Customer perception can make or break your brand reputation.

But why is customer perception important, and how can you improve it?

Let’s explore what it is and how to measure it, then look at 10 ways to make customers look at your brand with a positive lens and increase product engagement!

What is customer perception?

Customer perception is the impression that users have about a brand or product based on their interactions, experiences, and overall satisfaction. It includes how customers view the quality, value, and reliability of a brand’s offer, and it’s heavily influenced by marketing, word-of-mouth, and personal experiences.

Positive customer perception can lead to brand loyalty, while negative perception (e.g. poor customer service) can harm a business’s reputation. That’s why any business should aim to manage and influence customer perception to build a strong and favorable brand image.

Why does customer perception matter?

Customer perceptions matter because customers can easily switch to alternatives (especially in SaaS), and maintaining a positive perception ensures long-term customer loyalty and retention. Additionally, positive perceptions benefit many aspects of your business, including:

• Customer retention: Positive perceptions lead to higher customer loyalty and reduced churn rates.
• Brand reputation: Favorable perceptions enhance a company’s image and attract new customers.
• Competitive advantage: Good perceptions help a SaaS company stand out in a crowded market.
• Referrals and reviews: Satisfied customers are more likely to recommend the service to others, driving organic growth.

How to measure customer perception

Now, let’s look at different ways to track customer perceptions and see if you need to do something about it:

Collect customer feedback with in-app surveys

The best way to learn how your customers perceive your brand is by asking your existing users directly. After all, they’re the ones who experience it.

For this, you can segment your users and trigger contextual in-app surveys such as CES (customer effort score), customer satisfaction surveys, and NPS surveys to understand their points of view. This way, you can collect feedback that’s relevant to their specific needs, improve their product experience, and close the feedback loop.

For example, if you were to ask users about how easy it is to start with your product, here’s the type of survey you’d need to create:

Monitor online reviews and social mentions

85% of consumers put their faith in online reviews, and according to HubSpot, 60% of consumers believed that customer reviews were either very trustworthy or trustworthy.

Hence, it’s very valuable to monitor what people say about your brand in online reviews, social media, and forums. As well as find ways to spread more positive comments online.

But how do you get customer reviews?

1. Ask users for a review after they’ve finished their onboarding.
2. Allow users to submit feedback when a new feature is out.
3. Use in-app surveys or patterns to encourage customers to leave a testimonial or a review.
4. Send an email to loyal customers asking them to leave a review on G2 or Capterra.

Track behavioral and customer experience data

Product usage data can help you understand exactly how and why your product is being used. It can pinpoint features that are regularly used and those that are ignored and provide insights for improving customer perception.

To track it, you can use feature tagging and event-tracking to collect data on users’ clicks, hovers, or even text input as they use your product. And then, use analytics reports to visualize the data and find actionable insights.

For example, you can use a product management tool (like Userpilot) to perform path analysis and visualize how customers navigate through your product. This way, you can learn what goals they’re trying to achieve, what obstacles they’re facing while using your product, and how you can design a more smooth user experience.

Conduct interviews for more in-depth insights

Interviewing customers is the only way to understand customer perceptions at a deep level.

For this, invite current customers to engage in an interview and ask them open-ended questions where they can explore their actual feelings and thoughts about your brand.

The goal is to understand how customers feel, as well as their needs, preferences, pain points, and deep desires. This way, you can adapt your product development, marketing strategies, and the user experience to their needs—and improve their perceptions.

How to improve and create positive customer perception

Once you have developed ways to track customer perception, it’s important to know what you can do to improve it.

Let’s explore 10 strategies that will help you:

Personalize customer experience across touchpoints

Providing a personalized customer experience opens the door to driving more customer success, building customer loyalty, and thus creating positive perceptions.

The best way to do it is by segmenting your user base and designing a relevant product experience for each.

For instance, you can use a welcome survey to gather information such as the user’s industry, their role within their organization, or their main motivation for using your product. Then craft an onboarding path that addresses their specific jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) and responsibilities.

Provide contextual help with interactive guidance

Another way to improve customer perception is by triggering contextual help when presenting your product’s core features.

So instead of showing a generic product tour that users are likely to skip, you can trigger an interactive walkthrough to provide contextual help when the user needs it.

