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Customer Perception: Definition, Importance, How to Manage

Customer perception is a critical factor that can make or break a company. Understanding this is essential for any business looking to succeed in today’s competitive market.

In this blog, we’ll explore the definition of customer perception, its importance, and how to manage it effectively.

What is Customer Perception?

Customer perception refers to how customers perceive a brand, product, or service, and their perception can significantly influence their buying decisions. 

It is a subjective and often emotional response that various factors, including personal customer experience, word-of-mouth, advertising, and online reviews, can influence. 

Customer perceptions significantly impact buying decisions and loyalty to a particular brand or company. It is key to understanding how customers view and relate to a business and its offerings.

Importance of Customer Perception

Why is customer perception important? The high customer effort score reflected customers’ challenging and frustrating experiences when interacting with your support team, negatively impacting their perception of our brand. 

Effective management of such perception is crucial for several reasons:

Influences Buying Decisions

It is pivotal in determining whether a customer buys from your business. Positive perception influences customer perception, increasing sales, while negative perception can deter potential customers.

Brand Loyalty

A strong and positive customer perception can lead to brand loyalty. Customers who perceive a brand favorably are likelier to become repeat customers and advocates, which can be invaluable for long-term customer success.

Competitive Advantage

Businesses that effectively manage and improve customer perception in a crowded marketplace can gain a competitive edge. When customers feel to perceive a brand as trustworthy, reliable, and customer-centric, it stands out from the competition.

Reputation Management

It directly affects a company’s reputation. Managing customer perception allows a business to maintain a positive image, even in the face of occasional hiccups or negative feedback.

Pricing Flexibility

A positive customer perception can enable companies to command premium prices for their products or services. Customers are often willing to pay more for brands they trust and perceive as high quality.

How to Identify and Measure Customer Perception

To manage customer perception effectively, it’s essential to identify and measure it. Here are some methods to do so:

• Surveys and Feedback Forms: Create surveys and feedback forms to gather customer opinions and perceptions. Ask questions related to their experiences with your brand and products.
• Social Media Listening: Monitor social media platforms and track mentions, comments, and reviews related to your brand. Tools like social media listening software can help automate this process.
• Customer Interviews: Conduct in-depth interviews with customers to understand better their perceptions and what drives their opinions.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Use the NPS system to measure customer loyalty and gauge overall customer perception.
• Competitive Analysis: Compare your brand’s perception with that of your competitors. This can provide valuable insights into your strengths and weaknesses.

Ways to Manage Good Customer Perception

Managing customer perception is an ongoing effort that involves various strategies and actions. Here are some critical steps to help you in this process:

01. Consistent Branding

Ensure your branding, including logos, messaging, and design, is consistent across all customer touchpoints. Consistency builds trust and reinforces your brand image.

02. Quality Products and Services

Consistently deliver high-quality products and services to meet or exceed customer expectations. This will lead to positive word-of-mouth and improved perception.

03. Customer Feedback

Actively seek and listen to customer feedback. Address concerns and make improvements based on their suggestions. This shows that you value their opinions and are committed to customer satisfaction.

04. Transparency

Keep your business’s rules and methods clear. Honesty and openness can increase trust and influence customer perception.

05. Effective Marketing

Craft marketing campaigns that resonate with your target audience. Highlight your brand’s strengths and values to create a positive consumer perception in the minds of potential customers.

06. Online Reputation Management

Monitor online reviews and social media mentions. Address negative comments professionally and promptly. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews.

07. Employee Training

Train your employees to provide excellent customer service. A positive interaction with your staff can significantly impact how customers perceive your brand.

08. Community Engagement

Engage in community initiatives, and support causes that align with your brand’s values. This can improve your reputation and foster a positive brand perception.

09. Adapt to Changing Trends

Stay current with market trends and evolving customer preferences. Adapt your products and services to meet changing demands.

Types of Questions to Use on Your Customer Perception Survey

When creating a customer perception survey, it’s important to use various question types to gather valuable insights about your products, services, and customer satisfaction. Here are different types of questions to include in your survey:

Demographic Questions

Including demographic questions can help you segment your survey data and better understand how different customer groups perceive your brand. Examples include:

• “What is your age range?”
• “What is your level of education?”
• “Which industry do you work in?”

Learn why understanding your  Customer Journey  critically transforms your customer experience programs for the better. 

Multiple-Choice Questions

These questions provide predefined answer options and help collect quantitative data. Examples include:

• “On a scale of 1 to 5, how satisfied are you with our product?”
• “Which of the following features do you find most valuable?”

Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions allow customers to provide detailed, qualitative feedback. These questions can reveal insights that you may not have anticipated. Examples include:

• “What do you like most about our product or service?”
• “Is there anything we can improve on?”

Likert Scale Questions

Likert scale questions measure the intensity of agreement or disagreement on a statement. They are often used to gauge customer opinions and attitudes. Examples include:

• “Please rate your level of agreement with the statement: ‘Our customer service is responsive and helpful.'”
• “How likely are you to recommend our product to a friend or colleague? (1 = Not likely, 5 = Very likely)”

Net Promoter Score (NPS) Questions

NPS questions are used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. Customers are asked to rate on a scale of 0 to 10 how likely they are to recommend your product or service to others. The NPS question is typically followed by an open-ended question to gather additional comments.

• On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend our new mobile app to your friends or colleagues?

CSAT and CSE

Csat (customer satisfaction score) questions:.

CSAT questions measure overall customer satisfaction with a specific product or service. It typically involves a simple rating scale. Examples include:

• “How satisfied are you with your recent interaction with our customer support team?”
• “Rate your overall satisfaction with our delivery process.”

CSE (Customer Effort Score) Questions:

CSE questions assess the ease with which customers can achieve their goals when interacting with your company. This metric is crucial for understanding the customer experience. Examples include:

• “How easy was it to find the information you were looking for on our website?”
• “Did our team make it simple for you to resolve your issue?”

Customer perception is a vital element of business success. A positive perception can increase brand loyalty, trust, and competitiveness, while a negative perception can harm your business. 

By consistently delivering quality products and services, being transparent, listening to customer feedback, and effectively managing your brand’s image, you can shape a positive perception that benefits your business and your customers. 

Remember that customer perception is not static; it requires ongoing efforts to maintain and improve.

QuestionPro empowers businesses to gather valuable customer journey insights through surveys and feedback. This data helps understand and manage customer perception effectively, enabling organizations to make informed decisions, enhance customer experiences, and drive improved customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Experience the power of customer perception management with our free trial of QuestionPro and unlock actionable insights today!

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What is customer perception research and how can it help my organisation?

Customer perception research explores everything that your customers have previously and are currently taking on board regarding your organisation. It includes customer experience, what they perceive and hear about you, whether expectations are being met, and external influences on their decision making. Simply put, it can focus in on how your customers really perceive your organisation and what you can do to improve customer service, brand image, and product or service range. 

Knowledge gained from the results of a customer perception research study will help you and your organisation develop ideas and solutions for driving the business forward. Key findings and trends will pinpoint what you must do to improve customer opinion and drive customer loyalty. Importantly, results data will detect what motivates your customers to purchase or recommend your products or services. It will uncover what the customer would like to see more of and where things might be going wrong or causing detriment to the brand. 

In this article, we will discuss the importance of customer perception research, types of customer perception research, using customer segments to organise a study, and the customer perception questionnaire.

The importance of customer perception research 

Customer perceptions are central to the success of your organisation. Customer perception research is exploratory research that will tell you how your customers perceive your organisation, its people, your services/products, the wider brand. The findings results will precisely inform you on whether you are making the right decisions for the organisation and thus, leading your organisation in the appropriate strategic direction.  

Today when it comes to marketplace competition, the organisation will be facing multiple challenges as the impact of online marketing can be brutal when businesses try to outdo one another to gain an advantage. For this reason, marketers strongly recognise the power of identifying the customers’ needs and expectations; working out why they are attracted to a service provision, product, or marketing campaign. Alongside excellent customer service, the best way to compete more successfully is to offer the customer what they want now. In addition to this, you will want to offer the customer what they do not yet know they want - based on the customer behaviours and motivations revealed in a customer perception study, you can be certain that they will appreciate whatever it is once it is seen or experienced! 

