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Customer Research

What is customer research.

Customer research is conducted so as to identify customer segments, needs, and behaviors. It can be carried out as part of market research, user research, or design research. Even so, it always focuses on researching current or potential customers of a specific brand or product in order to identify unmet customer needs and/or opportunities for business growth.

Customer research can focus on simple demographics of an existing or potential customer group (such as age, gender, and income level). Indeed, these considerations are vital determinants of a product’s target audience. However, such research also often seeks to understand various behaviors and motivators —factors which place a product’s use and potential on a higher level of study. Thus, the goal of such research is to expose clear details about who is—or will be—using a product as well as the reasons behind their doing so and how they go about using it (including the contextual areas of “where” and “when”). Customer research may be conducted via a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and ethnographic field studies. It also commonly involves doing desk research of online reviews, forums, and social media to explore what customers are saying about a product.

While customer research is usually conducted as part of a design project, it is also often conducted in other departments of an organization. In some cases, customer research is part of marketing—for instance, to ensure that marketing campaigns have the right focus. In other cases, it can be carried out as part of concept development or ideation so as to identify opportunities for future products, services, or features. In any case, such research is an essential ingredient in keeping the end users in clear sight long before the end of any design phase.

Literature on Customer Research

Here’s the entire UX literature on Customer Research by the Interaction Design Foundation, collated in one place:

Learn more about Customer Research

Take a deep dive into Customer Research with our course User Research – Methods and Best Practices .

How do you plan to design a product or service that your users will love , if you don't know what they want in the first place? As a user experience designer, you shouldn't leave it to chance to design something outstanding; you should make the effort to understand your users and build on that knowledge from the outset. User research is the way to do this, and it can therefore be thought of as the largest part of user experience design .

In fact, user research is often the first step of a UX design process—after all, you cannot begin to design a product or service without first understanding what your users want! As you gain the skills required, and learn about the best practices in user research, you’ll get first-hand knowledge of your users and be able to design the optimal product—one that’s truly relevant for your users and, subsequently, outperforms your competitors’ .

This course will give you insights into the most essential qualitative research methods around and will teach you how to put them into practice in your design work. You’ll also have the opportunity to embark on three practical projects where you can apply what you’ve learned to carry out user research in the real world . You’ll learn details about how to plan user research projects and fit them into your own work processes in a way that maximizes the impact your research can have on your designs. On top of that, you’ll gain practice with different methods that will help you analyze the results of your research and communicate your findings to your clients and stakeholders—workshops, user journeys and personas, just to name a few!

By the end of the course, you’ll have not only a Course Certificate but also three case studies to add to your portfolio. And remember, a portfolio with engaging case studies is invaluable if you are looking to break into a career in UX design or user research!

We believe you should learn from the best, so we’ve gathered a team of experts to help teach this course alongside our own course instructors. That means you’ll meet a new instructor in each of the lessons on research methods who is an expert in their field—we hope you enjoy what they have in store for you!

All open-source articles on Customer Research

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Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

• Customer surveys : Survey tools such as Survicate are essential for conducting quantitative and qualitative research across various customer touchpoints and improving digital CX
• Diverse research methods : Employ a mix of customer research methods like different types of surveys , interviews, focus groups, observational studies, and usability testing to gain comprehensive insights into customer behavior and product interaction.
• Importance of continuous feedback : Establishing feedback loop mechanisms is crucial for ongoing improvement, ensuring that products and services evolve in response to customer needs .
• Data analysis : Systematic data collection followed by thorough analysis using appropriate customer research tools is key to identifying trends and making informed decisions. ‍
• Actionable feedback : Prioritize and strategize based on research findings to create actionable insights that drive measurable improvements in customer experience management and business processes.

Cutting through the chatter to hear your customers' true opinions is no small feat.

Tailored for business owners and marketers, this article zeroes in on how to conduct customer research . We'll highlight the strategies that directly connect you to your audience's preferences and pain points. By tapping into these insights, you'll be equipped to make informed, impactful business decisions.

Dive in to transform customer feedback into a clear direction for your brand's growth and success.

What is customer research?

Customer research is an essential practice focused on collecting data about your customers to understand their characteristics, needs, and behaviors.

Why is customer research important?

• Informed Decision-Making: You gain actionable insights into customer preferences and satisfaction, empowering you to make data-driven decisions.
• Enhanced Customer Experience: Understanding what your customers value guides your efforts to improve their experiences with your product or service.
• Strategic Focus: Tailoring your business strategy becomes more focused as you identify key demographics and market segments.
• Product Development: Product features and improvements align better with customer expectations when informed by customer research.
• Competitive Edge: Detailed knowledge about your customers can give you a competitive advantage by identifying opportunities and gaps in the market.

Customer research vs. market research

Customer research and market research serve distinct purposes in understanding buyers and the competitive environment.

Customer research dives deep into your existing or potential customers' behaviors, needs, and preferences . It aims to create a detailed understanding of the customer journey , from awareness to purchase and is often qualitative in nature.

On the other hand, market research takes a broader approach, examining the market as a whole, including industry trends, competitor analysis, and market share.

While customer research is about the 'who' and 'why' behind purchasing decisions, conducting market research addresses the 'what' and 'how' of market conditions and opportunities.

Both types of research are crucial for informed decision-making but focus on different aspects of the business landscape. Customer research is about improving the customer experience and tailoring products or services to consumer needs. Market research is about understanding the market landscape to strategize and position offerings effectively.

Primary research vs. secondary research

In customer research, understanding the distinction between primary research and secondary research is crucial for choosing the right approach to obtain your insights.

Primary research

Primary research involves collecting data firsthand for your specific research goal. This data is original and gathered through methods directly controlled by you. Examples include:

• Surveys and questionnaires : Deploying custom surveys to collect customer feedback on a new product or service.
• Interviews : Conducting one-on-one dialogues to dive deep into customer opinions and experiences.
• Focus groups : Facilitated group discussions to obtain a range of perspectives on a particular topic.

Secondary research

Secondary research methods rely on data previously collected by others. It's an evaluation of existing information that may include:

• Industry Reports : Analyzing market research findings related to your sector.
• Academic Journals : Reviewing studies and papers for trends and outcomes that align with your interests.
• Market Analysis : Assessing competitor data and market summaries to inform your strategies.

Types of customer data

Before diving into specific categories, understand that customer data is essential to personalize your marketing strategies and enhance customer experiences. This data comes in two core types: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative research gathers non-numeric information that captures your customers' opinions, motivations, and attitudes. This data often comes from:

• Interviews , direct conversations that provide in-depth insights.
• Open-ended survey responses allow customers to express their thoughts in their own words.

Quantitative data

Quantitative research collects numerical data and can be measured and analyzed statistically. Key sources include:

• Transaction records : Sales data showing purchasing patterns.
• Website analytics : Metrics like page views and click-through rates representing user behavior.

Best customer research methods

When conducting customer research, you need to select the right methodology to gain valuable insights. Various research methods cater to different needs, from understanding user behavior to gauging customer satisfaction.

Customer surveys and questionnaires

Deploy online surveys and questionnaires to quickly gather quantitative and qualitative data from a large audience. For example, a survey tool such as Survicate offers a variety of different distribution channels:

• surveys embedded in emails
• website pop-up surveys
• mobile app surveys
• link surveys
• in-product surveys

Surveys are a cost-effective way to gather market research insights from the entire customer digital journey . If you use them as a part of a feedback loop, they can help you improve the CX considerably.

widely via email, websites, or social media platforms. Ensure your questions are direct and easy to understand to maximize response rates.

Conduct interviews to collect in-depth qualitative data. One-on-one interviews allow for a deep dive into customer opinions, beliefs, and experiences. Record these sessions, if possible, to ensure that none of the details are lost.

Focus groups

Utilize focus groups to explore customer attitudes and behaviors in a group setting. This method sparks conversation and can uncover insights that might not surface in one-on-one interactions. Be wary of group dynamics such as conformity, which can influence individual responses.

Observational studies

Observational studies involve watching how users interact with your product in their natural environment. This method provides unfiltered, real-world user behavior that can be invaluable in understanding how your product is used.

Usability testing

Usability testing is imperative for evaluating the functionality and design of your product. Recruit participants to complete specific tasks while observers note where they encounter issues or experience confusion.

Field trials

Conduct field trials by providing users a prototype or beta version of your product for a certain period. This hands-on approach yields feedback on your product's performance in real-life scenarios.

Review mining

Lastly, review mining involves analyzing customer feedback found in online reviews and forums. This passive method is particularly useful for identifying common pain points and areas for improvement without the need for direct interaction.

Types of customer research

Customer research encompasses various methodologies aimed at understanding your market and clientele. Tailoring these approaches helps you stay informed and make data-driven decisions.

Competitive research

You analyze your competitors to benchmark your products, services, and customer satisfaction levels against them. This helps in identifying industry standards and areas for improvement.

Customer journey mapping

Journey mapping involves charting the steps your customers take, from discovering your brand to making a purchase and beyond. It's a strategic approach to understanding customer interactions with your brand.

Buyer persona research

You create detailed profiles of your typical customers based on demographic and psychographic data. These personas help in crafting targeted marketing strategies.

Customer experience research

You assess customers' overall experience with your brand, from the usability of your website to customer service interactions, to optimize every touchpoint.

Customer segmentation research

Market segmentation divides your customer base into distinct groups based on common characteristics to provide more personalized products and services.

Customer needs research

You investigate your customers' underlying needs and desires to develop products that solve specific problems or enhance their lives.

Customer satisfaction research

You measure how your products and services meet, exceed, or fall short of customer expectations, often using surveys, feedback forms, and follow-up interviews.

Pricing research

You evaluate customers' responses to pricing changes and their perception of your product's value to establish an optimal pricing strategy.

Brand perception research

You gauge how customers perceive your brand to ensure your messaging aligns with their beliefs and your company values.

Designing a research plan

Precision and structure are pivotal for gathering actionable insights in constructing a customer research plan. These steps will guide you through creating an effective framework for your research efforts.

Set objectives

Identify what you want to achieve with your research. For instance, you may aim to understand customer satisfaction , identify buying patterns, or test product concepts. These objectives should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound (SMART) to ensure clarity and focus.

Identify target audience

Determine who your customers are by segmenting the market. To accurately represent your overall market, include demographics, psychographics, and behaviors in your segmentation. Knowing your audience can tailor your research to yield more relevant data.

Recruit participants

Once you know who to target, select participants who best represent your customer base. Employ strategies such as customer databases, social media outreach, or third-party panels to gather a varied group that reflects your target audience's diversity.

Choose appropriate methods

Your objectives will dictate the methods you choose. Qualitative approaches like interviews afford depth, while quantitative methods like surveys provide breadth. Select the right blend of methods to gain a multidimensional view of customer sentiments.

Sampling techniques

Employ sampling techniques to generalize your findings. Random sampling ensures everyone has an equal chance of selection, while stratified sampling involves dividing your audience into subgroups and sampling from these categories to ensure all segments are represented.

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

Establish ongoing mechanisms to capture customer feedback regularly. This could involve periodic surveys or real-time feedback systems. Make sure you continuously iterate your product or service based on this input, creating a virtuous cycle of improvement.

Data collection and analysis

Effective customer research hinges on the systematic collection and meticulous analysis of data to decipher patterns, understand behaviors, and make informed decisions.

Gather data systematically and analyze it to uncover patterns and trends. Use analytical tools that can handle your data type and amount. Look for relationships between variables and compare these findings against your goals.

Quantitative data analysis

You'll handle numerical data that can be measured and compared in a straightforward manner. Quantitative analysis often employs statistical tools to interpret data sets and deduce meaningful insights. Common techniques include:

• Descriptive Statistics: Summarize your data through means, medians, and modes.
• Inferential Statistics: Make predictions and infer trends from your sample data.
• Regression Analysis: Determine the relationship between variables.

Qualitative data assessment

With qualitative data, your focus is on interpretative analysis of non-numerical information, such as customer interviews or open-ended survey responses. Key approaches involve:

• Thematic Analysis: Identify patterns or themes within qualitative data.
• Content Analysis: Categorize text to understand the frequency and relationships of words or concepts.
• Narrative Analysis: Explore the structure and content of stories to gain insights into customer perspectives.

Mixing methods

Combining quantitative and qualitative analysis can provide a holistic view of your customer research. Employ a 'mixed methods' strategy to:

• Validate findings across different data types.
• Gain a richer, more nuanced understanding of research questions.
• Balance the depth of qualitative assessment with the generalizability of quantitative analysis.

