs assay, it'due south of import to place the points of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journeying that provide unexpected please.

  • What can your company alter?
  • What are the elements that y'all tin can build from?
  • What parts of the experience needs to be worked on?

Request these questions tin can lead yous to valuable insights as you work to solve for your customers.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

The first step to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their shoes: If you were the customer when nosotros buy your goods, use your technology, or sign up for your services, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?

Your customer needs analysis is a good starting bespeak for getting in the mind of your client, especially when information technology comes to identifying common pain points. From there, you can build a proactive plan to implement your customer-first values throughout the client lifecycle. Hither are some tips for doing so:

1. Offer consistent company-broad messaging.

Also often customers go defenseless upwards in the "he said, she said" game of existence told a product can exercise one thing from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left with the perception that the visitor is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications across all departments is one of the best steps towards a customer-focused mindset. If the entire visitor understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, and so the letters will hands interpret to meet the customers' needs.

To become everyone on the same page, organize sales and client service meetings, transport out new product emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, and require quarterly training and seminars or staff hosted webinars to share important projects.

2. Provide instructions for like shooting fish in a barrel adoption.

Customers purchase a product because they believe it volition run across their needs and solve their problem. Withal, adoption setup stages are not always clear. If best practices aren't specified at the get-go and they don't see value right away, it'southward an uphill battle to proceeds back their trust and undo bad habits.

A well-idea-out postal service-purchase strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.

One way companies gain their customers' attention is providing in-product and email walkthroughs and instructions every bit soon as the customer receives a payment confirmation. This limits the confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate mail-purchase euphoria.

A customer education guide or noesis base is essential to evangelize proper customer adoption and avoid the 'floundering effect' when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new customer onboarding services, host live demos and webinars and include events and promotions in their e-mail signatures.

3. Build feedback loops into every phase of the process.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and it will change the manner you operate your business. Criticism often has negative connotations. However, if you flip problems to opportunities you lot tin easily ameliorate your business to fit the customer'due south needs.

Just as you solicited customer feedback in your needs analysis, yous can keep a pulse on how your customers feel at calibration with client satisfaction scores, customer surveys, exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or personal customer feedback emails.

If you're able to comprise this into a repeatable procedure, you'll never be in the dark about the state of the customer experience in your system, and you'll exist enabled to proceed improving it.

Take customer suggestions seriously and act on those recommendations to better design, product, and system glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the client feel and this mentality should trickle down to every aspect of the arrangement.

iv. Nurture client relationships.

When a customer buys a product or service, they want to utilize it right away and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a month, it'due south important to constantly think about their future needs.

Proactive relationship-edifice is essential to prevent customers from losing their mail service-buy excitement and ultimately churning. If customers stop hearing from you and you don't hear from them this tin exist a bad sign that they are about to churn.

Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service structure and advice strategies. Solve for the long-term client demand and create a customer service squad dedicated to cheque-ins and customer retentiveness, testify appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go higher up and beyond and communicate production updates and new features.

5. Solve for the correct customer needs.

Excluding customers from your cohort of business can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. However, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose yous cannot is a major footstep toward solving the right problems. All customers' needs tin can't be treated every bit and a visitor must recognize which problems they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.

To find the correct customer priorities, create heir-apparent personas and uncover consumer trends, look at client'due south long-term retention patterns, establish a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers and communicate with your ideal customer in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments and suggestions.

Successful startups, brick and mortar shops, and Fortune 500 companies alike all solve and prioritize customer needs to stay ahead and establish manufacture trends.

6. Provide great customer service.

If a problem arises, your customers want to become it resolved and feel heard in the process. This starts with being able to meet their needs with empathy, but along the style, the process for obtaining back up should exist like shooting fish in a barrel and on a channel that's convenient for them.

Some client needs are time-sensitive and require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less critical and tin can exist resolved at a more casual pace. Let'due south interruption downwards the types of client service and how each optimizes your team's power to fulfill client needs.

1. Email

Email is i of the most primal forms of client service. Information technology allows customers to fully describe their problems, and it automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers only take to explain their effect once, while reps can reference important case details without having to request boosted information.

E-mail is all-time used with customer needs that don't need to be resolved right away. Customers tin can ask their question, go back to work, and return to the instance in one case the service rep has found a solution. Unlike phones or chat, they don't have to wait idly while a rep finds them an answer.

One limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers take trouble describing their problem, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates fourth dimension-consuming roadblocks when the result is overly complex. To be condom, use email for simple problems that require a brief explanation or solution.

2. Telephone

When customers take issues that need to be answered immediately, phones are the all-time medium to use. Phones connect customers direct to reps and create a homo interaction between the customer and the business. Both parties hear each other'south tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human being element is a major cistron in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy most when at that place's a frustrated or angry client. These customers are virtually likely to churn and crave your squad to provide a personalized solution. Your team can use soft communication skills to appease the customer and foreclose costly escalations. These responses appear more than 18-carat on the phone because reps take less fourth dimension to formulate an answer.

The most common flaw with telephone support is the expect time. Customers detest existence put on hold, and it'due south a determining factor for customer churn.

3. Chat

Chat is one of the nigh flexible customer service channels. Information technology tin can solve a high volume of simple problems or provide detailed back up for complex ones. Businesses keep to prefer conversation because of its versatility as well as the improvement in efficiency it provides for customer service reps.

When it comes to solving customer needs, conversation tin can be used to solve near any problem. Simple and common questions can exist answered with chatbots that automate the customer service process. For more advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to help them diagnose and resolve problems.

The limitations of conversation are like to those of email. However, since the interaction is alive, any lack of clarity between the two parties tin drastically touch troubleshooting. As a former conversation rep, there were enough of times where I struggled to get on the same page as my client. Even though we resolved the issue, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer's feel.

4. Social Media

Social media is a relatively new customer service channel. While information technology's been around for over a decade, businesses are now beginning to adopt it every bit a viable service option. That's considering social media lets customers immediately report an event. And since that report is public, customer service teams are more motivated to resolve the customer's trouble.

Social media is an excellent channel for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crisis. When a crisis occurs, your customers' product and service needs become the chief concern of your organization. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management programme, your team can continue to fulfill customer needs during critical situations.

Social media is different from other types of customer service considering it empowers the customer the most. Customers tend to accept more urgent needs and wait instant responses from your accounts. While this type of service presents an enormous opportunity, information technology also places tremendous pressure on your reps to fulfill client demand. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before you offering routine support.

v. In Person

As the oldest form of customer service, you're probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who accept brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living almost their locations. This fulfills a convenience need every bit customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it dorsum to the company through an online service.

In-person customer service is corking for businesses with strong service personnel. Without dedicated employees, your customer service team won't be able to fulfill your customers' product or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond client service.

5. Call Back Service

Sometimes it'due south non most how quickly your business organisation tin provide a solution, but rather how efficient you can make the service experience. For example, say a customer has a simple question about pricing that should only accept a few minutes to answer, merely their expected wait fourth dimension for phone service is over fifteen minutes. Rather than making this customer spend more time on hold than really speaking with a representative, you can offer a retrieve service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the next rep is available.

Another state of affairs where this type of service comes in handy is with text-based mediums like electronic mail and live chat. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and tin lead to friction if the example isn't transferred to another platform. Having a call up service available allows customers to schedule fourth dimension to speak straight with reps, specially when they experience like they aren't gaining progress on their case. Instead of having to create a completely new support ticket, call backs seamlessly transition the chat to a more effective channel.

six. Customer Self-Service

Self-service teaches your customers how to solve bug independently from your support team. Rather than calling or emailing your business whenever they need assistance, customers can navigate to your knowledge base and access resources that assistance them troubleshoot issues on their own. Not merely does this get customers faster solutions, only it also saves them from having to open a ticket with your team. This makes the feel feel much less like a formal back up case and more like a quick roadblock that your customers can handle on their own.

Cocky-service is advantageous for your squad's productivity as well. If more customers apply your knowledge base, less will phone call or email your team for help. This volition gratuitous your reps up more to focus on complex service cases that require a longer time commitment.