Types of customer perception research 

Quantitative customer perception research.

Answers to research questions are gathered by conducting a quantitative questionnaire. Quantitative research methodologies include online surveys and panel research. 

Qualitative customer perception research

Answers to research questions are gathered by conducting a qualitative semi-structured questionnaire, which allows for more ‘free comment’ from the participant. Qualitative research methodologies include telephone surveys, face to face surveys, and focus groups. 

Mixed method customer perception research

Answers to research questions are gathered by conducting a mixed-method questionnaire. Mixed method quantitative and qualitative research methodologies include online surveys supported by telephone surveys. 

Using customer segments to organise customer perception research 

It is good practice to use customer segments (sometimes known as customer personas) to guide and divide the data according to these different customer types. Customer segments are simply, grouped representations of your customers according to distinct market sectors or other key behaviours. Typically, a customer perception survey would include screening questions to define the customer segments early on. When the survey data is generated, the results can be effortlessly filtered according to the type of customer, making the discoveries even more meaningful.

The questionnaire 

• All research must start by identifying the key objectives of the research and recognise important areas that the organisation needs to find out more about. Once done this will provide the structure you require to start building a customer perception questionnaire. 
• Key areas can include how do the customers experience the service they receive, what do they think of individual products, how do they relate to the company brand, what are the perceived strengths and weaknesses? 
• Overall perception evaluation is calculated by measuring how well the customers' expectations meet their actual experience and how this compares to the intended perception of the organisation. 
• Who to survey? The research can begin with the organisation’s existing customers but can also include lost customers and prospective customers. 

conclusion 

Nowadays quality and reliable customer insight is more valuable than it has ever been. Good data from customer perception research will give you the information you need to make core improvements to your organisation. By making significant or even small changes in tune with what your key customers are telling you, you will naturally have more cohesion with your existing and future audiences. This in turn means more visits to your website and an increase in the uptake of your services, more purchasing, and many more happy customers. There are lots of things you can do to increase your visibility and customer satisfaction, but importantly, a customer perception research study will help to get you started and go some way in identifying the core pillars that will help move your organisation forward. Eventually, the success of your business will demonstrate the value of listening to your customers' perceptions.

Would you like to discover how customer perception research will benefit your business or organisation?  Get in touch today and see how Mackman Research can help you conduct customer perception research… 

Dr Gemma Mackman

Research Director

Dr Gemma Mackman is co-founder and Research Director of the Mackman Group. Her professional career has given her a broad knowledge of business practices, an appreciation of good customer service and experience of a diverse range of sectors. Gemma is also a member of the Market Research Society and has completed research training provided by the Economic and Social Research Council.

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Customer Perception: What It Is, Why It's Important, and How to Improve It

Updated: August 04, 2021

Published: May 28, 2021

Thanks in large part to the internet, we've reached a turning point in human history.

The constant connectivity. The steadfast march of technology. The "know everything" environment. It's all changing the way you, me, and your customers perceive a company or brand. In some cases, our perception is influenced by word of mouth — recommendations from friends, online reviews, tweets, and Facebook rants. In other cases, it's our own experiences — both online and off — that shape the way we think about a brand.

If you're in a customer success role, you have a say in the conversation surrounding your product or service. You can shift these discussions and assessments to work for you, not against you. Because at the end of the day, positive customer perception — while highly subjective — is largely influenced by the quality of service you deliver.

Customer Perception

Customer perception refers to the customer's opinion of your business or products. It summarizes how customers feel about your brand including every direct or indirect experience they've had with your company. By monitoring customer perception, your businesses can spot common user pain points and improve the customer journey.

Measuring customer perception requires you to gather a variety of qualitative and quantitative customer data. You'll need to look at resources like product usage reports, NPS® survey s , and customer interviews to get an accurate view of customer perception. If you don't have this data, consider adopting customer feedback tools to help you collect this information from your customer base.

Why Customer Perception Matters

According to a recent survey, 1 in 3 customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. In other words, we're not far from a world where your customers' perception of both your brand and quality of service could take precedence over traditional competitive advantages like pricing, features, or usability.

And if you're not currently investing in your customer experience and perception, you're at risk of falling behind. Many businesses are already taking stock of their support and services efforts, with 50% of customer-care leaders rating “investing in new technologies” as one of their top priorities over the next five years, according to McKinsey.

Now that we know why customer perception matters, let’s dive into different ways you can improve and uphold it in your business.

8 Ways to Improve Customer Perception

• Look inward.
• Strike an emotional chord with your customers.
• Lean on positive language.
• Commit to consistency.
• Fill skills gaps before they become evident.
• Break down data silos.
• Collect customer feedback.
• Follow up with customers after every interaction.

1. Look inward.

Are you putting process over people?

One of the biggest obstacles businesses often have to overcome is their processed approach to customer success. While it's valuable to have direction, too much process and protocol can get in the way of real, human interactions.

To ensure your business isn't getting in its own way, take the time to evaluate your existing approach. Ask yourself:

• Are you being proactive or reactive in your communications with customers?
• Are you getting to them before a problem arises, or scrambling to collect all the necessary information you need as the problem escalates?

2. Strike an emotional chord with your customers.

"Our research across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that the most effective way to maximize customer value is to move beyond mere customer satisfaction and connect with customers at an emotional level — tapping into their fundamental motivations and fulfilling their deep, often unspoken emotional needs," explains Alan Zorfas and Daniel Leemon.

Think about it: Actions and words carry a lot of weight with customers. To build strong bonds and promote a positive experience, you must actively demonstrate a long-term interest and commitment to the relationship through every touchpoint.

This task requires you to dig beyond the surface and actively listen to a customer's needs and goals, while also tuning in to the details they’re leaving out.

This attention to detail can be easily achieved if you apply sound and communication expert, Julian Treasure's, simple listening acronym , RASA:

• A ppreciate

This "process of extraction" forces you to listen with intent, while also granting the customer permission to speak openly and freely about their concerns, issues, or complaints. The more they reveal, the more opportunity you have to tap into their motivations and intentions to effectively guide them towards the desired outcome in a human and empathic way.

3. Lean on positive language.

Dr. Barbara Fredrickson, a leading researcher on the study of positivity , suggests that positive emotions have the power to open us. In other words, these feelings allow us to see more — they change our perspective and our understanding of possibilities.

Trouble is, people are often hesitant to introduce these types of positive emotions in the business world, operating under the notion that it's not appropriate or should be minimized. However, according to research from the Advances in Developmental and Educational Psychology journal, suppressing the interpersonal emotions of employees for customers could lead to a decline in customer satisfaction.

“People providing services in the capacity of their work with daily interactions with customers sometimes develop feelings for them. The expectation from these employees to suppress natural emotions, positive and negative alike, is a mistake," Yagil explains.

"The expression of natural positive emotions is well received by the other party and is likely to contribute to customer satisfaction and customer loyalty."

4. Commit to consistency.

When evaluating consistency, it's important to take a step back and consider its role in your customer onboarding process .

To tee up a positive customer perception, you'll want to ensure that the hand-off from sales to support or customer success is fluid and reflects how you want folks to view your brand.

To achieve this type of harmonious experience, it's helpful to establish core operating values — like respect, integrity, and customer focus — to serve as a framework for all of your brand interactions.

For example, Zappos — an online shoe and clothing shop that has set the standard for customer experience and service — asks that its employees live by the following 10 values:

Image Source

In doing so, there are no questions around how to act, what to think, or how to approach a customer problem. You just do it. And if the operating values are enforced consistently, customers will begin to expect that level of quality over and over again.

Of course, there is — and should be — flexibility around how you adopt and apply these values. This will help you avoid communications coming off as canned or impersonal during more specific customer interactions.

