How to Understand What Your Customer Is Thinking

Living in a business world with tons of analytics, feedback, and scripts, we may feel assured that customer behavior is predictable. That mindset can be unpleasantly ruined by confusing requests or decreasing sales. Understanding the customer’s real needs can become one of the trickiest business tasks, but if we don’t accomplish it, even the brightest business idea would not be successful.

Our company provides customer and technical support services, and believe me — we have been in the field. Defining what customers are actually thinking about a company, a product, their needs, and their experience is not easy. It requires deep knowledge of the market, properly set up business processes, a lot of reading between the lines, and hours and hours of communication. Luckily, there already is a roadmap that may speed up the process, and I’m here to share it.

Why should our customers need us?

No auto-conglomerate would earn its millions if it only sold cars. Because if customers just needed cars, there would be no difference between Kia, Toyota, and Porsche. Successful brands sell not cars, but comfort, safety, speed, or prestige. Meeting customers’ true needs begin with defining a mission of a brand, its values, and the idea we offer to the world. You probably already have them, even if they are not written in golden letters above your desk. What we need is to get back to that mindset that made us leave familiar duties and predictable schedules, and start with entrepreneurship.

What do we know about our customers?

The point where an idea meets the real world is customer experience. Do we make offers to the right people? Who are they, and how much do we really know about them? Do we deliver on your brand’s promises? These would be the right questions to ask. Now let’s get answers to them.

Looking intently at a customer’s portrait

We should start by analyzing information about a target audience. What do we know about them, except their approximate age, place of living, and native language? Generic data is simply not enough to deliver a message to your audience. We should get as many details as possible about their interests, professions, and environment. Tools like and social media may help a lot — we can gain a lot of insights from analyzing what blogs they follow, or on what channels they encountered our brand. The final goal of this research is to define what needs they have and how can our product fulfills them.

Making good use of the reviews

Communication between a customer and a brand is easier than it has ever been. Analyzing customer support tickets, monitoring comments on social media, sending surveys via email, and creating profiles on review sites — these are all precious sources of insights into customers’ opinions. People should be thanked for the reviews, even for the negative ones, as they have spent their time giving a company a chance to get better. In case of some issues coming up, it would be good to contact a reviewer directly and take some actions to improve the customer’s experience.

Following a customer’s path

Nothing helps businesses understand their customers better than trying their shoes on. There’s a technique called “customer journey mapping” — it suggests defining all touchpoints where a customer interacts with a company before, during, and after a purchase. We should start by asking questions like “Why did a customer subscribe to us on social media?” or “Why did they download our app for the first time?” and go along the whole journey. At each step, we need to think about what can attract or turn off your customers, and identify strengths and failed touchpoints.

3 bonus tricks for hearing what customers actually think

We have done a good job of getting closer to our customers. How then do we not mess it up in an actual conversation? Here are some experience-based tips leaders and customer-facing team members may find useful.

• Asking clear and concise questions

  We should not confuse our customers, but encourage them to give you as much information as possible. Questions should be open, simple, clear, and engaging. Instead of “What do you need from image editing software?” we ask “How do you use image editing software?”. It is important to avoid closed questions (those that can be answered in one word), those are natural roadblocks for a conversation.

  
  

• Talking to a person, not to yourself

  Our mind loves to take control over the dialogues, finishing another person’s sentences for them and deciding how you’re going to answer. If we don’t want our customers to feel unheard and disrespected, we should suppress that internal companion and focus on the words we actually hear.

  
  

• Addressing what a person actually says

  We should not always direct a conversation where we wish it to be going. Comments should be based on what the customer actually said, and our thoughts on it. If we want to hear a customer, we should not try to answer with scripted phrases or try to squeeze in a sales pitch. A conversation should be moved forward with reactions to customers’ words, relatable questions, and requests.