Customer today is influenced by a number of aspects that are factored into his buying decisions. This changes the way he behaves in certain situations, often determining whether he purchases the product or not. Subtle variations in his buying decisions can play a big role in the success or failure of a business. This article discusses about how customers’ buying behavior influences his/her purchase decision and how businesses can make use of it to increase their sales.
Importance of customer buying behavior
Studying customer behavior helps you in understanding how customers think, how they are influenced, who influences them and what motivates their purchase. Purchase is the end result in the process of customer’s decision-making. By knowing the buying behavior of a customer, businesses can get more sales out of their products or services.
Understanding customer buying behavior – what does it do to your business?
Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower – Steve Jobs
Innovate. It gives you an opportunity to be the first in the industry to identify changes in buyer’s decision making process. This provides you with a platform to come up with products or services that suit customer’s preferences more, taking them closer to the purchase. Studying customers’ buying behavior helps you in tracking the varying customer preferences, giving you a scope to innovate accordingly. Understanding customer buying behavior is important for any business as it helps in figuring out the changing needs of customers and targeting their products or services in a better way.
How to track customer buying behavior?
You can track customers’ behavior by asking them a series of questions in the form of an interview. Questions could be about various aspects like when they buy, how often they buy, in what quantities they buy, where they prefer to buy from, whose advice they choose before buying, etc. This will help you in understanding the efforts you have to take to motivate customers to purchase your products.
Going through the customers purchase records in the store can provide you with information regarding their purchase patterns. This leads to identifying the products or services that will be immediately popular and will sell well.
Being alert to the pain points or the inconveniences faced by the customers while shopping for your products proves useful. It gives you an opportunity to redesign your processes and strategies to make purchasing process simple, easy and customer friendly.
What influences CBB?
Social factors like culture, family, reference groups, opinion leader etc. play a key role in impacting purchasing decisions. Other factors like age, occupation, income levels, personality traits of individuals, degree of awareness of products and services among customers also influence customer buying behavior.
The extent of complexity involved in the purchase motivates the customer either to choose the product himself or approach his social circle for advice. For example, a customer purchasing a car tries to get as much information as possible about the various models, price, availability etc. from all sources before making a purchase. But the same customer would not gather as much information before hand when purchasing groceries.
Businesses must also keep in mind the Government policies, seasonal changes etc., which form the external factors that alter the buying patterns of a customer. For example, a sudden increase in the price of gasoline may result in an increased purchase of certain types of automobiles and vice versa.
Customer preferences do not remain same all the time. Products or services must be suited to the current needs of customers that may have changed from the past. Understanding customers’ buying behavior helps in designing products, processes, communications, advertisements, strategies that make it easy for customer to purchase the product or service from you.