Interpreting and reporting results

Turn your data into action by using insights to inform business decisions. Whether it is refining product features or adjusting marketing strategies, use the research to create value for your customers and your business.

Drawing conclusions

When you are ready to draw conclusions from your customer research, begin by assessing the data's significance. Look for patterns and trends in the feedback and quantifiable data. Tabulate your findings when possible, as this makes comparisons clearer:

• Quantitative Data : Calculate averages, frequencies, and percentages. A table showing the response distribution for each question can clarify these statistics.
• Qualitative Data : Group feedback into themes. For instance, list common descriptors used by customers when discussing a product feature.

Conclusions should directly relate to the research objectives you set before the study.

Creating actionable insights

After drawing conclusions, it's crucial to translate them into actionable insights:

• Prioritize : Determine which findings substantially impact your objectives or pose the biggest challenge to your CX.
• Strategize : For each priority area, brainstorm potential strategies. This may involve a simple list or a SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) for complex decisions.

Always ensure that your insights are actionable; they should inform decisions and lead to measurable improvement in consumer experience or business processes. Communicate these insights with clear, straightforward language to the relevant stakeholders in your organization.

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

Customer research is adapting to leverage cutting-edge technologies. You'll notice a significant shift towards harnessing data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI) to derive deeper insights into customer behavior.

You can leverage Survciate AI-powered features as well. Try the AI survey creator that will design your customer or market research survey in under a minute after you describe your needs and objectives.

After you collect feedback, you can use the AI Topics feature to speed up getting qualitative insights. It will automatically categorize and summarize answers to your open-ended questions. Worth trying, isn't it?

Social listening

Social listening tools are another trend on the rise. They enable you to monitor your brand's social media presence and gather direct feedback from conversations about your products or services. Mobile ethnography also offers a way to observe customer interactions in a natural setting, providing contextually rich data.

Predicting customer behavior

Lastly, as the emphasis on personalization grows, predictive analytics are being adopted to tailor customer experiences. These techniques analyze past behavior to anticipate future needs, enhancing your ability to meet customer expectations preemptively.

Remember, these methods involve collecting various forms of customer data, so being vigilant about privacy and ethical data use is crucial. Follow regulations and best practices to ethically manage the information you gather.

Survicate for your market and customer research

As we've explored, the key to thriving in the current market is to truly understand your customers. The challenge, however, lies in efficiently gathering and interpreting their feedback to inform your business strategies.

With its user-friendly interface, Survicate allows you to create targeted surveys, collect real-time feedback, and analyze the data with ease, ensuring that every customer voice is heard and accounted for.

Survicate's suite of features simplifies the process of connecting with customers and extracting the insights you need to make data-driven decisions. Whether it's through NPS , customer satisfaction surveys, or user experience research, Survicate provides the clarity and direction required to adapt and excel in a fast-paced market.

For those ready to elevate their customer research, consider giving Survicate a try. Start your journey to clearer insights today with a free 10-day trial of the Business Plan , and experience the full potential of focused customer feedback. Take the step today, and transform the way you connect with your audience.

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Customer Research: The Most Underappreciated Strategy In Your Toolkit

Customer research has far-reaching positive implications for businesses. This is a step-by-step guide for how to leverage the tool.

These ecommerce scenarios all have something in common:

• Glossier names its cult-hit cleanser “Milky Jelly” 
• Harry’s launches a new deodorant and shifts from a shave brand to a personal care   
• Katelyn Bourgoin positions Charboyz meat kits as a social solution for suburban dads
• A maternity brand figures out how to present its proprietary sizing, which improves conversions and decreases returns 

The answer: good customer research. 

Each of those bullets came about because the brand or founder listened closely to stories their customers and prospective customers told. 

These brands know something too few ecommerce companies have taken to heart: customer research has far-reaching implications for businesses. With the right resources and process, it’s possible to collect meaningful insights that help you improve many areas of your business, from marketing to customer support to product development. 

And although it may seem intimidating first, the time and financial investment customer research requires is manageable for most teams — especially in light of its ROI. 

This article is a step-by-step guide to formulating a research plan, interviewing customers, and turning the qualitative data you collect into meaningful improvements for your brand. 

The rest of this articles outlines how to:

• Think about the benefits of customer research
• Put together a research plan
• Run effective customer interviews
• Gather indirect customer research
• Put your research data to good use

What is customer research?

Customer research is a structured way to find out why customers do and don’t buy. It’s an effective way to step out of your head and into the buyer’s journey, so you can provide better products and experiences. 

Why is it especially important for ecommerce? 

For ecommerce leaders, the biggest benefits of customer research include: 

• Getting outside the jar 
• Knowing what to improve (instead of guessing)
• Providing better customer-centric experiences

Customer research gets you outside the jar

Imagine sitting inside a jar (an empty one) and trying to read the label. Even if you could make out a letter or two, or perhaps a fine print medical warning, it’d be impossible to piece together what the whole label looks like from the outside.

That’s a bit like trying to imagine a new customer’s experience from inside your brand. You know your site inside and out, and that’s a strength in many contexts. But it’s also a weakness because your proximity to the brand makes it impossible to know what it’s like for new customers to hit your homepage or try to purchase something.

You’re stuck inside the jar, and one of the best ways to get out is customer research. 

But that’s not the only benefit. 

Customer research helps you identify data-backed improvements

There’s a marketing approach Katelyn Bourgoin calls “ liquor and guessing .” It’s the old formula of gathering smart, creative people in the same room, giving them a cool product to work with, and letting them guess their way (occasionally with liquor) to more sales. 

While that occasionally works, it’s a bit like throwing a dart with your eyes closed — you could hit the board, but it’s not likely. Customer research provides a more guaranteed path. 

Some of the most common benefits folks cite is clarity around their messaging strategy — who to speak to, how to speak with them, and when to do so. 

Just wrapped up my 1st customer interview. 🕺Walked away with an entirely new approach, at least 10 content ideas, and a plethora of vocabulary I hadn't used before. Future copy has written itself. @KateBour never stop pushing this narrative. This changed my marketing world. 🙏 — Kristen LaFrance (@kdlafrance) May 2, 2019

But depending on what you set out to discover, customer research can do way more than that. 

Harry’s for example, crowdsourced some of their newest products from current shoppers. Jaime Crespo, GM at Harry’s, told Retail Brew the brand had 1,600 customers call in or send emails requesting deodorant. And 120,000 customers said in a survey they wanted to see deodorant or antiperspirant. Harry’s leaned into this.  

Crespo says, “We have a very strong, close connection with the customers. So we start talking with the customers and asking them, okay, why do you want a new product in deodorant? What’s wrong with the products that you’re currently using? And that’s how we develop our proposition.”  

This ties into the third major benefit for ecommerce brands.

Customer research shows you how to build better customer experiences

One of the biggest strengths of ecommerce, and especially DTC, is the unique opportunity brands have to influence or control every aspect of the customer experience . 

And better experiences pay off:

• PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found 65% of them said they were more strongly influenced by a positive experience than a great ad campaign
• Coschedule found marketers who do audience research at least once per year are 303% more likely to hit marketing goal
• McKinsey says brands that improve the customer journey see revenue increases as much as 10-15% — while lowering service costs by 15-20%

When you start dialing in the customer experience , metrics like conversion rate, lifetime value, average order value, return on ad spending, and others improve as well. 

Customer research shows you, with astonishing clarity, how visitors are experiencing your brand. Meaning, it also shows you where to improve, where to double down, and where missed opportunities are, too. 

Here’s how to get started. 

How to build a foundation with a one-page research plan 

If you’re doing DIY research for your brand (DIY as in not hiring outside) help, start with a plan. This doesn’t have to be complex, either. 

To put together a one-page customer research plan, you’ll want to define:

• Your goals for researching
• Who will “own” the research
• Who you’ll talk with 
• What success looks like 

Below are each of those pieces in more detail.

What are your goals for customer research? 

While it’s admirable to simply want to know your customers better, your research will be far more effective (read: impactful for a specific area of business) if you start with some goals.

I say “goals” because Hannah Shamji, Customer Researcher , emphasizes every customer research project should have two goals:

• A research goal
• A business goal

Your research goal is typically in the form of a question. Be careful of going too broad here though. Shamji says a question like “why are customers buying?’ is too vague to be useful. It’s not something you can actually measure and answer. Instead, try something like, “why are customers in the past 6 months buy or not buying?” This is more specific, measurable, and directive. 

Once you have your research goal, your business goal outlines how you’ll use the research — what decision it’ll drive internally or what it will inform. Hannah explains this as, “stepping away and peeling back the future state of where this data is going to live and be used.” For example, if you want to know why customers have and haven’t bought in the last six months, perhaps you’re looking to improve new customer conversion rates.  

Who is going to be doing the research?

Ideally, you want to appoint one person to lead the research efforts. This person “owns” the research project. 

They can be an internal team member or an external expert, like Shamji or an agency. The point is, you identify one person who’s responsible for running the research and organizing the findings. This, among other things, ensures the research actually happens. 

How will you find customers or prospects to talk to?

Once you have your goals and your project owner, you now need someone to research. 

Figuring out who that “someone” is involves two steps: 

• Identifying which type(s) of customer you need to talk with
• Outlining how you’ll engage them 

1. Identifying who to talk with 

You’re no doubt aware you have different types of customers. These different types include distinct personas with distinct needs. Your different customer types also include action-based segments — customers who just purchased, signed up for the email list, or canceled a subscription. 

Each type of customer provides a different type of insight. For example:

• Prospective visitors can help you understand why folks come to your site, what they’re looking for, and where they get tripped up.
• Customers who just purchased can give insight into what triggers and contexts motivate other new customers to buy. 
• Repeat customers can help you see what’s both delightful and frustrating about the experience you’re providing.
• Higher average order value customers can provide insight into what drives brand fanatics.  

And that’s just to name a few. 

Ultimately, who you focus on depends on your research question. Let’s say you’re a DTC drink subscription company, and you want to understand why subscribers canceled their recurring soda subscription last month. Your goal is to reduce churn. To do this research, you’ll want to speak with subscribers who canceled last month and dig into why they moved on. 

The general rule is, speak with the customer segment or prospective customer segment that’s best equipped to answer your research questions. 

2. Outlining how you’ll engage them

Once you know who you’d like to talk with, you can identify how you’ll reach out to them.

If you’re speaking with existing customers, this may be as simple as an email. 

If you’re speaking with prospective customers, you’ll also want to consider where to find folks and how to qualify them as well.

Note: I’ll get into the logistics of both of those below. For now, simply write how you plan to reach out to folks. 

What types of research make the most sense?

The next planning decision you’ll want to make is, “What type or types of research will give us the best data for our question?” There are quite a few types of research, and they all have strengths and weaknesses. 

Here’s one helpful framework:

• Direct vs. indirect : Direct research involves actively reaching out to customers. Think interviews, online surveys, questionnaires, user testing, and similar primary research methods. Indirect research is more passive. These are methods like social listening (gleaning data from social media) or buying market research. 
• Qualitative vs. quantitative: Qualitative research methods focus on substance and answering “why is this the case?” Quantitative research methods focus on numbers and answering “how often is this happening?” Most research methods excel in one area or the other. But some methods, such as surveys, can help you answer both. 

You can plot most research methods (interviews, surveys, polls) along those two axes: 

Keep in mind combining multiple types of research is often an effective way to gain clarity around your research question.

For example, if you want to know why website visitors aren’t converting on the homepage you rolled out last month, interviewing prospective visitors will help. But so will looking at heatmaps and path analytics in Google docs. 

Non-interview research options 

The rest of this article will focus on interviewing customers because this is one of the most impactful research methods , as Katelyn Bourgoin illustrated: 

That being said, you may sometimes want to start with research options that aren’t interviews. For example, when you’re:

• Not sure what questions you need to ask or who could answer them 
• Needing to gather a large volume of data points quickly around a specific question 

In those scenarios, non-interview options include: 

• Customer surveys: Via email or form add-ons 
• Live chat transcripts : 29% of consumers use or plan to use chatbots to shop online. If you’re using chatbots, there’s a wealth of qualitative data sitting in those conversations. 
• Customer support: The people answering emails, calls, and chats from potential customers or customers every day are a rich source of insight . Don’t neglect what they know. 
• Forums/communities : Listen in wherever your potential customers hang out — Quora, Slack groups, Facebook communities, LinkedIn groups, local meetups, etc. This is a helpful way to find common pain points and desires. 
• Social Media: Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok, Clubhouse, Facebook…if your potential customers are chatting there, there’s something you can learn from lurking. 
• Product reviews: Mining competitor reviews, similar products on amazon, or browsing aggregate review sites can indicate where customers are most fed up and what they may be looking for instead. 
• Audience research tools. Several tools, such as SparkToro , UserInput , and Hotjar , are specially built for figuring out who your audience is and what they’re interested in. 

