How to identify customer needs

Staying relevant as a business can be challenging in volatile and ever-evolving markets. Being able to identify and meet customer needs is essential to staying on their radar. There are so many benefits to this: brand loyalty, expanding your target audience and more. That’s why it’s so useful to conduct effective market research that uncovers these needs and to understand how they apply to your brand product. To help you, this article looks at how to identify common types of needs, what matters most to UK customers and how to conduct a customer needs analysis. Let’s get started.

Identifying customer needs means getting inside the mind of your target audience. These could be your pre-existing customers, in which case, you’ll be responding to their needs changing over time. But if you’re looking to expand your customer base, being able to identify new needs can also help get them interested in your product or service.

Handily, you can break down some of the most common types of customer needs into groups. This can be useful if you’re looking to take a specific approach to targeting your customers. Let’s look at some of the most important ones.

Understanding what your customer might be thinking or feeling and how they expect you to respond to that is an important need. This means that one of the core aspects of handling customer needs is customer service.

Empathy is not a new type of need. But in an age where customer interactions are increasingly digital, looking at how it fits in with your approach to digital comms is essential. In fact, it’s even more important to get it right when you don’t have face-to-face interactions with customers. 

Your customer support teams can practice empathy when communicating with customers digitally. Some of the ways they can do this include:

Customers are looking into products and services because they want to perform a specific action. This could be a solution to a problem, or something that responds to a desire – for example, a laptop that’s fast, efficient and has a lot of space.

Customer needs can change over time, especially in competitive industries where other companies are trying to outdo each other in responding to what customers want from a product. They might be constantly upgrading their technology to make it better and more equipped to respond to customer’s wishes.

Perhaps they’ll even invent new technologies to respond to customer needs in a way that’s never been seen before in commercial markets. By responding to customer needs with a unique or competitive product, businesses create a unique selling point (USP). 

Once you have a competitive product, you need to be able to sell it to customers. Convenience is an essential need – you’ll be making the product easily available and accessible to customers. No matter how useful your product is, many customers will still want a product to be easily accessible before they purchase it.

In the digital age, customers can purchase items with one click. They don’t need to leave the comfort of their homes to shop. But there are aspects of an online shopping experience which can affect the convenience of purchasing with you. Most customers will want a smooth journey where it’s easy to purchase an item with limited friction. If the process of purchasing an item is too slow, this can lead to issues like shopping cart abandonment.

A customer’s experience of shopping with you can have a big boost on brand loyalty and trust. This involves how a customer feels about your company and product throughout their entire customer journey. CX can be affected by a wide range of factors like:

Transparency is a key feature of customer experience. This involves:

Once you know what to look for, you’ll need to be able to identify how well you’re meeting customer needs. You could find that you’re meeting some customer needs well, or there could be a gap between what you’re providing and what a customer needs. Several of SurveyMonkey’s products help you to reach out to customers and find out what matters to them most. We’ll explore these in this next section.

With SurveyMonkey’s fully customisable Audience tool, you can segment your target audiences into different groups based on different demographics. SurveyMonkey then sends your survey out to people from our global panel who meet your exact criteria. Using the ‘Who do you want to survey?’ option, you can add criteria like:

With this level of detail, there’s so much you can find out about what your customers want based on their demographics and personas. You can also use our screening questions option to target even more specific audiences. We suggest using checkboxes or multiple-choice questions for this option.

SurveyMonkey’s Idea Screening tool is another great way to find out what your customer thinks about your product. This can be a great way to test their responses to new product functionalities. Or, how they feel about any changes to your branding.

Our Idea Screening tool uses a sequential monadic survey style. This means that we’ll show your target audience or a subset sample all of your ideas (or ‘stimuli’), or some of them. At least 2 of your ideas will be shown as random. For each idea, your audience will receive the same set of follow-up questions. Respondents will see up to 5 of your ideas.

The tool is customisable and you can:

Once you’ve chosen your stimuli, it’s time to prepare the survey according to the following steps:

Our Usage and Attitudes tool can help you find out more about customer usage and attitudes based on demographics and customer personas. Our Question Bank helps you select the right questions to ask respondents based on:

SurveyMonkey provides customisable survey creation, including multiple-choice, checkbox and comment box options.

In addition to using SurveyMonkey’s above tools to identify customer needs, utilising a customer needs analysis can also be a great idea. In this next section we will look at how you can conduct this type of analysis. Customer needs analysis is also known as a means-end analysis. It involves identifying a link between:

A customer needs analysis means looking at what’s known as a ‘means-end’ approach. This is because customers usually buy a product because they want to address some need or desire. 

For example, one customer might be buying a cap because they need something to protect themselves from the sun. Another customer might be buying the same cap, however, because they like the aesthetics of it. 

So, as you can see both customers are buying the item for the same features, but they’re using it to satisfy different needs. One customer is buying it for its functional purpose, while the other is buying it for style or status symbol purposes. A customer needs analysis, therefore, involves identifying the values that your customers connect with when it comes to your product.

Other ways to look at customer needs include examining the entire customer journey. Identify pain points or challenges your customers might face during their shopping experience with you. That’s why asking your customers through surveys can be a great way to discover how people feel about certain product functions or uses.

The most pressing customer needs are constantly shifting. These can be for wide-ranging reasons, such as economic and cultural factors. This year, the UK’s customers are looking for products that help deal with new desires and challenges. Let’s look at how.

UK customers want to be reassured by the brands they shop with. Customers who receive reassuring communications or messaging from brands might be more likely to shop with you. Some ways you can reassure your customers include:

While it can be tempting to play it safe when it comes to social and political issues, customers in the UK might be becoming more supportive of brands who take a stance. Customers want to feel represented in the products they buy. 

At the end of the day, though, representation might not be enough. Consider being transparent about your commitments to ethical sourcing and biodiversity, for example. Brands might also do well at showing how they’re the most saver-friendly option during the UK’s cost-of-living crisis.

Another interesting trend in customer needs is virtual reality (VR) marketing. This gives businesses a new way to interact with their customers, especially when it comes to demonstrating products and product testing. One of the benefits of this is that it can provide a much more memorable experience for customers who are early adopters of virtual reality.

Despite the UK’s cost-of-living crisis, shopping frequency may be on the rise. While customers might have less money to spend, they might be looking out for great deals and offers from their favourite brands. Consider keeping your retail offers fresh to attract bargain hunters.

While it might not be clear why the UK’s shoppers are using Amazon less, they might be becoming less interested in shopping with the online marketplace giant. Consider selling directly via your website or via an easy-to-use eCommerce platform instead.

With UK customers becoming more aware of the environmental and ethical impact of fast fashion, they are cutting back on buying new clothes. For brands that sell clothing, consider having a resale option to show your dedication to reducing fabric waste. Second-hand items are also becoming more socially acceptable. This means that companies might do well to invest in selling stylish second-hand items which have social as well as functional value to their customers.

Based on these trends, it looks like the UK’s shoppers are starting to prioritise value for money and ethical choices. They might be less concerned with buying new and might have less money to spare. This doesn’t mean they’ve necessarily cut back on their spending. The second-hand market is also growing, which could be a new avenue to tap into for eCommerce sites and clothing brands.

Identifying customer needs is an important process for any marketing team. That’s because you can gain insight into why people value your products, as well as any pain points or challenges they have during their customer journey. SurveyMonkey provides a range of tools that can help you identify what drives your customers. Using these key insights, you can reach new audiences through targeted advertising and whitepapers that clearly demonstrate how new products respond to customer needs. Reach new customers today with SurveyMonkey