How to Tailor Your Business to Suit Your Customer Base – Anna Clarke
One of the key success factors in the modern environment is the capability to meet the needs of customers. Unfortunately, up to 54% of US consumers were not satisfied with their experiences and thought that the companies they were purchasing from needed substantial improvements to their business models.
While Amazon-level flexibility remains an unattainable technological marvel for most smaller practitioners, the examples of these industry leaders may serve as a powerful motivation to improve your clients’ satisfaction through logical planning and thoughtful experimentation.
We hope that the following recommendations will provide guidance on how you can tailor your business to suit your customer base.
#1. Crunch the numbers
With big data opportunities becoming the word of the street in the corporate world, the same principles can be successfully applied by smaller companies. Record all purchases made by your consumers and search for common patterns.
Does your retail store attract more visitors between 6 p.m. and 8 p.m. on working days? What are the websites producing the maximal amount of downstream traffic to your e-commerce platform?
Can you identify your ‘customer type’ in terms of age, occupation or purchasing preferences? Data analysis may be the most effective and cost-efficient way for small and medium businesses to learn more about their consumers without being intrusive.
Remember that you also need to take action afterward by employing an additional cashier for busy hours or implementing a better cross-platform code to make your website work equally well on iOS and Android devices.
#2. Ask for feedback…
A loud and angry customer calling the manager is worth ten silent customers who leave your store to never return again. Getting straightforward and sincere criticisms of your work may feel like a severe punch in the ego for some managers.
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Keep in mind that this may also be viewed as an eye-opening experience since the person being extremely disappointed with your service actually wants to love your company and really wishes it to change to the best.
Such criticisms are also much more transparent than big data analysis where the interpretation of the findings may be more difficult than sincerely asking for clarifications and providing gratitude for the provided explanations.
A good idea for small and medium businesses is to ask for feedback openly through social media. Afterward, you can publish practical results to demonstrate how these recommendations were implemented and gain greater trust from your followers.
… but do not demand it
While customer feedback may be highly valuable for your improvement, most businesses somehow believe that they have the right to demand it from consumers through endless follow-up messages, pop-up windows, and other intrusive requests.
Sincerely speaking, even extremely satisfied clients have no motivation to spend 15-20 minutes of their time helping your business prosper. Make sure that you create viable incentives if you really want to collect their feedback and learn more about the ways to improve customer experiences.
#4. What grows up must come down
As the demands of your clients and their sheer numbers increase, the first idea coming to your mind is to grow your business proportionally. While there is nothing wrong with this strategy, it is always useful to test its potential long-term outcomes before investing additional resources.
As the Pareto principle suggests, not all growth types are created equal. Your big data analysis has demonstrated the key customer segments, the most popular services, and the key problem areas of your business. All investments must be ideally focused on these areas.
Similarly, you may want to ‘cut off’ some elements of your business that do not produce comparable results.
#5. Personalization is the key
In both B2B and B2C environments, consumers seek to be recognized and treated in a more personal and productive way. As of 2018, up to 91% of all customers preferred the brands that recognised their needs and provided unique promotional offerings.
A good start in this dimension is to identify what specific benefits you can provide to your loyal consumers (discounts, limited-time offerings, bundle sales, free delivery on selected items, etc.).
Afterwards, you can use the accumulated data or the information provided by consumers at registration to make their personal business experiences more satisfying and unique.
Finding a fine balance between the benefits of standardization and the adaptation to customer needs may be a tricky endeavor even for experienced businesses. The key takeaway of this article is to avoid popular marketing trends and start with your consumer in mind.
Learning more about your customer base and using big data and feedback to tackle specific limitations may be substantially more effective than applying highly generic principles used by every other company in the market.
A customer journey is a path of experimentation and finding the common language while the recommendations provided earlier should serve as general directions.
- How to Tailor Your Business to Suit Your Customer Base – Anna Clarke - August 13, 2019
