What is Customer Perception? Everything You Need to Know About it
Table of contents
What do your customers think of your brand? How do they feel about your products and services?
If you’re not sure, you’re not alone. Understanding customer perception can be tricky because it’s subjective and varies from person to person. But just because it’s hard to pin down doesn’t mean you should ignore it.
Your customers’ opinions about your business are crucial—they influence whether people keep coming back to you or not.
If you make a bad impression, you risk losing a lot of customers. But if you understand how they feel and what they think, you can make smarter decisions that keep them happy and loyal.
In this article, we’ll take a closer look at:
- What is customer perception?
- How to measure customer perception?
- Ways to get customers to have a positive perception of your business
Table of Contents
- What is Customer Perception?
- Why is Customer Perception Important?
- How To Identify And Measure Customer Perception
- Examples of How Brands Improved Their Customer Perception
- Wrapping Up
- Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
What is Customer Perception?
Customer perception can be defined as how customers view your brand. In other words, when someone thinks about your brand, what emotion does it bring out in them?
It’s normally shaped by your customer base’s experiences (direct or indirect),beliefs, and interactions with your brand. Studying this in detail helps you identify things your customers like and dislike about your brand.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, puts it across in the best possible way:
“Your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room.”
It’s important to keep in mind that this perception isn’t shaped by just your product or service.
Let’s say you own a coffee shop and that most of your customers like the coffee you serve. But that’s not enough for them to perceive your brand in a positive way. It’s also about the ambience, the quality of service, and the friendliness of the staff.
All these factors contribute to your customers’ opinion about your coffee shop.
Why is Customer Perception Important?
Let’s delve into why customer perception matters
- Drives Purchasing Decisions: The way your consumers perceive your brand determines their willingness to purchase your products and services. It’s a no shocker that a positive perception can increase the likelihood of repeat purchases.
- Shapes Brand Reputation: It’s simple! If customers view your brand in a positive way, they’re likely to spread the word in their social circles.
- Brand Advocacy: Satisfied customers who perceive a brand favorably tend to share their experiences, thereby acting as advocates. This influences potential customers through word-of-mouth and social media. This organic promotion can significantly boost a brand’s reputation and reach.
Recommended read: How Great Customer Service Can Drive Business Growth
How To Identify And Measure Customer Perception
Understanding customer perception might seem intangible. But it can be measured can be measured through feedback, metrics, and online mentions.
By analyzing this data, businesses can gauge customer sentiment and identify areas for improvement. Let’s find out how:
1. Customer Surveys and Feedback Forms
Gathering direct feedback from customers is essential for understanding their perception of your business. You can
Collecting customer feedback is the first step in understanding how your business is perceived.
Regularly tracking what customers think about your brand helps you gauge your market reputation. Knowing whether feedback is favorable or unfavorable allows you to take necessary actions to improve.
Here are 2 very popular metrics that you can find out through customer feedback:
- Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS is a commonly used metric that measures loyalty by looking at a customer’s likelihood of recommending a business to their friends and family.
It is measured by asking customers a simple question: “On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our company/product/service to a friend or colleague?”
0 stands for ‘least likely’ and 10 stands for ‘most likely’.
How to Calculate NPS:
Based on the ratings, customers are categorized as Promoters (customers giving a score of 9-10),Passives (customers giving a score of 7-8),or Detractors (customers giving a score of 0-6).
Finally, NPS= {(Number of Promoters – Number of Detractors) / Total Number of Respondents}× 100
This formula gives a score ranging from -100 to 100.
- Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
CSAT measures customer’s overall satisfaction with your business, product, or service. It is calculated by first asking the question, “How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the products/service you received?”
The responses are usually on a scale of 1 to 5, or 1 to 10; where 1 might represent “Very Dissatisfied” and 5 or 10 might represent “Very Satisfied.”
How to Calculate CSAT:
Once customers have answered the CSAT question, add up the positive scores and divide by the number of respondents.
For instance, On a scale of 1-5, if the total positive score from all respondents is 400 and there were 100 respondents, the average CSAT score would be 4 out of 5.
2. Social Media Monitoring
Social media is a goldmine for gauging customer perception. Social media monitoring involves tracking mentions, comments, and discussions about your brand across various social media platforms. This allows businesses to capture real-time feedback and sentiment about their products, services, and overall brand image.
Here’s how you can analyze your social media data:
- Sentiment analysis: Monitoring your brand’s mentions and hashtags used by customers can help identify the tone of conversations around your brand. Social media analytics tools such as Hootsuite, Hashtagify. could be of help to identify the trends. You can also analyze your customers’ sentiments by closely looking at what they comment on your social media pages. Are they mostly positive, negative or neutral? This sentiment analysis helps determine the attitude of your customers towards the brand.
- Competitor comparison: Analyze your brand’s social media reach and performance against your competitors to understand where you stand in the market.
- Track Trends and Patterns: Over time, social media monitoring can reveal trends in customer opinions. For instance, are there recurring complaints about a particular aspect of your product or service? Or do customers frequently praise a specific feature? These insights can guide business decisions and improvements.
