Customer perception: What it is, why it matters, and how to influence it for the better

How do your customers really see your brand? What shapes their impressions from the get-go?

The answers to these questions can impact and inform everything from your marketing strategy to product roadmap to sales campaigns and more. But how do you get inside the mind of your target customer, and more importantly, influence their opinion of your company? Getting on the right track starts with understanding customer perception.

What is customer perception?

Customer perception is the overall impression that customers (and your wider target market) have of your business.

It's a journey that starts before customers even land on your website or visit your store. They have an initial brand image in their mind, formed by ads, social media, and word-of-mouth recommendations—all of which define a customer’s expectations.

Once a sale has been made, perceptions are solidified by the product and post-purchase experience.

Different brands have different brand identities and customer perception goals in mind. Some want to be known for their budget offerings, while others aim to build a luxury image through high-quality materials and stellar customer service. There’s no single correct approach.

Why does customer perception matter to your business?

Customer perception and consumer behavior are vital to business management for a few reasons.

Think of it this way, if your customers perceive your company as offering low-quality products that provide poor value or being dishonest, they have every reason to shop elsewhere. On the other hand, even if you produce excellent products, if your brand has low market visibility, you’ll still have a difficult time building trust with customers.

So, you need to actively manage and influence how customers see you. This means consistently delivering quality, value, and responsive service across all customer touchpoints.

In the age of social media, where news travels fast, having a strong brand perception is a valuable asset in not only attracting but also retaining customers.

What can impact customer perception?

How customers perceive your brand image is shaped over the long term by many factors. These can broadly be split into two categories: direct and indirect experiences. Let’s examine the nature of customer psychology in each of the following areas:

Direct experiences with the company

A direct experience is when a brand and consumer interact with one another—for example, when a customer is browsing your website, making a purchase, or having a conversation with one of your team members.

These customer touchpoints are the easiest to get right. You need to ensure that your customers are getting what they need out of every interaction, whether that’s making a purchase or getting a question answered quickly. From the design of your website to the helpfulness of your customer service representatives, each element should be geared towards providing an outstanding experience.

If your business can consistently deliver excellent customer service, it not only solves immediate issues for your customers, but also builds a positive perception of your brand, potentially among other prospects in your target audience.

In this way, direct experiences also foster indirect engagement because people are more likely to return and recommend your brand to others.

Indirect experiences with the company

There’s a good reason why companies spend billions on adverts and marketing campaigns—it’s because they showcase your brand’s values and qualities to potential customers.

Effective adverts cut through the noise. They grab the viewer’s attention through emotional engagement and use storytelling to communicate core values and a unique selling proposition.

Some adopt the innovation ethos, appealing to tech-savvy consumers looking for the next big thing. Others may emphasize their commitment to ethical practices, resonating with socially or environmentally conscious shoppers.

Customer perceptions are also heavily influenced by third-party reviews. Psychologically, consumers place a high value on social proof.

Positive feedback, whether it’s from like-minded peers or trusted journalists, acts as a form of validation. It’s often the final piece of evidence that reassures a buyer that they’re making the correct decision to shop with your brand.

There are a few approaches you can take to cultivate positive scrutiny. Many brands encourage customers to leave honest feedback on their product pages or sites like Trustpilot or Google Reviews.

Others ask reputable publications or consumer choice websites like Which? to consider their products in comparison to other market leaders.

A trendy approach right now is to work with brand collaborators or influencers on platforms like TikTok—this can really cut through to niche target demographics such as Gen Z. Ultimately, every business can indirectly benefit from the power of word-of-mouth marketing.

How to measure and assess customer perception

To improve your consumer perception, you need to first clearly understand where your business currently stands. Do you just need to do more of the same, or completely reinvent your brand image?

Measuring customer satisfaction is a critical step in this process because it helps you pinpoint areas of excellence and where there are opportunities for improvement. There are three main ways to start doing this:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys are used to collect feedback immediately post-interaction.

This could be a basic questionnaire or rating system that you’re presented with on a product page, purchase screen, or after any type of customer service has concluded. They’re useful because you can compare customer views across different touchpoints and see where you’re hitting or missing the mark.

Dialpad makes it easy to create CSAT surveys in minutes. You simply write the questions, fill in the template, and select how customers can leave feedback (for example, slider bars or comments boxes).

Then, you can automatically send it to customers on-page or via SMS immediately after a service interaction—for example, after a customer support call. Once your survey is live, all responses are fed directly into a centralized analytics hub for easy browsing and real-time insights.

On top of this, Dialpad’s unique Ai CSAT feature fills in the gaps by predicting feedback for customers who don’t respond—ensuring results aren’t skewed in favor of only the happy customers and showing the full picture of up to 100% of customer interactions.

Other customer support metrics

Beyond CSAT, there are several other metrics that are useful in understanding consumer perception. The main ones are Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Effort Score (CES).

