The best way to improve your business is to understand your customers. You should know their demographics, their habits, and their opinion of your company. When you know these things, you can really give them what they want.
How do you find out these things, though? There are many tools now that can collect data about what your customers want from your business. We’re going to go over some things you could start doing today to find out more about your clients’ needs from sentiment analysis to face to face meetings.
Sentiment Analysis
Sentiment analysis is a process that interprets the tone of texts as positive, negative, or neutral. This can be used on any site that allows reviews, including social media. By doing this, you can find out if people are saying good or bad things about your business, and where to change from it.
Doing a sentiment analysis will save you a lot of time and energy because you won’t have to read all the comments; you’ll get a summary afterward. However, there are some faults in this system, so you’ll have to double-check.
For example, when a customer writes that the food “ wasn’t that good,” the system will see “good” and think it’s a positive statement, although the writer means that the food was bad, which is negative. Sentiment analysis is an excellent way to get an idea of how people feel, but it’s not always a perfect interpretation.
Track Activity Online
We live in a world where many purchases and advertisements are made online. You can track how your customers interact with your website and social media sites to know more about what they like. If they’re looking at one area of your website more than other parts, you’ll know that’s what they’re interested in.
On social media, there are ways to see how many shares, likes, and views a specific post gets. You can see which ones are the highest, and then understand that’s the type of content your clients want to see or know more about. If it’s regarding a product, then you know that they like it!
With your website, if there are a lot of people leaving after only clicking once, you could have a problem, meaning it takes too long to load or is confusing. These are all ways to use your consumer’s behavior to know what they want more of and what to fix.
Conduct Surveys
This is one of the most straightforward ways to get customer feedback. There are a variety of surveys you can give out to your customers. Many businesses add a link after a client completes the check out process, or you can have it on the bottom of your receipts.
Net Promoter Score surveys are when you ask a question on how likely a customer is to do something, and they rate it 1 to 10. These are easy to give out because, for clients, they don’t require a lot of effort to complete.
Another type is called a Customer Satisfaction survey, which is when there are many categories, and the client has to choose if they were delighted in that aspect all the way to very unsatisfied. This is another straightforward type of survey.
Some other ways you can conduct surveys are Customer Effort Scores, Post-Purchase, or Product Development.
Send an Email
Emails are a great way to reach people nowadays. We all have one from work, school, or as a way to stay connected to friends and family. You can get their emails by requiring it to make purchases with you or through social media.
When you email them, make sure it’s as personal as possible. Always address them by name and maybe something about their buying habits with you. You can ask them directly how they feel about your business or ways to improve. This is also a perfect opportunity to insert a survey for your customers to take.
Meet Them Face to Face
This is the most personal way to connect with your clients. You can invite your best customers to an event and socialize with them there. Or you can simply ask them while they are at your shop.
It can just be as simple as, “Are you enjoying your experience today at the store?” See how they respond and go from there. If you’re the owner or manager, it will show your customers that you genuinely care about their experience with your company. This will create a good rapport and reputation with them.
The Bottom Line
Depending on if you want to take a more analytical approach or personal approach to finding out what your customers want, there are many ways to do it.
You can try sentiment analysis, track their behavior, provide surveys, email them, or talk to your clients face to face to understand what they want from your business.
