+13236381128
+15199002991
+61480040096
Book a Demo
TRY A SAMPLE SURVEY
en_US Englishfr_FR French
en_US Englishfr_FR French
+13236381128
+15199002991
+61480040096
en_US Englishfr_FR French
Voxco logo white

Understanding the Essence of Customer Needs Analysis

Market research 04 12
FS logo 1
Nielsen logo copy
LEGER
westat logo
idg logo
Pressganey 1
Consumer Opinion Services

See what question types are possible with a sample survey!

Try a Sample Survey
Table of Contents

Customer needs analysis helps you to evaluate and understand the expectations of your target audience. It allows you to explore the minds of your target audience and uncover their needs and pain points. 

By leveraging the data on customer needs, businesses can understand why customers are choosing your company over another or why they suddenly stopped doing business with you. 

In this blog, we explore the importance and impact of customer need analysis in your business.

01

What is Customer Needs Analysis?

Customer needs analysis is the process of identifying what requirements customers may have for a product/service to understand what motivates them to make purchases. By identifying the features and benefits that encourage customers to purchase a product/service, organizations can make the needed changes to their marketing and product development strategies.

The goal is to gather insights into customers’ preferences, behavior, and pain points. It allows you to recognize the diverse expectations your target audience may have and how well you are delivering to those expectations. 

Often used in product development, marketing campaigns, and branding, customer needs analysis ensures that the product or service provides value and benefits to the customers.

Agile Customer Experience Guide

Customer-first mindset makes the difference between a leader and a laggard. 

Learn what the key pillars of agile CX are and how you can achieve CX excellence in our guide.

Download Guide

02

What are the types of customer needs?

Customers typically buy products or services when trying to solve a problem. When they’re looking for the product/service they want to purchase, they have certain expectations from the product and certain requirements that they would like it to meet. Analyze customer needs to drive buying decisions. Let’s try to understand some common needs:

The right price

  • Customers purchase products/services that fit their budget. Additionally, they expect the price of what they buy will reflect its quality.

Effectiveness

  • This addresses customers’ requirements regarding the product’s ability to solve the problem they bought it for. Is the product able to provide the benefits promised?

Usability

  • Customers prefer products that have a short learning curve and are easy to use. They buy the product not just to solve a problem but to solve it easily and seamlessly.

Sustained quality over time

  • Customers want products that remain functional over time and their quality to remain consistent.  

Good customer support

  • Good customer support is often a big requirement for customers, and that is why they buy products or services from organizations that can deliver timely, personalized support. 

Leverage online survey tools to create personalized customer need surveys and gather data via multiple channels from the global market.

03

Why should you conduct a customer needs analysis?

Conducting customer needs analysis will help you learn what’s important to your customers. You can gain insights on where you should focus and which pain points to resolve to deliver a great customer experience. 

When you understand your customers and learn the driving factors, you uncover opportunities to increase customer satisfaction and reduce churn. The insights can help you confidently develop a product or marketing plan and meet customer experiences. 

Furthermore, you can also tailor your efforts to the key audience, thus reducing pain points, optimizing customer retention programs, and solidifying customer loyalty. 

→Deep dive into customers’ needs.

→Meeting customers’ expectations.

→Connecting customers’ needs with customer experience. 

Customer experience builds over time with each interaction, touchpoint, and step in the purchase journey. With customer needs analysis data, you can arm your internal teams to create customer-centric and insights-driven strategies to grow business. 

Leverage a customer experience platform to gather structured and unstructured data from your target audience and uncover their needs and expectations. A sentiment analysis tool can help you identify the negative and positive words that customers associate with your brand. 

Frost & Sullivan conducted 100k surveys across 300 industries annually with Voxco.

Read how Voxco helped Brain Research improve research productivity by 60%.

Read their story>>

04

What are the two types of customer needs analysis?

To deliver an exceptional customer experience, it’s essential to identify what’s causing friction in the customer journey and the touchpoints that needs optimization. Here, we will explore two types of approaches to analyze customer needs- means-end analysis and brand attitude analysis. 

Understand the needs and expectations of your key customers using a means-end approach. While evaluating brand attitude informs you what your key audience thinks of your brand and how it meets their needs. 

Means-end analysis: 

Customer needs analysis is a means-end approach. This means that customers decide what to purchase based on the value-based goal of a product. It involves analyzing answers that determine why a customer would purchase your product or service. 

Buyer reasons can be divided into three main categories, and those are:

Benefits

  • This refers to the real or perceived benefit of a product that the customer expects from the purchased product. For example, when a customer purchases a belt from a high-end brand, they may think that this will improve their social status.

Features

  • This category refers to customers purchasing a product or a service based on its attributes or features. For instance, a customer may purchase a phone because of its high-resolution camera.

Values

  • This area refers to the values or traits of customers that this product/service may help fulfill. For instance, when a customer purchases a book related to investments, they might think that this product will help them become more financially sound.

Brand attitude analysis:

Brand attitude refers to what customers think of a brand or product. It is important to understand consumer brand attitude when developing customer needs analysis surveys.

These are a few ways in which organizations may try to obtain information on brand attitudes:

Brand category analysis

  • This analysis involves identifying similar and dissimilar brand groups within one product category and then outlining the reasons for the perceived similarity or dissimilarity.

