Your customer base is filled with people from all walks of life. Different cultures, different ethnic groups, different generations, etc., all make up their own portions of your customer base, and that’s always important to keep in mind. Because they all have one thing in common: a need for your product – but that’s where the similarities can stop!
After all, different people can need the same product and/or service for a number of reasons, and focusing on this will help you to support the diversity within your customer base. And when you show support for this, your customer base can grow at a rapid rate in the future. But how do you effectively support the people who buy from you, but who you don’t know anything about? Here are our tips.
Start with Your Customer Service
If you want to support your diverse customer base, you need to meet them where they are. You need to be able to provide a diverse customer service to them in turn, which means at the very least, being able to speak their language. No matter where you are in the world, more than one language is going to be spoken, and you should never depend on simply working with English as your basis.
So make sure you’re looking into working with services such as a bsl interpreter; with about 11 million deaf individuals in the UK, about 151,000 of whom use this form of sign language, you’ll be able to service a far greater portion of your customer base. And sure, a lot of your current outreach programs are done online, but what about when it comes to being able to work in person again, or speaking over the phone? Communication is understanding, and if you want to understand who your customers are, you need to be able to speak to them!
Focus on Different Customer Needs
Your customers are all going to have different needs, even if they’re coming to the same shop to find the same product. Some are simply looking at the way the product functions, some are looking at the way the product is priced, some are looking at the way the product looks (and if they could imagine it fitting into their home), and the list goes on and on!
However, it’s the common customer needs within your customer base that you need to identify here. So send out a survey to those who have shopped with you; ask them what they look for when they come to your store? Come up with some customer needs and see if they identify with them – do they want something affordable, or do they want to buy something sustainable, or do they want a mixture of elements to choose from?
The more research you do know, the better you’ll support diversity in the future. After all, customer diversity will always exist without us even encouraging it, and knowing it exists within your customer base is the simple key to ensuring you can grow your client list at a steady rate.
Make Your Company Visible
Is your company visible? By that we ask: how many people know about your brand name? Would they recognise your name or logo if asked to pick it out? And what are you doing to promote your voice in the long run? Because without visibility, it’ll be hard to reach out to a diverse audience. And without a diverse audience, you’ll never know what it’ll take to support the diversity within your customer base – you simply won’t know what people want!
But how can you fix this? How can you promote your company to a wider audience, in a way that’ll get them to respond? Get onto social media. It’s the best platform for reaching thousands at once, and the more you have to ask, the more answers you’ll get. Make sure your posts are interactive, and use features like feedback polls to make any data you get here as quantitative as possible.
You’re likely to get a lot of long-winded responses, and this will ensure it’s easier for you to identify customer wants and needs. And remember what this is in aid of: the more you can prove you care about customer experience online, the more potential customers you’ll pull in!
Your customer base’s diversity needs support; how can you ensure you’re reaching out to the subsets of the people who shop with you? Use methods like those above.