5. Fill skill gaps before they become evident.

Modern customer success or customer service professionals know how to treat customers like humans — not just ticket numbers. They know when to be proactive, when to ask clarifying questions, and what to do when they don't have the answer right away. These are all skills that are needed for a positive customer perception.

But this skillful approach to service and customer relationship building doesn't come without proper training and a commitment to continuous learning. And as the industry standard continues to shift to meet the demands of the empowered, informed customer, folks in customer-facing roles need to keep pace.

To maximize your competitive advantage, it's important that both you as an individual — as well as your larger organization — are aware of the skills and service areas that need improvement, and are also willing to invest in software and training to help bridge the skills gap.

6. Break down data silos.

A data silo is information that's only accessible by one team or department. If anyone else wants to see that data, they need to communicate with the team that owns it. This not only slows down internal processes, but also creates negative interactions with customers. Customers want transparency and will get easily frustrated if they think you're withholding information.

For example, airlines are often criticized for poor customer service. That's because airport security makes it difficult for employees to share information. When flights get delayed or canceled, gate attendants aren't allowed to reveal specific details about the problem. While this data silo keeps passengers safe, customers are less understanding when their needs aren't being met.

Unless you're an airline, your business probably won't be restricted by intense security protocol. While you may have some sensitive data, most information should be easily accessible and readily available when it's relevant to customer needs .

This is where data management plays a crucial role in enhancing customer experience. The right data management software leads to more personalized interactions and improved customer perception.

7. Collect customer feedback.

You can't improve customer perception without knowing what your customers already think about your company. After all, you don't want to stop doing something that they really like or keep doing something that they really hate. By collecting customer feedback, you'll know exactly how they feel about each aspect of your business.

Customer feedback can be obtained in a few different ways. The most popular way is using surveys or questionnaires to quickly poll customers. You can also conduct interviews and hold focus groups for more in-depth conversations. Regardless of what you find, customers will appreciate your efforts to consider their suggestions.

Additionally, one of the biggest challenges businesses face is getting participants to submit feedback. Unless the customer has a strong opinion of your brand, they may not be interested in taking a survey. This leaves your feedback only consisting of either highly positive or highly negative reviews. Consider offering an incentive for submitting customer feedback and you should get a more accurate feel for customer perception.

8. Follow up with customers after every interaction.

Following up with your customers may seem trivial, however, it's a small investment that rewards a major payout. In a 2021 survey, 97% of companies did not send a follow-up email to customers to see if they are satisfied with the response — that’s a lot of lost opportunity. Motivating customers to return to your business strengthens your relationship with them and increases customer loyalty.

Follow-up messages present the opportunity to enhance the customer's experience or prevent potential churn. For example, after a positive interaction, you can use a follow-up call to upsell and cross-sell . Since the customer just had a good experience, they'll be more likely to upgrade or buy another product.

On the flip side, if your customer's experience was negative you can use your follow-up to collect customer feedback. Ask them why their experience was poor and assure them that your business is still the best option for achieving their goals. PWC found that 32% of people, after one negative experience, would stop doing business with a brand or company they previously loved. That means your company could save three out of every 10 unhappy customers simply by sending an email or making a phone call.

Creating Positive Customer Perception

The bar for customer expectations is rising. They want to eliminate the complexity involved in solving their problem and they want you to know when it's appropriate to balance automation vs. human outreach.

If you fail to acknowledge this shift, you can expect your brand perception to take a hit. But if you get the wheels turning back in the right direction, placing an emphasis on the importance of that perceived experience with your brand, well, we think you'll enjoy the outcome.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in July 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Customer Perception: What It Is & How to Improve It

Reputation Staff Writer

Understanding customer perception in marketing is critical to the healthy viability of any company. By analyzing the role of perception in consumer behavior , you can take steps to control how customers view your business and improve customer acquisition and retention.

So, what is customer perception ?

In this article, we’ll cover consumer perception, meaning, and its definition . In addition, we’ll outline why it matters for your business. 

Once you know what consumer perception is, you can start making progress towards enhancing your company’s image and bottom line.

Why Does Customer Perception Matter?

Your brand’s consumer perception is critically important and should appeal to customers on a more significant level because people buy things based on emotion. As much as businesses hope people make purchases because of sound, logical decisions, that just typically is not the case. 

Every customer’s engagement with a company’s brand will impact customer perception, meaning if the customer has a positive interaction, such as receiving products on time and as described, trust and brand loyalty will grow. By garnering an image of a reputable company, the cost of acquisition and retention of clients becomes infinitely more cost-efficient. 

Conversely, customers develop a depreciating view of a brand when they have a negative experience, such as defective goods, disputed refunds, no after-sales support, and so on. Aside from affecting the bottom line due to the cost in returns, it will also make acquiring new clients more difficult. 

Related: How To Use Customer Delight For Brand Reputation Management

This is why companies need to define consumer perception metrics. By integrating a customer perception definition into the Product Manager’s KPIs, you can measure if a marketing team’s efforts produce beneficial results. 

What is Customer Perception?

When answering “ What is the customer perception definition ?” businesses refer to customers’ awareness, experiences, and feelings about your company and products. Keep in mind that close attention must be paid to how a customer relates to your brand. 

Multiple factors influence customer perception, including overt and indirect engagements with a company. Through these interactions, customers develop an opinion about a brand, whether from advertising, ads, customer reviews, social media comments, etc.

Consumer perception begins with the first contact with a company and continually develops as customers engage through different channels. Anything a business does has an impact on how customers perceive it. Everything from the way goods are showcased in a retail store, the colors and shapes in your logo, the ads you make, and the discounts you offer contribute to the overall reputation of your company.

What Influences Customer Perception?

Several factors can affect customer perception, such as:

• Firsthand knowledge

Influencers

Customer feedback, firsthand knowledge.

The personal experience a consumer had when purchasing and using a product significantly impacts consumer perception . Customers will develop a positive view of the brand if the product, customer service, price, logo, color, discounts, and other factors succeed in making an excellent impression. However, if they did not enjoy their interaction with the brand, it can leave an indelible mark.

Related: Tune in to the Voice of the Customer to Build Trust in Your Brand

Marketing is typically the first point of contact a consumer has with any particular brand. Whether through social media, traditional advertising, or other channels, creating compelling ads is one of the most important factors influencing the customer experience . A company’s advertisements and promotions will aid in the creation of a favorable consumer view.

Influencers are slowly overtaking friends and family when it comes to affecting someone’s opinion regarding a product. Since people are more likely to purchase items after they have been tried by someone else first, if an influencer has given a product a positive review , they are more likely to try it out. 

Before making any significant purchases, many people read customer reviews . With this in mind, it’s imperative you collect and encourage customer feedback. Understanding how customer reviews can help or hinder your company goes a long way into managing customer perception.

How Do You Improve Customer Perception?

Many factors that affect consumer perception can seem to be beyond your control. However, the reality is that all perceptions are influenced by how you engage with your customers.  Here are some methods for improving customer perception:

Pay Attention to Customer Reviews

Since customer reviews are one of the main influencers over customer perception, it should be one of the first issues you address.

Since every interaction is a chance to affect your consumer perception, if you take the time to listen to and respond to consumer reviews, you can start making consumers feel heard and appreciated.

Related: Customer Reviews Loom Large in Local Search Report

Recognize who the Target Market is

Not everyone will want what you offer, and you certainly can’t please everybody all of the time. Instead, figure out who you’re trying to reach and what that target market wants. This will allow you to tailor and unify your brand’s message through the different marketing channels.

Recognize and Reward Customer Service Excellence

Customers’ perceptions are affected by every interaction they have with your company, which means that every employee impacts their feelings. To create a favorable customer view, you must first develop a customer-centric culture that empowers employees to behave in the customer’s best interests.

Reputation Can Enhance Your Brand’s Image

Customer perception influences how consumers feel about you. As a result, their perception will determine whether they do business with you again and recommend you to their family and friends. In other words, how your customers view you is critical! 

While understanding what customer perception is may be the first part of the equation, managing it is the second. 

