Optimizing the customers’ experience is one of the biggest challenges many businesses face today. But, it is essential to achieve the core business goals.

Once you know which factors lead the customers to choose your company over the competitor or vice-versa, it adds to your advantage. You can alter your business strategies to boost growth and enhance the customers’ experience.

On the other hand, a lack of deep understanding of the audience’s behavior is a barrier even for budding businesses.

So, let’s discuss five things you can do to understand your customer better-

Design An Interactive Survey Or Questionnaire

An online survey or questionnaire is one of the easiest methods to ask customers for insights. Not only is it a way to gain customers’ insights but also an intelligent customer engagement strategy.

Nowadays, getting customer feedback in real-time has become an easy process, thanks to free online survey tools!

Some key points to follow while designing a survey are:

Focus On Getting An Unbiased Opinion

Ask your customers for their opinions without disclosing your own. Your aim is to get uninfluenced, genuine, and impartial insights even if they are negative.

For example, you can ask something simple like, “What do you think we can do better?”

Ask Relevant Questions In Simple Language

The key here is to be concrete in asking questions that are relevant to specific topics. For example, “How our software helped you to improve the effectiveness of your marketing strategies?”

Such types of questions will help you to determine the value of your existing customers are getting from your products and services.

Focus On One Area Of Customer Experience At A Time

A particular survey should address only one area of customer experience, such as purchase convenience, service effectiveness, etc. This makes it easy for you to gather insights about a specific area and then act upon it.

Generate Data From Google Analytics

From clicking a link to reading a web page, every action of the customer offers valuable insights. You can use user behavior tracking tools to see how customers are interacting with your website.

For example, Google Analytics is a great tool for gathering information such as bounce rate, time on page, etc. This real-time data helps you to draw conclusions about your customers’ likes and dislikes.

You can analyze what makes people stay or leave a particular page of your website. If your website isn’t connected to Google Analytics, it’s high time to do so.

Put Yourself In Your Customers’ Shoes

The best way to understand your customers’ buying journey is to travel through their path. You can do it through an advanced technique called customer journey mapping.

It is a visual representation of your customers’ experiences with you. It gives you a detailed view of their journey based on ‘touchpoints’ like the interaction between a customer and your brand during, before, or after the purchase.

After identifying the failed touch points, you can take steps to solve the issues to improve their experience.

Gauge Your Competition

Interviewing the competitor’s customers provides you with a perspective of your target company or consumer. By knowing your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, you can differentiate yourself in the market.

Once you identify their position in the market, you can analyze how much time and money they invest in product development, innovation, etc. This way, you can re-shape your plan to enhance the customers’ experience.

Plan For Future Customer Engagement

Making a plan for customer engagement for the future is as essential as creating a plan for the present. Looking at the past behavioral data tells you about what features your customers have found valuable.

Understanding your most visited pages gives you an idea of what type of content strategy works best to solve your customers’ challenges.

You can draw trends across the common features to find out why your customers liked them. Further, it gives you an idea of what your competitors have accomplished so that you can explore these areas.

These are some of the techniques to know your customers better and inspire new customer engagement efforts. Whatever technique you choose, make sure that it caters to what’s right for your audience!