Understanding Customer Perception is Key to Increased Opportunities

What do you know? Or more important, what should you know? Hearing and clearly understanding the voice of your customer in today’s competitive environment has become an essential and fundamental requirement to future planning. It is ultimately your customer’s voice that matters the most. Successful organizations hear that voice and effectively use it to guide their activities. You may have heard rumors about what your customers are thinking, or even whispers from them along the way, but it is up to you to clearly understand the thoughts and opinions of your customers in order to compete effectively. Your market, and the business environments of your customers, likely have changed significantly over the past few years. The following are just a few examples of crucial information that can be obtained from your customers to see how you can increase your sales volume today.

 

Your organization’s strengths and weaknesses. Does it really matter what you perceive as your organization’s strengths and weaknesses if your customers view them as something entirely different?

 

Competitive information. Recognizing your customers’ opinions about your organization is paramount. Knowing what your customers think about your competition is even better.

 

Unmet customer needs. Your customers are connected to your industry from different angles.

 

Future trends. The state of the economy over the past number of years has been unprecedented. You may have found your industry changing at a pace so fast that it is almost impossible to keep up.

 

Take a moment to consider the importance of customer perceptions on your business and the impact their reality has on your organization. Think also of your organization’s current actions with regard to customer perceptions:

• Can any of the performance issues you face today result from inaccurate awareness of customer perceptions?
• Are your organization’s improvement efforts targeted at addressing critical performance issues as prescribed by your customers?

Many well-run and well-intentioned organizations fall short in these areas. As a result, many improvement efforts target issues that have a relatively low impact on improving customer satisfaction and, therefore, competitive advantage. Management-generated improvement ideas prove effective, but often, and especially in the ongoing stages of organizational improvement, general feelings and intuitions are inadequate triggers for positively affecting customer satisfaction.

  

Many organizations have learned the importance of consistently measuring customer perceptions and satisfaction through a formal customer survey program. A formal process allows customers to share their views about an organization’s performance in a way that is timely and objective, and in today’s market, it is a requirement to staying ahead. Many organizations have expressed a desire to go it alone, but eventually find it challenging to do it in the most effective manner. We have found organizations often ask: 

• Where do I start?
• What method(s) should I use?
• Who should I survey?
• How often should surveys be conducted?
• Who here should implement the surveys?
• How should results be communicated to management?

Our response is simple: we’ll handle it. With nearly three decades of combined experience in market research, our professionals have seen it all and can guide the development and implementation a customer perception survey that will provide an organization with numerous opportunities such as:

• Significant improvement in an organization’s ability to target improvement efforts that will have a real impact on their overall success.
• Improved insight for management and employees into the effects of their actions on customer satisfaction.
• Opportunities to strengthen relationships with key customers.
• Increased business opportunities.

Overall, customer perception surveys can help organizations make strategic decisions, and they provide organizations with a clear understanding of the market’s awareness and perceptions of their products/services. A customer perception survey helps an organization keep its finger on the pulse of a rapidly changing marketplace. 

 

If you’re wondering if a formal customer research program is right for you, we can help. Call us toll-free at 1-800-999-6615, email us at mail@tweedweber.com and/or visit us on the web at

www.tweedweber.com. Also, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn (Tweed-Weber, Inc.) and Twitter (@TweedWeber). The result will be the knowledge you need to make the right decisions to guide your organization into the future. In a world of uncertainty, the ability to clearly focus your organization creates a distinct competitive advantage. No one can guarantee certainty, but market research can guarantee clarity. You will Know More, so you can Do More.