NPS captures the extent to which customers would recommend your brand, measured by a question that categorizes respondents into promoters, passives, and detractors.

It's simple to measure—just ask how likely they are to recommend your business on a scale of one to 10. High scores indicate brand advocates, while low scores point to detractors.

CES, on the other hand, represents the ease with which customers can get their issues resolved or tasks completed. To measure it, you ask customers questions like “Did our service meet your needs without any hassle? Rate from one (strongly disagree) to 10 (strongly agree).”

As a rule of thumb, lower effort scores and higher net promoter scores are directly linked to customer satisfaction. What sets them apart is the fact that they’re more targeted so you can see specifically which areas of your service need improvement.

Tracking reviews and social media mentions

These days, social media is treated as its own ballgame for influencing consumer perception. Just as positive reviews can make your brand seem appealing, negative posts can impact customer acquisition and retention.

So, it’s important to actively monitor these channels and respond to feedback quickly. Otherwise, minor complaints can become a full-blown PR disaster if left unchecked.

There are many social media tools that are designed to track public-facing social media posts, such as Buffer, and reputation management tools that monitor review sites (like G2 and Yelp). From a PR perspective, these are important complementary pieces to use alongside direct feedback collection tools.

5 Ways to improve customer perception

But to make a true impact on customer perception, you need to do more than simply measure it. Here are five actionable strategies to elevate how customers view your brand, ensuring their experiences are positive and their feedback is taken to heart:

1. Continually monitor and improve the customer experience you offer

What is customer expectation if not a fickle beast? Consumer demands evolve over time, meaning continuous brand monitoring is a crucial task. You need to actively seek out and address any friction points at an early stage, which requires regularly going into the granular details of the customer journey.

The key is to collect customer feedback across all key customer touchpoints. Then you should go through it with a fine-tooth comb to uncover any noticeable trends. This isn’t an easy task, but it’s how you stand out from competitors that don’t put the effort in.

Having an Ai-powered contact center solution can save hours every week. Dialpad Support, for example, makes data collection and analysis a much more streamlined job with features such as Ai CSAT. By leveraging Ai in customer experience, you can help supervisors save time, empower agents to respond to customers more accurately, and gain a more complete picture of the many buyer personas that interact with your business.

2. Collect customer feedback—and act upon it

Feedback is key to supporting your brand identity—every comment, positive or negative, represents an opportunity for improvement. It’s incredibly valuable when a customer tells you what they want to see improved, and yet so many businesses neglect to collect and use this invaluable feedback.

Besides using the customer feedback you collect, it’s also a good practice to respond to comments—even the negative ones—on public-facing sites such as Google Reviews.

Being responsive on social media shows your customers (and prospects) that you’re committed to providing a good experience, even if you had a product mishap or if a service employee just happened to have a bad day.

3. Make collaboration across your organization easier

A customer’s experience with your brand should be consistent across all channels and with every service agent.

With more communication channels than ever before, achieving this in practice requires active effort to put departments on the same page.

One of the most basic things you can do is streamline communications by using a versatile platform that consolidates all these business collaboration channels in one place.

A platform like Dialpad integrates with all major CRM platforms, meaning customer data is accessible to any service agent and is never siloed within one department, such as your sales team.

Other built-in tools like conference calling and live sentiment analysis bring your team closer together—for example, making it easy for supervisors to see if customers are complaining about certain features or new updates and quickly organize a strategy call with the team in real time.

4. Promote customer success stories

Case studies and positive reviews on social media or review sites are a fantastic source of social proof. Sadly, many prospects won’t know about your amazing customer stories and comments if they aren’t directly shown them. This is where your marketing team comes in.

Take screenshots of trust scores, product ratings, and even long-form reviews—and then amplify their reach to a wider audience.

You can do this on social media, for example, by sharing customer success stories or hosting prize giveaways for people who post pictures of their favorite products. Alternatively, you can integrate positive ratings and reviews into your ad campaigns as a means of building credibility.

5. Support good causes and community initiatives

Finally, you can improve customer perception and stand out from the crowd by aligning your brand with meaningful causes that resonate with your customer baseIf you’re a local business, put yourself at the heart of the community with projects like fundraisers, donations, or volunteering events. If you ship products around the world, launch schemes like carbon offsetting or using more sustainable materials.

Improve customers’ perception of your business with Dialpad

Customer perception can make or break a business. Your brand image has a significant impact on your bottom line, both attracting new customers and drumming up repeat business.

Achieving a positive perception is a multifaceted project—you need to blend the data science of feedback with the creativity of brand storytelling. It's about painting your company (and its products) in the best possible light at every consumer touchpoint.

Dialpad’s customer engagement platform can help you gather the conversation intelligence you need to understand how to improve your customers’ perception of your business. From its hyper-accurate Ai that captures keywords and topics during customer calls, to the seamless integrations with your CRM platform and marketing tools to create a unified digital workspace for your team, Dialpad can help you uncover valuable insights from the conversations you’re already having every day.