3 tips for putting yourself in your customers’ shoes

A key part of enhancing how you engage with your customers is really thinking like them and putting yourself in their shoes. This helps you to better understand how you can create useful and relevant content, when best to approach them and the best channels to use. We have 3 top tips for helping to adjust your mindset:

1. Invest time in gaining a deeper understanding of your customers’ needs

To begin with, you need a clear idea of who your main customers are, what market they are from and how your products or services could meet their needs.

A good way to get an understanding of their needs is to collect direct customer feedback. A survey could be used to collate data so you can identify trends and gaps in terms of customer needs. This could also be supplemented with advisory boards, focus groups and collecting personal customer feedback.

2. Develop customer personas and use them

Customer personas are characters we create that are highly detailed representations of our customers. They help us empathize with customers and identify common features across customer segments. They should be based on market research and the real data you collected when developing your understanding of your customers’ needs. Mapping out the personas will help you to recognise key traits, motivations, communication preferences and what they value in your brand. The key to building a customer persona is arming yourself with lots of data: 

• Start by identifying what information/research you already have and identify any gaps
• Outline which colleagues know these customers or have insights or data about how these customers interface with your brand/company
• Make it personal - give your persona a name, job title and hobbies to bring them to life
• Consolidate common beliefs and behaviours e.g., how they complete their work

You then should begin to question what the persona’s main challenges and needs are, what they need to do when interacting with your product or service, how you can make their life easier and how they like to be engaged.

3. Define customer objectives, clearly outlining their pains, gains, and micro-moments

We must consider the key barriers our customers face and the main opportunities available to them during key moments of their journey. Across their journey, they will experience pain points they struggle with, as well as unmet needs, which, if addressed appropriately, could add benefit to their experience. To really put yourself in the shoes of the customer, you should map out potential problem scenarios, their objectives, and the pains and gains they might be experiencing. This will help you get in the correct mindset and create a truly customer-centric strategy.

With continuous developments in digital technology, we can collate more data than ever about what customers need and what they do online. Google termed these user-initiated moments of intent as micro-moments. It’s a moment where customers intend to fulfil a need to know, go, do or buy something.¹ As these are moments driven by customers, this will really help you to truly understand their needs.

Putting yourself in your customers’ shoes can help enhance your engagements as it allows you to be in the right place, be useful, be quick in engaging the way they want and enables you to connect the dots between what, when, how and across all channels! Want more assistance with evolving how you engage with your customers? Get in touch today!

References

1. Ramaswamy S. How micro-moments are changing the rules. Available from: https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/marketing-strategies/app-and-mobile/how-micromoments-are-changing-rules/