Reputation has the tools you need to discover what your customers want and predict their future needs. With our reputation management services, you’ll have the resources you need to transform every interaction into a competitive advantage. If you use a CRM like HubSpot, Reputation integrates with your CRM to create in-depth dashboards to measure your brand’s reputation and performance to improve your customer experiences and conversions. Contact us today for a free demo!

Keep Reading: How to Use Online Reputation Management to Streamline Customer Experience

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Customer perception and why it’s so important.

11 min read How do your customers see your brand, and what do they believe about you? Learn about the factors that influence customer perception and why it’s so important to cultivate a positive view.

What is customer perception?

When it comes to products, services, brands , and everything else, we all have prebuilt beliefs and expectations that influence how we perceive experiences and ultimately our response to them.

In most instances, before we even engage with a brand or business , we’ve already formed some idea of what the experience will be like and what we would want it to be like. Our perceptions precede the experience and ultimately shape our response.

Take a box of chocolates at a chocolatier, for example — before experiencing the contents, we all have expectations of what might be delivered. These expectations are influenced by different drivers, such as the quality of the chocolates and the overall costs, and our own beliefs (which may or may not have been affected by what we’ve seen or heard already).

We may have seen reviews online that rave about the chocolates, reinforcing our expectations that they are indeed good and worth buying. All of this contributes to our perception of the experience and future brand loyalty .

The fact is that consumer beliefs, expectations, and sentiment towards a product , service, or offering are directly linked to how they perceive their experience with you. If you ignore the actual experience as well as how it’s perceived, you risk doing harm to the long-term image and health of your business and brand.

But despite the clear pitfalls, this is precisely why so many brands and businesses often miss the mark: they have an idea of what they feel their consumers are interested in, while the reality is far different.

Free eBook: 2024 global consumer trends report

Why is customer perception important?

As consumer beliefs , expectations, and feelings towards brands, products, or services are linked to how they perceive their experience, ensuring you meet those expectations correlates with your overall success.

This means that every time a consumer or customer has contact with your brand , the experience has to meet their expectations – doing so ensures their perception of you is a positive one.

Positive customer perceptions can influence whether your customers believe your values are similar to theirs and whether they can trust your brand to meet their needs. This can influence whether customers return to purchase more, or whether they choose a competitor . Three loyalty metrics – customer satisfaction , likelihood to recommend, and likelihood to purchase more – can be affected by the perception a customer has of you. This makes the customer experience so important.

The impact of how customers perceive experience

Consumers’ beliefs, expectations, and feelings toward your brand, product, or service are directly linked to how they perceive their experience with you. These perceived experiences are affected by prior expectations and beliefs, subsequently influencing future engagements.

If we ignore the actual experience as well as the customer perception of that experience, we risk doing harm to the long-term health of our business and our brand.

A good personal experience can trump other views and begin to change the wider perception as well. If a buyer has had a great customer experience, they may advocate for you through word of mouth and reviews, changing public perception for the better as well.

Above all, the customer experience needs to dovetail with the image you portray. If there’s a gap between how customers experience your brand and their perception of your brand, issues can arise.

For example, if a customer believes your brand cares about excellent customer service because of the marketing you put out, but their personal experience has been the opposite, it can negatively impact their chance of repurchasing.

What other factors influence customer perception?

Online reviews.

If your customers have a positive experience with your brand, they’re more likely to recommend your company to others. Online reviews can be the first point of contact your company might have with customers who are searching for products and services – and what they find can greatly influence their perception of your brand .

Advertising

The first time a customer might encounter your brand is through your marketing. Advertising, social media posts, and more are also effective at keeping your brand top-of-mind and portraying your brand in a desirable way. Cultivating a good public image and perhaps combating negative brand perception can be helped greatly by a solid marketing strategy.

Influencer marketing

Often influencer marketing works in tandem with your wider marketing strategy, which might include social media advertising and other mediums such as TV or Out of home. Influencer marketing works on the theory that people are more likely to do something if others do – social proofing. Using experts on the topic or industry to advocate for your brand or product – either to niche audiences or the mass market – helps validate your offering.

However, whilst you can use influencers with sway over your customers to create a good perception of your brand, this approach can’t fix all your problems. Ensure your experience lives up to the hype across every channel – including customer support , online platforms, and in-store – to help create, and maintain, a positive customer perception.

Customer support

Even if your customer has a positive perception of your brand and public image, this can quickly go wrong if they encounter a problem with a product or service. How your customer support responds to an issue can be the difference between a customer maintaining a good view of your brand and finding an alternative.

Brand values

Your brand values can often define your public image. Many brands such as Patagonia, Dove, Ben & Jerry’s, and Truist put their values at the heart of what they do and the products and services they sell. Customers may decide to purchase from you based on your values and what you stand for, so make your brand values a part of your business and allow them to define your customer perception.

How to measure customer perception

We’ve already focused on how to develop brand value through brand perception . But customer perception is very nuanced, and pinning down how exactly customers feel about and view your brand requires several different approaches.

Take the temperature of online reviews

Gathering data from online reviews can help you to determine how your company is perceived by customers who’ve been motivated to post online. Positive or negative reviews can strongly influence whether a potential customer will choose you – so make sure you’ve got tools in place to capture reviews on platforms you don’t control, and a plan in place to fix issues highlighted.

Analyze website and search data

Using O-data – such as website traffic – can help you to see if customers are searching directly for your brand, and how they are discovering your content. You’ll be able to see the points of friction in the customer journey that customers are experiencing – for example, are your website visitors leaving at the point of sale? By analyzing this data , you should be able to see what might be contributing to a good or bad view of your brand.

Look at your marketing data

Your marketing can be instrumental in forming a positive customer perception. By looking at your marketing data – such as email open rates and click rates – you can see who is responding to your marketing output. Charting the path between your marketing and sales can help you see if your marketing and digital presence are leading to greater sales. If your marketing is working, it’s likely there’s a good perception of your brand. If one customer segment is under-performing, perhaps there is a perception issue where they don’t trust in your business to meet their needs that should be addressed

Assess your brand identity

The look and feel of your website and other channels can determine your customer perception. If your website is well presented, clearly shows what you sell and how it can help the customer, you’ll be in a much stronger position.

Make sure your website and other channels have the information your customers need about your products and services For example, is your website missing vital product accreditation required in your industry? Anticipate what customers expect to see, and make sure you can deliver that.

Send out customer opinion surveys

Of course, gathering feedback directly from customers can help to crystalize exactly how they perceive your brand. Using various customer experience metrics – such as NPS , CSAT , and more – can help you to see in specific terms how your customer views your brand. Even better is a customer opinion survey that allows for open text responses, so your customer can tell you in their own words what they like and don’t like about your brand.

How to improve customer perception

Create impactful customer experiences.

As mentioned, personal customer experiences can greatly influence your customer perception and your public image. By creating impactful customer experiences, you can shape the positive customer perception of your brand not only with individuals but with those who read the reviews they leave and the social media posts they make.

Act on feedback

Using the customer feedback and data you gather to change how customers feel and experience your brand can be the difference between your business stagnating and moving with the times. Customer needs and opinions will change over time, so taking customer feedback into account and making the appropriate changes will help you to stay current. It’ll also mean that new customers get the best experience from you.

Be consistent

Consumer perception can change very quickly with one bad experience. By focusing on providing consistently good service and products that meet expectations, you can ensure that customer perception has little reason to waver.

Make sure all your teams work together

Though your marketing and sales teams might have direct contact with potential customers, your whole team needs to be aware of what influences customer perception. Your public image depends on your customer experience matching your brand values and your customer perception, so everyone – from product developers to senior management – needs to make sure the work they produce meets these standards too.

Related resources

Ai & customer experience 13 min read, customer experience transformation 15 min read, customer lifecycle management 19 min read, customer experience automation 11 min read, customer centricity 16 min read, customer data platforms 14 min read, customer experience insights 12 min read, request demo.

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Customer Perception: What It Is and How To Measure It

The concept of customer perception seems obvious, it is basically the customer’s opinion of a company at any given point during their customer journey .