As a result, you’ll be able to:

• Hand hold users step by step with progressive onboarding.
• Respond to in-app behavior in real-time.
• Avoid overwhelming users with information they won’t retain.
• Enhance the user’s learning experience as they can grasp how to use core features while interacting with the product.

Deliver ongoing training to shape how customers perceive your product

Educating customers about your product is a constant, never-ending task. But when done well, it will keep users engaged with your app as they find success with it.

This can involve engaging existing users with educational content such as webinars, slideouts, or tutorials and triggering them when relevant. This way, instead of expecting users to learn by themselves, you can provide them with the information they need, when they need it.

For example, you can invite potential customers to webinars where they can learn more about how to find success with your product. As well as give them access to a great library of webinars where they can learn about any topic whenever they want.

Utilize gamification when celebrating customer milestones

With gamification, you can provide a more entertaining experience and create positive reinforcement to keep users engaged and have a positive perception of your brand (i.e., an engagement loop).

For this, you can add elements such as badges, daily quests, progress bars, and levels for a more exciting onboarding experience—creating a positive loop in the user that makes their path to success more enjoyable.

Inform customers about product enhancements via in-app announcements

In-app notifications are powerful for announcing new features and encouraging existing users to engage with them.

However, notifications can be annoying if not done right. That’s why they should be triggered on a segmented audience based on feature engagement, feature requests, or user personas (like in the screenshot below).

For instance, if you just added a new feature to one of your product’s tools, you can trigger a friendly notification when a user starts using the tool—encouraging them to give it a try.

Leverage product data and in-app messages to offer proactive support

Customer data is not only a great way to understand your audience’s pain points, needs, and desires. It’s also a useful way to provide proactive customer service.

This is because you can analyze what’s causing friction, address it, and prevent users from having to search online or reach out to your customer service team.

You can offer proactive help depending on your feedback collection method, for instance:

• Using funnel analysis to see if there’s a substantial drop in engagement during the onboarding process and then make it more user-friendly or interactive.
• Sending CES surveys to understand what features are more challenging to use, then trigger in-app guidance so users won’t feel the need to look for help.
• Measuring feature usage to see if there’s a core feature with low engagement, then work on introducing it to users through hotspots, checklists, or an enhanced UI.

As a result, you can solve problems before they happen—creating a positive perception of your product.

Act on feedback to improve customer satisfaction

In-app surveys like NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, or CES surveys are not only useful for collecting feedback but also for segmenting dissatisfied users.

And more than telling you who has a low score, survey responses also tell you why they’re dissatisfied. For instance, by tagging their responses, you can analyze NPS responses with a tool like Userpilot to identify detractors and their issues.

Then, to avoid the spread of negative perceptions, you can trigger targeted help to these users so they can overcome their obstacles—preventing churn in the process and creating a positive perception.

Build a resource center to provide instant support

A great opportunity to improve customer perception is through an in-app resource center.

This is because it prevents users from leaving your app to solve their issues and experiencing friction.

That said, to create an effective knowledge base:

1. Identify common issues that make customers drop off and disengage.
2. Survey your users, review your support tickets, and examine your usage data to see what’s causing friction and pushing customers away.
3. Create help resources in different formats to directly tackle these challenges. It can include FAQs, tutorial videos, step-by-step guides, or help articles.
4. Organize your resources in content modules so users can find resources that are relevant to them.

Reward loyal customers with exclusive beta access to new features

One trick to expand more positive perceptions in your user base is to reward your power users with exclusive beta access.

For this, you can trigger an in-app message to promoters (i.e. your most active users) telling them that they now have access to a beta feature.

As a result, you’ll be able to gather feedback from people who know your product, cultivate loyalty, and generate positive customer perception.

Incentivize reviews to build customer loyalty

To build loyalty, you can set up a loyalty program where customers are awarded points each time they take a desired action, and those points can be exchanged for credits, free months, etc.

For this, reward existing users for writing reviews or bringing in referrals through word-of-mouth.

This can involve, for example, triggering a follow-up message to users who responded to your NPS survey with a score of 9 or 10, asking them to leave a G2 review.

Conclusion

Customer perception is essential for your brand, yet it can be easy to ignore.

By collecting and analyzing customer data, you can implement many of the strategies we explored here. And as a result, make sure that your brand reputation is in a good spot.

That said, why not book a Userpilot demo to see how it influences customer perception and improves the customer experience without coding?

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