Written by Allie Breschi

Companies want to stay relevant and innovative and often look at other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

However, a vital component to growth is at every businesses’ fingertips — their customers.

Yes, customers are the ones with the ability to determine your business’ longevity and progress.

“You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology,” Steve Jobs notably stated. “You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it.”

Although the importance of being a customer-centric company is not a new concept, the right steps to achieve a customer service focus are still hazy.

How do you understand the customers’ needs? What can your company change? Do other departments need to change their goals?

Navigating this arena can be daunting and a steep learning curve if you haven’t paid close attention to customers before. So to steer you in the right direction here’s a beginner’s guide that defines customer needs unpacks common barriers that prevent companies from fulfilling their customers’ needs, and discloses solutions to start improving customer service.

An example of customer need takes place every day around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to experience hunger (need) and decide to purchase lunch. The type of food, the location of the restaurant, and the amount of time the service will take are all factors to how individuals decide to satisfy the need.

Below are the most common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one another to drive a purchasing decision.

16 Most Common Types of Customer Needs

Product Needs

1. Functionality

Customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their problem or desire.

2. Price

Customers have unique budgets with which they can purchase a product or service.

3. Convenience

Your product or service needs to be a convenient solution to the function your customers are trying to meet.

4. Experience

The experience using your product or service needs to be easy — or at least clear — so as not to create more work for your customers.

5. Design

Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick design to make it relatively easy and intuitive to use.

6. Reliability

The product or service needs to reliably function as advertised every time the customer wants to use it.

7. Performance

The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer can achieve their goals.

8. Efficiency

The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.

9. Compatibility

The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.

Service Needs

10. Empathy

When your customers get in touch with customer service, they want empathy and understanding from the people assisting them.

11. Fairness

From pricing to terms of service to contract length, customers expect fairness from a company.

12. Transparency

Customers expect transparency from a company they’re doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.

13. Control

Customers need to feel like they’re in control of the business interaction from start to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn’t end with the sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, adjust terms, etc.

14. Options

Customers need options when they’re getting ready to make a purchase from a company. Offer a variety of products, subscriptions, and payment options to provide that freedom of choice.

15. Information

Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication so customers have the information they need to successfully use a product or service.

16. Accessibility 

Customers need to be able to access your service and support teams. This means providing multiple channels for customer service. We’ll talk a little more about these options later.

In this article, we’re going to explore how to attract and sustain customers based on meeting their inherent needs and imposing value. For lunch, this could be a special promotion, a short wait time, or a post-dining thank-you email. If companies can begin to make changes before their customers’ needs aren’t fulfilled, this can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you need to do the following:

1. Customer Needs Analysis Survey

The customer needs analysis is typically conducted by running surveys that help companies figure out their position in their respective competitive markets how they stack up in terms of meeting their target customers’ needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions about your brand and competitors, as well as customers’ product awareness and brand attitudes in general.

Questions can include:

• Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
• Questions asking customers to group your brand in with similar and/or competing brands
• Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences for usage

You can learn more about which questions to ask in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

2. Means-End Analysis

Once you’ve conducted the customer needs analysis survey, you can use the answers to get a fuller picture of the reasons why your customers purchase from you, and what makes your product or service stand apart from your competitors’.

A means-end analysis analyzes those answers to determine the primary reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those buyer reasons can be divided into three main groups:

1. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were buying a computer, for example, they might buy it because it’s smaller and more lightweight than other options.

2. Benefits: A customer buys a product or service because of a benefit, real or perceived, they believe it will offer them. The customer might also buy the computer because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.

3. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, individual values, real or perceived, they believe it will help them fulfill. The customer might think the computer will help them to be more creative or artistic and unlock other personal or professional artistic opportunities.

As you might imagine, these reasons for purchasing something can vary from customer to customer, so it’s important to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them into these three categories. From there, you can identify which of those motivating factors you’re solving for, and which you can improve on to make your product or service even more competitive in the market.

Types of Customer Service

The communication channel your team uses to respond to customer needs plays a major role in their ability to resolve problems. Some customer needs are time-sensitive and require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less critical and can be resolved at a more casual pace. Let’s break down the types of customer service and how each optimizes your team’s ability to fulfill customer needs.

Email

Email is one of the most fundamental forms of customer service. It allows customers to fully describe their problems and automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers only have to explain their issue once, while reps can reference important case details without having to request additional information.

Email is best used with customer needs that don’t need to be resolved right away. Customers can ask their questions, go back to work, and return to the case once the service rep has found a solution. Unlike phones or chat, they don’t have to wait idly while a rep finds them an answer.

One limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers have trouble describing their problems, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates time-consuming roadblocks when the issue is overly complex. To be safe, use email for simple problems that require a brief explanation or solution.

Phone

When customers have problems that need to be answered immediately, phones are the best medium to use. Phones connect customers directly to reps and create a human interaction between the customer and the business. Both parties hear each other’s tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy most when there’s a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are most likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your team can use soft communication skills to appease the customer and prevent costly escalations. These responses appear more genuine over phones because reps have less time to formulate an answer.