What is not so simple is tracking and measuring all the different variables that influence customer perception. The good news is that one direct way to improve customer perception is to provide high-quality customer service. The reason is that customer service impacts the satisfaction metrics that influence customer perception, too.

Customer perception is directly tied to the bottom line. Nearly 70% of people are more inclined to spend more money with a company with excellent customer service. Good customer service extends Customer Lifetime Value (CLV), too. About  24% of satisfied customers will return to a business two or more years after a good customer service experience.

Not surprisingly, bad customer perception has the opposite effect. Customers don’t hesitate to move on. PWC found that, after just one negative experience, one-third of people would stop doing business with a company they were loyal to in the past.

Customer satisfaction is a powerful engine for business success, and customer perception is an important factor. Let’s look under the hood because it turns out there are many moving parts affecting customer perception.

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What is Customer Perception?

To form a perception, you first have to perceive. Webster’s Dictionary defines perceive as:

To attain awareness or understanding of, to become aware of through the senses.

Perception involves three psychological constructs: sensing, organizing, and reacting. In the context of customer perception, the sensory stage is how a customer feels moving through an experience with your brand as part of their customer journey.

They integrate their thoughts and emotions and then organize a response around that, based on what just happened and also on past experiences.

Brands can prioritize customer success at all three stages by providing satisfying experiences, clarifying the next steps when interacting with the brand (“don’t make me think”), and creating frictionless options for taking action.

Why Customer Perception Matters

One example of why customer perception is important in business is perceived value. When a brand can charge a premium price for a commodity product or service that is not that much different from the competition, they are successfully managing the customer perception that their product has more value.

Perceived value is at the heart of some brand image strategies. It helps a commodity product stand out based on an emotional connection with the audience. Examples of customer perception influencing pricing are:

• Generic vs branded products.
• Luxury brands that charge hundreds of dollars more for a product that offers the same utility as a much less expensive version.
• Legacy brands that leverage the trust built up over time to command a higher price.

Apart from pricing strategies, customer relationship management strategies have a huge influence on customer perception too. What factors should companies take into account? Some important areas include:  

Past experiences: D o your customers have high or low expectations based on past interactions? Positive interactions over time build trust, reinforce customer loyalty, and help  increase customer retention .

Example: Customers with a positive experience are more likely to recommend a product or service to family and friends.

Price : What is the customer’s perception of the price based on the marketplace and perceived value?

Example: Branded vs. generic drugs.

Quality : How does the product or service quality compare to others?

Example: Mercedes Benz vs. Suzuki

Experience with product or service: Is it pleasant or frustrating to interact with the product or service? In today’s world of social media, customers’ experiences influence other customers’ perceptions. Customers’ sharing their experiences can help or harm customer acquisition.  Negative or positive word of mouth helps other people form perceptions of your brand.

Example: Multiple Amazon reviews that mention a product defect that undermines functionality.

What Are Ways to Improve Customer Perception

Overall, the best way to improve customer perception is to provide best-in-class customer support. This increases positive word-of-mouth recommendations. Brands can also highlight customer success. Especially powerful are when customers share their successes, so be sure to give happy customers an opportunity to share their stories.

On the systems side, it’s helpful to minimize internal barriers to providing a good customer experience. Instead of maintaining siloed data, companies can reorient internal communications and data sharing around collaborations to best serve the customers.

Finally, bonding with customers over shared values by supporting social causes creates strong connections. Barron’s reports that nearly 60% of Americans want the companies they spend money with to speak out about issues such as racial discrimination and social justice. 70% of consumers want to know what brands are doing to help social and environmental issues, and 46% factor in the brand’s social responsibility efforts during purchase decisions.

How to Identify and Measure Customer Perception

As you know, many channels affect the customer experience with your brand. Social media, in-store experiences, online reviews, word of mouth, help desk experience, website user interface, help functions, service calls, and more.

You can control some of these aspects but not others. The key to improving customer perception is to optimize the variables under your control. To create and maintain a positive customer perception, you have to offer an exceptional experience and form a connection with buyers at every stage of the customer journey .

The place to start is simple: ask them. Most companies don’t collect customer feedback, so the ones that do could gain a competitive advantage. In a 2021 survey , 97% of companies did not send a follow-up email to gauge customer satisfaction.

Collect Customer Feedback

People are more likely to complain than to offer praise. If you don’t have an ongoing system for collecting customer feedback, you probably hear most frequently from unhappy customers. While that feedback is definitely important to pinpoint where your processes need improvement, your data will likely be skewed toward negative comments from unhappy customers.

Here are some steps to consider to help get a bigger picture of the potholes in the customer journey:

• Create a strategy before you start asking. What do you need to know and why? 
• Create specific questions rather than broad ones. 
• What segments of your customers are best to ask? 
• Be sure to include short-answer and blank space opportunities for customers to elaborate. 
• Personalize the ask. Don’t send a survey to “Dear Customer” from the “customer service department.”

A great place to start is with a couple of quick, simple questions that yield two important metrics: Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score is a way of gauging how likely a customer is to recommend your product or service. The NPS matters because word of mouth is very powerful for brands in customer acquisition, retention, and attrition.

The NPS is a customer service Key Performance Indicator (KPI) metric that helps companies quantify overall customer satisfaction. While there can be some variation among different campaigns, the basics question for the NPS is:

On a scale of 0 (extremely unlikely) to 10 (highly likely), how likely is it that you would recommend our offering (product, service, or company) to a friend or colleague?

Scores of 9 or 10 are “promoters”.

Scores of 0 through 6 are “detractors”.

What is the formula for Net Promoter Score?

The NPS formula is:

NPS = (# of Promoter Scores / Total # of Respondents) – (# of detractors / total # of respondents)

For example, from a survey of 100 customers with 60 promoters and 20 detractors, the NPS is 40.

While calculating NPS is important, the NPS alone may not tell you the whole story. Combining NPS scores with other customer data can yield deeper insights to improve overall customer satisfaction. Kayako pulls back the curtain on exactly how we did that in this article .

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Like the NPS, the Customer Effort Score (CES) is a metric based on one question:

On a scale of 1 (very low effort) to 5 (very high effort), how easy was it for you to get your problem solved?

The CES measures customer effort because it turns out that customers don’t like to expend much effort getting answers to questions or resolutions to their problems. Gartner says that the amount of effort a customer has to expend to get a resolution is the most important predictor of customer satisfaction, directly affecting customer perception.

Compared to the Net Promoter Score (NPS), the CES is a better predictive metric for customer repeat purchasing and increased spending. According to Gartner’s research, 94% of customers with a low-effort experience had the intention to repurchase, and 88% said they would increase spending.

Poor CES performance leads to customer attrition and lower customer perception. In fact, 81% of customers with high-effort experience intended to spread negative word of mouth.

A positive CES improves NPS substantially. For companies with top-performing CES metrics, the NPS is 65 points higher than for companies with marginal CES.

The CES impacts future sales as well. 88% of low-effort customers said they would increase their spending, and 94% said they would repurchase. In contrast, only 4% of those with high-effort outcomes intended to repurchase.

Favorable CES also leads to cost savings for companies both in staff time and turnover. Low-effort interactions decrease up to 40% of repeat calls, 50% of escalations, and 54% of the need for channel switching. Overall, low-effort interactions cost 37% less than high-effort interactions. When companies equip service agents to provide better customer experiences, they feel better about their jobs, and their intent to stay increases up to 17%.

Moving Ahead

Companies can pull several different levers companies to improve customer perception. The key is to create a strategy and track simple metrics to see which area has the most impact. Providing quality customer service is one lever that can help raise all your metrics.

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Brand Perception , Customer Experience - CX , Voice of the Consumer

What is Customer Perception?

In general marketing terms, customer perception refers to customers’ awareness, their impressions, and their opinions about a business and its brand, along with its products and services. Customer perception can be shaped by both direct and indirect interactions with a brand’s offerings — it’s not entirely dependent upon marketing or upon the inherent quality of the product or service itself.

It may seem difficult, then, to control customer perception. While control might not actually be possible, there are several ways to influence how customers view companies through brand market research .