Top-of-Mind awareness

  • Top-of-mind studies ask customers to attach positive and negative associations to a brand and then provide reasons for these associations.

Usage trends

  • This involves analyzing a customer’s past usage and predicted use to identify the attributes and consequences that may result in different usage patterns.

Purchase and consumption timing

  • Products or brands are often associated with a usage context that is pivotal to understand in order to position and advertise them effectively.

Check out our sample survey templates to get a peek at our software.

  • Create surveys that look great on any device.
  • Use built-in themes or customize your own.
  • Choose from 100+ question types.
  • Easily set up advanced skip logic, piping, and routing.
Try a sample survey

05

How to uncover customer needs?

To uncover customers’ needs, you can gather data and feedback using various methods, such as the three mentioned here. The aim is to learn about customers’ expectations, motivations, and preferences across every touchpoint to increase customer satisfaction. 

Customer needs analysis survey:

Customer needs analysis is usually conducted by sending surveys to respondents and obtaining their input. This helps companies identify their target customers’ needs and their position in the market in regard to how well they’re meeting these needs. These surveys predominantly ask questions about a brand’s competitors and product awareness.

Questions for active customers

  1. How did our product meet your needs?
  2. How easy was it to learn to use the product?
  3. How easy was it to complete the task?
  4. What is the one feature you want to change in our product?

Questions for passive customers

  1. What motivated you to become our customer?
  2. What can we do/change to improve your experience?
  3. What made you stop using our products?
  4. What features do you prefer in our competitor’s product over ours?

Voice of customer program

Surveying or interviewing customers can help you delve deeper into customers’ experiences. Bring the customer’s voice to the center of your strategy development to identify the unmet needs of your target audience. 

Voice of customer program can add value to your customer needs analysis as it can help you uncover the key to driving more sales in the highly competitive market. You can leverage online survey tools to create interactive NPS, CX, CES, and CSAT surveys. Gather textual responses and leverage robust survey software that offers sentiment analysis tools. 

Questions:

  1. How likely are you to recommend our service to your co-worker?
  2. How was your experience while using our service/product?
  3. How easy was it to use our product?
  4. On a scale of 0 to 7, how would you rate your satisfaction with the purchase journey?

Now that we have discussed two ways you can analyze customer needs let’s explore how to perform a customer needs analysis.

[Free Webinar Recording]

Want to know how to increase your survey response rates?

Learn how to meet respondents where they are, drive survey completion while offering a seamless experience, Every Time!

Watch Webinar Now!

06

Steps to conduct customer needs analysis

Let’s explore the steps to analyze customer needs. 

1. Segment your customer base: 

Identify who are your key customers by segmenting your customer base. Use the existing customer data to create customer segments based on the frequency of purchase, order values, or timeline. 

For this, you need to ensure you have access to complete customer data. Siloed information will make it difficult to build segments. That being the case, use omnichannel survey software that integrates data from all channels/platforms. 

2. Gather customer feedback:

Now that you have created customer segments, you should conduct surveys to gather customer feedback in accordance with the stage in the customer journey. 

Create engaging surveys with various question types that help you perform a customer needs analysis. Include open-ended questions to give customers the platform to share their honest opinion. Survey software such as Voxco also offers multi-mode that allows you to use phone or mobile-offline surveys with online survey tools. 

3. Build customer feedback loops:

Leverage every feedback opportunity to engage customers in a conversation. Learn how you can meet their needs and where you need to improve by employing a customer feedback loop with your NPS survey. 

Close the loop at every interaction to never miss out on the critical experience. Keep a pulse on customers’ expectations, experiences, pain points, and motivations to optimize their journey. 

4. Analyze customer feedback:

So now you have customer feedback from multiple sources, but all the unstructured data needs to be analyzed. 

Statistical analysis and cross-tabs can help identify patterns in closed-ended feedback. While using ML tools like text analysis and sentiment analysis tools can help you make sense of the open-ended feedback. 

Extract the valuable insights to see how you can align customer needs with the delivered customer experience.

Discover what your customers truly need and want.

Schedule a demo and see how you can enhance research efficiency with Voxco.

Book a Demo

07

Conclusion

The goal of customer needs analysis is to understand what your customers prefer and expect and how successfully you meet those needs. However, it is important to understand that customer needs are not the solutions you should develop. You should leverage the data to develop solutions that address those needs while staying true to your company’s mission. 

Analyzing customer needs helps you identify the true needs of customers so you can make necessary changes and not get caught up in trends. 

08

FAQs on Customer Needs Analysis

1. What are some ways in which organizations can address customer needs?

Organizations can solve customer needs by providing good customer service. By providing customers with a channel of communication to communicate their concerns and grievances, you can continually identify the areas of your organization which need improvement. This ensures customer needs are addressed even when a customer needs analysis surveys aren’t sent out.

2. Why is customer needs analysis important?

It is important because it helps you understand the needs and wants of your key customers. Thus, allowing you to develop products and services that meet those needs. This leads to increased customer satisfaction, higher sales and profits, and competitive advantage.

3. What are the benefits of customer needs analysis?

The benefits of analyzing customer needs include the following:

  • Enhanced customer satisfaction
  • Increased sales
  • Competitive advantage
  • Customer-centric solutions
  • Stronger customer relationships

Read more