Ways Gather Information
This contributed post serves as good reminder that it’s time to start paying closer attention to my customer’s wants and needs. Plus, it offers some great ways to get the job done.
Gathering Customer Info – Made Simple
Every business, regardless of which sector they specialise in, should be taking steps to get to know their customers better. This way, you can make products that they actually want to buy and tailor your services towards offering genuine improvement to their lives.
Finding out more about your customers doesn’t have to be as challenging as you may think. Here, we will look at a few of the ways that you can better understand your clients for the benefit of your business.
Customer Surveys
The first and most obvious way of gathering customer information is by providing them with surveys to
fill in. Using this method, you can ask them the questions that you would like answered the most, as well as key information about them.
The tricky part tends to be getting customers to fill in these forms in the first place, so you should offer incentives for them to do so such as promo codes and discounts.
Real-Time Behaviour
While surveys are a good way of getting an overview of your customers, they do tend to result in generalisation being drawn.
Real-time data is very useful as it is unfiltered and you can discover how your customers actually behave in certain situations.
So, you could look into phone call tracking as a way of getting the information you require.
Monitoring your website is also very useful, so you can find out things like how long customers are staying on
your site, what links they are clicking on and what content they are sharing. The online world is very useful for keeping track of customers.
Customer Service Records
When people get in touch with your business for any reason, this is the perfect opportunity to ask them questions about their experience with your company.
If you’re a small business, finding time to handle customer calls and other contact can be difficult. This is why a lot of start-ups choose to outsource their customer service. Contact center automation can be the simplest solution to give you back more time, while still providing quality customer service and keeping clear records of all the contact you have with your customers.
People are usually much more amenable to responding to questions when they are the ones who have contacted
you rather than you being the one to have got in touch with them.
Comprehensive Contact Information
An accurate contact list is like marketing gold dust and something which you should take the time to build up and look after over time.
After a client has bought from your company, you need to make sure that you keep the lines of communication open as much as possible without being pestering and annoying.
The longer you have a relationship with a client, the more information you will gather which will be of use to you.
Social Media
With the younger generation spending more and more time on social media, this is an invaluable tool which also allows you to gather more customer info.
Keep track of the posts that get the most shares and comments to see what is having an effect on your
customers.
Your social media strategy should be based on appealing to your clients in any way that you can.
So, there you have a few ways that you can gather more information about your customers – a task which is always going to be a worthwhile exercise which will help you out in the long-term.
As a blogger, I also use google analytics to gather data on visitors to my site. I’ve also started in-depth customer surveys in the form of actual conversations with my ideal clients, called Avatar interviews or Discovery calls. Will write a post on this once I’ve mastered this skill.
How do you gather data on your customers?