Customer behavior and perception of brands is not in all actuality driven by logic — from negative brand associations, to positive or even sentimental brand attachments. According to Harvard professor Gerald Zaltman , 95% of purchase decisions are subconscious. Remember that commercial jingle for an iconic software brand you grew up hearing on TV? It probably left a lasting impression on your young mind, and in turn given you a brand perception that is hard to let go of. 

The intangible concept of customer perception is often at odds with the tangible effect on business outcomes, as customer perceptions of a company’s products or services can have a serious impact on the long term viability of a business’s offerings. Just ask any insights professional at Disney, a company that takes the motto “make people happy” very seriously by listening to the voice of the customer to improve its offerings. 

According to the Harvard Business Review , emotional connection to a brand is the key to long term business outcomes. Customers that have developed a bond with a business are in fact more valuable than highly satisfied customers; these customers, described as “fully connected” are actually 50% more valuable than the average customer. Therefore, if brands can win people over by forming emotional connections with them, brands can be highly influential in swaying customer perception. 

How can brands form emotional bonds with customers if they do not understand them on an emotional level? By looking beyond customer survey data or online behavioral analytics, organizations can drive strong customer connections by speaking directly with them through brand market research, gaining valuable context on people’s motivations, current lifestyles and a range of other factors that shape their emotions, perceptions, and future decisions.

Why is customer perception important?

Perception does more than impact each individual purchase, it shapes the long-term relationships between customers and brands. This is often reflected in customer retention rates and the ability for brands to continue receiving relevant feedback and intelligence from their loyalists. Because of the importance of customer perception, every touchpoint between a company and its customers should strive to affect customer perception in a positive way.

Brands must also understand which elements have the broadest and most profound impact on customer perception. These elements can be both tangible and abstract, but each has the potential to be shaped by insights, CX, and UX professionals.

Some tangible factors that influence customers’ perceptions include:

• Price : Pricing a brand’s offerings should always be part of a comprehensive business strategy. However, it must be understood that context impacts customer perceived value (CPV) — lower prices are not always better, as any modern art dealer can ascertain.
• Quality : Quality can apply to multiple attributes in a product — attributes whose importance can differ from customer to customer. Marketers should understand what feature most distinguishes their products or services, and which are most desirable in target markets.
• Branding : Logos, artwork, and even packaging all deliver a message about a company and its brand. Marketers should ensure these elements meet and exceed customers’ expectations, helping brands stand above others.
• Service : Service quality will make or break customer perception, where even companies with superior products can lose business if customer support operations are not in place. Customers are more likely to write online reviews after highly positive or highly negative service experiences, which can improve or exacerbate brand awareness. 

Some less-tangible factors that influence customers’ perceptions include:

• Advertising : How marketers deliver messages about a company, as well as the outlets they choose, can drive customers in both positive and negative directions.
• Reputation : Brand reputations are built over time and can be quite durable. They are formed from customer experiences with products and services, but also secondary interactions from third-parties (i.e. media coverage). While marketers attempt to measure their reputations online, sudden events can impact reputation without warning.
• Influencers : Influencers are people that customers trust, and are among the biggest factors impacting customer perception aside from the customer’s own personal experience. Customers that have firsthand experience with a product, service, or brand are most likely to sway other potential customers during the organizing stage.

What are the stages of customer perception?

To understand customer perception, researchers must first uncover insights into the customer experience (CX) and how it impacts customer perceived value (CPV). While many brand leaders understand the value of strong CX, customer experience quality continues to fall, having shrunk for 19% of brands in 2022 according to Forrester Research .

A number of factors can contribute to this downward CX trend — outdated ecommerce sites, labor shortages, etc. Whatever the reasons, it is apparent that many business leaders are growing more disconnected from their customers, and are failing to prioritize making people’s lives easier with their products and services. As a result, they are losing even more influence over customer perception.  

CPV, or the importance ascribed to a brand’s offerings in terms of how much they are willing to spend on it, is equal to a customers’ perceived benefit minus its costs. Striking a balance between price and value is not an exact science, but it requires a large sample of context-based customer feedback using qualitative research methods to better understand. 

Engaging with customers at scale not only brings organizations closer to understanding their customers, but it helps develop customer empathy across the business. With these objectives in mind, organizations can understand the phases of the customer perception process.

The three stages of customer perception include:

• Sensing : Characterized by the physical senses, customers use this stage to accumulate ‘knowledge’ about a product, service, or brand through physical sensations such as visual impressions, touch, sounds, and tastes.
• Organizing : During this stage, customers make sense of the information they’ve attained, interpreting its value based on context, personal beliefs, perceptions of themselves, and other highly subjective factors. At this stage, customers will categorize the object of their critique and compare it to other objects within their chosen categories. For example, a consumer hoping to buy a winter coat may prioritize coats by price, but also color and thickness, during the organizing stage.
• Reacting : Customers will act based upon the sensing and organizing stages; in addition, they are influenced by internal and external stimuli ranging from personal history to online reviews. Although each reaction and its contributing factors are different, buyers tend to experience similar processes of evaluation before making their decision.

Insights, CX and UX professionals who understand these three phases are better equipped to impact customer perceptions in a positive way. However, it’s impossible to capitalize on every contributing factor to shape customers’ behavior, as customers make tradeoffs, switching out one aspect of an offering for another of higher perceived value. 

How to Understand Customer Perceptions

Understanding underlying motivations of consumer behavior through qualitative, brand market research is a strong method used by business leaders to influence customer perception and boost sales.  

Brands have some ability to measure customer perception quantitatively, but this data is best understood and more profound when explaining it from customers themselves. Having conversations with customers helps to illuminate customer perceptions by probing and clarifying sentiment to uncover the heart of the ‘why’ behind their perceptions.

Discuss makes it easy for organizations to connect with customers and quickly turn their experiences into insights. Learn more about how to leverage qualitative research to improve CX with our infographic: “Using Customer Feedback for Customer Journey Pain Points.” 

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What Is Customer Perception?

Customer perception is how customers view a company or product based on their experiences and interactions. Customer perception can be affected by the customer’s own personal opinions, beliefs, and values.

Companies strive to create a positive customer perception to build customer loyalty and trust. Sometimes it can be a huge challenge for companies. As rightly said by Marlanges Simar, Senior Director of Customer Experience at Walgreens, in Clootrack's 102 CX Study,

“The top-of-mind challenges that brands should be sure to manage include: - inevitable retrofitting understanding of customer perception to what the brand wants to be vs. what the brand actually means to its customers."

The entire process of customer perception starts when a consumer sees or gets information about a particular product. The customer collects information about a product and interprets the information to make a meaningful image of a particular product. 

When customers see advertisements, promotions, customer reviews , social media feedback, etc., relating to a product, they develop an impression of the product. This process continues until the consumer builds an opinion about the product. 

For example, Avon uses a pink color with white and black accents. This color predominantly attracts women, while men feel alienated by pink color. The customer perception is built based on the colors used in the logo.

Example 2: A popular blog Techylist changed their theme & their traffic spiked by 15% on their top traffic posts like GTA San Andreas Apk .

But if a product is trying to attract both men and women, using just pink might not be a good idea.

Why is Customer Perception Important?

A happy customer is one who is satisfied with the experience that he has with a product or a service. Consumer perception can make or break your brand. 

When customers have a pleasant experience of getting their products delivered on time, they form a perception. Getting the products that were as described in the product description also creates a positive customer perception. When customers experience great after-sale service, it will develop a positive opinion of the brand.

But when customers have a bad experience, such as broken products, no returns, no after-sales service, etc., the customers build a negative perception of the brand.

When companies work towards strengthening the bond between customers and the company, customer perception improves, giving way to a better competitive edge.

Customer perception is also important to determine the kind of image a brand wants to build.

For example, when a retail clothing store displays clothes on crowded racks using low-quality plastic hangers, customers get a perception that it is a low-quality brand.

But when the same clothes are presented well with back-lit mannequins, neatly arranged, good quality attractive hangers, etc., the customers build a different perception of the brand.