Again, we don’t go deeper on each of those types of research here because that could be a book in itself. But keep in mind these can be a good starting point in certain scenarios, and they’re often useful to layer on top of interviews for additional context. 

For example, Natalie Thomas, Director of CRO Strategy at The Good, explains we always start with the journey: the path the visitor takes, where they’re coming from, and what their mindset is. 

If we were working with a glasses company, we might ask, “what keywords are people searching for? Are they landing on your site because they’re looking for cute glasses? Are they looking for blue light glasses, or are they looking for acetate glasses, or are they not looking for glasses at all?” This kind of journey analysis diagnoses any problems, which helps us form specific research questions and business goals. With this method, we can ensure we’re asking the right question and focusing research on points of highest return.  

How to Conduct Customer Research to Improve Customer Experience

How do you define “enough” and wrap up the project?

The last piece of your plan is defining “enough.” Or, what success looks like. This is identifying, “we know we’re done with this phase of research when…” 

There are a few ways to benchmark this:

• After x amount of weeks
• After talking with y customers
• After identifying z trends 

While customer research ideally becomes an ongoing effort at your brand, it’s useful to know when each piece of research wraps up. So, make sure and set a finish line. 

How to conduct effective 1:1 customer interviews

Once you have a plan, you can start executing your research. This part is a lot of logistics — and a lot of fun. It involves:

• Reaching out to potential interviewees
• Formulating interview questions 
• Running interviews 

Those steps sound simple enough, but many folks get tripped up here. Do you pay people to participate? What do you say in the emails? And, for the love, what do you say in the interview??

Here are some answers based on our experience and the experts we talked with. 

First, reach out to your target audience and get them to engage

The plan you built above identified which customer segment you’ll interview. Here’s where you start engaging that segment. Some questions you might run into here include:

• How many people do I contact?
• Do I pay or incentivize them to participate?  
• How do I qualify them?
• What do I say when I email people?
• How do I not lose my mind scheduling it all? 

They’re all good questions! Let’s take them one-by-one. 

How many people do I reach out to? 

It’s unlikely every customer will accept, so email 1.5 to 2x the number of customers you’d like to wind up talking to. 

If you’re doing customer interviews, aim to speak with at least 5-10 people. Jess Nichols, User Research Leader and Experience Strategist, recommends , “For exploratory research, like interviews, I aim for eight to 10 participants per segment. This number ensures you can identify patterns, similarities, or differences in your participants’ responses and allow you to dive deeper into nuances you may discover during research.”

So, if you’d like to speak with 10 customers, email 15 to 20 with an interview request. 

Do I use incentives? 

This depends on your budget, the segment you’re trying to reach, and whether you have time to try a no-incentive approach first (if you hear crickets, you can always add in an incentive later).

If you’re interviewing existing customers, particularly brand enthusiasts or loyalists, you may not need to sweeten the ask. But if you’re trying to connect with prospective customers, an incentive will generally speed up your timeline and up your response rate.  

If you opt for incentives, Hannah recommends you use between $20 and $50 per person . This “encourages sign ups and avoids no shows without biasing customers to only give positive insight.”

How do I qualify research participants? 

If you’re pulling from your existing customer base, you may be able to use analytics you already have to qualify participants. For example, the date they purchased or canceled (if they’re subscribers), average order value, types of products they’ve bought, and so on. 

If you’re rounding up prospective customers who have never seen the site before, you’ll want to qualify them in some sort of a screening survey. For example, we once worked with a paint company. This paint was five times the price of normal paint because it was low VOC, environmentally friendly, made in the US, and had many other benefits. 

Natalie explains that, when she qualified prospective paint customers for research, one of the things her team asked about was pricing sensitivity. She notes, “if you get the wrong person in the door, they’re going to say, ‘I would never even consider this,’ and the rest of your research is null with that individual.”

Most researchers opt to qualify participants in a screening survey (e.g. using Google forms or Typeform ). The important thing is you do qualify your participants by some means. Remember, the folks you speak with should be the ones who are best equipped to answer your research goals. If you cast a wide net with no qualifiers, your findings will be far more muddied and conflicting — if they’re useful at all. 

What do I say when I email people? 

Think of the emails you like to receive and read. They’re probably clear, concise, and have a bit of personality to them. That’s the kind of email you want to send here, too. A good interview request email will:

• Have a clear subject line. If you’re offering an incentive, feel free to lead with that. For example, “Laura, $25 Amazon gift card for your thoughts…” If you’re not incentivizing, aim for a subject line that’s both interesting and accurate. Perhaps, “How you can help us improve [x]” since folks like opportunities to help. 
• Explain why you’re emailing. Clearly explain what you are doing (research) and what you’re not doing (pitching a sale or some other hidden agenda). 
• Explain why you’re researching. Briefly say why you’re doing research and how their participation will help.
• Set expectations for an interview. Define how long the interview will take, what the person needs to do to prepare (usually nothing), and whether it’s face-to-face, video, or voice-only. You may want to mention that any data you collect won’t be sold or shared outside the company as well. 
• Equip the reader to take action. A good way to do this is to include a link for the respondent to book an interview slot, e.g. via Calendly . 

For a good starting point, check out Hannah’s email template: 

How do I schedule it all? 

Whoever is leading this research probably has other to-dos on their plate. To ensure interviewing customers won’t completely wreck their (or your) schedule, it’s best to:

• Batch interviews on certain days
• Schedule batches back-to-back
• Use a tool like Calendly to prevent calendar conflicts

This approach doesn’t just help you schedule, it helps you interview well. Hannah explains , “When you stack interviews like this, it triggers the compound effect and helps you immerse in the world of the customer. By the third interview you’ll be asking sharper questions, spotting more nuances and drawing richer customer insight.”

One other tip: batch interviews but leave about 15 minutes between each one. This will give you time to transition (read: take a snack break). It’ll also ensure it’s no big deal if you need to run five minutes over to let an interviewee finish a specific thought. 

Interview customers to collect the data (using the Jobs To Be Done Framework) 

When it comes to running each interview, it’s helpful to think of it in two parts: 

• Pre-interview prep
• During interview guidelines 

Pre-interview prep: formulating questions  

The biggest task here is coming up with a list of potential questions you can ask. 

One popular method is formulating questions around the Jobs To Be Done (JTBD) framework. There are several books on this topic, and I’ll spare you all the nuances of it here. But the basic premise is customers “hire” your products or services to fulfill needs in their life. For example, I recently “hired” a Ruggable rug to reduce my mental load — I don’t want to worry about rug fuzzies or stains for the next half-decade. Other folks “hire” certain meal kits to take meal planning off their plate or to feel more confident (e.g. by losing 15 lbs). 

Understanding what job customers hire your product to do, what else they considered to fill that job, and what drove them to try and hire it out in the first place can yield rich qualitative insights. 

To find those insights, many interviewers ask questions about: 

• Triggers: Triggers are what make potential customers go, “Hey I have a need here.” For example, a trigger for needing a new mattress may be getting married or adopting a dog who sleeps in the bed. 
• Deciding: Making a decision usually involves many desires, anxieties, and hesitations. For example, price, social perception, durability, and so on. 
• Looking: Before purchasing, customers consider alternatives to your product. These may be the competitors you have in mind — or they may not. If I need new cookware, I may consider Caraway, whatever is on the kitchen aisle of TJMaxx, or asking my grandma if she has extra cast iron. 
• Purchased : Those who chose your brand have a reason for doing so. Oftentimes, that reason isn’t particularly rational or logical either. 
• Using: Identifying friction points, moments of delight, and what customers expect next can all help you craft better experiences. 

Keep in mind, you won’t get through all of your template questions in each interview. In fact, you shouldn’t necessarily aim to. Remember to tailor your conversations around the specific research and business goals you have in mind. 

During the interview: listening for emotions, taking notes, and what not to do 

When you first hop on the phone or video, you want to do a few things right off the bat:

• Set expectations around length; reiterate what time you’ll wrap things up
• Reassure the interviewee there are no right or wrong answers (it’s about collecting their story and experience)
• Let the interviewee know if they don’t want to answer a question, they can decline
• ASK TO RECORD

Seriously, don’t forget that last one. There are few things more disheartening than wrapping up an interview and realizing you didn’t hit the record button (facepalm). Zoom is a great option for storing and recording interviews if you don’t already have one. 

Once you’ve done a quick intro, your goal is to listen way more than you talk. Here are a few things, in particular, you’re listening or watching for: 

• Emotional language:  Katelyn Bourgoin, CEO of Customer Camp, explains , “The interesting thing about how people buy is that 95% of the purchases that we make are actually driven by unconscious emotional triggers.” One of your goals in the interview is to identify these triggers. Listen for words like “angry” or “frustrated.” 
• Shifts in tone or volume: Pay attention to how someone says something, not just what they say. Shifts in tone can indicate excitement or disappointment. And emphases on certain words underscore their importance. 
• Shifts in body language: Changes in facial expression or body posture can all indicate strong underlying emotions. Keep an eye out for these, too. 
• Stories: Our buying decisions are highly contextual. They’re embedded in our emotions, daily lives, and goals. Stories help illuminate these factors. 
• End goals: How did they hope buying a product or service would make them or their lives more awesome? 
• Underlying motives: As Katelyn pointed out, we’re not always aware of why we buy. Listen for underlying motives in the stories the customer tells. Don’t take every statement at face value. 

Ultimately, when you identify these clues, you’re pinpointing insights you’ll use later on when you apply your research. “The secret to identifying insights lies in understanding the human brain works on two levels and that most of our behavior is influenced by subconscious motivations in the brain. We’re simply not consciously aware of why we do what we do,” Daryl Travis, CEO at BrandTrust told me. To draw out unconscious behaviors, he recommends asking for stories. “…ask them to share in story form their experiences aligned with what you’re trying to understand. Inevitably, they will share the experiences that are emotionally intense and therefore most relevant.”  

Also, a quick note on taking notes: 

Ideally, you’re taking minimal notes during the interview (because you’re recording), and this will help you tune in to the other person. Bob Moesta, President and CEO of Re-Wired Group (and pioneer of Jobs-To-Be-Done), only writes down the words he wants to follow up on and unpack, for example. 

The final result looks like a treasure map. 

Like Bob, you’ll want to dig deeper into certain words and cues throughout the interview. Here are some follow-up questions that are particularly helpful for drawing out richer insights: 

• Why is that? 
• Can you tell me more about that? 
• What led you to that decision?
• Could you walk me through your thought process there?
• What else was going on that made that the right choice?
• Sounds like that [need/want] was important to you. Why is that? 
• That seems to bug you. I bet there’s a story there. 
• You seem pretty excited about that. Why was it a big deal?  

Lastly, when you’re running the interview, you want to check yourself for these common mistakes:

• Forgetting to record (seriously, it’s the worst) 
• Talking more than you listen 
• Asking leading questions
• Asking either/or yes/no questions
• Formulating statements as questions
• Accepting an answer at face value (use those follow-ups!)
• Quickly filling the silences (let these prompt the interviewee to speak)

The leading questions thing is important, and it’s one of the more difficult to keep in mind during your first interviews. For example, I once asked, “what made this product enjoyable?” That question is leading because I assumed the person found the product enjoyable. Turns out, she didn’t! Two better questions would’ve been, “Tell me how you used this product” or “what was your experience like using this?” 

Likewise, either/or questions are leading because they assume only two possible outcomes. So are double-barreled questions because they trap the interviewee. Natalie explains, “Sometimes a double-barreled question is, ‘How much do you love our product and our emails?’ And, well, they might hate your product and really love your emails. So now they can’t even answer that appropriately.” Avoid these, too.

These mistakes may take some practice to spot, and you’ll get better with practice. For your first interviews, do your best to stick to open-ended questions that keep your assumptions out of the picture and give the interviewee plenty of room to tell their story. 

How to map research data to real brand opportunities 

All too often, great research winds up on dusty digital shelves. It’s not because brands plan on wasting the effort they’ve gone through. It’s often because of sheer overwhelm.

