What is customer need analysis?

Customer need analysis is concerned with identifying the product/service requirements of the target customers. Customer analysis in marketing is used in an array of brand and product management context including product development, concept development, customer value analysis, and means-end analysis. The ultimate goal of this engagement is to understand customer needs and their position in the overall market. Apart from being a business development tool, customer needs analysis is a valuable analytical technique to gauge better marketability of a product or service.

Why customer need analysis matter

Most successful businesses today take steps to meet customer needs at the earliest. For the modern marketer, taking strides to ensure that the customers’ needs are met will help align with other internal teams at your organization including the sales team, customer support team, and the product team. With the whole organization operating under a cyclical process of undertaking customer need analysis, companies will see results in no time.

Customer need analysis methods

Innovation and effective marketing come from using customer need analysis tools to uncover the unmet needs of target customers and acting upon them to provide better experiences to the customers. Infiniti Research reveals some of the common methods that can be used for customer need analysis:

Start with existing data

It is most likely for companies to have data that has already been collated for several other business processes. The data can include customer interviews, past surveys, and customer-support call logs. This data must be reviewed as a part of customer need analysis to track the unmet needs of customers. This is a more feasible option for companies rather than spending big bucks on an extensive research campaign.

Connect with stakeholders

Interviewing stakeholders can provide collective information that is cost-free. Sales and support teams can be considered for this. They often have a list of bug reports, feature requests, and enhancement ideas that they would have collected directly from the customers. These can be combined to generate a preliminary list of requirements.

Map the customer process

For companies who want to gain customer insights on the difficulties in undertaking a particular purchase process, it is essential to first map a particular customer process in a step-by-step fashion. This helps companies build newer and better ways to simplyfy the processes for customers.

 Map the customer journey

Mapping customer journey is a great way of undertaking the customer need analysis. It is a visualization of processes that a customer encounters with a product or service. It includes multiple phases and touchpoints from the prospect of a loyal customer. This easily helps companies identify the points of friction and opportunities of improvement.

Analyze competition

Knowing what your competitors are doing will help evaluate where you stand in the market and identify gaps in your offerings. An effective SWOT analysis will also give companies a fair idea of their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. SWOT analysis can be carried out for a brand, product, or even an experience. Also, it is essential to define competition both narrowly and broadly, and not just companies in the same industry but also similar companies in other industries.

Analyze cause-effect relationship

Sometimes, thinking about the flip side of a situation will help solve problems with ease. Business problems can be identified through surveys, observations, and other data sources which can help pin-point other root cause problems. This ensures better customer need analysis and helps in addressing root-cause problems, thereby enhancing user experience.

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