Customer perception or consumer perception plays a major role in buying behavior. Hence companies are going the extra mile to create a pleasant and happy customer experience for their customers. Companies are ready to spend money and effort to influence customer perception and drive profitable consumer behavior.

What are the Factors Influencing Customer Perception?

Customer perception can be influenced by external factors, some of which are listed below:

1. Personal Experience

Customer perception is highly influenced by the personal experience that a customer has while buying and using a particular product. If the quality, customer service, price, logo, color, discounts, etc., could make an excellent impression on the customers' minds, they would build a good perception of the brand. But if they do not enjoy the experience with the brand, it will leave an everlasting impression.

2. Advertising

Customers get to see the products first through advertisements and therefore become one of the biggest factors that influence customer perception. The advertisements and campaigns that a company runs will help to build a positive customer perception.

3. Influencers

People generally buy things when another person has tried and tested them. Such people who have bought it first and tried the product become influencers. When people hear about a great product that the influencer has tried out, it will influence them, person, to buy it and test it out, as the recommendation has come from a known person whom they trust.

4. Customer Reviews

Many people look into customer reviews before buying a product. This shows that customer reviews are an important factor in defining customer perception. If the consumers see that a product has fewer stars, it means that the product does not have good customer reviews. The impression that it creates in the consumer’s mind is negative.

5. Social Media

Social media has become the strongest medium to manage customer perception. When a social media audience gets consistent communication regarding a product, the users build an image of the product. Social media can be used to post content, images, videos, etc., which helps to build the kind of perception intended by the company.

How to Measure Customer Perception?

Customer perception is not a mystery!

Brands can monitor and measure perception by investing a little time and using smart tools and techniques.

Customer perception, when measured, provides a stream of valuable consumer insights. When a brand conducts a deep dive and measures customer perception,  It unlocks behind-the-scenes of how customers look at your brand. You can see how customers engage with and react to your brand.

So how do companies monitor and measure consumer perception when they’re looking at it from behind the scenes?

Here’s how: 

1. Analyzing Website Traffic:

Do you know what customers really think about your business?

Achieving a positive customer perception can boost conversions and customer retention.

In contrast, negative perceptions will only stunt your growth .

In fact, for some businesses, it’s even meant their demise.

But what does achieving a positive perception actually entail?

How do you make sure your customers have the best opinion of your business?

In this blog, we’ll reveal all. You’ll learn:

• The definition of customer perception
• Why it’s important to measure it
• The factors that affect how your customers perceive you
• The tools and techniques you need to improve your perception for the long run

Let’s get started.

What is customer perception?

The term customer perception refers to your customers’ opinions about your brand.

It’s a subjective attitude they’ve developed from a variety of factors - both direct and indirect.

For example, say a customer buys your product and enjoys a great experience with your brand.

Their perception of you will be a positive one.

If a customer suffers poor customer service - or even hears about it from another customer - their perception is going to sour.

Why is customer perception important?

Everything your customers hear about your brand will affect their perception.

In turn, their perceptions affect future decisions and purchases - making it an incredibly important metric to consider.

For instance, 81% of customers state that they’ll only buy from a brand they find trustworthy.

It means that these customers are more likely to buy from companies with a great reputation.

At the same time, social media and online reviews have made it much easier for new customers to discover your business.

But these customers can also discover negative opinions about your business too.

They'll also find your competitors vying for their attention.

Couple these facts together, and it’s easy to see how a negative perception can push customers to shop elsewhere.

What affects customer perception?

Customers will form their opinions from a variety of sources - some of which you have more control over than others.

These factors can include:

• Your marketing output
• Your values as a business
• Your customer service quality
• Customer reviews
• Customer social media mentions

Let’s break down each into more detail.

1. Your marketing

Brands will often use specific marketing strategies to attract and influence key demographics.

These might include using humorous or thought-provoking campaigns, depending on the brand’s tone of voice and identity.

Brands will also use different marketing channels to different ends too.

For example, fast fashion retailers are going to be more reliant on social media, rather than traditional TV advertising.

Whatever demographic a brand tries to reach, managing your perception through marketing requires in-depth research and clarity of purpose.

Related article: Want to learn more about how to engage your customers? Find some inspiration with our favourite customer engagement examples .

2. Your values

Your brand values are also a crucial factor in influencing your customers’ perceptions.

Listing them on your website can help prove your reputation as a brand.

These company values can be customer-centric, as well as societal or environmental.

For example, a brand might aim to provide the most memorable experiences to their customers.

At the same time, they might also seek to improve their carbon footprint.

Even so, actions speak louder than words.

So remember, customers will have a better opinion about the brands that actually live up to their values, rather than those that pay lip service.

Related article: Want to learn more about the importance of brand values? Get expert advice on increasing your customer engagement .

3. Your customer service quality

Supporting your customers with the best service possible is crucial - whatever the contact channel .

This is because customer service has a huge effect on how customers talk about your business.

For instance, 87% of customers will share great experiences with others.

In contrast, 95% of customers will share bad experiences too.

It makes customer service one of the key frontlines for improving customer perception.

Related article: Want to take your customer service efforts to the next level? Make your customers smile by completing these 8 SMART customer service goals .

4. Customer reviews

79% of customers trust reviews as much as recommendations from their friends and families.

Positive reviews are great social proof for your business, as they help to prove you as a trustworthy brand.

For example, Beaches of Normandy Tours effectively leverages social proof in this way. Their website showcases videos featuring past travelers narrating their experiences touring WWII landmarks.

That said, receiving negative reviews doesn't always have to be a complete disaster - they’re a useful indicator for the areas in which you need to improve.

They also provide the perfect opportunity to demonstrate proactive customer service too.

5. Customer social media mentions

Much like online reviews, customer social media posts can also affect your customers' perceptions.

That said, social media posts are also much more likely to meet a wider audience.

This can work both for and against you.

A great social media review might introduce new customers to your business.

In contrast, negative social media coverage might turn customers away.

This might happen even before they've learned who you really are.

To combat this possibility, a focus on stellar customer service is once again vital.

• How do you measure customer perception?

There are a few key ways in which you can get a better understanding of your customers’ perceptions. These include:

• Review analysis
• Social media listening
• Market research
• Customer service analysis

Let’s take a look at each in turn.

1. NPS scores

Net Promoter Scores aim to uncover how likely a customer is to recommend your brand to others.

It’s one of the easiest ways to get concrete statistics on your customers’ perceptions.

After all, if your customers are happy to advocate you to others, it’s clear that they see you as trustworthy.

2. Review analysis

Direct reviews and testimonials can be great for your brand.

That said, direct feedback might not give you the full picture.

Customers are more likely to give impartial feedback on external review sites.

Take sites like Trustpilot and G2, for example.

These sites gather and total customer reviews to produce an overall star rating.

This is great for a quick insight into how your customers currently perceive you.

You can also take a deep dive into both positive and negative reviews.

It’ll give you a more thorough understanding, as well as inspiration for the areas in which you need to improve.

3. Social media listening

Social media listening is a website engagement tool that allows you to analyze how customers talk about your brand online.

It'll help you gain fast insights into your customers' true opinions.

It’s also a great tool for responding to comments.

That way, you can highlight the positive interactions while dealing with the negative ones quickly and efficiently.

4. Market research

Interviewing customers can be a great way to learn more about their perceptions.

Consider interviewing customers who’ve never bought from you before, as well as those that converted.

For example, e-commerce stores could survey customers who abandoned their shopping carts .

The responses you receive will give you real insights into your customers’ perceptions - as well as the reasons why they didn’t convert.

5. Customer service analysis

By analysing the sentiment in your customer interactions, you’ll gain fast insights into your customers’ real opinions.  

The same is true for support tickets too.

Repeat tickets can reveal underlying issues affecting your perception.

So, remember to review your interactions.

If you offer live chat to your customers, make sure you analyze your live chat transcripts .

If you’ve deployed a chatbot on your website, keep track of the most important chatbot analytics too.  

How do you build a positive customer perception for your brand?