7. Interactive Virtual Assistant

Chatbots are no longer novelties that customer service teams utilise to bear witness off their technological prowess. At present, they're integral pieces of back up strategies as they act more like interactive virtual assistants than simple, question-and-respond bots. Today'south chatbots are powered past innovative AI engineering that interprets customer needs and tin can walk people through footstep-by-step solutions.

interactive virtual assistant for customer service in a car

Prototype Source

The image above shows a perfect example of how useful today's virtual assistants tin can be. In this situation, the client is learning how to use their new motorcar — a product that typically offers a lot of unique features and an all-encompassing operator's manual. To help new users navigate the car'due south bones features, this brand offers an augmented reality tour hosted by a virtual assistant. The user but has to roll their photographic camera over unlike parts of the automobile and the chatbot will tell them everything they need to know.

Interactive features like this show that you're investing in more than simply product development. Y'all're thinking virtually how you'll back up customers and what services you tin adopt that will make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this type of customer service and it tin often be a reason why many volition return to your business.

8. Integrated Customer Service

Integrated service tin exist described equally all of the petty things your brand does to remove hurting points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them about major updates or announcements, and some of information technology is reactive, like pinging a customer success manager whenever someone submits negative feedback to your team.

Even though these pain points may seem modest, they add upward over time if left unchecked. The all-time way to remove most of these points of friction is to adopt automation as you abound your customer base. Automated customer service tools like ticketing systems, aid desks, and workflows assistance your team keep pace with increasing customer demand. This technology lets you maintain that same level of personalized customer service even every bit more people accomplish out to your business for support.

There's no "best" type of client service. When used together, each medium compliments the other and optimizes your overall performance. This creates an omni-aqueduct experience for your customers which volition keep them coming dorsum for more than.

What do customers want from a typical client service situation?

It's important to note that customer service is reactive. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you're providing excellent client service.

  • Listen: While it'due south normal to want to chop-chop become customers in and out of your service queue, information technology's important to actually listen to what their issue is before giving them a solution. They may have a more nuanced upshot that a boilerplate response can't provide. There's nothing more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn't actually solve their event. Automation is great, but just ensure that it is helping customers.
  • Don't Brand Customers Repeat Information: No one wants to answer or submit the aforementioned questions repeatedly. Non only is it inconvenient, it shows the client that no one is listening or paying attention. If you have a ticketing system, review the client's history or contour to become familiar with their situation earlier responding.
  • Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written communication and tin can unintentionally come across as cold. To convey some warmth you could introduce phrases like "I'd exist happy to help with that," or "Hope your day/calendar week is going well."
  • Exist Responsive: Not only exercise customers want their problem solved, only they prefer information technology'south resolved quickly. If yous can't solve their issue easily when they offset contact you lot, set expectations around when information technology volition be resolved (24hrs, 2 business concern days?) and proceed them in the loop. Don't ghost them.

Each customer has their own unique needs, but at that place are a few that are universal.

1. Simple Solutions

While your product or service may run using a complex set of algorithms and procedures, customers don't need to know that. They merely desire a solution that resolves their result with as little fuss as possible. Proceed your messaging simple and focus on how your make will solve the customer's trouble.

two. Personalization

Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Use their proper noun in communications and tailor your messaging to the heir-apparent persona they most closely align with. Adding a personal touch when it comes to marketing lets customers know that their needs are at the forefront of your brand'due south mission.

iii. Value

Does your production or service outperform the contest or provide a more price effective solution for consumers? If and then, drive that point home in your messaging. Explain how and why they should choose your product or service over others on the market. How will customers do good when they choose your make?

4. Transparency

One of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers is to exist transparent. No ane wants to feel duped past disingenuous, bait-and-switch ad. Be honest well-nigh your production or service'south capabilities and pricing whenever possible.

5. Accessibility

While it is e'er encouraged to empower customers to help themselves with features like a knowledge base of operations, getting actress assistance when they demand it shouldn't be difficult. Whether it'south phone, email, or conversation support, it's important to be responsive to consumer needs. At the beginning of this commodity we identified accessibility equally one of the most common types of customer needs. If your squad is unresponsive to their needs, customers will trade your brand in for a competitor that fills the gap.

Understanding Client Needs and Expectations

One of the best things you can do is continue learning based on the types of issues that come up so that you lot tin can proactively address consumer needs and go on improving on the experience.

While the process requires quite a bit of legwork, the results will be instrumental in the success of your make. Once you understand client needs and expectations, you tin work towards delighting them with your product.

Editor'southward note: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

customer profile templates

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Originally published Jan 12, 2022 vii:00:00 AM, updated Feb 28 2022