Department of Secretarial Science

Customer Contact & Secretarial Operations Coordination Level IV

Unit of competency፡- Addressing Customer Needs

MODULE TITLE: Addressing Customer Needs

Module code: BUF CSC4 M03 1112

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LEARNING OUT COMES: At the end of the module, the trainees will be able to:

LO1: Assist customer to articulate needs

LO2: Satisfy complex customer needs
LO3: Manage networks to ensure customer needs are addressed

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LO1: Assist customer to articulate needs
 Identifying Customer Needs

 What are customer needs?

 Methods to Identify Customer Needs

 Types of Customer Needs

Identifying Customer Needs

Identifying customer needs is mission-critical for businesses looking to create a product that
truly speaks to their customers’ problems. Not to mention, the easiest way to position your
brand smartly in the market is to unite your internal teams behind the specific needs of your
customers.

Customer needs are the named and unnamed needs your customer has when they come in
contact with your business, your competitors, or when they search for the solutions you
provide.

To identify the needs of your customers, solicit feedback from your customers at every step of
your process. You can identify customer needs in a number of ways, for However, identifying
the needs of your customers is easier said than done. In our experience, there are a couple easy
ways to gain insight into what your customers need from you.

Methods to Identify Customer Needs:

1. Focus Groups
2. Social Listening
3. Keyword Research

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For more resources to help you identify and understand the needs of your customers,
check out our guide: 

Anticipating Customer Needs

The importance of anticipating customer needs can’t be overstated. When you anticipate what
your customers need from you, you can   or expand your product features or services to meet
those needs early.

Customers don’t part ways with brands that meet their every need. By anticipating customer
needs, you can ensure that your product lines up with their expectations before they even have
to ask for a new feature, service, or solution from you.

Meeting Customer Needs

Meeting customer needs is crucial for any business looking to retain and attract new customers.
Because, as important as the discovery phase is, knowledge about what your customer needs
from you is only as good as the way you use it. So, how do you meet customer needs?

16 Types of Customer Needs (and How to Solve for Them)

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 business's fingertips -- their customers.

Yes, customers are the ones with the ability to determine the longevity and progress of
your business. Happy customers result in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and brand
reach as they spread the word in their social circles. 

The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that result in happy
customers is by understanding and meeting customer needs.

16 Most Common Types of Customer Needs

Product Needs

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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.

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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 product, subscription, and payment options to provide that freedom of
choice.

15. Information

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Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your brand to
days and months after making a purchase. Business 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. 

If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this
can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention. However, with some many types
of customer needs, how do you understand which ones apply to your customers
specifically? 

How to Identify Customer Needs

The first step to identifying customer needs is with a customer needs analysis that takes all
of the following into account: product-market fit, customer feedback, input from your
service team, and any customer service data you can gather. From there, you'll be able to
identify customer needs as well as any friction that exists in your process.

"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."
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.

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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. 

3. Customer Feedback

If you want to know what your customers think about the experience with working with
your company, ask them. Interviewing your customers and members of your service team
can contribute to a customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer
lifecycle.

As you gather data from your customer needs analysis, it's important to identify the points
of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journey that provide
unexpected delight.

 What can your company change?

 What are the elements that you can build from?

 What parts of the experience needs to be worked on?

Asking these questions can lead you to valuable insights as you work to solve for your
customers.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

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The first step to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their 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?

LO2: Satisfy complex customer needs

Satisfying Your Customer’s Needs
All customers have different needs, and while you might not be able to satisfy all of them, you must
to try to fulfill as many as you can. Unless you can meet most of your customers’ needs, they will
keep searching for other options.

Functionality
For many customers, functionality is a primary need. This is the reason they opted to buy your
product. If your product cannot serve its purpose, you will not earn your customer’s trust and gain
repeat purchases.

Affordability
Many customers these days are operating in a challenging economy. They will not buy products that
are overpriced. You need to find a way to lower your costs in order to acquire these potential
customers. However, quality cannot ever be sacrificed over price.

Convenience
In a world filled with complex products, you need to make life easy for your customers. Apart from
the product itself, its packaging also needs to be convenient. Storing products must also be easy.

