Undertaking customer research on loyalty, satisfaction and service can make a big difference to your business. You’ll need to focus your efforts on finding out as much as you can about existing and potential customers. If you can work out how they make their buying decisions, you can adapt your sales methods and techniques to fit your customers’ needs.
For business customers, you’ll want to know how big their businesses are, what sectors they’re in, and who makes the decision to buy your product or service.
If you’re targeting individual consumers, it may be useful to know such things as their gender, age, occupation, income, lifestyle, attitudes or social class.
For your existing customers, try to find out:
• what they think about your products or services
• why they need your product or service – this may be different from what you believe
• why they buy from you and not your competitors
• what they think of your prices
• what they expect from you, eg reliable delivery
• how they rate your customer service
• how they think you could develop or refine your products or services
For your potential customers, try to find out:
• who your potential customers are and what groups they fall into
• how many potential customers there are
• how much of your kind of product or service they already buy from your competitors
• the criteria on which they make buying decisions
• what it would take to get them to buy from you
• what developments they expect in your product or service
• when and where they prefer to buy
Visit www.b2binternational.com/work.html for information on our customer loyalty and customer satisfaction research programme or contact one of the team at www.b2binternational.com/contact.html.
