This is a question many companies have a bit of a feel for, but let’s be honest it’s mostly a guess. In a well functioning business you will have a tight feedback loop, this means that your customer service or customer success team provides valuable insights into what your customers like and dislike. But as you may be privy to, this isn’t always the case. The customer service teams are more prone to mitigate angry customers who feel as if they’ve been wronged, probably because of missing packages or delayed deliveries.
In fact, a lot of times you can see upper management and marketing having a strong belief about what customers want to pay for and your unique USP. But these don’t always resonate with their customers, throughout the years we have seen examples of companies who are strongly committed to their environmental and organic cause, but their customers actually value something completely different.
Why is there a dichotomy in what businesses market and what customers value?
There really isn’t one answer that fits all, but maybe we can boil it down to failed marketing. Companies spend a large portion of their budget on marketing, and it’s supposed to be spent towards marketing the company’s values. But if that isn’t what drives the willingness to pay, well the marketing is just off. Marketing is a tough business, communication is difficult especially when you have a limited amount of time to get your message across.
We have already touched on the lack of the feedback loop from your customer service team, or the boots on the ground. But a similar issue business may struggle with is segmentation and customer personas. This typically boils down to your business not knowing what each customer group values and how to best market to them. You should understand what middle aged men are willing to pay for, meaning certain attributes of your product. What are the drivers in the product, not your perceived values but the actual values.
How can I measure what the customer values in my product?
Gathering data and information about your customer and products can be done in many ways. Training your staff in your customer service and customer success team could be a great way to gain qualitative insights into what your customers value. Make your marketing staff read reviews about your product online, or sit in with the customer service team.
However, this is a time consuming process and demands a lot of collaboration between your department or teams. While you should obviously do this, a more cost efficient and faster way to gain this valuable insight is through a pricing software. That will provide you with all the granular insights you need. What is important to consider is of course that you are not merely scraping the web and getting an average price, that is just a guessing game. But as we alluded to before it is the granularity in the insights that will bring you value. You want to be able to know that your customer X is paying Y% more for your product if it’s sustainable and sold online.
You can not afford not to have these insights and data. And you shouldn’t spend time to get this insight.