Reliability
People will get to know your company is reliable if you give them what you promise. You need to
avoid false advertising. If you posted a significant discount on your marketing materials, you need
to follow through. If you implied that your products would have more features, you need to do as
promised. Otherwise, people will not trust you anymore. If you send a promotional banner to the
banner printers ensure you choose a reliable company that produces accurate results that you can
be proud of.

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Control
When buying products customers like to feel they are a part of the entire process. The sale does not
end when they have paid for their items. Customers want to feel like they are in control of
determining which store to purchase from and how much to spend. They also need to have power if
they disliked the product, by giving them a fair product return and replacement policy.

Options
These days, it is not enough to present potential customers with a single option. You need to ensure
you give them a wide variety of choices depending on what you are selling. In addition to the
choices of products to buy, you need to provide them with a range of payment options.

You might not be able to do all these things, because no business is perfect. What you must do is
show that you are doing everything you can to fulfill your customers’ needs and make them feel
satisfied. This will help create loyal customers that spread positive feedback about you.

7 Effective Methods to Identify and Meet Customer Needs

Most of the businesses focus on innovations and fail to align their brand with customer
needs. Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that
don’t focus on customers.

Being customer-focused help in understanding customers better and align products and
services to create great value. You can not persuade consumers without knowing what they
are looking for. Identifying and meeting customer needs should be the focal point of every
business to build a solid customer base. 

Once you have a clear knowledge about the same, you can further use it to persuade your
customers. We have outlined the techniques of identifying customer needs and wants as
well as using the information to win more customers.

What are customer needs? 

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Customer needs are defined as the influential factors that trigger them to buy your product
or service. In order to identify customer needs, it is important to understand the reasons
behind their decision making.

In order to understand customer needs better, it’s very important to know who your
customers are. By defining your target audience and segmenting them based on their
industry or other attributes, you not only get a clear view of what’s your selling proposition
but also identify their needs. 

Here are four simple steps to follow in order to meet customer needs successfully.

 Identify – Follow customer needs analysis via surveys, interviews, focus groups, or social listening.
 Distribute – Once identified the needs, you can distribute it across the right teams and departments.
 Create – Tailor product features, create detailed content that speaks about customer needs.
 Collect – Obtain customer feedback regularly to learn how your efforts meet their expectations.

Why is it important to identify customer needs?

Businesses are taking strides to understand customer needs and meet them as early as
possible to align with internal teams. 76% of customers expect companies to
understand their needs.

With business operating under a cyclical process of anticipating, and meeting customer
needs, you can have quick and positive results. Prior to your business promotions or
product launch, it is vital to know your customer needs and wants. Conducting market
research can greatly help you to understand your potential customers.

The more you know about your customers, it helps you define your brand positioning
around their needs and help your business in the following ways: 

 Provide faster solutions – One of the common things customers want is real time support. By
identifying the needs of your customers you can provide faster and effective support. 
 Improve your products & services – Customer research helps understand the motives behind the
buying process. You can learn about the areas you are missing out and create an effective USP. The
insights can be used to enhance the products or services to satisfy customer needs.

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 Reduce the number of support tickets – Building the product and services considering the needs of
the target customers ensures effective solutions to customer issues.

How to identify customer needs? 

Recognizing customer needs includes deep research across your industry and asking your
customers lots of specific questions. It is very important to gather in-depth details from
your customers through regular communication and be sure you can deliver on their
individual needs.

What is the customer needs analysis?

It refers to a comprehensive analysis that can benefit your business to understand what
value your customers want from your products or services. It provides valuable insights
about your target audience that can be inculcated within the brand positioning to make
sure that delivers great customer value.

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Effective customer needs analysis depends mainly on two factors. Firstly, to create
customer personas and identify what customer inputs are needed to create breakthrough
products and the second is to know how to capture customer inputs and feedback.

Conducting customer research to understand the factors that influence purchasing

decisions can be done by:

 Customer interviews – It is the direct way of collecting customer inputs. You can interact directly
with customers who are using your product or who have chosen to buy it. It is considered to be
reliable over other ways of acquiring inputs. 
 Focus groups – Focus groups comprise a small group and focal point is a specific product or topic.
The groups emphasize qualitative or quantitative surveys because it provides more opinions and
motivations.
 Surveys – The analysis done through surveys help businesses to get a picture of their position in the
market in terms of fulfilling the needs of their target customers.

The case study video speaks about the importance of identifying customer needs:

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