You think you know what the customer wants. And you kick off a new product or service launch, and you are 100% sure that you have a super hit idea on your hands. Many months and sometimes many millions later you realize that the parabolic growth you expected never came about. What happened? There could be many reasons for it but one of the most common and easily avoidable one is lack of proper needs analysis.

 

What Is Customer Needs Analysis?

 

Customer needs analysis is the process of identifying what motivates a customer to buy products or services. Knowing which features, attributes, and benefits are relevant to customers can help businesses adapt their product development and marketing strategies.

 

Doing a customer needs analysis involves drawing insights from a variety of customer data, like surveys, social media posts, product reviews, and more. When you look into customer feedback, you can detect unmet needs and opportunities for improvement and innovation. Maybe your customers suggest a new feature that you can add to your product roadmap. Or perhaps they point out some flaws in your customer service that you need to fix.

 

How to Do a Customer Needs Analysis?

 

A customer needs analysis should provide insight into your customer’s pain points and challenges. It can inform all of your internal teams ‒ from sales and marketing to customer support ‒ to create data-driven strategies to improve your business.

 

Here’s how to do a customer needs analysis in 5 steps:

 

• Gather data from your customers

• Sort data by customer needs

• Analyze data

• Visualize data

• Align product / service with customer needs

 

Increasingly Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence is being used to help with analyzing and visualizing data. But, this may not be needed for every situation. Excel and Pivot Tables might be just the right mix of tools in many cases. Do not follow the herd! Choose your own path wisely.

 

Knowing what’s important to your customers  can help you rethink the way you market your products. And understanding what they need allows you to deliver a great customer experience at every step of the buyer journey.