3 Free Ways to (Really) Get to Know Your Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of your business. Without their business, your business doesn’t have a chance. Kate Zabriskie shared a wonderfully simple and powerful viewpoint, “The customer’s perception is your reality.” In order to be able to cater to your customers’ perceptions, you must take an interest in getting to know them better. Take a look at a few free ways to improve customer satisfaction by getting to know your customer.

Free ways to improve customer satisfaction   

1. Check Your Website Analytics

All business owners need to review their website analytics on a regular basis. Don’t just glance at how many website visitors you had for the month, spend a considerable amount of time going through the report in detail. Services like Google Analytics make it free to look in the behavior of your past, current and potential customers. Take advantage of website tracking and get to know what your customers want and don’t want.

By breaking down the data, you can hone in on pages and specific content that your customers are most interested in. You can discover how your customers view the content on your website and how they choose to proceed. Knowing this information will give you a glimpse into the lives of your customers and what is most and least important to them.

When reviewing your analytics, look out for this data to help you understand your customers.

• • What are my most and least visited website pages?
• • How did my traffic reach my website?
• • What social network directed the most and least traffic to my website?
• • What day of the week was my website viewed the most and the least?
• • Is there a time of day that is most attractive to my visitors?
• • What geographical location(s) gives me the most and least visits?
• • What content on my website received the most and least bounces?

Search Engine Watch recently posted fantastic information that will help you in your journey of understanding the data on your analytics tool. Check out their article, 25 Metrics to Measure Your Content Marketing Success, for a great guide to getting started.  

If you haven’t set up a web tracking code on your website yet, stop reading and visit Google’s support page here. According to W3Techs, “Google Analytics is being used by 52.9 percent of all websites on the internet.”

Tracking and analyzing your website traffic is something that has to be put at the top of your priority list in order to get to know your customers’ wants and needs.  

2. Review Your Social Media Analytics

Social media marketing has taken over and encompasses all of the old school marketing tactics like newspaper ads, television commercials and outdoor billboards. It allows consumers to gain a customized shopping experience and it gives businesses the ability to reach customers on a personal level.

If you are not taking advantage of the analytics and user information social platforms are providing, you are missing out on free ways to improve customer satisfaction. Let’s take a look at Facebook Insightsfor example.

Facebook shares with all of their users, “Since Pages are public spaces, your engagement with Pages is also public. We provide Page Insights to Page managers about people’s activity on their Page.” As a Page owner, you have the ability to check out how Facebook users are interacting on your page, just as you can with their website.

Why would you want to know how users interact with you on social networks?  Aabaco Small Business shares, “The average consumer mentions brands 90 times/week with family, friends and co-workers.” By looking into how users interact with you and your competitors on social media you will be able to create content that they’ll share. Playing to your target market’s appetite to share will help your business drive online sales and raise your overall brand awareness.

Look at the same data you searched for when analyzing your website traffic analytics and compare the information.

• • Do you see trends in your business’s most and least popular days?
• • Is your Facebook page attracting a high volume of users in specific locations?
• • Do your followers interact more with videos, photos or article links?
• • Which of your posts were most shared by your followers?
• • Is there a popular time of day that your posts are seen most?
• • Which of your photos and albums get the most engagement and interaction?

After you have gathered all of your findings, go ahead and spend some time analyzing them. By knowing these details about your past, current and potential customers you will be able to reach certain conclusions that give you an idea of their behaviors. When you are able to predict how your followers will react, you can post favorable content and give them what they want.

To have a detailed understanding of how to use Facebook Insights to improve customer satisfaction with your online presence, take a look at this article posted by Social Media Examiner. Give your customers what they want and how they want it to improve your overall customer experience.  

3. Contact Past and Current Customers Directly

It’s time to sit down at your desk with a telephone and list of customer contact numbers. There’s nothing like having a one-on-one conversation with your customers to really get to know them and vice-versa. We recommend calling them but if for some reason you are unable to do that, sending emails will suffice. For on-going customer service inquiries, you can send out posts every so often on your social media profiles to gauge their satisfaction.

What kind of information are you looking for when reaching out to them? Here are a few example questions to get you started in the right direction.

• • How did you first hear about us?
• • What made you choose our company over our competitors?
• • Does our customer service meet to your expectations?
• • Is there anything we can do to improve our customer service?
• • What is your favorite product/service we offer?
• • Do you know that we currently offer [20] similar products?
• • Is there a product/service you would like to see us offering?
• • How often would you like to hear from us through telephone… email… social media?
• • Would you share our product/service on social media with your stamp of approval?

Having this conversation will help you better understand your customers’ perceptions, wants, needs and personal opinions. When you know the answers to these questions, you can supply customer service that is tailor-made for your consumers.  

Improve Customer Satisfaction with our Award Winning Customer Service

Here at A Courteous Communications, we know a thing or two about providing elite customer service. We are an award winning answering service that handles millions of customer service telephone conversations each year. The key to the free ways to improve customer satisfaction shared in this article is to follow through. After you analyze your data and reach certain conclusions, you need to put those findings into action to provide great customer service.

Did you know that you can hire a team of virtual receptionists to help you with your telephone customer surveys? Or that you can have those same virtual receptionists run a customer service hotline?

If you need help in the customer service department, give us a call at 1-800-785-6161 to speak with an account specialist about the services we can bring to your business.