“The most overwhelming aspect of research can be the sheer amount of reading that’s required to understand the material,” writes Lucy Denton, Senior Product Designer at customer research app Dovetail . “The average one-hour interview transcript might contain 10,000 words and you’re looking at half a dozen of these, and that’s before the workshop output, diaries / journals, visual documentation, or observation notes.” 

The good news is, there are a few steps you can take to help your future self use the data you collect. These steps include:

• Consolidating your research into one central location
• Organizing your research with tags 
• Socializing your research with various teams 

Then, once you do those things, you’ll be in a good position to analyze your findings and: 

• Identify big picture trends
• Highlight rich customer personas
• Map observations to improvements
• Prioritize improvements

Let’s look at the help-your-future-self logistics first. 

Consolidate, organize, and socialize 

The first steps of putting data to use include creating a home for it, organizing insights, and sharing them with others. 

Consolidate: create a home for the research

Pull stuff in one visible, accessible place. This could include:

• A shared Google Drive
• A dedicated customer research Slack Channel
• An Airtable or Notion Base
• A research tool such as Dovetail

Whatever you choose, it needs to be something that (a) keeps your research in mostly one place and (b) is accessible to the appropriate team members. 

Erik Goyette, Senior UX Researcher, Shopify: “To catalog our research, we’ve built a research library. Anyone across the company can go there to find our reports, slide decks, and recordings of our presentations.” (They use Dovetail.)

Keep in mind, you’ll want to take your recorded interviews and generate transcripts of those. This will make reviewing and organizing the research much, much easier. Useful transcript tools include Rev and Descript . Both the original recording and the transcript should live in whatever home you create for research. 

Organize: make the research easier to consume

Once your research has a home, you’ll want to use some system to keep any observations you pull out of transcripts segmented as well. One easy way to do this is to use tags. 

These tags should highlight key insights and relate to the business goal in your original research plan. Hannah explains, “You already know what the data is going to inform…based on that you’re going to start to get ideas of types of insights you need.” Insights could be top objections, new features, search motivations, pain points, customer journey points, and so on. 

How else do you know if you’re looking at an insight? Here are some indicators you’ve found one:

• It’s grounded in data . You can point to the sentiment in the research/transcript and not just your memory.
• It occurs often . Multiple interviewees mention it.
• It’s embedded in high emotion . The point has some strong emotion or sentiment attached to it.
• Useful to the business . The point maps to an opportunity — usually, to improve some aspect of the customer’s experience or journey with the brand. 

Use some sort of system to highlight, grab, or tag parts of your transcripts that fit these bullets. 

And for the perfectionists out there, keep in mind there’s no one right or wrong way to tag your research. A minimal approach may work well for a lean team just starting research whereas something more extensive may be ideal for a larger team with thousands of inputs. 

Some pointers for developing your approach:

• Start minimal : You can always add more process later. For now, pick something that’s intuitive and has a low learning curve for other team members. 
• Functional : Any tagging system you choose should help you use the data. Relate tag names to business goals or end uses. 
• Visual: Colors help team members quickly sort and bucket insights. Don’t go overboard (12 colors is a bit too much, yeah?) but do use visual cues. 

Socialize: share what you find with others

While it’s good for you to be knee-deep in the research, it’s even better for your teammates to jump in there with you, too. Silo-ed data is crippled data, so make sure various team leads can access it. (Note: if the research contains any sensitive customer data, be thoughtful about how you secure and distribute this.) 

Three reasons it’s important to distribute, or socialize, what you find: 

• Each team will see something different. A customer service team member will spot a different opportunity or use case than a marketer. That’s a good thing.
• You’ll prevent redundancies. Socializing data also prevents various teams from running similar surveys (and frustrating customers in the process). 
• You’ll enable customer-centric decisions . Executives and team leads can’t make customer-centered decisions if they don’t have access to the customer’s experience. 

Remember, customer experience spans every team and aspect of your brand. So, give every team access to what the customer is experiencing so they can contribute ideas for improving the holistic journey. 

Identifying real insights 

Once you’ve organized, tagged, and distributed your research, you’re in a good position to step back and analyze. Researchers sometimes call this finding the “arc of the data” — the overall trends that move like a current through what you’ve collected. 

You likely have some gut ideas based on the research you’ve done. But you mustn’t immediately run with these. For one, that’s a good way to introduce bias. “Attempts to merely rely on human memories and impressions from interviews are likely to introduce bias. And even if we did keep notes, when we consume raw data directly, we’re in danger of unconsciously giving weight to certain points,” writes Lucy Denton . “From there we’ll likely form misleading opinions that lead to impulsive decision-making, and eventually, take the whole team down a path that focuses on the entirely wrong outcome.”

Relying on gut alone in research (much like in testing) leads teams on wild goose chases. Instead, take a step back and look for overarching trends like customer segments and potential brand improvements. 

Look for customer segments or personas

One of the great things about qualitative research is it helps you build rich and useful customer personas. 

Quantitative data like Google Analytics reports can tell you whether customers are primarily on mobile, what region of the country they come from, and other data or demographic points. But if your customer personas stop there, they’re not going to be particularly useful. 

“The first way to create a buyer persona that doesn’t suck, is to actually talk to your customers,” Adrienne Barners, founder of Best Buyer Persona told me. “Data Analytics and survey data is a wonderful way to validate what your customers are saying, but starting with audience research and qualitative data makes for a richer and more accurate persona.” 

What does a richer persona look like? It takes motivations and behavior into account. “Segmenting people according to job title, age, or gender, doesn’t tell you why they bought your product. Think of segments as ‘jobs’ or the reason they purchased your product and how they use your product,” Adrienne explained. “Segmenting in this way means you’re able to broaden your segmentation while keeping it focused on buying behavior.”

Two related perks of building rich ideal customer segments: 

• They’ll improve your journey map. The best journey maps highlight what personas think, feel, and experience at every point . This is exactly what you can pull from rich customer segments and interview data. 
• They’ll help you make sense of conflicting data . It’s not uncommon for one person to say they bought for x reason while another person explains they bought for y reason . Rich segments help resolve that tension. 

Remember to keep an open mind as well! When Katelyn Bourgoin and her husband started researching potential customers for Charboyz , they assumed their main persona was a farmers market shopper. Turns out, it’s what they wound up calling Suburban Jock Dads. This persona, Katelyn explained on the DTC Voice of the Customer podcast , “probably used to be somebody who would go out every weekend prior to having kids, and now was looking to rebuild that social community through his now suburban life.” 

And so, when the Bourgoins launched their first box, they didn’t position it as a food box. “We positioned it as a virtual barbecue,” Katelyn said because that fit their ideal persona much better. 

This leads into the next thing you’ll want to do with your insights and personas: map those observations to areas of your business. 

Map observations to areas of the business

The conversations you have will rarely tell you exactly what to do with your business. As in, a customer isn’t going to say, “You know, if you had advertised your fitness gear to me as suiting up for ‘me time,’ I totally would’ve bought it.”

Nope. It’s part of your job to identify insights and then map those insights to potential improvements in your brand. 

This involves:

• Hypothesizing potential improvements
• Prioritizing and testing those improvements

Hypothesizing improvements

Because you’re talking with customers about their experience and journey, insights you collect can apply to any area of your business.

Some common applications include:

• Ads: When you know what context and motivation brings potential customers to you, you can do a better job engaging them — especially if you know the words and phrases (“voice of customer”) they relate to. 
• Email sequences: If Ruggable had interviewed me after I purchased one of their rugs, they’d know prompting me to upgrade to a 9×12 cushioned rug pad (+$130) before the product shipped would’ve been a more effective post-purchase email CTA than asking me to purchase another rug…before I’d even received the first one.  
• Content: The pain points your potential customers wrestle with, the hesitations they faced when purchasing, the questions they had about using it…these are all content opportunities. Adrienne Barnes writes , “The first thing I look for when turning audience research into a content strategy is customer questions. Customers often need help learning how to use the product or the benefits of a feature.”
• Social media: Likewise, the same sentiments that inform your articles can inform your social posts. What contexts can you show your products in? What rave reviews will resonate most with your target personas and what you know about them? 
• Product images: Knowing how customers use the product in their everyday lives can inspire you to produce more relevant and contextual imagery for your site and product galleries. 
• Customer support: It may be you discover new common pain points and how to head them off, which reduces your customer support load. Or maybe you identify a channel where customers feel particularly helped and decide to lean into it. 
• Product design or development: If customers regularly express a need you don’t address or a frustration with your product/service, there may be a good reason to prioritize the improvement. 
• Wayfinding/ Improving poor UX : Understanding what brings customers to your site and what needs they’re looking to fill once they’re there can inform how you structure navigation, what filters you provide to sort products, product category names, and so on.

For example, Bob Moesta and Katelyn Bourgoin did a live customer interview with Amanda Natividad who recently purchased a Peloton. Moesta and Bourgoin wanted to understand why and how Amanda decided to buy the premier stationary bike. Some insights and hypothesized improvements they uncovered were:

• It was too hot to walk outside . This is one reason Amanda became interested in a bike. Could this insight inform advertising strategy in geographic areas where it’s often too hot or too cold to exercise outdoors?
• Amanda didn’t read reviews; she trusted word-of-mouth from friends . Could incentivizing referrals and word-of-mouth drive higher conversion rates for Peloton? 
• Mental health was a huge purchase motivator . Perhaps one of Peloton’s biggest competitors isn’t other exercise bikes or gyms, it’s counseling and therapy.
• She didn’t consider herself a “workout fanatic.” Yet most of Peloton’s ads feature chiseled, thin models. Could more diverse product imagery help prospective buyers identify with the product more readily?

And these are all hypotheses from one interview! Imagine what you could find in a whole set.

Prioritize and test potential improvements 

Once you have a handful of hypotheses, you can start crafting experiments and testing improvements. 

This is an important step. “[Interview] Data is never going to tell you exactly where to go because it shouldn’t be the only spoke in the decision wheel,” Hannah Shamji cautions. “It’s going to help you improve and inform and drive…but it shouldn’t be the only deciding factor.” 

Put another way, research gives you evidence for what to test and which directions to test in — but you still need to test.  

But how, out of all your hypotheses, do you decide where to start? Two tips on picking which tests to prioritize: 

Start with what customers prioritize

According to research by PwC, 80% of American consumers point to speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendly service as the most important elements of customer experience .

If your research indicates any major holes in those areas, consider starting there. 

Work on your Peak-End Moments

Another option to improve the critical moments of your customers’ experiences. 

It’s tempting to think each part of a customer’s experience is equally weighted — as if the ad that brought them to your site is 1 point and the header they see once they get there is another one point. 

But psychology indicates this isn’t how we recall interactions. Rather, we pay extra attention to the intense highs/lows and final moments of any experience. This is called the “peak-end” rule .

“Recognize the brain doesn’t remember everything. It only stores the experiences it deems—via emotional intensity—that are worthwhile to store for future reference,” Daryl Travis advised me. “Once you identify those experiences—Behavioral Economics refers to as Peak-End moments—then you know what are the real opportunities for brands.” 

Figure out the common peaks and ends from your interview data. Then, prioritize improving those pieces. 

Go ahead, kick off your research project

Start with a plan, find your participants, and create a home for the data you collect. From there, analyze your body of research and map your findings to areas for improvement. 

Then, tell us the most interesting thing you learned! 

Remember, the time and effort are worth it — customer research is one of the most effective ways to understand what your customers experience, identify ways to improve that experience, and boost all kinds of related metrics from conversion rates to lifetime value, and more.

If you still aren’t sure where to start with your research, head to our free Stuck Score™ tool. We can help identify areas on your website that aren’t converting. Try building a research plan based on the identified pain points.

Find out what stands between your company and digital excellence with a custom 5-Factors Scorecard™ .

About the author, laura bosco.

Laura Bosco is a former Content Marketer at The Good and freelance writer. She helps translate thoughts, opinions, and client experiences into written products that are both entertaining and educational.

A 6-step guide to customer research (and profiting from it)

This post was a collaboration between

Lawrence Chapman , Amelia Wilson

Lawrence Chapman

Lawrence is our Copywriter here at PMA who loves crafting content to keep readers informed, entertained, and enthralled. He's always open to feedback and would be thrilled to hear from you!

More posts by Lawrence Chapman.

Amelia Wilson

Amelia is a Content Executive at The Alliance. She’d love to ghostwrite your next article, so get in touch!

