Do you know what your customers need and want? What are three things that all consumers desire?
Building customer loyalty is all about going above and beyond to create the ideal customer experience. To do that, you have to pay attention to the customer, even if they don’t explicitly say what they want or need.
Continue reading to learn how to satisfy customer needs and wants.
How to Fulfill Basic Customer Desires
According to Horst Schulze, there are three things that all customers desire, and employees should focus on fulfilling these desires.
1) Customers want your product or service to be free of functional flaws; it should do everything they need it to do. For instance, if you run a massage parlor, your customers should feel completely relaxed and pain-free by the end of their massage.
2) Customers want to be served as quickly as possible. Slow service is enough to ruin a customer’s experience even if it’s otherwise positive.
3) Customers want to receive your product or service from someone who seems like they genuinely care about their feelings, argues Schulze. He stresses that this third factor—personal care—often matters most of all when learning how to satisfy customer needs and wants. If your employees make the customer feel valued and welcomed, it sets a positive tone that can make up for potential mistakes or flaws. For example, suppose workers at a hardware store remember a customer’s name and the products they usually buy. In that case, the customer will have an exceptional experience even if the store doesn’t have everything they need in stock.
| Personal Care Is a Competitive Advantage In Linchpin, Seth Godin explains that in nearly every industry, countless businesses do everything they can to optimize their ability to fulfill the first two desires: They want to offer goods and services that meet minimum customer expectations and can be delivered quickly. But market leaders like Amazon and Walmart have built powerful systems capable of satisfying these desires, making it essentially impossible for other businesses to find a competitive advantage by pursuing the same goals. However, Godin asserts that businesses can win customers from these competitors by building emotional relationships with these customers (validating Schulze’s opinion that personal care is the most important customer desire). To do this, employees should see their work as a gift (rather than an obligation), by going beyond the minimum of their job description. He also advises that employees commit to being their authentic selves at work. For example, a mechanic at an auto repair shop could go out of their way to educate customers about basic car maintenance instead of just fixing the current issue. If the mechanic showed genuine concern for their customers’ ability to affordably maintain their vehicles, the customers would feel grateful and gladly return to that auto repair shop. |
Discover Your Customers’ Unique Desires
Schulze notes that beyond the three basic desires, each customer has a unique set of wants and needs. Employees should ask customers what they can do to help, then listen carefully to try and understand what they want, even if the customers struggle to communicate it. Their true desires may not be exactly what they say they are. For example, imagine a customer comes into an electronics store asking about a specific TV model. After talking to them, the employee realizes that what they really want is a large screen with great picture quality for their living room home theater setup. The employee guesses that a projector would better suit their needs and recommends that the customer buy one of those instead.
To please your average customer as much as possible, you’ll have to conduct research. Schulze advises gathering extensive customer feedback through recurring surveys. Then, use this data to tailor your product or service accordingly.
| Discover Customers’ Desires by Asking Them About Their Lives In The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick also contends that consumers typically can’t articulate what they desire from your business. He elaborates that this is because they aren’t aware of what they truly want. Furthermore, he warns that if you try to uncover a customer’s desires through conversation, they may lie to you to spare your feelings. For instance, if a server asks a customer at a restaurant how their food is, they may say it’s delicious to avoid making a fuss, then never return to the restaurant because they received overcooked chicken. For this reason, instead of directly asking customers what they want, ask them about their daily lives. Learn everything you can about their goals, the problems they face, and how they currently try to solve them. This way, you can tailor your business to help them get what they want most. While Schulze suggests conducting formal research through surveys, Fitzpatrick contends that informal conversations with customers (or potential customers) can give you everything you need to know. Keep in mind that Fitzpatrick wrote this advice for people researching their customers’ desires while designing their service, rather than those who are fine-tuning their service in the middle of a customer interaction, as Schulze describes. While serving a customer, it may do more harm than good to spend time questioning them about their life when there’s something they want immediately. |
