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Marketers have realized that the era of ‘customers are always right’ is equally applicable today as they need to know customers’ perceptions of their products. Customer perception is quite impactful in regards to buying behavior, customer loyalty, and general market image. Managing customer perceptions enables organizations to align their strategies with customers’ expectations as well as improve customer value proposition and hence fuel growth.
In this article, businesses must learn some important factors that will help them to understand some of the customer perceptions about their products so that they can be in a position to outcompete their rivals in the market. To learn more in detail, keep reading this guide till the end.
1. Leverage Customer Feedback Channels
One way of assessing one’s knowledge of customer perception is by having feedback through various customer touch points. In this regard, questionnaires completed online, feedback forms, and customer reviews that can be found on sites like Google, Yelp, Trustpilot, and other similar sites arefriend. If you want to gather the opinions of your customers, you should request them to give their thoughts or ideas when they are making a purchase or after interacting with your brands.
Also, it has been noted that social media platforms provide a perfect background for providing feedback in real time. By having a smooth internet service provider to ease the process of tracking the comments, messages, and mentions made by customers, one reaches a position to see how the customers feel about their products and what changes they wish to see.
2. Implement Sentiment Analysis Tools
Currently, with the advancement of new technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, organizations have an opportunity to use Algorithmic approaches such as Sentiment Analysis to evaluate the customers’ attitudes expressed in the text. These tools give features of Entity Extraction to get opinions given by the customers through their comments, tweets, and any other textual feedback and judge whether it is positive, negative, or neutral feedback.
Moreover, the enormous amount of information we produce today makes it possible for businesses to utilize sentiment analysis as a tool to quickly establish patterns and trends in customer sentiment, which can help find and rectify problems as soon as possible and use the information gathered to improve their products.
3. Conduct Focus Groups and Customer Interviews
Although valuable, digital feedback cannot be compared to the general deep understanding of the habits gathered through personal encounters. Focus groups and customer’ interviews are especially valuable for the subject because they let businesses delve into consumer insights.
Such qualitative approaches are useful in allowing organizations to explore further the responses that they get from the customers, to allow for additional probing to be done, and to get more reasons as to why certain decisions are being made. The kind of interaction such as these can elicit feedback details that are not easily read out in survey or review form, which gives a deeper insight into the customers.