More posts by Amelia Wilson.

As a competitive intelligence pro, you’re likely hyper-aware of what’s going on in the market, but are you missing a crucial piece of the puzzle? Analyzing your competitors is key, but understanding your customers' needs, behaviors, and motivations is arguably even more crucial.

After all, it’s the target audience that’s informing your competitors’ strategies. Just like you, they’re trying to win the hearts, minds, and wallets of their chosen market. If you can understand customers’ motivations better than your competitors, you’ll be well-placed to deliver stronger solutions to their pain points and win market share away from your rivals.

To that end, your customer research is the key to delighting your audience and outmaneuvering the competition.

Let us show you how. 🤿

What is customer research?

Customer research aims to learn more about the needs and behaviors of customers and to use that information to create products, features, and messaging that resonate with them. In other words, customer research helps you sell your products by tailoring your approach to the needs of your customers.

Customer research typically involves more qualitative approaches like in-depth interviews, ethnographies, usability testing, social listening, and feedback surveys. The goal is to gain specific insights into the end-user experience with a company's brand, products, services, and communications. 

While market research and customer research are often spoken about in the same breath, they’re not the same. Market research explores the wider marketplace, while customer research focuses on:

(i) Your customers themselves, and

(ii) Your interactions with them. 

Key questions customer research can answer include:

• Who are your customers and ideal buyer personas?
• What are their daily challenges, needs, and desires?
• How do they feel about your company and its competitors?
• What excites them or frustrates them?
• How can you improve your customer experience?

The advantages of customer research

While market research works top-down to size up opportunities, customer research works bottom-up to optimize the customer experience. Its strategic power comes from providing a detailed view of real people that market data alone often misses.

Armed with this granular feedback, businesses can:

• Fine-tune their buyer personas
• Create tailored marketing campaigns
• Drive referrals and boost loyalty
• Develop customer-focused products
• Identify new opportunities
• Guide business decisions

Let’s explore how.

Fine-tuning buyer personas

Buyer personas represent different consumer groups that make up your broader target audience. They include details on demographics, attitudes, behaviors, pain points, and brand perceptions.

This data comes straight from talking to living, breathing customers through interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Vivid personas should guide product design and all marketing decisions.

Crafting tailored messaging

Communicating effectively starts with understanding motivations. Customer interviews and focus groups provide context on why people buy certain products and what messaging best resonates with their needs or desires.

These perspectives enable your teams to craft relevant, compelling messaging and campaigns that get results. They also reveal how customers describe your products in their own words, which can be integrated into selling points.

Driving referrals and loyalty

Loyal customers spend more and refer others. But you can’t engender true loyalty without delighting people with outstanding products, services, and support.

In-depth customer feedback exposes pain points and unmet needs you can address to boost satisfaction. It also uncovers potential new offerings or upgrades to make customers raving fans.

Improving products and services

Usability testing and customer co-creation sessions help optimize every aspect of your offerings. Seeing real people interact with products provides insights that lead engineers, designers, and product marketers would never uncover on their own.

Identifying new opportunities

Customer research also illuminates latent needs and new product ideas you may never have considered. These seeds often sprout into disruptive innovations or entirely new lines of business.

Guiding business decisions

Customer perspectives provide tangible guidance on where to invest resources versus where to cut your losses. Their feedback should steer everything from new market entry to brand repositioning.

No product is created in a vacuum

The Competitive Positioning Playbook teaches you...

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How to conduct effective customer research

So, we know customer research is important, but how exactly do you carry it out? Here’s a six-step guide to uncovering those all-important insights:

1) Define your goals

First, pinpoint the questions you need to answer. Is it about improving customer retention? Identifying new product opportunities? Optimizing pricing? Defining your goals upfront is crucial to gathering the right kind of data.

2) Choose your research methods

Select techniques that best provide the insights you need. Some possibilities include interviews, focus groups, surveys, usability testing, ethnographies, and social listening.

Why not mix quantitative surveys with qualitative insights? Surveys easily gather wide-ranging feedback from many customers, while open-ended interviews and ethnographies provide the understanding needed to transform findings into human-centered insights. Balance both for a holistic perspective.

3) Ask the right questions

Craft questions that will guide upcoming strategic decisions. For interviews, focus groups, and usability tests, prepare open-ended questions that support your research goals. And be sure to avoid jargon and keep your language conversational.

4) Define your sample

It’s essential to gather the opinions of those who matter, i.e. people who match your buyer personas. To get a good sample, here are some guidelines we recommend you follow:

• Aim for 10 participants per buyer persona : Depending on your audience, you may need to target multiple personas. Be sure to source separate sample groups and include roughly 10 people in each.
• Search recent surveys : If you’ve carried out a survey recently, use it to your advantage. Those participants have recently interacted with your company, so their recollections may be more reliable.
• Mix it up: While a sample formed entirely of your loyal fan base may massage your ego, it’ll compromise the quality of your market research. So, mix it up a little, and seek a variety of opinions. Include people who’ve purchased your product, people who opted for your competitors, and people who may be on the fence. Get out of your comfort zone, put on your hard hat, and prepare for a mixed response; criticism is your friend, not your enemy.

5) Engage your participants

Market research firms have catalogs of potential participants at their fingertips, but not every company has the same luxury – meaning you need to get your hands dirty and find people yourself.

That may sound like a hassle, but don’t worry – here are some tips to make recruiting participants easier:

• Use incentives: People like to be compensated for their time, and a small incentive will make them more likely to take part in your research. Whether it’s a small cash payment or a shopping voucher, it’s a small price to pay to get your study over the line. If you can’t afford to offer incentives, give them access to exclusive content, or discounts on future purchases.
• Be social: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn have one thing in common: they bring together your fans and followers in one place, meaning you can send a blanket rallying call asking for support – piece of cake!
• Use your CRM: Your CRM system should be your best friend when it comes to picking a sample. With the click of a button, you can filter your customers by time period, company size, account type, etc., and contact the relevant people for your study. Also, be sure to liaise with sales teams if you need help accessing accounts.
• Spread the word: Whether it’s your family members, friends, or colleagues, tell everyone you can think of you’re conducting a study and need help. Share posts on LinkedIn and ask others to like and share, and before you know it, your initial post will reach thousands of prospective respondents. The more creative you are, the more people you’ll attract.

6) Analyze and share your findings 

Don’t silo research within a single department – be generous with your knowledge! Make sure all teams apply insights to enhance products, services, and experiences. Look for key themes, insights, and representative quotes. Produce an executive summary, then disseminate learnings across all teams to drive solutions.

Let’s wrap up with a quick recap of our top tips for successful customer research:

• Mix quantitative surveys with qualitative techniques for comprehensive data.
• Engage both current and potential customers to avoid confirmation bias.
• Observe real customer behaviors as well as soliciting opinions.
• Keep an open mind to learn something new rather than validating assumptions.
• Make the research experience positive to build goodwill.
• Follow up with participants to share how their feedback impacted business decisions.

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A complete guide to customer research — with templates

What makes your product great? What problems does it solve? People will look to you — the product manager — as the expert on these questions. But you know that the answers are not based solely on your own opinions and experience. The most important input often comes from somewhere else: customers.

Understanding customers is integral to developing a lovable product . As a product manager, you will want to explore everything from your users' demographics to their inner motivations and struggles. This process of sussing out their needs and challenges is called customer research.

Conducting customer research is complex and dynamic work, where your curiosity is a tremendous asset. To plan, gather, and analyze feedback, product managers use a wide variety of methods — qualitative, quantitative, and a mix of both. You can take a highly sophisticated approach to this, but many times effective customer research entails talking to customers and using simple tools or templates to analyze their feedback.

In this guide, you will learn the fundamentals of conducting primary research so you can better understand the folks you are trying to help. You can try seven customer research templates to help you experiment with different methods and save time in the research process.

Engage a community and analyze feedback in Aha! Ideas. Start a free trial .

With Aha! Ideas , you can host live empathy sessions with your customers to learn more about their need and preferences.

Why should you do customer research?

Customer research is an essential component of product strategy — alongside competitor analysis , market research, and overall business needs. The insights you glean from meeting and surveying customers help to shape your strategic initiatives , ensuring that your team is poised to deliver what people really want from your product.

A key reason to perform customer research is to gain new perspectives on your product. Your customers may tell you things you never realized — hidden problems, unique ways of completing tasks, and even alternate use cases. What you believe matters most about your product may not even be on your customers' radar.

Let's say your product has a reporting feature with low usage . Your team decides to give the reporting interface a major upgrade. You spend the time and resources to build these updates — only to scratch your head when there is no uptick in usage. What went wrong?

If you breezed past talking to your customers, it is possible that the interface was not the factor keeping them from engaging. Maybe they prefer to use a separate reporting tool — in which case, an integration capability would have been a much more valuable feature to build.

Customer research helps you avoid spending time solving proble ms that do not exist — and highlights the ones that are real and deserving of your attention. This way, you know where to focus your efforts for the best chance of making your customers happy and meeting business goals.

How much customer feedback is the right amount?

The short answer? It depends. Your specific goals, the scope of your research, and the stage of your product's development all play a role. Here are some things to keep in mind when determining the right amount of customer feedback to collect:

Understand your goals Are you looking to validate a new product idea or improve an existing product? Do you need to better understand customer pain points or gather usability insights? These answers will shape your product development goals and dictate the depth and breadth of feedback required.

Define your sample size Consider the size of your target audience and customer base. In some cases, a smaller sample size can provide valuable insights, especially if you are conducting in-depth qualitative research . For quantitative research, a larger sample size might be necessary to ensure statistical relevancy.

Ensure diversity of perspective Aim for variety in your feedback pool. Different demographic groups, usage patterns, and customer segments can provide a more comprehensive understanding of customer needs and preferences.

Include a mix of feedback channels Analyzing feedback from different channels can provide unique perspectives and insights. Experiment with a variety of feedback methods and channels — such as releasing surveys, conducting interviews , and reviewing your social media and customer support interactions.

Consider resource constraints Think about the time, budget, and staff you have available for collecting and analyzing feedback. Balance the scope of your research with what you can realistically manage.

Remember, customer feedback is often collected in iterations. Start with a small group of users for early insights, then expand your feedback pool as you make improvements. Each iteration helps you refine your product and strategy.

And while quantity matters, the quality of feedback is crucial. Sometimes a few detailed, insightful responses can be more valuable than a large number of superficial ones.

Primary vs. secondary customer research

Product managers will use both primary and secondary customer research to gather information. Briefly, the difference is:

Primary customer research refers to gathering your own data and feedback firsthand via interviews, focus groups, surveys, and other methods.

Secondary customer research refers to findings gleaned from external sources like analyst reports and third-party surveys.

Both types can be valuable, but when it comes to your goals as a product manager, primary research is superior. While secondary research will help you understand demographics and broader trends, primary research allows you to drill down into the details of your specific product and target audience.

Your customers' own experiences are invaluable and one of the surest signals to creating a lovable product. For this guide, we will focus on the fundamentals of conducting primary research.

How do product managers gather customer feedback?

How do product managers come up with new ideas for a product?

How to conduct customer research

On a basic level, customer research entails reaching out to current or potential customers and gathering feedback from them via direct conversations or more indirect methods (like online surveys). Advanced tools such as product analytics and idea management software can certainly augment your approach — but are not necessary to get started.

Follow these steps to conduct your own primary customer research:

1. Define your objective Outline your research goals and determine what it is you really want to learn. For example, your objective could be to learn broadly about your customers' business goals or gain a deeper understanding of their experience with a specific feature set.

2. Decide which customers to contact Your objectives will help you decide who to speak with — especially if your product caters to a diverse group of customers. Think about current and potential customers and form a list of people to reach out to.

3. Prepare If you are leading an interview or focus group, meet with your product teammates to prepare your questions. Keep in mind you may need to coordinate with other team members who want to sit in on discussions. If you are conducting a survey, build it — then decide how and when to distribute it.

4. Start your research Conduct your interviews or hit "send" on your survey When talking directly with customers, remember to listen more than you speak. Ask meaningful follow-up questions to encourage deeper thinking and discussion.

5. Analyze, summarize, and share your findings Look for trends in the feedback you received. What did customers agree on? What were the most popular ideas or recurring pain points? Find common threads and share the findings with your team. Together, you can discuss and prioritize the customer ideas that support your overall goals — and promote those ideas to your product roadmap .