As we’ve seen, many factors influence your customers’ perceptions.

To make sure you’re building a positive image for your brand, take into account the following tips:

• Learn who your customers really are
• Build trust
• Become customer-centric
• Be available - wherever your customers are

Let’s dive in a little further.

1. Learn who your customers really are

To ensure your customers' perceptions remain as positive as possible, you need to make sure you’re targeting your real audience.

After all, you don’t want to waste any time trying to influence the wrong demographics.

For instance, say you primarily serve Millennial and Gen Z customers . Why prioritize print advertising when you can focus on social media instead?

To get started on learning more about your customers, take a deep dive into your site’s analytics.

Use surveys to develop an understanding of the types of customers you’re serving too.

It’ll help you craft a more positive and specific perception.

2. Build trust

Once you've targeted the right customers, you want to make sure that you’re always demonstrating yourself as a trustworthy brand.

The great news is that you can build customer trust in a variety of ways.

Even your site’s design and user experience can help to broadcast respectability.

To get started building trust, analyze your digital customer journey and your promise of value.

Make sure you demonstrate and follow your brand values too.

It’ll prove to your customers that you always stick to your promises.

3. Become customer-centric

70% of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated.  

Statistics like this are proof that customer experience has become the key brand differentiator .

It’s no longer enough to have competitive prices and a great standard of product.

Customers want to know they are being treated well throughout their entire journey.

As such, companies that foster a customer-centric culture consistently outperform those that don’t.

To get started with a customer-centric approach, focus on creating more meaningful relationships.

Prioritise customer conversation, feedback, and research.

By listening to your customers and learning their pain points, you’ll be able to design a digital customer experience strategy that vastly improves the customer perception.

4. Be available - wherever your customers are

When it comes to providing a positive customer experience, near 80% of US customers cite the following as crucial:

• Convenience
• Knowledgeable help
• Friendly service

It’s why you need to provide your audience with fast and helpful customer service - wherever they are and whenever they need it.  

The easiest way to do this is to adopt an omnichannel customer engagement solution .

For example, Talkative allows you to engage with customers whether they are shopping on your site or browsing social media .

Live chat and chatbots allow you to provide fast customer service, 24/7.

You can even bring the in-store experience online by using video chat for customer service .

Whatever communication channels you use, providing your customers with a fast way to engage will mean a much-improved perception.

Looking for a smarter way to serve your online customers ? Start a free trial with Talkative today.

The takeaway on customer perception

Positive customer perceptions are one of the most valuable assets a brand can have.

But with so many variables affecting your customers' attitudes, it can prove tricky to influence.

After all, everyone’s entitled to their opinions.

Either way, if you can improve how customers perceive your brand, you’re more likely to boost conversions and retention.

So, to make these improvements for your customer perception:

First, consider how you market your business.

Next, consider how you reflect and respond to customer reviews too - both good and bad.

Finally, consider how effective your online customer service really is.

Ultimately, it’s one of the key ways in which customers develop their perceptions.

With the right customer service solution, it’s one of the quickest ways to win them over too.

And that's where Talkative comes in.

Our real-time engagement platform provides a suite of contact channels and capabilities , plus deep integrations into systems like Salesforce .

What's more, with our intelligent engagement features, you can always match your customers with the right advisor at the right time.

Want to learn more? Book your Talkative demo today , and discover how to increase customer satisfaction across your website, app, and social channels.

• What is customer perception? 
• Why is customer perception important? 
• What affects customer perception? 
• How do you build a positive customer perception? ‍
• The takeaway

Engage more customers in just three minutes

Get your weekly three minute read on making every customer interaction both personable and profitable. Sign up to the Talkative newsletter now.

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What is Customer Perception — a Comprehensive Guide

A business’s success or failure is increasingly determined by customer perception. The way a customer feels about your brand plays a bigger role in consumer decision-making than the price or service provided. This means that your business success largely hinges on creating positive customer perceptions. 

In this guide, you will learn what customer perception is and how to improve the way customers view your business. Let’s start by getting a customer perception definition.

What is Customer Perception? 

Customer perception is the way a customer views your business and products. A customer’s opinion about your business will be formed by direct and indirect experiences with your brand. Being aware of customer attitudes toward your business can help you improve your service, product, and customer journey.

Creating positive customer perceptions is essential for business success. By understanding what your customers think of you, you can make better strategic business decisions and improve the overall customer experience. Customers’ perceptions of your brand can impact your bottom line significantly. 

This means that if customers like what you offer, they are more likely to buy from you again. Now that we know the customer perception meaning, let’s move on to how customer perceptions influence your business. 

How Customer Perceptions Influence Your Business

The importance of perception cannot be overstated. Creating a positive consumer perception of your business can lead to higher sales and greater profits by improving retention rates and increasing loyalty. 

So, if customers like what you offer, they are more likely to buy from you again! With a large variety of competitive options available to consumers, it is not enough to have a well-known brand. The way customers feel about your business can increase brand loyalty and result in positive referrals. 

Likewise, negative customer perceptions can damage your brand image and drive both current and prospective customers away. This is why customer-perceived value is important. 

Factors Affecting Customer Perceptions 

As mentioned earlier, perception in business is important, which is why you need to know the factors that go into a positive perception. We describe these below: 

Marketing — it refers to the overall way your brand is portrayed through advertisements, websites, social media posts, events, and public relations. Make sure these aspects are in alignment. All platforms should convey the same message and portray what you want the public to know and feel about your brand to create a positive business perception. 

Social Media — this is a great platform to interact with your customers and give them a chance to voice their opinions about how well you are doing, or not. If they received substandard service you can ask them about the poor quality or value perception deficit they experienced. 

Customer Service — we talked about what is customer perception and why it is important, but your customer service agents are the first line of contact for your customers and have a direct influence on how your brand is perceived. They can also give you some feedback and describe ways in which past experiences can affect customer expectations. 

Review and Critiques — there are a lot of forums where customers go to voice their criticism or give a review about a company. It is important to monitor these forums because it is important to respond to customer complaints and give your side of the story. 

Media Coverage — sometimes your business will get some attention from the press and it is always important to tell the audience why customers are important and how much their feedback means to you. 

So far, we covered what is customer perception and why is perception important, but you need to know how good of a job you are doing creating this perception. Let’s take a look at this next. 

How to Measure Perception 

There are several metrics you should be monitoring when measuring the effectiveness of your customer perception efforts: 

CSAT — this is the customer satisfaction score and it allows customers to quantitatively rate the service they receive. Looking at the ratings and accompanying comments can show you what your customers are thinking and feeling.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) — this is a tool for measuring how likely your customers are to recommend your business to others. NPS is less transactional than CSAT and focuses on the way your customers feel about your brand rather than how they feel about their recent customer service experience.

Customer Effort Score (CES) — this score measures how easy (or difficult) it is for customers to solve their issues or to complete a task using your product or service. Ideally, you want buyers to get the resolution they need with little effort.

How Do You Change Customer Perception? 

We already know what customer perception is and why it is important, but what if you don’t like your current perception and would like to change it? One way is to strike an emotional chord with your customers. 

Research shows that across hundreds of brands in dozens of categories shows that the most effective way to maximize customer value is to move beyond mere customer satisfaction and connect with customers at an emotional level — tapping into their fundamental motivations and fulfilling their deep, often unspoken emotional needs. 

Also, you can commit to consistency. When evaluating consistency, it’s important to take a step back and consider its role in your customer onboarding process. To tee up a positive customer perception, you’ll want to ensure that the hand-off from sales to support or customer success is fluid and reflects how you want folks to view your brand.

Trust Pexly to Help You Improve Your Business Perception 

In this article, we talked about why is customer perception important and why the customer is important. Now that you know the customer perceived value definition you can go about improving the way customers see your business. 

If you need any help in doing this Pexly can be of help to you by setting up dedicated customer support teams, content moderation teams, and many other ways to help improve customer perception.

Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you!

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

CEO Avada Commerce

Drive 20-40% of your revenue with Avada

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 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.

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.

• 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.

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!

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