Customer Perception Guide: What it is, Main Factors & How to create?

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In today’s digital age, everything virtually is about Google search away, which helps your products and services be found; however, your competitors are easier to find as well, so this might be challenging for you all. Meanwhile, in the company’s ability, customer perception always has an essential role in appealing to more new users and keeping in touch with existing customers.

Additionally, the basic fact about consumer’s behavior is that they want good quality, but they also want to know they are getting excellent value at the same time. The value here doesn’t lie in being judged by goods or service they are buying, but also by the availability and usability of the customer service that keeps up to it. Brand recognition is not necessary anymore, but consumers want to feel good about a brand and company.

Everything about these facts is included in just one single term: Customer Perception. Then, the good news is that companies can manage a wide range of factors to form the individual’s perception of their company/brand. So, let’s start our The Only Guide You’ll Need to Create an Amazing Customer Perception article right now to know everything about it!

What is Customer Perception?

Customer perception was known as “A marketing concept that encompasses a customer’s impression, awareness or consciousness about a company or its offerings.” via its formal definition. Simply speaking, customer perception is the way your current customers and potential customers think about your company. This direct perception can affect the attraction of up to minute customers and the capacity to keep standard relationships with current customers.

The Importance of Customer Perception

1. Customer perception can affect everything

There is a SurveyMonkey report described that 58 percent or more people pay attention to a brand’s message, especially the brand they have been trusting for a long time. From understanding the customers to communications and advertising, their purchasing decisions, their loyalty, the way they think while recommending a brand and, their advocacy efforts, customer perception always has a vital role. Study research published in May 2019 from Deloitte shown that repetitive customers often refer to brands that they have a purchasing history in the same way with their friends and family, with words like “love,” “adore,” “happy.”

2. Enrich the brand value and obtain more opportunities for business

During this process, as consumer perception progressed on some levels, at the same time, their emotional expectations would also grow. This creates a point where we depend on brands to develop exciting, engaging customer experiences, generate and implement content, and bring out new technologies that help our lives better and sometimes included in social matters to shape our environments.

The 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer Special Report shows 67 percent of respondents from 8 global markets who agree with the statement, “A good reputation may get me to try a product, but I will soon stop buying it unless I manage to trust the company behind the product.” Meanwhile, only 1 of 3 people can say that they trust the brand they purchase.

3. Customer experience generate a majority of business possibilities

Brand loyalty has become one of the most valuable advantages for a company to own when the marketers try to add more and more to offer customers emotional assets and creating a great consumer perception via positive shopping experiences. Most of the business possibilities are created through offline and online customer experience.

In 2019, Adobe and Econsultancy revealed that B2B companies create most of their business changes from enhancing customer experience. Above all other essential factors such as content marketing, social media, video, data-driven marketing, and many more, this factor was prioritized.

st think about it, when we buy a product because of easy placing order, or maybe the fact that the app or website runs smoothly, or nice, welcoming and helpful sales rep, and so on. We must know that purchasing goods is now becoming less about the goods themselves and more about the embedded value we get during the process.

4. Consumers are committed to the brand

In the luxury sector, instead of the price or usability, customers are more committed to the brand. As we have seen from the luxury industry, consumers often don’t stay loyal to the price or function of a brand.

Meanwhile, they are likely to commit to the brand itself, which they think will offer them a niche and exclusive luxury experience. So, it seems more logical and efficient for such brands to enhance the brand perception instead of getting involved in price competition or value-added features on the item.

5. Costs to find a substitute are lessened greatly

At present, the budgets and criteria can be no matter the most important factors. Consumers now have more options than before. We have the advanced technology to help us find products and services and reduce the costs greatly to switch from one brand to another with the least endeavors and costs, as soon as the customer is unhappy or has a negative perception.

4 Main Factors Influencing Customer Perception

Branding

Branding includes elements from the logo, UI, and packaging to physical stores’ lighting to bring the initial image for potential clients. This is the main reason why companies often put a lot of money on the design and appearance of its company and services to make those visuals influence greatly on consumer perception.

What’s more, users’ demographics of certain brands’ products also impact those brands’ customer perceptions. This is extremely true for the luxury business when customers of this industry usually joint the brand image to their own identity. That’s why high luxury brands are so critical to their customers.

Advertising

Advertising lies in these campaigns that your company runs to provide implied perceptions about your products. What you say about your brand/company, and the messages being delivered to others will help them form opinions.

Plus, customers don’t just only want to feel good about your brand/company and its service, but they also need to be treated well, and the products and services also have to perform as advertised. So, advertising is crucial in forming customer perception, which lies in what you say about your company, the mediums you select, and how you demonstrate your message to drive consumers positively and negatively.

Influencer

Influencers are people that customers trust and being among the heaviest factors that influence customer perception apart from the customer’s own personal experience. Based on what I can see, customers who have immediate experience with your goods, service, or brand will be likely to recommend to other potential customers during the organizing stage because the people around us always have a huge impact on our making decisions. Whether the customer is reached in person or via social media, they all follow the human nature that individuals listen to the opinions and thoughts of people around them.

Read more:

• Influencer Marketing - How To Win Customers And Influence People
• How to Successful with Instagram Influencer Marketing
• How to Become an Instagram Influencer?

Personal Experience

It is not just about your products like those sneakers, or the watch, or that lipstick, but it is also about the interaction each of us has with brands via different channels. The days for customers to look for goods and services to use are long gone.

Now everybody is in search of a consistent, outstanding experience, which they think is worth reliving and sharing on social networks. From a modernistic website that reacts to the customer’s desires, to demonstrating target content which improves that experience or the internal media and customer’s services, everything has to be correctly custom-built for your public so that they create a customer perception from which you may benefit.