6. Repeat Customer research is an ongoing part of product management. You will need to collect feedback from many customers to make informed product decisions. And with every new product launch or major release, you may need to start fresh with a new objective and customer set.

Because it is ongoing, it helps to keep all of your customer research organized. You want to be clear on how your findings will inform the features you develop. For example, the Research tab in Aha! helps you collect whiteboards, interview notes, and ideas right on feature cards.

Editor's note: Although the video below still shows core functionality within Aha! software, some of the interface might be out of date. View our knowledge base for the most updated insights into Aha! software.

Related: 35+ customer questions for product innovation

Get started with customer research templates

Customer research templates offer a simple way to start discovering who your audience really is and what matters to them. Using templates helps you add much-needed structure to your customer research process. Below, you will find an assortment of templates to try — from planning to interviews, surveys, and summarizing your findings.

Aha! software customer interview template

Customer research planning template, customer interview notes template.

Customer survey template

Customer feedback poll template

Customer focus group discussion template, customer research presentation template.

This customer interview template is a great one to start with. It is a guided template with helpful prompts and instructions in each section. This makes it simple to plan your conversations with customers so you can get the most out of each interview. It is available in Aha! software — which gives you a central place to document and organize your findings.

Start using this template now

This planning template helps you define your objectives, identify which customers to talk to, and prepare for your research session. It includes sections for customer profiles (personas, segments, and companies) to add context to your research group.

An interview template will keep your notes organized during conversations with customers. It will also help you guide the flow of the interview and note any takeaways or action items to proceed with after the session ends. Feel free to customize the discussion questions to match your objective.

Customer research survey template

Customer surveys allow you to gather insights from more people in less time — with the added benefit of built-in reporting via online survey tools. This template will help you learn how to design an effective customer research survey and plan the demographic, use case, and customer satisfaction questions that you want to ask. It includes a blend of question types for both fixed and open-ended responses.

Polls offer a simple way to incorporate a quantitative component into your qualitative research. For example, you can quickly gauge the group's opinion on an idea by inserting a poll in an online focus group or empathy session . This template will help you jot down ideas for future polls.

Similar to the customer interview template, this focus group template will help you structure your session. It emphasizes a well-planned agenda over note-taking — encouraging you to be present in the discussion when you are facilitating a focus group. You can always record the focus group session to revisit later and take detailed notes.

After you have conducted your research, showcase your findings. Sharing results with your team makes customer research even more impactful — customer opinions matter at every level of the business and every stage of the product development process . This template will help you convey your top takeaways in a presentation.

Customer research has long been a core tenet of product management — and will continue to be. Templates like these will help you streamline your research process so you can focus on interacting with your audience and distilling insights from what they share.

When you are ready for a more comprehensive solution beyond simple templates, give idea management software like Aha! Ideas a try. With Aha! Ideas, you can crowdsource feedback via ideas portals, engage your community with empathy sessions, and analyze trends at the individual, organization, and segment levels. This helps you prioritize customer feedback with ease and promote the ideas that support your business goals directly to your product roadmap. (Note that you can use Aha! Ideas as a standalone tool, but many of its features are also available on Aha! Roadmaps . This makes it a great choice for teams seeking an all-encompassing product development solution.)

Discover exactly what your customers want. Start a free Aha! Ideas trial today.

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16.01.2024 6 mins read

Customer experience (CX) is arguably the most critical differentiator for brands today. With the current cost of living increases and economic uncertainty, people are getting more selective with where and with whom they spend their money. Typically, price and quality are very structured, leaving little room for influence. CX, however, offers incredible opportunities. As a result, the CX delivered will determine the winners and losers on the retail battleground.

One of the keys to great CX is understanding as much as possible about the people who use or could use your product/service. This means knowing more than just their current shopping habits; it means also deeply understanding the role your product plays in people's lives and what are the areas of opportunity and improvement.

The main challenge is how to get your hands on such insights. What is the best way to undercover and analyse this information rather than simply making assumptions based on brand bias or leadership hunches?

The solution is research. It is investing time and money into gathering the data that you can then use to make informed, data-backed decisions. However, research is a broad term with multiple implications and interpretations.

Before we explore the value and benefits of research, let’s first look at some key research essentials.

For business purposes, typically, there are 3 subjects and 3 types of research.

* The term "user" is typically used in digital product design and technology, while the term "consumer" is associated with physical products like food, clothing and retail. However, it can also apply to digital products involving financial transactions.

As shown above, research is a broad term. Therefore the correct type of research must be conducted to have the best outcome. 

Having worked in research, I often see people mentioning (and using) market and user research interchangeably.  

They are, in fact, two very different areas.

Market research is like looking at a big map to find where people live and what they like buying. User research is like knocking on specific doors in those cities to talk to people directly and watch them use a certain product. It helps to understand every individual’s needs, learning why they buy a certain product and how they use it.

Imagine you want to design a new car. Market research tells you which cities need cars, while user research tells you what features and comforts people want inside the vehicle. It's important to distinguish them because combining both ensures you create a car that sells well and also satisfies customers.

 “Combining both market and user research ensures you build a car that sells and satisfies customers.”

But it is also essential for the business to know the difference because you want to be sure that you are requesting the correct information you need to make your decision.

Customer research gauges customer satisfaction with a brand or product and uncovers factors that contribute to brand loyalty. But, if you consider the customer a complete entity, they are so much more than that. In truth, the customer is the buyer studied by market research and the user studied by user research.

Customer research is like combining market and user research. It's about studying the map, talking to people, and even driving around to see how they behave daily. Customer research examines the big picture and individual experiences to help businesses make better decisions.

The purpose is to understand what customers need, how they behave, and what they like or dislike. It guides businesses in creating products or services that meet customer expectations.

Begin by defining clear goals for your research. Determine the decision you must make and what information you need to come to that decision.

For example:

Establish how you will gather your information. 

There are 2 ways:

#1 Primary research - collect data directly from customers- internally or through an agency 

#2 Secondary research - collect the data from completing desktop research. 

The information you want to gather will determine which option you choose. My rule is don’t research just for the sake of it; if the data already exists, then use it. Sometimes, desktop research is sufficient for what you want to do. However, sometimes, it isn’t and can’t offer the value that talking to your customers can.  

“Don’t conduct research just for the sake of it.”

Primary research is the kind of research we do here at All human. 

If you go ahead with option 1, then you will have to decide on methodology and approach:

UX research methods answer a wide range of questions. You will most likely need the help of a specialist researcher here, but broadly speaking, there are 3 dimensions:

• Attitudinal (what people say) vs. behavioural (what people do).
• Qualitative (why and how to solve it) vs. quantitative (how many/how much).
• Context of use (phase of the product development process).

Source: The Nielsen Norman Group

As illustrated above , each method is assigned according to the intended outcome. This is why it is so important to formulate precise research questions at the beginning of the project, as they determine all of the other phases. 

“User research is only as effective as the questions you ask.”

This is what it will look like when applied to the earlier example of the kinds of questions brands will want to research.

Think of it like cooking a meal. Once you've gathered the ingredients (data), you analyze them to see what flavours (insights) emerge. Then, you use these insights to create a tasty dish (action plan) that satisfies your customers.

At All human, we believe that the research is as effective as the quality of our communication about it, therefore, we typically will present the findings in the form of high-quality presentations with storytelling and data visualisation techniques. If we are under time constraints, we’ll go for a more agile approach, and our designers will implement the changes as we learn from the research. This can be very beneficial to clients as it means they are seeing the impact and, ideally, positive outcomes very quickly. 

“Your research is only as effective as the quality of your communication about it.”

Source: Example of a slide All human used in a presentation to illustrate the insights we collected from research we completed on the CX of shopping online

Gathering and interpreting the data is just one part of the process. The second part is taking the insights gleaned and applying them. This is where you can realise the actual value and potential of research. It’s also where you will need the professionals and the people with the necessary skills to implement the actions. For example, designers can take the learning and incorporate them into the design of a product or app.

There are lots- which is good. One of the better-known examples is Netflix. In the competitive streaming world, Netflix was facing a huge challenge: keeping and gaining subscribers. Through user research, they discovered that viewers were feeling overwhelmed by content choices and wanted the content to be curated with recommendations based on their preferences. Netflix revamped its interface, adding features such as Candela, top picks for you and improved search, resulting in better retention, higher engagement, and increased revenue. 

Proper research, which offers the most commercial value, is done consistently and focuses on understanding and meeting customer needs as the core of everything. This should not be confused with occasionally surveying customers to confirm your ideas and impress colleagues with an "I told you so" moment. That isn't actual consumer research; it's called confirmation bias and is not beneficial to your business.

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Customer Research: Types of Customer Research, Methods, and Best Practices.

In the ever-evolving landscape of business, understanding your customers is the key to success. Customer research, a systematic process of gathering and analyzing information about customers, plays a pivotal role in making informed business decisions and developing effective strategies. In this comprehensive guide, we delve into the types of customer research, the methodologies involved, and best practices for optimal results.

Comprehensive Guide to Customer Research: Types, Methods, and Best Practices

What is customer research.

Customer research involves the systematic exploration of customer behaviors, needs, preferences, and experiences. It combines qualitative and quantitative studies to gain insights into the target audience, facilitating informed decision-making and the development of strategies to meet customer expectations. The essential components of customer research include:

1. Research Objectives

Clearly defining research objectives is paramount. It involves determining the specific information or insights the organization aims to gather, ensuring the collected data aligns with organizational needs.

2. Target Audience Definition

Identifying the target audience is crucial, representing the group the research focuses on. This audience should mirror the organization’s customer base or intended market.

3. Research Methodology

Choosing appropriate research methods is vital. Whether surveys, interviews, focus groups, or data analytics, the methods should align with objectives, providing desired depth and breadth of insights.

4. Data Collection

Conducting data collection activities is core to customer research. Proper techniques, such as surveys, interviews, or data analysis, ensure the accuracy and reliability of gathered information.

5. Data Analysis

Organizing, categorizing, and interpreting collected data is essential. From quantitative techniques to qualitative research, the goal is to derive actionable insights that inform decision-making.

6. Findings and Insights

Effectively communicating research findings involves summarizing and presenting results. Visualizations, reports, and dashboards convey information clearly and understandably.

7. Recommendations

Based on findings, practical and actionable recommendations guide business decisions, whether for product improvements, marketing strategies, or customer experience enhancements.

8. Iteration and Continuous Improvement

Customer research is an iterative process. Regularly incorporating insights into strategies ensures organizations remain responsive to customer expectations and market changes.

Types of Customer Research

Understanding the various types of customer research is crucial for tailoring approaches to specific objectives. Some common types include:

1. Customer Satisfaction Research

Definition:.

Customer satisfaction research revolves around measuring and analyzing how satisfied customers are with a product or service. It helps in identifying areas for improvement and gauges overall customer contentment.

Key Elements:

• Surveys and Feedback Forms: Use structured surveys or feedback forms to quantify satisfaction levels.
• Net Promoter Score (NPS): Measures the likelihood of customers recommending a product or service.

Implementation:

Regularly conduct surveys and analyze feedback to gauge customer sentiment, focusing on enhancing areas with lower satisfaction.

2. Customer Needs and Preferences Research

This type of research aims to uncover the underlying needs, desires, and preferences of customers. It provides insights into what customers are looking for in a product or service.

• In-depth Interviews: Engage in one-on-one interviews to delve into the motivations and preferences of customers.
• Observational Studies: Observe customer behavior in real-life scenarios to identify unmet needs.

Conduct qualitative research through interviews and observational studies to gain a deep understanding of customer needs, informing product development.

3. Customer Experience (CX) Research

CX research focuses on understanding and optimizing the overall customer journey, identifying pain points, and ensuring a seamless and satisfying experience.

• Customer Journey Mapping: Visualize the entire customer experience, from initial interaction to post-purchase.
• Usability Testing: Evaluate the ease with which customers navigate through products or services.

Create detailed customer journey maps, conduct usability tests, and analyze customer interactions to enhance overall experience.

4. Brand Perception Research

This research assesses how customers perceive a brand, including awareness, image, associations, and loyalty. It helps in shaping and maintaining a positive brand identity.

• Brand Surveys: Measure brand awareness, associations, and loyalty.
• Competitor Analysis: Understand how the brand compares to competitors.

Regularly conduct brand perception surveys and analyze competitor strategies to maintain a positive brand image.

5. Customer Segmentation Research

Customer segmentation involves categorizing customers based on shared characteristics, behaviors, or needs. It enables targeted marketing strategies.

