What is the way the customers perceive the enterprise and its products or services in their minds?

What do your customers think of your brand? How do they feel about the products and services you offer?

If you’re unsure about the answers to these questions, you’re not alone. Customer perception is often difficult to understand because it’s subjective and varies from buyer to buyer. But this ambiguity doesn’t mean you should ignore your customers’ opinions. These feelings deserve your attention—after all, they determine whether or not consumers continue to do business with you.

If you leave the wrong impression, you risk losing a significant chunk of your customers. The Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report found that over 50 percent of consumers would switch to a competitor after just one bad experience with a brand.

To create and maintain positive customer perception, you have to offer an exceptional experience and form a connection with buyers at every stage of the customer journey.

Customer perception is the opinions, feelings, and beliefs customers have about your brand. It plays an important role in building customer loyalty and retention as well as brand reputation and awareness.

“Regardless of their actual experience, customer perception is all about how the customer feels about your brand and their interactions with you,” explains Sam Chandler, senior manager of customer success at Zendesk.

What influences customer perception?

Customer perception is influenced by both direct and indirect interactions with your business. Factors such as social media, online reviews, pricing, quality, influencers, and CX all affect consumer perception. You can control certain elements, including the quality of your product or service, the prices, and the customer experience. But you can’t control others like reviews and social media posts.

Why is customer perception important?

Customer perception is important because it impacts a business’s bottom line. Say a customer becomes so frustrated with your brand that they decide to end their subscription with your business. You might think it’s a small loss—just a single subscription—but that churn represents much more value. That buyer might have gone for an upsell or cross-sell, or they may have remained a loyal customer and told their friends to buy your product.

Once you realize how much impact a single customer can have on your bottom line, their perception of your company will seem like anything but a small matter.

• Customer perceptions affect your brand image

Many consumers love to share their positive experiences with people in their network. For example, they might tell their family about a restaurant that serves delicious pizza. Or, they’ll encourage their coworkers to use a productivity app that slashed their work time in half.

But customers don’t always say good things. Their word-of-mouth depends on their perception of your brand.

“We all know that consumers are more likely to share poor experiences than good ones (and with triple the number of people!),” says Chandler. “It’s also important to remember that once people get an idea in their heads, it’s hard to change their minds. In fact, we’re hardwired to find info that supports our preconceived notions—it’s called confirmation bias.”

Enough negative word-of-mouth marketing over time will solidify a bad brand reputation, and that’s no small matter. Chander believes brands should protect their reputation by “being in front of your customer perception and the narrative surrounding your CX.”

• Customer perceptions influence purchasing decisions

You might think if you offer a superior product or an unbeatable price, customers will naturally flock to your brand. That might be the case, but these factors don’t guarantee that outcome. Other important factors may impact their perception of your brand and their decision to make a purchase.

Say you offer the lowest price among your competitors and your product is high-quality. But at the same time, your company’s support team is slow to respond and doesn’t offer a generous return policy. As a result, a customer may pay more for a competitor’s product to receive better service.

“Consumers are more likely to share poor experiences than good ones (and with triple the number of people).” Sam Chandler, senior manager of customer success at Zendesk

4 steps to improve customers’ perception of your brand

After collecting your metrics, you’ll know how customers feel about your brand. You’ll need a game plan to help you improve if your customers don’t view you in a very positive light. And if you find your company has a great reputation, don’t rest on your laurels—you’ll need to take steps to continue maintaining that standard.

1. Provide stellar customer support
2. Share customer success stories
3. Encourage company-wide collaboration
4. Support social causes

To maintain positive customer perception, your brand can’t settle with a mediocre or poor customer service operation. Strengthen your customer support with a combination of tactics.

First, provide self-service options (such as a knowledge base or FAQ pages) so customers can get quick solutions to simple problems without having to contact your support team.

Next, invest in an omnichannel support solution like Zendesk to serve your customers in a variety of ways. See which channels your customer base prefers to use, then ensure you have the tools you need to seamlessly move conversations from channel to channel—this is what it truly means to provide omnichannel customer service.