How to Measure Customer Perception

Yes, you are able to measure customer perception as it is not a mystery! Measure customer perception can lie in investing a small amount of time and using creative tools and techniques. Customer perception, when measured, provides a stream of valuable consumer insights. When brands start diving in measuring customer perception, they can see how customers engage with and interact with their brand. And here is how companies monitor and measure consumer perception in 3 steps:

1. Analyze the Website Traffic

There are hidden truths about how customers assess your brand on the company’s website. When you analyze your website traffic and look for clues in the right places, you can get the insights into customer perception. Analyze the trend of user behavior on your website will also enable you to clarify whether there is any change over time in brand perception.

Some free tools like Google Analytics can be utilized to analyze your website by looking into basic details:

• How many clients typed your company URL in the search bar?
• Are there any customers who downloaded your documents?
• Who has clicked an email that you had sent?

2. Read the online Customer Reviews

There are 72% of customers who will not take action until they see the reviews. That’s why customer reviews can greatly affect customer perception. Positive customer perception can be created if there are good reviews. Hence, companies make use of customer reviews to measure customer perception.

There is a lot of product review websites, such as G2Crowd, Yelp, AppExchange, Angie’s List, Salesforce, and so on as they have a huge database of customer feedback. Before deciding to purchase your products, your customers will potentially check the reviews. So, you can set up Google alerts to get notifications when reviews are posted. By taking this method, you can straight away know what customers are saying about your items and measure the positive or negative perception that is formed in the mind of potential customers.

3. Analyze Social Media Conversations

Analyzing social media conversations is one of the most productive methods to measure customer perception because social media conversations are always a great start to see what people are talking about your brand.

Users of goods and services are all around the Internet and they are utilizing social media as a channel to express their experiences, liking, or hatred towards a brand. When businesses or brands begin tracking brand mentions, it can lead to a group of honest feedback. It will bring insights into what customers perceive about your brand as well as the chances to manage your brand reputation, and an understanding of how consumers interact with your brand’s goods or services.

For instance, there is a brand named Clootrack that analyzed social media conversations of the top US hotels. After analyzing detailedly about 40,338 traveler and guest conversations, Clootrack generated a list of the customer perception drivers that visitors considered before they book a hotel room, which proves that social media conversations can be a great means of measuring customer perceptions.

4 Ways to Create and Maintain Good Customer Perception

Listen to Customer Feedback

Without knowing what your customers already think of your company, you will be unable to improve customer perception because you don’t want to stop serving something that they really enjoy. So, when you gather customer feedback, you will know precisely how they think about each aspect of your business.

You can obtain customer feedback in a few different ways, and the most popular one is about utilizing surveys or questionnaires through customer feedback tools to poll customers at the soonest time. You are also able to conduct interviews and focus on groups to get more in-depth conversations. No matter what you find, customers will appreciate your endeavors to consider their suggestions.

In addition to that, one of the toughest challenges that businesses might face is about having participants to submit feedback. In case the customer doesn’t have a secure opinion towards your brand, then they might not be concerned about taking a survey.

So, there might be the case that your feedback only has either highly-positive or highly-negative reviews. You should then consider providing a bonus for submitting customer feedback, and you should get a more precise feel for customer perception.

Keep your Words

In advertising and truth in general communication, companies should follow the truth and don’t make false promises. If you say your product can do something, ensure it can work. If someone calls your customer service department and you say that you can help, make sure that you can. Keeping words is so important in affecting your customer perception.

Stay Consistent

There is a crucial element in the customer perception definition because the perception reflects what consumers think and how they feel about your goods and services. But what will happen if different channels will give out contradictory or separate messages? So, lacking consistency can negatively affect your brand’s consumer perception, which can cancel your marketing efforts or harm your general image.

That’s why every brand must strive for consistency and to ensure that you have an integrated marketing strategy to implement across all channels. You will have to take care of the first brand interaction with the after-purchase tactics, and your consumer’s journey must be an easy, pleasant one to be built on the same values, principles, and supportive messages.

Create Emotional Connections with Customers

In one research form Deloitte, it reveals that to recommend a product or brand, people need more than mere company values and CSR promises, but they also need a strong, reliable emotional connection that can help to form their customer perception.

Also, HubSpot shows that consumers who have an emotional bond with the brand will have a 306 percent higher lifetime value and a 71 percent chance to recommend a company, compared to the average rate of only 45 percent.

I know that we live in a digitized world, so what kind of emotional bonds do customers want to have? According to Deloitte’s research, the consumers do look for brands that are willing to be their friends and expect these relationships can be based on responsiveness, which is a good understanding of their socio-cultural and political contexts, understanding, a good degree of personalized and multi-directional communications.

Customers usually want from their favorite companies to understand the type of products and services they use and what frequencies and utilize them to give them out personal information and experiences. Like friends, customers expect brands to stick to their feelings, pay close attention to their feedback, listen, and reply. When these things are accomplished, brands can get positive consumer perception.

Conclusion

Finally, you might know this or not; your company has already had a perception. Most importantly, it can work in your favor or against you. However, customer perception is about feeling and fact. From the very beginning touchpoint to last, the whole company is involved in this perception and can come up with it positively. If you now pay attention to how your brand is perceived, you can work towards enhancing it or fixing it for a better tomorrow.

So, we’ve gone through the definition of customer perception and showed you how to use skillful techniques that would win more positive perceptions from clients and drive loyalty and differentiate your brands from competitors. If you have something on your mind, feel free to leave a question. Follow our website for more helpful articles to support you running your business!