Customer-Centric Technology Design: How to Keep Your Audience’s Needs Top of Mind
Your customers are your compass, the “true north” that guides you towards more effective services and technology design. Simple questions like “what do my customers want?” and “what would make my customers’ lives easier?” not only create new avenues for product development, but also give you the ability to tailor your communication and outreach efforts. You have an opportunity to meet your customer where they are, ensuring their expectations and pain points are key components of your ongoing tech strategy.
Want to know more about this empathetic approach? Loyalty, sales, satisfaction, and even new customer acquisition will fall into place as long as you keep an eye on that reliable customer compass needle. You’ll give your business a competitive edge as well, carving out a distinct corner of the market where you are the champion of relevant, high-quality technology across your target audience.
No matter how well you do (or don’t) understand your customers, Tarkenton’s technology design experts are here to lay the groundwork for fully assessing the desires of your audience, separating actual needs from misleading assumptions.
Customer Focus Strategies: 6 Ways to Get to Know Your Audience
Back to that handy compass. In order to get the needle moving, there are a variety of ways you can take on your customers’ perspective and elevate their valuable opinions and feedback. Let’s get started:
Persona Development
Persona-centric technology design begins with the creation of fictional stand-ins for your actual audience members. Interviews, data, and previous interactions with your products and services help build the necessary persona profiles, and the result is a comprehensive document reflecting the demographic information, background, goals, skills, attitudes, and environments of the customers you’re looking to please. This can help you understand their needs more deeply, fueling a whole new tech strategy that’s built around audience goals and behaviors.
Market Research
From surveys to polls to customer feedback forms, market research methods are a great way to gather quantitative data about your audience, get answers to specific questions, deep dive into your customers’ current technology experiences, and understand the motivations and concerns behind your customers’ actions. All their needs are right there in the research. Your teams just have a little digging to do.
Customer Focus Groups
Using a diverse group of people who represent different segments of your target audience, a customer focus group can be the perfect place for open, honest discussions about customer needs and expectations. Maybe there are common challenges across audience segments, or maybe there are distinct differences that can inform more tailored product design. Just be sure not to ask leading questions. You want to encourage detailed answers and genuine insights, not responses that confirm what you think you know.
Social Listening
What are people saying about your brand? What about your industry? What about your competitors? Tracking high-performing industry keywords as well as mentions of your specific business can help you identify emerging trends and issues, keeping you ahead of the curve. Plus, you can effectively gauge the balance of positive, negative, and neutral sentiments about your brand so you can adjust your marketing and tech strategies as needed.
Website Analytics
Your own website is a goldmine of customer data and analytics. For instance, you can track visitor behavior such as page views, bounce rates, time spent on site, and conversion rates to get an idea of how your audience navigates from one page to the next and, potentially, where their needs and interests are leading them. The locations and demographics of your website visitors are also up for analysis, giving you even more data to work with as you put together the puzzle of your customers’ expectations.
Competitive Analysis
Don’t forget those pesky competitors. In fact, when it comes to crafting products with more customer focus, they may just be your unsung heroes. A closer look at your competitors’ target audience, marketing strategies, and patterns of customer engagement (hello, social media) can help identify gaps in the market that your business can fill and generate some fresh ideas for content, communication, and technology design that you wouldn’t have considered otherwise.
Separating Needs from Assumptions
“It is always better to ask a question than to make an assumption, because assumptions set us up for suffering.” – Don Miguel Ruiz, The Four Agreements
That’s a little dramatic for our taste, but the theory still stands: assumptions are likely to lead your business towards a tech strategy that’s not nearly as lucrative or productive as you’d like it to be. Getting to know your audience is quite complex, and assumptions can destroy the foundation of even the strongest customer focus groups or website analytics. At Tarkenton, we tend to highlight two undeniable tactics for prioritizing customer needs:
User Journey Maps
A successful user journey map is a vibrant visual representation of a customer’s interactions with your brand. It follows them from the initial click all the way to the final purchase, providing a big picture view of what your customers want and expect. No more guesswork. No more “strategic” shots in the dark. You now have an in-depth, data-driven understanding of how your product design can improve and how you can streamline your communication and product delivery for higher customer satisfaction.
Project Plans
A compass is a great tool for getting you where you need to go, but so is a detailed roadmap. That’s what project plans are for. Before you dive into market research strategies like the ones we’ve outlined above, press pause and consider how well you understand the market and what the specific scope and goals of your research are. You’ll also want to understand the risks, resources, and performance metrics that your project will entail, setting yourself up to use only the right tech tools and shift your strategy as new information is revealed.
Remember, your customers are the focus here, and you want to identify what’s best for them. Assessing their needs will require agility, collaboration, and open minds as you and your teams dismantle your assumptions about your target audience and make way for real results.
Exceptional Customer-Centric Product Design with Tarkenton
Say “yes” to better customer experiences with support from Tarkenton. We understand that customers are the heart of all you do and achieve, and we want to see you strengthen your connection with them and grow your knowledge of how they behave. Success is right around the corner. You just have to reach for it.
Contact Tarkenton today to learn how our expert market research and consulting services can help you understand your target audience and deliver best-in-class technological solutions.