Managing Customer Perception is everything when customers research businesses like yours online. The way your customers perceive your company impacts sales and retention — and it can even affect your ability to bring more customers in your doors. In other words, your success depends on creating a positive customer perception. To help, we’ve created this guide to customer perception: What it is, why it’s important, and what you can do to enhance yours. Keep reading to form a deeper understanding of how customer opinions impact revenue, and learn what you can do to control and improve how customers perceive your business.
What does customer perception entail?
Customer perception encapsulates the emotions and thoughts your customer associates with your product and brand. It’s a viewpoint they’ve molded from every encounter they’ve experienced with your business, both overt and subtle. Whether searching online, reading reviews, or past visits to your business.
It extends beyond merely whether customers harbor positive feelings towards you; customer perception also comprises the sentiments your business kindles within them, and any illustrative terms they’d employ when discussing their experience.
Grasping how your customers interpret your company can aid in enhancing your promotional strategies, spotting avenues for service improvement, and fostering more traffic, referrals, and sales.
What makes customer perception significant?
The manner in which your customers interpret your business affects every move they make. A positive customer perception can enhance brand fidelity and foster word-of-mouth referrals. It accomplishes this through two mechanisms:
Value congruence: If your business is seen to uphold robust values that resonate with your customers’ beliefs, they are exponentially more inclined to patronize you. A 2020 consumer culture study discovered that 71% of consumers favor brands that share their principles.
Signals of trust: A favorable customer perception assists in establishing trust. If your business enjoys a reputation for being dependable (that is, it delivers on its promises), customers are more prone to interact with, purchase from, endorse, and refer you.
The Four Pillars of Managing Customer Perception
Customers’ opinions are swayed by a more complex array of factors than you might anticipate. While your outward marketing might propose a specific image of your enterprise, they will also formulate their own judgment based on a diverse range of considerations.- Customer Testimonials – A staggering 93% of consumers delve into online reviews prior to making a purchase. This implies that your online testimonials significantly influence how potential customers perceive your brand.
- Brand Promotion – It’s not surprising that the manner in which you project your brand through marketing profoundly affects how customers interpret your business.
- Business Principles – As highlighted earlier, customers are inclined towards businesses that echo their own values. Promulgating and adhering to public company principles significantly sways your customers’ impression of your brand. Example: Supporting the Local Community
- Quality of Customer Assistance – The caliber of support you offer your customers broadcasts what you think of them. Stellar customer assistance signifies that you value them and that you prioritize their experience.
Techniques to Gauge Customer Perception
Considering that customer perception is comprehensive and influenced by nearly every facet of your business, there are multiple methods to assess it.
Track Online Commentary
Your customers tend to express their opinions online, often discussing your business on social media and review platforms. If you’re attentive, this feedback is instrumental in assessing customer perception.
Online references on social media platforms can be scrutinized to evaluate customer sentiment and pinpoint recurring motifs linked to your brand. For instance, you might employ Twitter data to generate a word cloud from text analysis.
Further depth can be gained through text analysis on reviews, customer satisfaction feedback, and social media commentary to examine sentiment.
Strategies to Foster Positive Customer Perception
While it may appear that various factors shaping customer perception are beyond your influence, the reality is that all opinions are rooted in how you interact with your customers and your company’s conduct. Here are four strategies to ensure your company is viewed in the most favorable light.
Engage with Customer Feedback
Devoting time to respond to and implement customer feedback significantly enhances the perception of your company’s concern for its customers.
Comprehend Your Target Audience
It’s impossible to garner universal admiration. Instead, discern who you aim to attract and understand their desires.
Acknowledge and Encourage Customer-Oriented Behavior
Since customer perception is shaped by every encounter customers have with your business, it signifies that every employee contributes to how your customers feel.
To cultivate a positive experience for managing customer perception, you must first establish a customer-centric culture that encourages employees to prioritize the customer’s best interest.
Begin from the top. The management team and seasoned employees must prioritize customer interests. If they set a positive precedent, the rest of the company will emulate.
Establish a culture focused on employees.
Remunerate employees fairly, provide opportunities for growth, and offer support to prioritize customer service. If you put your internal team first, they will reciprocate with your customers.
Encourage everyone to interact with customers. From engineers to executives and every functional team in between, everyone should be engaging with your customers. This can be achieved through comprehensive customer support, conducting customer interviews, or hosting events.
Take Action
People will never forget how you made them feel.
This profound truth applies perfectly to the concept of customer perception. It dictates your customers’ sentiments towards your brand, their loyalty, and their propensity to endorse you to their close acquaintances. Put simply, your customers’ perception of you matters greatly!
Prioritizing the cultivation of a positive customer perception not only accelerates your business growth, but it also contributes to enhancing your customers’ satisfaction.
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Managing Customer Perception is our specialty if you feel overwhelmed. We can create marketing packages based on your monthly marketing budgets. Contact our team to learn more and dominate your local market!
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