For example, imagine a retail clothing brand launching a new product line. By monitoring their social media channels like Twitter and Instagram, the brand can track customer reactions to the new collection – using a unique hashtag.
The brand can also analyze customer sentiments with tools like Brandwatch to gauge customer reactions. Tools like Instagram Insights or Twitter Analytics help review engagement metrics. This allows them to observe if customers are sharing photos of their purchases and what they’re saying about the style, fit, and quality.
3. Online Reviews and Ratings
Online reviews and ratings refer to feedback left by customers on various third-party sites. These can range from general review sites like Yelp and Google Reviews to niche sites like G2.
Reviews and ratings are often the first things potential customers look for when researching a brand. They provide a snapshot of what existing customers think about your business and can significantly influence the perception of your brand.
Here’s how you can make the best use of online reviews of your brand:
- Regular Monitoring: Regularly check review platforms for new customer reviews. This proactive approach ensures you’re always up-to-date with customer feedback. It is also a good idea to sign up for new platforms relevant to your industry. This helps customers find your brand instantly and post their review.
- Respond to Reviews: Engage with both positive and negative reviews. Acknowledging positive reviews shows appreciation while responding to negative feedback demonstrates your willingness to listen to customers and address their issues.
- Analyzing Feedback for Insights: Look for patterns in the reviews. Are there specific aspects of your service repeatedly praised or criticized? This can highlight strengths to build upon and areas that need improvement.
Consider a hotel chain monitoring its reviews on TripAdvisor. The management could use all the feedback to understand guests’ perceptions of their facilities, cleanliness, customer service, and overall experience.
For instance, if several reviews point out the friendliness of the staff as a positive, the hotel can capitalize on this strength in their marketing. Conversely, if there are recurring complaints about room cleanliness, it signals a need for immediate action in housekeeping standards.
Recommended read: Customer Feedback Guide: How to Collect and What to Do With It?
4. Website Analytics
Your website often serves as the first point of contact between your business and potential customers. Utilizing website analytics is crucial for understanding how users interact with your site and how they perceive the brand.
Tools like Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Crazy Egg can provide in-depth insights into user behavior, such as which pages they visit most, how long they stay, and at what point they leave.
These tools can help you track key metrics mentioned below, offering valuable data to enhance the user experience:
- Bounce Rate: The percentage of visitors who leave after viewing only one page. A high bounce rate might indicate that your site isn’t engaging or relevant to visitors.
- Session Duration: The average amount of time users spend on your site. Longer sessions suggest that users find your content valuable and engaging.
- Conversion Rate: The percentage of visitors who take a desired action, like making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. This reflects how effectively your site turns visitors into customers or leads.
Here’s how you can analyze your website for your business:
- Evaluating User Experience: Analyze which pages are most visited and how users navigate your site. This can reveal what attracts users and where they might be getting lost or frustrated.
- Identifying Pain Points: Where do users typically exit your site? Or what are the pages with high bounce rates? These could be areas where the user experience needs improvement.
- Measuring Effectiveness of Changes: After making adjustments based on analytics, continue to monitor these metrics to see if there’s an improvement in user engagement and satisfaction.
For example, an e-commerce business can use website analytics to understand customer behavior during the shopping process. For example, if analytics show a high drop-off rate at the checkout page, this might indicate a problem with the checkout process, such as limited payment options.
5. Sales Data and Conversion Rates
Analyzing sales data and conversion rates is a direct approach to understanding customer perception and its impact on business performance. This method provides tangible insights into how customers are responding to your products or services.
This is where using a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Salesforce can be helpful. A CRM can aggregate and organize sales data, making it easier to spot trends such as seasonal fluctuations, responses to promotions, or shifts in buying patterns.
These insights are crucial in understanding what motivates customer decisions and how they perceive your offerings at different times. Moreover, a CRM can segment this data by customer demographics or behavior, allowing for more nuanced analysis of how different groups respond to your products or services.
Here’s how such comprehensive data can help your business:
- Product Performance: You can evaluate which products or services are performing well and which aren’t. High-performing products might benefit from further investment, while low-performing ones may need re-evaluation or discontinuation.
- Marketing Effectiveness: Analyzing how different marketing strategies and campaigns impact sales can help in strengthening those efforts. This can reveal what messaging resonates with your audience and how they perceive your brand under various marketing efforts.
- Customer Segmentation: Break down the sales data by different customer segments. This helps to understand how various groups perceive your products and whether certain demographics are more engaged than others.
A retail business, for example, can use sales data to track the success of a new clothing line. If the conversion rate (the percentage of website or store visitors who make a purchase) is higher for this line compared to others, it suggests that customers have a positive perception of the new line.
6. Customer Support Interactions
Evaluating customer support interactions is a crucial method for gaining insights into customer perception. These interactions often provide direct feedback on your products, services, and overall customer experience.
To do this properly, you need a helpdesk like say Hiver or Zendesk or Freshdesk. Such a platform organizes and categorizes customer inquiries, allowing you to identify common issues and gauge overall customer sentiment.