• Demographic Segmentation: Grouping customers based on age, gender, income, etc.
• Behavioral Segmentation: Segmenting based on purchasing behavior or product usage.

Analyze customer data to identify commonalities, enabling personalized marketing strategies for different segments.

6. Competitive Research

Competitive research involves analyzing competitors’ strategies, products, and customer experiences to identify opportunities for differentiation.

• Competitor Product Analysis: Evaluate features, pricing, and positioning of competitors’ products.
• Social Media Monitoring: Track customer sentiments regarding competitors on social media.

Regularly monitor competitors, analyze product offerings, and gather customer feedback to identify areas for improvement and differentiation.

7. Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping visualizes the end-to-end customer experience, identifying touchpoints, emotions, and areas for improvement.

• Customer Touchpoints: Identify and analyze all the touchpoints a customer has with the brand.
• Emotion Analysis: Understand customer emotions at each stage of the journey.

Create detailed customer journey maps, incorporating feedback from various touchpoints to enhance the overall journey.

These types of customer research provide organizations with a holistic view of their customers, enabling them to make informed decisions, improve products and services, and stay ahead in a competitive market. Each type serves a unique purpose, and a combination of these approaches ensures a comprehensive understanding of customer behaviors and preferences.

How to Conduct Customer Research: 10 Key Steps

Conducting effective customer research involves a systematic approach:

1. Define Research Objectives

Clearly define specific objectives to guide the research process and focus on relevant questions.

2. Identify Target Audience

Determine the specific target audience or customer segment that aligns with research goals.

3. Choose Research Methods

Select appropriate research methods and techniques, considering advantages, limitations, and resource requirements.

4. Develop Research Instruments

Design clear, concise research instruments such as survey questionnaires or interview guides.

5. Recruit Participants

Recruit participants matching the target audience criteria through various channels, ensuring communication clarity.

6. Conduct Data Collection

Implement chosen research methods, maintaining ethical guidelines, privacy, and data confidentiality.

7. Analyze Data

Use appropriate analysis techniques, whether quantitative or qualitative, ensuring rigor and alignment with research objectives.

8. Interpret Findings

Analyze patterns, trends, and relationships in data to gain insights into customer behaviors, preferences, or needs.

9. Communicate Results

Present findings clearly through reports, presentations, or visualizations, tailored to the target audience.

10. Apply Insights

Apply insights to inform business decisions, enhancing product development, marketing, and customer experiences.

Customer research is iterative; monitor outcomes, conduct follow-up research, and stay responsive to evolving customer needs.

Examples of Customer Research Questions

Crafting effective customer research questions is essential. Examples include:

• What factors influenced your decision to purchase our product/service?
• How did you first hear about our company?
• What specific features or aspects of our product/service do you find most valuable?
• What improvements or enhancements would you like to see in our product/service?
• How likely are you to recommend our product/service to others? Why?
• What obstacles or challenges did you encounter when using our product/service?
• How does our product/service compare to competitors in the market?
• How satisfied are you with the level of customer support you received?
• What are your expectations for pricing and value in relation to our product/service?
• How frequently do you use our product/service, and for what purposes?

Tailoring questions to the industry or service being researched ensures gathering relevant information.

Best Practices for Customer Research

Following best practices is essential for accurate and valuable insights:

1. Clearly Define Research Objectives

Identify specific goals and objectives to guide research, focusing on relevant questions and areas of investigation.

2. Use a Mix of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

Combine qualitative and quantitative research methods for a comprehensive understanding of customers.

3. Identify Your Target Audience

Clearly define the characteristics and demographics of the target audience for accurate representation.

4. Create Unbiased and Neutral Questions

Formulate clear, unbiased, and neutral questions to avoid leading or influencing participant responses.

5. Use a Variety of Data Collection Methods

Explore various data collection methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media listening.

6. Engage With Customers at Different Touchpoints

Interact with customers at different stages, from pre-purchase to post-purchase, to understand the entire customer journey.

7. Maintain Confidentiality and Anonymity

Assure participants of confidentiality and anonymity to encourage honest and unbiased feedback.

8. Analyze and Interpret Data Systematically

Systematically analyze data using appropriate techniques, identifying patterns and key insights.

9. Continuously Iterate and Improve

Regularly revisit research objectives, update methods, and gather feedback for continuous improvement.

10. Communicate Findings and Take Action

Present research findings to stakeholders, using insights to inform strategic decisions, product development, and marketing.

By following these best practices, organizations can conduct effective customer research, gaining valuable insights into customer behaviors and preferences.

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Consumer Research: Examples, Process and Scope

What is Consumer Research?

Consumer research is a part of market research in which inclination, motivation and purchase behavior of the targeted customers are identified. Consumer research helps businesses or organizations understand customer psychology and create detailed purchasing behavior profiles.

It uses research techniques to provide systematic information about what customers need. Using this information brands can make changes in their products and services, making them more customer-centric thereby increasing customer satisfaction. This will in turn help to boost business.

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

An organization that has an in-depth understanding about the customer decision-making process, is most likely to design a product, put a certain price tag to it, establish distribution centers and promote a product based on consumer research insights such that it produces increased consumer interest and purchases.

For example, A consumer electronics company wants to understand, thought process of a consumer when purchasing an electronic device, which can help a company to launch new products, manage the supply of the stock, etc. Carrying out a Consumer electronics survey can be useful to understand the market demand, understand the flaws in their product and also find out research problems in the various processes that influence the purchase of their goods. A consumer electronics survey can be helpful to gather information about the shopping experiences of consumers when purchasing electronics. which can enable a company to make well-informed and wise decisions regarding their products and services.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

Consumer Research Objectives

When a brand is developing a new product, consumer research is conducted to understand what consumers want or need in a product, what attributes are missing and what are they looking for? An efficient survey software really makes it easy for organizations to conduct efficient research.

Consumer research is conducted to improve brand equity. A brand needs to know what consumers think when buying a product or service offered by a brand. Every good business idea needs efficient consumer research for it to be successful. Consumer insights are essential to determine brand positioning among consumers.

Consumer research is conducted to boost sales. The objective of consumer research is to look into various territories of consumer psychology and understand their buying pattern, what kind of packaging they like and other similar attributes that help brands to sell their products and services better.

LEARN ABOUT: Brand health

Consumer Research Model

According to a study conducted, till a decade ago, researchers thought differently about the consumer psychology, where little or no emphasis was put on emotions, mood or the situation that could influence a customer’s buying decision.

Many believed marketing was applied economics. Consumers always took decisions based on statistics and math and evaluated goods and services rationally and then selected items from those brands that gave them the highest customer satisfaction at the lowest cost.

However, this is no longer the situation. Consumers are very well aware of brands and their competitors. A loyal customer is the one who would not only return to repeatedly purchase from a brand but also, recommend his/her family and friends to buy from the same brand even if the prices are slightly higher but provides an exceptional customer service for products purchased or services offered.

Here is where the Net Promoter Score (NPS) helps brands identify brand loyalty and customer satisfaction with their consumers. Net Promoter Score consumer survey uses a single question that is sent to customers to identify their brand loyalty and level of customer satisfaction. Response to this question is measured on a scale between 0-10 and based on this consumers can be identified as:

Detractors: Who have given a score between 0-6.

Passives: Who have given a score between 7-8.

Promoters: Who have given a score between 9-10.

Consumer market research is based on two types of research method:

1. Qualitative Consumer Research

Qualitative research  is descriptive in nature, It’s a method that uses open-ended questions , to gain meaningful insights from respondents and heavily relies on the following market research methods:

Focus Groups: Focus groups as the name suggests is a small group of highly validated subject experts who come together to analyze a product or service. Focus group comprises of 6-10 respondents. A moderator is assigned to the focus group, who helps facilitate discussions among the members to draw meaningful insights

One-to-one Interview: This is a more conversational method, where the researcher asks open-ended questions to collect data from the respondents. This method heavily depends on the expertise of the researcher. How much the researcher is able to probe with relevant questions to get maximum insights. This is a time-consuming method and can take more than one attempt to gain the desired insights.

LEARN ABOUT: Qualitative Interview

Content/ Text Analysis: Text analysis is a qualitative research method where researchers analyze social life by decoding words and images from the documents available. Researchers analyze the context in which the images are used and draw conclusions from them. Social media is an example of text analysis. In the last decade or so, inferences are drawn based on consumer behavior on social media.

Learn More: How to conduct Qualitative Research  

2.Quantitative Consumer Research

In the age of technology and information, meaningful data is more precious than platinum. Billion dollar companies have risen and fallen on how well they have been able to collect and analyze data, to draw validated insights.

Quantitative research is all about numbers and statistics. An evolved consumer who purchases regularly can vouch for how customer-centric businesses have become today. It’s all about customer satisfaction , to gain loyal customers. With just one questions companies are able to collect data, that has the power to make or break a company. Net Promoter Score question , “On a scale from 0-10 how likely are you to recommend our brand to your family or friends?”

How organic word-of-mouth is influencing consumer behavior and how they need to spend less on advertising and invest their time and resources to make sure they provide exceptional customer service.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Targeting

Online surveys , questionnaires , and polls are the preferred data collection tools. Data that is obtained from consumers is then statistically, mathematically and numerically evaluated to understand consumer preference.

Learn more: How to carry out Quantitative Research

Consumer Research Process

The process of consumer research started as an extension of the process of market research . As the findings of market research is used to improve the decision-making capacity of an organization or business, similar is with consumer research.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

The consumer research process can be broken down into the following steps:

• Develop research objectives: The first step to the consumer research process is to clearly define the research objective, the purpose of research, why is the research being conducted, to understand what? A clear statement of purpose can help emphasize the purpose.
• Collect Secondary data: Collect secondary data first, it helps in understanding if research has been conducted earlier and if there are any pieces of evidence related to the subject matter that can be used by an organization to make informed decisions regarding consumers.
• Primary Research: In primary research organizations or businesses collect their own data or employ a third party to collect data on their behalf. This research makes use of various data collection methods ( qualitative and quantitative ) that helps researchers collect data first hand.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

• Collect and analyze data: Data is collected and analyzed and inference is drawn to understand consumer behavior and purchase pattern.
• Prepare report: Finally, a report is prepared for all the findings by analyzing data collected so that organizations are able to make informed decisions and think of all probabilities related to consumer behavior. By putting the study into practice, organizations can become customer-centric and manufacture products or render services that will help them achieve excellent customer satisfaction.

LEARN ABOUT: market research trends

After Consumer Research Process

Once you have been able to successfully carry out the consumer research process , investigate and break paradigms. What consumers need should be a part of market research design and should be carried out regularly. Consumer research provides more in-depth information about the needs, wants, expectations and behavior analytics of clients.  

By identifying this information successfully, strategies that are used to attract consumers can be made better and businesses can make a profit by knowing what consumers want exactly. It is also important to understand and know thoroughly the buying behavior of consumers to know their attitude towards brands and products.

The identification of consumer needs, as well as their preferences, allows a business to adapt to new business and develop a detailed marketing plan that will surely work. The following pointers can help. Completing this process will help you:

• Attract more customers  
• Set the best price for your products  
• Create the right marketing message  
• Increase the quantity that satisfies the demand of its clients  
• Increase the frequency of visits to their clients  
• Increase your sales  
• Reduce costs  
• Refine your approach to the customer service process .

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Research

Consumer Research Methods

Consumers are the reason for a business to run and flourish. Gathering enough information about consumers is never going to hurt any business, in fact, it will only add up to the information a business would need to associate with its consumers and manufacture products that will help their business refine and grow.

Following are consumer research methods that ensure you are in tandem with the consumers and understand their needs:

The studies of customer satisfaction

One can determine the degree of satisfaction of consumers in relation to the quality of products through:

• Informal methods such as conversations with staff about products and services according to the dashboards.   
• Past and present questionnaires/ surveys that consumers might have filled that identify their needs.   

T he investigation of the consumer decision process

It is very interesting to know the consumer’s needs, what motivates them to buy, and how is the decision-making process carried out, though:

• Deploying relevant surveys and receiving responses from a target intended audience .

Proof of concept

Businesses can test how well accepted their marketing ideas are by:

• The use of surveys to find out if current or potential consumer see your products as a rational and useful benefit.  
• Conducting personal interviews or focus group sessions with clients to understand how they respond to marketing ideas.

