Knowing Your Customer Is Key To Build Successful Products/Business

One might have built innovative products or products with great features, no-one will buy it if they don’t want it or believe they don’t need it. And it’s hard to persuade anyone that they want or need to buy your product unless you clearly understand the wants and needs of your customer.

The depth of understand is very crucial and it requires to understand more than the demographics of your customer, knowing their hobbies, tastes and interests along with what they watch, listen to and read, culture of the country they live in, their buying behavior is also very important to build successful products or businesses.

Before building the product or solution, one need to comprehend or build hypothesis on what type of person or segment is most likely to need or want the product or service being built and start with the customer discovery to validate the hypothesis and gain better understanding of the customer’s needs, wants, pains and gains to build the product that delivers the value that your customer looking for.

What you need to know about your customer?

1. Who They are — customer’s demographic information examples like age, race, ethnicity, gender, marital status, income, education.

2. What they do? — customers Job, hobbies, tastes and interests

3. What are their pains that your product can address?

4. Why they need buy from you — What is their reason for purchasing your product or service?

5. When they buy — How often they are going to buy the product or utilize your service?

6. How they buy and Where are they most likely to purchase — If your customers prefer to order online, then it makes sense to design your business model to include an eCommerce or online ordering component.

7. Who they are buying for — Are they buying your product for themselves or for others?

8. What are your customer touch points?

9. What are the changing needs of your customers?

Clear understanding of your customer segment or personas helps to :-

a) Rightly define Value proposition of your product or service — In-Depth customer discovery helps you to identify the major pain points of your customer and build you product in such way that address their pain points uniquely than your competitor.

Value proposition of your product changes as your business or your addressable market changes and it is good idea to review your value proposition regularly to tailor your products or services to better match the changing needs of your customers

b) Build Customer-centered products — By understanding your customer demographics , their life style, culture and behavior patterns enable business to design and deliver user experience that is intuitive and easy for the customer to use.

c) Price your product appropriately: Based on the Income levels of your target customer segment and buying patterns, Product can be priced appropriately.

d) Position and Market your product to the right people: marketing helps organizations to understand, reach and deliver values to their customers. Without clear understanding of your customers it is hard to where, when and how to market your product. If you do not create the awareness or recognition of your product or service to right customer, It’s hard to persuade or convince to sell your product.

e) Identify the right channel to sell your product or service: When you understand the buying behavior of you customers, it will be helpful to decide whether you need to make your product available online or sell it through brick & mortar store or through sales person etc.

f) Create personalized and unique customer experience: having clear understanding of your customer helps to identify various touch points with your customer and this information can be leveraged to create unique and personalized experiences to build trust, loyalty and strong relationships.

Precisely, In-depth understanding of your customer not only helps to build the right product to the right persona and market your product in the right way it also helps to customize the customer experience to create loyalty and repeat business.