There is no question that understanding and adapting to what your customers like and dislike about your product or service can be the difference between success and failure when making business decisions, but how exactly do you go about doing this? There are plenty of ways to learn more about what your customers think of your business, and in this article, we will look at two of the easiest and most effective ways to do this.
Why we must understand our customers
It is the job of every business and marketing team to understand what their customers like and dislike when it comes to their product or service. Understanding what brings a customer to you is a good starting point, but it’s equally important to understand your target market’s likes and dislikes about your industry. This information can be invaluable when making business decisions. It will help you make changes that benefit or enhance your existing strategy or recommend completely new ideas that might work to improve conversion rates and increase customer satisfaction.
How to get customer data
1) Extracting Customer Feedback
One of the best ways (and one of the ways we use regularly) to tap into what your customers like and dislike about your business/competitors is through extracting customer feedback. Extraction can be done across several platforms, but one of the most effective (and accurate) is using an online review website like Google Business Profiles.
On ‘Google Business Profiles’ you can find a list of all competitors and extract all of their customer reviews. You can further refine these results in a simple spreadsheet and even use machine learning sentiment analysis to speed up the process. However, we still think good ole fashioned manual reading gives us the best understanding.
We look at 5-star reviews and see what trends exist. Do people love that a competitor is “on time”, “clean”, “affordable”, “thorough”. What is it that prompted them to leave that 5-star review?
We also look at the 1-3 star reviews to see what they dislike about a competitors’ service and find ways to tap into that emotion through written copy and advertising.
How to scrape reviews
You can use various tools online to scrape reviews into an easy-to-read and filter spreadsheet. If you’re not tech-savvy, it doesn’t take too long to copy paste a few hundred reviews into a spreadsheet or even manually analyse them on ‘Google Business Profile’ (Formerly Google My Business).
We programmatically scrape this data to be accurate, time-efficient and provide the most significant amount of information In an easy to consume (and analyse) format.
2) Targeted Surveys
Another highly effective way of learning what your customers love and hate is through targeted surveys. The more you understand about your customers, the more likely you are to meet their needs, so it is vital that you use all of the resources available to gather this information.
The more you know about your customers, the better equipped you are to meet their needs. By tapping into what they love and hate via scrapping Google reviews or through surveys, it’s easier than ever to learn the information necessary for business success.
