To succeed in business, you have to please your customers. This is a simple fact of entrepreneurial life; your success depends entirely on the people who choose to buy your products or your services.

 

Knowing how essential customers are to a business, most entrepreneurs spend a huge amount of time seeking to cater to their customers in the best way possible. This can mean examining and improving customer experience, researching what customers want right now, and trying to guess what they might want in future. All of these are incredibly useful and well worth engaging with, but if there’s one thing any entrepreneur knows, customers are not always as predictable as one might hope.

 

Below, we’ve put together a few ways in which customers can surprise even the savviest and well-researched of entrepreneurs. If you keep these points in the back of your mind when making decisions and planning your business’ next move, you’ll be able to expect the unexpected from the people you rely on for your business success.

 

Customers are more understanding than many entrepreneurs think

While there will always be the risk of experiencing the occasional unreasonable customer, the vast majority of customers will be understanding if issues arise – if you communicate effectively. By apologizing for any problems a customer experiences, being upfront about any future difficulties, and listening to complaints in full, you should find the vast majority of your customers are incredibly understanding and willing to give you a chance to rectify the problem.

 

Customers may not behave as you expect

If you’re selling a product or service, you’ll likely have a target customer in mind. When creating this target customer, you’ll assess how you think that customer will behave; when they will want to buy, what they are willing to pay, and how they will search for your services or products. What may surprise you is that your target customers may act entirely differently to your projections, so you have to be flexible and willing to respond to customer behaviors you didn’t anticipate.

It’s important to utilize a variety of tools that can tell you what your customers do; service providers can use customer surveys to seek insight into what drew a customer to a website, while Amazon sellers can use the likes of WordTree to target keywords people are actually using when searching for products. By focusing more on what customers actually do, rather than what you expect them to do, you’re likely to achieve a well-rounded, beneficial approach.

 

Customers may not respond well to “hard sell” tactics

A lot of online advice about selling is based on “hard sell” tactics, discussions of creating a sales funnel, and focusing primarily on achieving conversions rather than the seeking to create a pleasant environment for the customer. While these profit-focused techniques can work, they also make a considerable number of customers feel uncomfortable. It’s therefore helpful if you use a balance of selling techniques to ensure your products or services appeal to as many people as possible.

 

In conclusion

By being aware of how customers may act differently from how you anticipated they would, you can be sure of formulating a healthy, customer-focused business that avoids stereotypes and embraces customers for who they are.

Source: Pixabay / CC0 Licence