Are you facing situations where you are losing business and don’t know the reason? Do you wonder if you just had magic wand using which you could know what exactly your customer wants?
Or wonder why the customer who used to buy stopped buying? If you are facing any of the above, there is a way to know the answer.
It is fact, one of the hardest things in business is knowing what the buyer wants. This is all the more important during the launch of a new product or service. Because knowing what the customer wants can give that crucial information to tailor the product, messaging and everything.
But the reality is, it is not easy to understand what customer want. It is proven that what customer say when asked vs how they behave when asked to purchase are totally different. This is the reason why sometimes running survey’s are not useful.
But if you are managing a business with active customers and have dedicated sales teams and customer service teams, then things are much easier. Your sales and customer support teams have keys to question of what customer wants.
The only thing required is asking right questions to the team members. Let us explore what insights to get customer these teams
Questions to customer service team
Customer service departments generally see the good, the bad, and the ugly side of the customers and all of that data is useful!
Whenever a customer is complaining or praising you at customer service level they are giving what they think. Unlike in survey’s where customers are worried about being observed and end up giving wrong data (called a Hawthorne Effect), when talking to a customer support team, that is not the case.
Pretty much, you’re getting detailed insights around what your customer truly thinks!
You are getting people to speak when they are most critical, and this can help fuel future feature
Talk to your customer service department weekly and ask the following questions:
- What are the top five questions you get from customers?
- What are your answers to these questions?
- Are there any particular aspects of X that people don’t understand?
- What aspects of X do people like the most/least?
- Have we missed anything important? Anything to add?
Knowing these issues will tell you where to start focusing your optimization/improvement efforts with several new ideas to try.
Questions to sales team
This dataset will tell you the reasons customers buy or don’t buy from your company.
During the sales phase, you’re going to uncover things that worked surprisingly well and other things that absolutely tanked.
This type of user data will shed light on the messaging you should improve and the stuff you need to highlight more. This can be used for web page optimization, new product updates, better sales communication as well as new ad collateral and campaigns.
Ask your sales team these five questions regularly to get the most out of your sales inquiries:
- What are the top five questions you get from prospects?
- What are your answers to these questions?
- What is the biggest barrier to keeping people from buying the product?
- Are there any selling points that work particularly well (or not so well)? If so, which one(s)?
- Have we missed anything important? Anything to add?
If you have a short sales cycle, recommend asking these questions weekly. If you have a longer sales cycle you might want to ask monthly.
Summary
As we said at the beginning, knowing what customer wants is a continuous process and requires various ways to understand. In some businesses, the customer explicitly mentions what they want but many businesses the needs, wants are not clear and they are vague.
It is not always about logical needs, it is also about the emotional wants of the buyer which are difficult to capture. As explained above, the customer support team and sales team have already tons of answers it can be leveraged.
