Identifying Unmet Needs and Customer Perceptions
About the Client
For over 7 years, the client has been a leading firm in the food and beverage industry, serving customers throughout the Western United States and South America.
Business Challenge
With rising competition, latest technological advancements, and changes in customer preferences, companies in the food industry need to embrace new models and strategies to compete in the marketplace. This makes it vital for companies in the food industry to gain detailed insights into the competitors, understand customers’ needs and preferences, latest market trends, and consumer buying patterns to better position their products and services in the target markets.
A leading firm in the food and beverage industry wanted to assess customers’ perception of their current offerings and strength of competing brands. The client realized that as technology improves, and the customers’ need advances, identifying the unmet customer needs was the only way to keep up their market position. Moreover, without a strategic approach to customer needs analysis, they encountered costly risks from demand and supply mismatch, which affected their customer satisfaction and resulted in revenue losses for the company. By leveraging Infiniti’s customer needs analysis, they wanted to define current and future customers’ unmet needs and understand customers’ buying criteria.
Are you looking to identify and meet your customer needs? Well, this can be a daunting task if you haven’t paid close attention to customer needs before. Learn how Infiniti’s customer needs analysis can help – Request a FREE brochure.
Top Challenges Faced by the Food Industry Client
Problem Statement 1: Demand for convenience
Tech-driven delivery systems have disrupted the traditional business model. With technological advancements in the food industry, customers have become more demanding. This compelled the client to leverage Infiniti’s customer needs analysis solutions to meet customer demands and ensure convenience.
Problem Statement 2: More discerning tastes
Today, customers have become more discerning. They are seeking out exciting and higher-quality meals. Due to this trend, the client realized the need to leverage customer needs analysis to better meet customers’ demand and sustain their market position.
Problem Statement 3: Opting for healthier foods
The modern customers’ emphasis on health has extended beyond the gym, leading to healthy eating habits. Hence, the client’s unstructured approach to customer needs assessment resulted in revenue losses for the company, leading to a sharp decline in their market position. With the help of Infiniti’s customer needs analysis solution, the client wanted to continuously improve the quality of their products by monitoring the initiatives undertaken by their competitors.
Problem Statement 4: Retaining profitability
Owing to commodity price shifts and dynamism in the market, the client found it challenging to retain their profit margins. By leveraging our customer needs analysis solution, they wanted to develop a standardized set of processes and competitive benchmarking metrics.
Customer needs are dynamic, and most companies often lose track of their changing customer needs. Are you finding it challenging too? Get in touch with our experts to leverage our customer needs analysis.
Solutions Offered and Value Delivered
The experts at Infiniti Research recommended a two-phase study to meet the client’s challenges.
Phase 1: Qualitative analysis
The initial phase of the customer needs analysis engagement focussed on identifying customers’ unmet needs, understanding purchasing drivers and barriers, and assessing customers’ perceptions of current offerings. By conducting interviews, surveys, and discussions, the experts figured out the needs of the customers and the market. This helped the client to implement better branding strategies and marketing initiatives to enhance their service offerings for the target market.
Phase 2: Quantitative analysis
The second phase of customer needs analysis engagement revolved around quantifying market perceptions, evaluating the most preferred product features, and the introduction of new products. The experts at Infiniti performed a thorough internal sales data assessment and an extensive customer survey to segment customers by needs, to compare performance against competitors, and develop value propositions to stay ahead of the competition.
With the help of Infiniti’s customer needs analysis, the client was able to increase their sales and market share by focussing on upgrading their product features. This further helped the client in successfully implementing the new customer segmentation approach and realigning their delivery system, as well as distribution and sales process based on customer needs.
The customer needs analysis solution further helped the client to understand their customer needs and their position in the overall market. They were able to introduce new products in the market, which subsequently enhanced the customer experience and improved profit margin by 13% in a year.
Finding it difficult to identify unmet customer needs? Our customer needs analysis solution can help. Request a FREE proposal!
What is a customer needs analysis?
A customer needs analysis is used in product development and branding to provide an in-depth analysis of the customer to ensure that the product or message offers the benefits, attributes, and features needed to provide the customer with value. To find the right customer priorities, businesses need to create buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, look at customer’s long-term retention patterns, establish a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers, and communicate with the ideal customer in their preferred social media space.
How can you identify customer needs?
To be good at marketing you need to be good at understanding and satisfying the most important needs of your customers in relation to your products or services. By understanding their most important needs you can tailor your product and service offering and shape your brand to meet their needs. Given our expertise in performing customer needs analysis for various businesses, we’ve listed out the customer needs analysis methods.
- Identify what your customers need through research, focus groups, or social listening.
- Mapping customer journey is a great way of undertaking the customer need analysis. It is a visualization of processes that a customer encounters with a product or service.
- Knowing what your competitors are doing will help evaluate where you stand in the market and identify gaps in your offerings.
- Analyzing cause-effect relationship ensures better customer need analysis and helps in addressing root-cause problems, thereby enhancing user experience.