Finally, speed up response times by using email autoresponders and message templates. This will improve efficiency with workflows that reduce redundant, repetitive tasks for your agents. With less stress and more time to spend with customers, your team will be able to consistently deliver empathetic, friendly, and helpful support experiences.

2. Share customer success stories

An effective way to influence customers’ opinions about your brand is to show them how you’ve helped other people succeed. When customers see how others have achieved their goals with your product or service, they’re more likely to perceive your brand positively.

“When talking about customer perception and its importance to business, it’s not just about brand reputation—we also can’t forget about perceived value,” Chandler says. “Perceived value directly relates to your bottom line. If customers don’t feel like they’re getting value from what you’re selling, they won’t buy it.”

You can help customers understand your brand’s value by showing them “the value of what you’re bringing on a regular basis,” according to Chandler. At Zendesk, for example, we routinely reach out to our customers and ask them to tell us how our product has helped them. Then, we share those testimonials on sales calls with potential customers and in newsletters to existing customers.

3. Encourage company-wide collaboration

The customer support team isn’t solely responsible for keeping customers happy—every department needs to work together toward this objective.

“Since CX teams sit at the forefront of customer interactions, these teams are frequently the first to be aware of product or policy issues that are causing experience issues,” says Chandler. “But to solve those problems, they often need assistance from other teams. This is where collaboration across your entire company is key.”

A simple way to streamline your internal operations and improve team collaboration is to use a customer relationship management (CRM) system. CRMs gather information about all the ways a customer interacts with a company and centralize that data in one main database. They also integrate with other customer-facing tools and make it easy to share customer details with each team that directly connects with consumers, including sales, marketing, and support.

In marketing terminology, perceived value is the customers' evaluation of the merits of a product or service, and its ability to meet their needs and expectations, especially in comparison with its peers.

Marketing professionals try to influence consumers' perceived value of a product by describing the attributes that make it superior to the competition.

• Perceived value is a customer's own perception of a product or service's merit or desirability to them, especially in comparison to a competitor's product.
• Perceived value is measured by the price the public is willing to pay for a good or service.
• The marketing of a product or service involves attempting to influence and increase its perceived value, which can emphasize qualities such as its aesthetic design, accessibility, or convenience.

Perceived value comes down to the price the public is willing to pay for a good or service. Even a snap decision made in a store aisle involves an analysis of a product's ability to fulfill a need and provide satisfaction compared to other products under different brand names.

The work of the marketing professional is to enhance the perceived value of the brand they are selling.

The pricing of products takes perceived value into consideration. In some cases, the price of a product or service may have more to do with its emotional appeal than with the actual cost of production.

Even a snap decision made in a store aisle involves an analysis of a product's perceived ability to fulfill a need and provide satisfaction.

Marketers who want to influence the perceived value of a product define its attributes in terms of its utility, or the extra benefits and values that the customer expects to get in using it. The perceived utility of many products and services may differ widely even among similar or virtually identical products.

There are five types of utilities that companies aim to create through marketing campaigns for products:

• Form utility is the aesthetic appeal of the physical design of a product. Even a utilitarian product like a frying pan can increase in perceived value because of its appealing design.
• Task utility is the value attached to a service that saves the customer time, effort, or money. Car detailing shops and laundry services offer utility value.
• Time utility refers to the ease of access to a service or product, such as 24-hour service compared to 9-to-5 hours.
• Place utility is the convenience of the location, like a fast-food outlet that's around the corner compared to a restaurant that's 20 miles away.
• Possession utility refers to the ease of purchasing the product. A department store that features online ordering, home delivery, or in-store pickup is aiming for possession utility.

A company's brand is meant to communicate a set of expectations associated with its products or services. That's why a well-established brand can command a higher price than its generic equivalents. Advil and Motrin both contain ibuprofen, but both brands are priced higher than generic ibuprofen.

Luxury goods, however, carry the perception of value to another level with the addition of prestige. The highest value of luxury goods is not associated with their utility but with the prestige that owning and using it entails. The perceived value of a Rolex watch is not based on its functionality but with its image as a mark of personal success and refined taste.

At the opposite end of the scale, some brands are marketed as smart bargains. The perceived value of a product may be its low price in comparison with competitors of equal quality.