A business’s success or failure is increasingly determined by customer perception. The way a customer feels about your brand plays a bigger role in consumer decision-making than the price or service provided. This means that your business success largely hinges on creating positive customer perceptions.
In this guide, you will learn what customer perception is and how to improve the way customers view your business. Let’s start by getting a customer perception definition.
What is Customer Perception?
Customer perception is the way a customer views your business and products. A customer’s opinion about your business will be formed by direct and indirect experiences with your brand. Being aware of customer attitudes toward your business can help you improve your service, product, and customer journey.
Creating positive customer perceptions is essential for business success. By understanding what your customers think of you, you can make better strategic business decisions and improve the overall customer experience. Customers’ perceptions of your brand can impact your bottom line significantly.
This means that if customers like what you offer, they are more likely to buy from you again. Now that we know the customer perception meaning, let’s move on to how customer perceptions influence your business.
How Customer Perceptions Influence Your Business
The importance of perception cannot be overstated. Creating a positive consumer perception of your business can lead to higher sales and greater profits by improving retention rates and increasing loyalty.
So, if customers like what you offer, they are more likely to buy from you again! With a large variety of competitive options available to consumers, it is not enough to have a well-known brand. The way customers feel about your business can increase brand loyalty and result in positive referrals.
Likewise, negative customer perceptions can damage your brand image and drive both current and prospective customers away. This is why customer-perceived value is important.
Factors Affecting Customer Perceptions
As mentioned earlier, perception in business is important, which is why you need to know the factors that go into a positive perception. We describe these below:
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Marketing — it refers to the overall way your brand is portrayed through advertisements, websites, social media posts, events, and public relations. Make sure these aspects are in alignment. All platforms should convey the same message and portray what you want the public to know and feel about your brand to create a positive business perception.
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Social Media — this is a great platform to interact with your customers and give them a chance to voice their opinions about how well you are doing, or not. If they received substandard service you can ask them about the poor quality or value perception deficit they experienced.
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Customer Service — we talked about what is customer perception and why it is important, but your customer service agents are the first line of contact for your customers and have a direct influence on how your brand is perceived. They can also give you some feedback and describe ways in which past experiences can affect customer expectations.
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Review and Critiques — there are a lot of forums where customers go to voice their criticism or give a review about a company. It is important to monitor these forums because it is important to respond to customer complaints and give your side of the story.
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Media Coverage — sometimes your business will get some attention from the press and it is always important to tell the audience why customers are important and how much their feedback means to you.
So far, we covered what is customer perception and why is perception important, but you need to know how good of a job you are doing creating this perception. Let’s take a look at this next.
How to Measure Perception
There are several metrics you should be monitoring when measuring the effectiveness of your customer perception efforts:
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CSAT — this is the customer satisfaction score and it allows customers to quantitatively rate the service they receive. Looking at the ratings and accompanying comments can show you what your customers are thinking and feeling.
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Net Promoter Score (NPS) — this is a tool for measuring how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others. NPS is less transactional than CSAT and focuses on the way your customers feel about your brand rather than how they feel about their recent customer service experience.
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Customer Effort Score (CES) — this score measures how easy (or difficult) it is for customers to solve their issues or to complete a task using your product or service. Ideally, you want buyers to get the resolution they need with little effort.
How Do You Change Customer Perception?
We already know what customer perception is and why it is important, but what if you don’t like your current perception and would like to change it? One way is to strike an emotional chord with your customers.
Research shows that across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that the most effective way to maximize customer value is to move beyond mere customer satisfaction and connect with customers at an emotional level — tapping into their fundamental motivations and fulfilling their deep, often unspoken emotional needs.
Also, you can commit to consistency. When evaluating consistency, it’s important to take a step back and consider its role in your customer onboarding process. To tee up a positive customer perception, you’ll want to ensure that the hand-off from sales to support or customer success is fluid and reflects how you want folks to view your brand.
Trust Pexly to Help You Improve Your Business Perception
In this article, we talked about why is customer perception important and why the customer is important. Now that you know the customer perceived value definition you can go about improving the way customers see your business.
If you need any help in doing this Pexly can be of help to you by setting up dedicated customer support teams, content moderation teams, and many other ways to help improve customer perception.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you!