The most common flaw with phone support is the wait time. Customers hate being put on hold, and it’s a determining factor for customer churn. In fact, more than a third of your customers won’t return to your business if they hang up while on hold. This is why your phone channel should be reserved for problems that require immediate, hands-on support.

Chat

Chat is one of the most flexible customer service channels. It can solve a high volume of simple problems or provide detailed support for complex ones. Businesses continue to adopt chat because of its versatility as well as the improvement in efficiency it provides for customer service reps.

When it comes to solving customer needs, chat can be used to solve almost any problem. Simple and common questions can be answered with chatbots that automate the customer service process. For more advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to help them diagnose and resolve issues.

The limitations of the chat are similar to those of email.  However, since the interaction is live, any lack of clarity between the two parties can drastically impact troubleshooting. As a former chat rep, there were plenty of times where I struggled to get on the same page as my customer. Even though we resolved the issue, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer’s experience.

Social Media

Social media is a relatively new customer service channel. While it’s been around for over a decade, businesses are now beginning to adopt it as a viable service option. That’s because social media lets customers immediately report an issue. And since that report is public, customer service teams are more motivated to resolve the customer’s problem.

Social media is an excellent channel for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crisis. When a crisis occurs, your customers’ product and service needs become the primary concern of your organization. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management plan, your team can continue to fulfill customer needs during critical situations.

Social media is different than other types of customer service because it empowers the customer the most. Customers tend to have more urgent needs and expect instant responses from your accounts. While this type of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous pressure on your reps to fulfill customer demand. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before you offer routine support.

In-Person

As the oldest form of customer service, you’re probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who have brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living near their locations. This fulfills a convenience need as customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it back to the company through an online service.

In-person customer service is great for businesses with strong service personnel. Without dedicated employees, your customer service team won’t be able to fulfill your customers’ product or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond customer service.

There’s no “best” type of customer service. When used together, each medium complements the other and optimizes your overall performance. This creates an omnichannel experience for your customers which will keep them coming back for more.

Now that you’re familiar with each customer service type, let’s talk about what your team needs to do to solve for different customer needs.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

What stops customers from meeting their needs with your services or products? The first step to solve a problem is to put yourself in your customer’s shoes: If you were the customer when we purchase your goods, use your technology, or sign up for your services, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?

1. Offer consistent company wide-messaging
2. Provide instructions for easy adoption
3. Ask customers for feedback
4. Nurture customer relationships
5. Solve for the right customer needs

This list includes common customer pain points and proactive steps to develop customer-first values.

1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging.

Too often customers, get caught up in the “he said, she said” game of being told a product can do one thing from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications across all departments are one of the best steps towards a customer-focused mindset. If the entire company understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the messages will easily translate to meet the customer’s needs.

To get everyone on the same page, organize sales and customer service meetings, send out new product emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, require quarterly training and seminars, or staff host webinars to share important projects.

2. Provide instructions for easy adoption.

Customers purchase a product because they believe it will meet their needs and solve their problems. However, adoption setup stages are not always clear. If best practices aren’t specified at the start and they don’t see the value right away, it’s an uphill battle to gain back their trust and undo bad habits.

A well-thought post-purchase strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.

One way companies gain their customers’ attention is by providing in-product and email walkthroughs and instructions as soon as the customer receives a payment confirmation. This limits the confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate post-purchase euphoria.

A customer education guide or knowledge base is essential to deliver proper customer adoption and avoid the ‘floundering effect’ when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new customer onboarding services, host live demos, and webinars and include events and promotions in their email signatures.

3. Ask customers for feedback.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions and it will change the way you operate your business. Criticism oftentimes has negative connotations, however, if you flip problems to opportunities you can easily improve your business to fit the customer’s needs.

Take customer suggestions seriously and act on those recommendations to improve the design, product, and system glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the customer experience and this mentality should trickle down to every aspect of the organization.

To keep track of this feedback, many companies track and gain their feedback through customer satisfaction scores, customer surveys, exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or simply a personal email can grab helpful candid customer feedback.

4. Nurture customer relationships.

When a customer buys a product or service, they want to use it right away and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a month, it’s important to constantly think about their future needs.

Proactive relationship-building is essential to prevent customers from losing their post-purchase excitement and ultimately churning. If customers stop hearing from you and you don’t hear from them this can be a bad sign that their lifespan is in danger.

Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service structure and communication strategies. Solve for the long-term customer need and create a customer service team dedicated to check-ins and customer retention, show appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go above and beyond, and communicate product updates and new features.

5. Solve for the right customer needs.

Excluding customers from your cohort of business can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers’ needs. However, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you cannot is a major step toward solving the right problems. All customers’ needs can’t be treated equally and a company must recognize which problems they can solve and ones that aren’t aligned with their vision.

To find the right customer priorities, create buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, look at customer’s long-term retention patterns, establish a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers, and communicate with your ideal customer in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments and suggestions.

Successful startups, brick and mortar shops, and Fortune 500 companies alike all solve and prioritize customers’ needs to stay ahead and establish industry trends.

How is your company solving for customer’s needs? Share them with me.