Customer Perception: Its Intro, Its Importance, and Its Growth

The world is changing very rapidly every day. There used to be a time when a brand image was the result of its price, usage, and features. That time has passed now. With the rapid involvement of technology in the business, customer perception is also now part of brand image.

This perception can be the result of anything like words of recommendation from a friend or colleague, online feedback, social media presence, case studies, a brand’s website, or more. Another thing that creates and affects the perception the most is customers’ own experience with that brand.

Customer Perception:

Customer perception is about a customer's opinion about a business or product. It is brief of what they feel toward your brand or product. This feeling is due to the direct or indirect experience they had recently or in the past.

When a business monitors its customers and their opinion, they find the pain points. These are the points that are creating negative experiences for your customers. Once these are identified, by improving that part of your service, try to eliminate them.

A variety of qualitative and quantitative data will surely help a business with monitoring customer perception. To gather these data, look for resources like product usage, survey data, and customer feedback. This data-gathering process will help you in coming up with accurate customer perceptions.

Why Customer Perception Matters:

In a report by Walker Information,  customer experience will stand on top, leaving price and product behind as a key brand differentiator by 2020. Well, they were not wrong. In today’s world, we are seeing more people making choices based on their experience with anything. This means that the traditional method (price, features, or usability) of creating the perception is no more effective.

Customer experience is the key that is now a key factor. And if you are not putting effort into improving it, then you are putting your brand image at risk. Some businesses think that investing in new technology is their top priority for the next five years. But to whom will you deliver all these new technologies as one day you might lose all your customers?

Methods to Improve Customer Perception:

There are several methods that one can try to improve their customer perception. Here we are going to discuss only important ones.

Less Process and Protocols:

When a customer interacts with a business, they expect it to be with a human. It doesn’t matter how much we get advanced in automation or AI, but whenever one needs help, one will seek a human.
If there are so many obstacles before reaching this human interaction, this will make your customer suffer. This suffering will damage your customer’s experience. And if the experience is affected, then this will surely affect their perception and your brand image.

To solve this problem, try to reduce the process layer or protocols before allowing a user to interact with human support.

Connect Emotionally:

Connecting with your customers is one of the most important things in sales and marketing. But keeping this connection till customer satisfaction is not beneficial anymore. To show your customer that you value them, you need to connect with them emotionally too.

In the world of customer experience, actions and words carry a lot of weight. With every possible touch-point, a brand needs to show its interest and commitment toward the relationship with its customers.
To do it, you need to dig deeper than satisfaction. You need to listen to your customers and know about their needs and goals. You should follow these points created by Julian Treasure, a sound and communication expert, to achieve emotional connection:
 

• Receive
• Appreciate
• Summarize
• Ask

Positivity is The Best Language:

Positivity is a trait that is taught to be adapted. Positive emotions can drive a customer to open up with you. When you show a positive attitude or emotion to customers, they lean toward that sales representative. This leaning of customers towards sales reps will change customers’ perspectives and create better opportunities for understanding possibilities.

“People providing services in the capacity of their work with daily interactions with customers sometimes develop feelings for them. The expectation from these employees to suppress natural emotions, positive and negative alike, is a mistake, " Dana Yagil, Professor at the University of Haifa, explains.

Consistent with Customers:

Consistency plays an important role in a customer’s journey of creating a perception. To make sure that your process is consistent with customers, you need to check the customer journey your team creates.
Make sure that the data of customers is synched well between different departments. So when a customer is transferred to the next department, the next team can proceed further without any delay.
The transfer process needs to be smooth, like fluid for creating a smooth journey, and reflective like a mirror to show them the image of your brand.

The Skills Difference:

When a customer approaches your sales rep, it is not just a chat, an email, or a call. It is a person on the other end trying to connect with your brand. A sales representative must know how to deal with that human on the other end. How to answer their question when they have an answer and how to tackle them when they do not have any answer for them.

But not every sales rep is equally experienced and skilled. This skill gap between team members can create differences in customer experience. It is an organization’s duty to find these skill differences and improve their teams.

Feedbacks and Follow Up:

Customer feedback is an honest review, and it can help a business to identify where they are lacking in creating a good customer experience. This feedback can be obtained in different ways. One popular way to do so is by survey or quick polls. Organizations can conduct interviews with individuals or groups for more in-depth conversations.

Whenever you make an interaction with your customers, make sure that you follow up. After solving their problems, connect with them again after a week or a month. This way, you show your customers that you care about them and value them.

Every customer is important for a business, and the perception of one single customer can affect brand image for thousands of people in its circle of influence. So this is why an organization needs to learn about customer perception and methods to improve it to make it work better for itself.