By analyzing tickets, chat logs, and email interactions stored in the helpdesk, you can understand the nature and frequency of customer concerns, as well as the effectiveness of your support team’s responses.
Here’s a little more detail on how you can analyze customer support interactions:
- Nature of Interactions: Review the types of queries or complaints customers present. Are they mostly about product features, service issues, or user experiences? This can highlight areas where customers may be facing challenges.
- Frequency and Patterns: This is an extension of the previous point. Identify the most frequent types of support requests or complaints. Recurring issues are indicators of problems that can significantly impact customer perception. For instance,let’s say a smartphone company frequently receives support requests about battery issues. This recurring theme could indicate a widespread problem with battery life. Such a pattern not only identifies a specific area for product improvement but also highlights a key concern impacting customer perception of the brand’s reliability.
- Response Effectiveness: Assess how well the customer support team resolves issues. Metrics such as response time and resolution time can shed light on how efficiently support staff answer customer questions.
Here’s a tip by Shep Hyken that will ensure that you deliver excellent customer service everytime:
“At any given time in your interaction with the customer, simply ask yourself this question: Is what I’m doing right now going to get that customer come back next time?”
– Shep Hyken, Customer Service and Experience Expert
For example, Boost Social Media customer support team is on standby 24/7 and ready to
extend your follower count across all your social media channels
Examples of How Brands Improved Their Customer Perception
1. Apple’s “Creativity Goes on” Campaign
During COVID-19, when the entire world was under a lockdown, Apple launched a campaign called “Creativity Goes on”. This included a series of videos showcasing how people around the world used Apple’s products to nurture their creativity during the pandemic.
It was a video compilation of people drawing on iPads, creating videos in MacBooks, using Facetime for connecting with people and more. In fact. celebrities like Oprah Winfrey and Lily James participated in this campaign.
Critics and consumers warmly embraced the campaign, praising its uplifting message and portrayal of creative resilience during challenging times.
During the lockdown, when many businesses were shutting down, Apple managed to impress its audience and create a strong brand perception. This shows the power of strategic marketing in maintaining positive customer perception even in difficult times.
2. Get It Made’s Super Fast Customer Service
Get It Made is a UK based manufacturing services company that handles a large volume of customer queries on a daily basis.
They needed a system that would help them close current orders fast, work on winning more new orders and, most importantly, ensure they can keep track of even the smallest of project details to ensure maximum customer satisfaction.
That’s when Get It Made found Hiver. Hiver’s features like shared inbox, notes and @mentions, and templates helped them immediately pick up a customer query the moment it landed in their inbox. They’re now able to assign queries to the right teammate, collaborate on complex issues, and use templates to answer FAQs – without a complicated helpdesk.
With Hiver, Get It Made improved their team efficiency by 250% and are able to serve their customers better. The company’s brand perception, in this case, improved because of their excellent customer service.
“Our clients often tell us that they choose us over our competitors due to our speed and quality of communication.” – Fin Brown, Project Manager, Get It Made
Wrapping Up
As you can see, customer perception is a little complicated to measure and improve. It’s not one single metric such as retention rate or customer satisfaction.
But with the right tools, you can put pieces together and build a detailed view of how customers perceive your brand. Improving this perception requires a holistic approach where you invest in multiple areas – from customer support to marketing to website optimization.
But, it all starts with a mindset shift – where you place the customer at the center of everything you do.
Speaking of customer service, you might want to check out Hiver. Built to work within the your inbox, Hiver centralizes all your customer communication in a single place – so that you never miss a query. With Hiver, you can not only manage customer interactions but also gather customer feedback directly from the familiar Gmail interface.
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Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
- What tools can help in measuring customer perception?
– Survey Tools: Platforms like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms for collecting customer feedback.
– Social Media Monitoring Tools: Tools like Hootsuite, Brandwatch, and Sprout Social to track mentions and sentiments on social media.
– Website Analytics Tools: Google Analytics, Hotjar, and Crazy Egg to analyze user behavior on your website.
– Customer Support Platforms: Systems like Hiver to track and analyze customer service interactions. - What are some effective ways to respond to negative customer feedback?
– Acknowledging the Issue: Show empathy and understanding.
– Apologizing: If there’s a fault, apologize sincerely.
– Providing a Solution: Offer a solution or a way to rectify the issue.– Following Up: Ensure the customer is satisfied with the resolution. - What role does employee training play in customer perception?
Employee training plays a crucial role in shaping customer perception. Well-trained employees can provide better service, handle complaints more effectively, and ensure a positive customer experience, all of which contribute to a favorable perception of the brand. - What are some common mistakes businesses make that negatively impact customer perception?
Common mistakes include:
– Ignoring Customer Feedback: Failing to act on feedback can make customers feel undervalued.
– Inconsistent Branding: Inconsistent messages and branding can confuse customers and weaken trust.
– Poor Customer Service: Slow or ineffective customer service can significantly harm perception.
