HOW DO CUSTOMERS BEHAVE?
You cannot sell effectively to your customers if you don’t know them.
IT is important that you not only know who they are in terms of their demographic data, but you should also understand how they behave and why they behave the way they do.
Customer relationship is becoming more critical by the day. The internet has made the business-customer relationship better, healthier and more personal. Customers are no longer just a number on the excel spreadsheet; they are no longer a generalized group that businesses lump into one hole; every customer is essential and wants to be treated as a particular person.
Therefore, for every business that wants to thrive, every company that wants to move past the status quo, understanding how your customers behave and why they behave the way they do is a significant needle-mover.
How do you understand your customer’s behaviour?
Buyers’ personas are increasingly becoming a significant part of every marketing and advertising team’s list of must-haves. With a buyer persona, a business can better understand how their customers behave.
A buyer persona is a document created to highlight and define a business’s ideal customer lookalike. A buyer persona is a combination of qualitative and quantitative values. Also, a buyer persona uses some level of assumptions and researched data to create an ideal customer.
With a well-researched buyers’ persona, businesses can better understand what customer’s fears are, their goals and ambitions, their hobbies, where they like to hang out, what inspires them, and many more.
When creating a buyer’s persona, a business must be ready and willing to understand the three primary factors influencing a customer’s behaviour.
Besides knowing what influences the customer’s behaviours, the business must also be willing to help the customer ease roadblocks and make the buyer’s journey smooth and exciting.
FACTORS THAT AFFECTS HOW A CUSTOMER BEHAVE
- Personality Traits: These include the buyer’s background, upbringing, where they live, the type of social interactions they have, and many more.
Personality traits and Social factors are very subjective; therefore, it is compulsory that a business properly understands the social environment a customer is coming from and how it affects how the customer interacts with the company.
For example, a person who is from an affluent background and regularly with wealthy people will feel offended if the waiter at a restaurant doesn’t greet them in a certain way. Or if the food tastes a certain way, the affluent customer might react with disdain and complaints.
But a person from a less affluent background may not react the same way the ‘affluent-background’ customer reacted.
A business must understand where their customers are coming from to improve the customers’ experiences better.
- Psychological factors: The psychological aspect deals with how a customer sees and perceives things, which invariably determines how they react to situations.
The psychological reaction a customer gives varies with their state of being emotionally and psychologically. For example, when a male customer’s proposal to hie fiancée is accepted, he will friendlier, and his response to even bad customer service would be milder.
But if the love of his life recently dumped him, he will react differently.
Because customers’ psychological responses are very fluid, the business needs to learn not to attach these responses as the entirety of the customer’s being. Instead, the company should try to understand why the customer responded the way he/she did.
- Social Trends: These external influences motivate a customer to buy certain goods and patronize certain services.
Social trends include recommendations from friends, online reviews, and social media conversations.
What are the current trends? And how do these trends affect your customer’s behaviour?
As a business, your life’s work is to please and satisfy your customers at all times. And you can’t do that if you don’t know them and how they behave. And what influences their behaviours.
How have you been able to know your customer’s behaviours? Could you share with me in the comments?
