Determine your customers' needs easily with an online survey

Customer needs analysis is a process of researching and evaluating what customers expect from a product or service. Companies often use this form of analysis to improve their products and create effective marketing campaigns.

If a needs analysis reveals that your customers want more options for your products, for example, you can develop new colors or sizes for that item.

In this way, a customer needs analysis serves, among other things, to better understand and get to know the customer. Because only if you know your customers’ wishes and needs can you offer them the right solutions.

In most industries today, there is a diverse range of products and services. This leads to a great deal of competition and makes it necessary for companies to stand out from the crowd and positively differentiate themselves from their competitors.

To do this, it is important to identify customer needs. Because only if you know them can you offer suitable solutions and achieve a high level of customer satisfaction.

But how do you identify your customers’ needs? This is where needs assessment comes into play. After all, no one can provide better information about customer expectations than the customers themselves.

You can derive a wide range of information from the needs assessment. You get concrete information about what your customers want, where there are problems and where you can support them. While your competitors are still trying to identify possible problems for your customers, you already know where to start.

In this way, you not only increase your sales, but also the loyalty and trust of your customers to your company.

We have compiled five essential steps for identifying customer needs below:

1. Get to know your customers better

When conducting a needs assessment, it’s important to get in touch with your customers and get to know them. Who are your customers? What environment do they come from? What values do they hold?

2. Determine the needs and goals of your customers

As a next step, ask your customers about their expectations and goals. About possible problems in the process flow or new projects in which you can support them. This way you will quickly find out what your customers really need.

Since you usually don’t have the time to talk to each customer in person, regular customer surveys are a useful tool for determining needs.

For example, you can easily create a needs assessment survey yourself using our feedback tool, or you can use our needs assessment survey template. You can then send the completed survey to your customers by e-mail, for example, and evaluate it afterwards.

3. Present possible solutions to your customer

You have evaluated the questionnaire with your customer and now know what challenges your customer is currently facing and what they would like from working with you. Now work out possible solutions and support options and present them to the customer.

4. Help your customer make a decision

After presenting different solution options to your customer, help them make the choice that is right for them.

5. Follow-up and continuous contact

The customer has chosen the solution you proposed? Great! Your work doesn’t end there. Continue to follow up with your customer after the sale is complete and ask if they are satisfied with the solution. Continuous contact may also result in further projects between you.


Every customer has wishes and needs. Determining these is the purpose of the customer needs analysis. But how exactly do you determine customer needs? What methods and tools are available to you? We have explained three relevant methods and tools below.

1. Personas

Personas are the creation of a fictitious user, who is supposed to represent the target group by assigning abilities, needs, expectations and behaviors. Personas thus offer a good opportunity to put oneself in the position of potential users in order to align marketing and product development as best as possible with the interests of the target group.

2. Surveys

Surveys are also a good way to find out how your products, the service quality or delivery and complaint handling, are received by the end user. Your customers are happy to give you the chance to improve negative user experiences through constructive feedback or to communicate their wishes and needs. Just ask.

Our easyfeedback survey tool can certainly help you collect valuable feedback from your customers through your own questionnaire. Feel free to give it a try.

3. Social listening

Social listening is all about learning how brands, companies and products are perceived on social media. By monitoring company- or product-related likes, comments, tweets and more, the goal is to identify how consumers, in particular, feel about your brand, products or services and what their expectations are.

The information gained from monitoring can be used, for example, to (further) develop products and brands or to eliminate negative experiences and transform them into positive ones in the future. Ultimately, social listening can be a helpful tool for strengthening one’s own brand and future market position.

Think in advance about what information you need from your customers. Ask a few specific questions rather than many questions that give you little input. If you want to offer your customers individual solutions, it is important to ask about the company and an appropriate contact person.

As a general rule, ask open-ended questions and give your customers the opportunity to express their wishes and needs. You will not achieve this by asking pure yes/no questions.

Below we have compiled a few examples of possible customer needs analysis questions:

• What problems have you had so far in area XY?
• Do you need a product that simplifies your processes?
• What additional functions would you like?
• Which products do you have a high demand for?
• What could simplify your processes?
• Are you planning new projects or business expansions?
• Which areas could still be optimized?
• What exactly is missing in these areas?

You can get more ideas for suitable questions from our needs assessment survey template. Or simply design a customer survey yourself via easyfeedback.