Your product needs to serve your customers, and a customer needs and wants analysis helps to ensure you are addressing all customer pain points.

These insights can inform your product development and keep a pulse on any changes in your customer’s needs and wants.

In this article, we’ll learn more about customer needs, conducting customer needs analysis, and how to gain insights from it with a tool.

What are customer needs and wants?

Customer needs and wants are the motivation for why a customer wants to buy a service or product. They can help you understand if your product is delivering the right value. And also how you can improve your product to be more attractive.

Some examples of customer needs and wants include customer pain points, brand image, product features and functionality, price, and user-friendly experiences.

Why is it important to understand customer needs?

At the end of the day, your customer should be your number one focus. Without them, you would have no business.

Understanding your customers’ needs and wants can help improve your product, directly impacting the value a customer would get from your product.

Understanding customer needs is important because:

It improves customer experience: If you can collect data on your customer throughout the customer journey, you can look at where users drop off or where they need to contact support. Then you can focus on those areas to improve your customer’s experience.

It increases customer satisfaction: Understanding your customer wants and needs can highlight any pain points or struggles users may have with your product. With that information, you can improve your product to enhance customer satisfaction while using your product.

It helps to meet and exceed customers’ expectations: You can use your customer’s needs and wants to help improve your new customer’s expectations. With customer needs analysis, you can segment users to develop personalized in-app experiences.

It provides good customer service: The more you can understand your customer needs, the more you can come up with solutions or present guides at the right time when issues arise. Predicting when there might be an issue (which you could find out with customer feedback) will level up your customer service.

What are the most common customer needs?

Let’s look at some of the most common customers’ needs so you can be aware of what they are when performing any customer needs analysis.

Product needs

Price: Depending on your customer, there might be restrictions on the budget they can spend on your product. You need to be mindful of your price so that your customer can afford your product and you can still make a profit.

Functionality and product features: Customers use your product to get a job done. If there is no need for your product, then it’s likely you aren’t going to have many customers.

Usability: No one likes a user interface that looks like it was built in the 90s and is clunky. You need to be mindful of creating a great product that is easy to use and provides a great user experience.

Product performance and efficiency: A reliable and efficient product is a standard for any product. If it contains bugs and glitches or takes ages to do anything, you’ll soon discover your churn rate is sky-high.

Customer service needs

Reliability: Customers want a product that works when they need it to. If they experience service outages or bugs, their customer experience is going to be a negative one.

Transparency: The more clear your product is, the better you’re serving your customers. If you try to cover up when you have serious outages or have to increase the price, the customers will lose trust in you.

Accessibility: In this digital age, customers prefer to choose where to access your product. It’s wise to make sure your website is optimized and mobile-friendly.

Useful information: No one enjoys dealing with automated responses that send you to the very documentation you read before that didn’t help. Your customer service representatives should have the training to provide useful information.

On-demand support: Some customers just want to find the answers to their problems themselves. Offering self-service support via knowledge bases can accommodate these types of customers.

Emotional customer needs

Time: If a customer needs help, you want to respond to their request as quickly as possible.

Friendliness: How customers interact with your product and team members can form positive or negative associations. Offering excellent customer service that is friendly can increase customer retention.

Empathy: Customers want to feel that whoever is dealing with their issues actually cares about solving them for them.

Control: It can be frustrating when you want to upgrade or cancel a service, and the option to do so is hidden within the depths of your product. Make your customer feel in control by making important decisions easy to access.

What is customer needs and wants analysis?

Customer needs analysis is finding out what the customer’s requirements are. The process of customer needs analysis can take the form of looking at the customer journey map, using segmentation to collect data from target users, gathering customer feedback with analysis surveys, and more.

Look at the customer journey map

The customer journey map looks at the starting point of when a customer discovers your product until they become a paying customer.

Being able to understand customers’ usage trends can help to know what pain points or needs they have in each stage.

With this customer needs analysis, you can prime the different onboarding stages, with the right information, so it’s clear your product will solve exactly their pain.

Segment users to collect data from your target customers

To understand your customers, you need to collect feedback from them. But you want to make sure that it’s collected from the right customers.

For instance, if you see a particular segment that doesn’t adopt a feature, you can segment them to trigger a user guide that will showcase the feature.

As different usage patterns appear in different user segments, you need to analyze customer needs in various segments in great detail.

Gather customer feedback with a customer needs analysis survey

An analysis is no good unless you have data. And the more data you collect, the better.

You want to make improvements over all the stages of the customer journey to increase your conversion rates.

Depending on the customer journey stage, showing different surveys can help you assess the customer’s needs at that exact point. Which gives you a better idea of what may need improving.

Visualize customer data to easily identify customer needs

It can be hard to spot trends by just looking at numbers. Taking the raw data you’ve collected and presenting it in a visual format makes it easy to spot trends and analyze customer needs.

For example, an NPS dashboard can show you the percentage of detractors, the NPS performance progress, and the progress over time.

Analyze customer feedback to extract valuable insights

Taking your customer feedback and conducting user sentiment analysis can help you uncover any trends within your product. You can group responses by positive or negative emotions and determine what may have caused the negative emotions.

You can use Userpilot’s NPS response tagging feature to see what might be causing low scores.

Address customer needs

With all that data you’ve collected from your customer and the time spent analyzing it, it’s time to address your customer’s needs.

Depending on what you find will depend on how you address your customer’s needs.

You may notice that there is a potential issue with the UX/UI of your product. You could investigate more by using heatmaps to see how users behave and then design to make it more user-friendly.

It could be that users need help finding a feature they want to use. If you know this, you can improve user onboarding by using an interactive walkthrough to showcase how to use that feature.

How to conduct a customer needs analysis with Userpilot

Userpilot is a product adoption platform that allows non-technical users to build personalized in-app experiences. Userpilot allows you to capture and display powerful analytics to inform your decisions within your product.

Gather data with in-app surveys

Gathering data is the key piece in customer needs analysis. And one of the best ways of doing this is directly from your customers.

Userpilot can let you create various in-app surveys, such as NPS and a satisfaction survey. These let you gather a range of different data that matters.

Moreover, Userpilot allows you to fully customize them to fit your brand image, and add different elements, such as long forms, videos, and much more.

You also have the option to trigger them wherever you like so if you have a certain point in the customer journey that you want feedback on, you can have them triggered at that point.

Segment customers to collect data from your target audience

With Userpilot, you can segment customers in multiple ways, such as:

• Feedback responses
• Activity
• Personal information
• Company data
• and Engagement profiles

This will help you examine each segment in more detail and uncover unmet customer needs.

Visualize data to prioritize customer needs

Taking all that data from users is useful to help you improve your customer’s experience.

But it can be hard to understand the customer’s problem. That’s why visualizing that data can help.

With Userpilot’s NPS dashboard, you can turn the data you’ve collected from your customers into useful visualizations to see your customer’s needs and then tag them to prioritize them.

It can also be useful to see the complete picture of what your customers are doing by looking at the overall customer usage patterns in helpful graphs and charts.

Conclusion

Customer needs analysis is a must-have process for any product. It helps get the feedback you need to improve your product so that your customer’s needs are satisfied and your users get a good experience and want to use your product for longer.

Want to get started with customer needs analysis? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how to accommodate your customer needs and improve your product.