Knowing your market position

You can find out how your current and potential consumers see your products, and how they compare it with your competitors by:

• Sales figures talk louder than any other aspect, once you get to know the comparison in the sales figures it is easy to understand your market position within the market segment.
• Attitudes of consumers while making a purchase also helps in understanding the market hold.      

Branding tests and user experience

You can determine how your customers feel with their brands and product names by:

• The use of focus groups and surveys designed to assess emotional responses to your products and brands.  
• The participation of researchers to study the performance of their brand in the market through existing and available brand measurement research.   

Price changes

You can investigate how your customers accept or not the price changes by using formulas that measure the revenue – multiplying the number of items you sold, by the price of each item. These tests allow you to calculate if your total income increases or decreases after making the price changes by:

• Calculation of changes in the quantities of products demanded by their customers, together with changes in the price of the product.   
• Measure the impact of the price on the demand of the product according to the needs of the client.   

Social media monitoring

Another way to measure feedback and your customer service is by controlling your commitment to social media and feedback. Social networks (especially Facebook) are becoming a common element of the commercialization of many businesses and are increasingly used by their customers to provide information on customer needs, service experiences, share and file customer complaints . It can also be used to run surveys and test concepts. If handled well, it can be one of the most powerful research tools of the client management . I also recommend reading: How to conduct market research through social networks.

Customer Research Questions

Asking the right question is the most important part of conducting research. Moreover, if it’s consumer research, questions should be asked in a manner to gather maximum insights from consumers. Here are some consumer research questions for your next research:

• Who in your household takes purchasing decisions?
• Where do you go looking for ______________ (product)?
• How long does it take you to make a buying decision?
• How far are you willing to travel to buy ___________(product)?
• What features do you look for when you purchase ____________ (product)?
• What motivates you to buy_____________ (product)?

See more consumer research survey questions:

Customer satisfaction surveys

Voice of customer surveys

Product surveys

Service evaluation surveys

Mortgage Survey Questions

Importance of Consumer Research

Launching a product or offering new services can be quite an exciting time for a brand. However, there are a lot of aspects that need to be taken into consideration while a band has something new to offer to consumers.

LEARN ABOUT: User Experience Research

Here is where consumer research plays a pivotal role. The importance of consumer research cannot be emphasized more. Following points summarizes the importance of consumer research:

• To understand market readiness: However good a product or service may be, consumers have to be ready to accept it. Creating a product requires investments which in return expect ROI from product or service purchases. However, if a market is mature enough to accept this utility, it has a low chance of succeeding by tapping into market potential . Therefore, before launching a product or service, organizations need to conduct consumer research, to understand if people are ready to spend on the utility it provides.
• Identify target consumers: By conducting consumer research, brands and organizations can understand their target market based on geographic segmentation and know who exactly is interested in buying their products. According to the data or feedback received from the consumer, research brands can even customize their marketing and branding approach to better appeal to the specific consumer segment.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

• Product/Service updates through feedback: Conducting consumer research, provides valuable feedback from consumers about the attributes and features of products and services. This feedback enables organizations to understand consumer perception and provide a more suitable solution based on actual market needs which helps them tweak their offering to perfection.

Explore more: 300 + FREE survey templates to use for your research

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MARCUS for BUSINESS

Ideas, Information & Inspiration

Customer Research: Types, Examples & Best Practices

• What Consumer Research is
• Importance of Consumer Research
• Benefits of Conducting Consumer Research
• Types of Consumer Research
• Tips for Conducting Consumer Research

Big businesses spend a lot of time and money on consumer research. You can, too, but as a small business owner, it can be hard to know where to start. Some research firms run gigantic surveys with tens of thousands of participants, but that’s astronomically expensive and not realistic for an entrepreneur just starting out. What’s more, some of the terms used in this field can be confusing and complex. But, as Marcus says, “If you don’t know your numbers, you don’t know your business.” In this article, we’ll help you understand how to conduct consumer research, why it’s important, and give you examples of how it’s done. This will help your company market itself better, become more profitable, and build customer loyalty.

Here’s What Consumer Research Really Means

At its core, Consumer Research means finding out what your customers want and need from your company and its products. It’s also finding out what they believe, and it looks at how they act when they’re purchasing. The end goal is to take this information, look at all of the other data gathered, and then use it to tweak your business to better fit your clients’ needs. Marcus’s saying “People. Process. Product” is exemplified here. Listening to customers and building a process around that information will lead to a better product.

Here’s Why Consumer Research Is Important

Who doesn’t appreciate it when their opinions are valued? Your customers express their values, attitudes, and enthusiasm through their pocketbooks. From a management perspective, acting on customer research information will help find oversights and missteps, leading to customer retention. This is why Marcus stresses that the first step to success for entrepreneurs like you is to know your numbers.

In a big business, even a tiny improvement in sales or marketing can have a considerable impact. That’s why most corporations pay a lot of attention to their consumer research data. For example, Verizon became the first wireless company to let their customers keep their phone numbers after switching carriers in 2003. (Richtel, 2003). Initially, the company opposed that move, citing that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. They came to this decision after listening to customer complaints, and they gained $3.8 billion in revenue that year. (Verizon, 2004). As Marcus says, “You don’t have to be a genius to run a successful small business, but you better be smart enough to be willing to learn.”

Here’s How Consumer Research Can Help Your Business

It puts you in tune with your customers.

Consumer research does many things. It can make your advertisements more engaging. It can help you find new customers you may have overlooked. It can even hint toward industry trends before they’re widely known. But the most important thing it does is help you connect with your customers. Customers, for the most part, tell you what they want . All you have to do is ask the right questions.

It helps develop new products and services.

Marcus says, “If you don’t evolve, you will die.” New products and services require innovation, and consumer research data fuels innovation. In 2008, The LEGO Group, maker of children’s toys LEGO, found that only 10% of their user base was female. The company decided to remedy that situation and sent researchers out to do a four-year study of what girls wanted out of their toys. In 2012, LEGO Friends hit the shelves, and the company has grown 15% annually since its launch. (Lafrance, May 25).

It helps fine-tune your existing products and services.

Your customers can tell you where they would like to see improvements. Sometimes, though, consumers don’t know what they want. That’s why breakthrough innovations and product maintenance are different animals. Cell phone users didn’t ask Apple for the iPhone. The average customer likely didn’t know iPhone technology was possible, but Steve Jobs knew it would revolutionize the industry. Apple does listen to its customers regarding app updates, requests for higher-resolution cameras, and other features. Using the right information at the correct times can lead to product innovations and improvements.

The Different Kinds of Consumer Research

Primary Consumer Research

When you or someone from your company interacts directly with your customers, asking them questions or having them fill out a survey, that’s primary consumer research.

You can hire a firm to do primary research for you so long as it only targets your customers.

• Primary consumer research is a simple method to gain data. It can be less expensive than other options because you don’t have to hire an outside company to help. You attain focused, specific details about your company and its offerings, but it offers little information about industry trends.
• Online forms, mailers, phone surveys, and focus groups are all examples of primary consumer research.

Secondary Consumer Research

• Hiring an outside company to compile and consolidate customer data information for you is called secondary consumer research.

It’s cost-effective because you don’t have to conduct any research yourself. It tends to focus less on your specific customers than industry and market trends on the whole. You can compare your company to others, which will give you a better idea of where you are excelling and where you need help.

• Secondary consumer research measures customer attitudes and preferences better than primary research partly because it pulls from a larger group of participants. It’s not as good at focusing on your specific products because it tends to ask general questions that result in general ideas about your industry.

Because most outside research companies use data gathered nationwide, it presents a better picture of how your company will fare across the country instead of just in your town or city.

• Examples of secondary consumer research companies include Nielsen, IQVIA, Kantar, Gartner, IPSOS, and Dynata. Some of the specific data these companies compile includes purchasing trends, demographics, and market confidence.

Qualitative Consumer Research

• The part of the word qualitative you should focus on is qual, as in quality. It focuses on how people feel about your products, and it asks them to focus on their quality.

It can also focus on how they perceive the quality of your customer service. Or the quality of your products’ perception. Qualitative consumer research is used in combination with primary or secondary research, and it delivers a specific kind of information.

• Qualitative consumer research is how you get information that relates to your brand. It uses words such as like, enjoys, love, prefer, dislike, and better. Asking a customer why they prefer product A compared to product B is an example. It’s not about how many people like it; it’s about how your customers feel.
• Qualitative consumer research is useful for areas that don’t lend themselves to more rigorous research methods. This is particularly useful for sensitive questions that people may not want to answer because it doesn’t put people into a yes-or-no situation.

It asks them to explain their answers. Questions like, “What is it you enjoy about product X,” and “What inspired you to purchase service Y?” are examples of qualitative consumer research.

Quantitative Consumer Research

• The other way you can perform your primary or secondary research is with quantitative consumer research. Focus on the quant portion of the word quantitative, like quantity. This form of research is all about the numbers. It can provide you with statistics based on shopping habits by gender, the exact amount of time e-retail shoppers spend on your website, or how many people are familiar with your store.
• Quantitative consumer research is useful for business owners who need mathematical answers to specific questions.

If your customers are overwhelmingly male, you can find out the exact percentage of male shoppers. However, you won’t be able to tell why you have so many male customers through quantitative research. You would need qualitative research to answer that.

• Examples of quantitative consumer research methods include surveys and questionnaires, and polls.

3 Consumer Research Tips For Entrepreneurs

Add surveys to your website, review cards to your check-out lines, and send e-mail questionnaires.

You can gauge satisfaction and see demographic splits just by asking your customers to tell you about themselves. You may have to incentivize customers to participate, but think of the value you gain by having usable data. Be sure to ask a mix of quantitative and qualitative questions to get the best responses.

Look for information in unusual places.

Websites like Quora, Twitter, and Reddit have users asking questions. By combing over questions on those sites, you can harvest important information. Plus, everything is indexed and organized for you. If you run a bicycle shop, there are countless threads, groups, and subreddits dedicated to bicycle enthusiasts. Those users are potential customers, and their inspirations, questions, and suggestions are valuable. As a bonus, this form of research only requires your time.

Be sure to make a plan.

Gathering a ton of information is only helpful if you know what you’re looking for.

Before hiring a consultant or launching your own customer research scheme, ask yourself the following questions.

• What are you hoping to accomplish through this research?
• Who are you targeting?
• Will you be able to measure growth if the data you collect leads you to make changes?
• How is the information you collect going to lead you?
• Are you willing to change your products if necessary?

The Right Questions For The Right Customers At The Right Time

Market research is just as crucial for small businesses as huge corporations. You never know when a slight increase in your customer base or launching a new product will boost your company into the stratosphere. Through consumer research, you’ll have a better idea of where to start those processes. If you give enough thought to asking the right questions, then you’ll get the answers you’re looking for. As Marcus says, “At the end of the day, the numbers don’t lie.” Gather the right data, and your business will be all the better for it.

• Is it time for your business to conduct consumer research?
• Which consumer research type best fits your business?

Doheny, Julia. (n.d.). Using Market Research For Product Development. https://www.b2binternational.com/publications/product-development-research/#_ftn1

Lafrance, Adrienne. (2016, May 25). How to Play Like a Girl. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/05/legos/484115/

Richtel, Matt. (2003, Jun. 25). TECHNOLOGY; In a Reversal, Verizon Backs Rule to Keep Cell Numbers. https://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/25/business/technology-in-a-reversal-verizon-backs-rule-to-keep-cell-numbers.html

Verizon Communications. (2004). Verizon Communications 2004 Annual Report. https://www.annualreports.com/HostedData/AnnualReportArchive/v/NYSE_VZ_2004.pdf

Featured Content

Everything You Need to Know About Customer Experience Research

Updated: January 20, 2023

Published: October 27, 2022

Think back to the last time you received amazing customer service . Remember how it made you feel and how you perceived that business before and after your experience. Compare that experience to the last negative encounter you had with a business, and the difference could not be more obvious.

With recent CX trends such as omni-channel marketing and support, along with the continued growth of e-commerce, it's necessary for companies to understand the customer experience (CX) from multiple angles to reduce pain points and improve customer satisfaction.

CX is not something that your company can just ignore, as nearly half of all customers report that CX is more important to them in 2021 than it was just a year ago. Given this surge in demand for a quality experience, how can your company pivot to meet your customers' rising expectations?

The answer lies in conducting extensive customer experience research. Keep reading to learn everything you need to know about CX research, or use the links below to jump ahead:

What is customer experience research?

Why is customer experience research important, customer experience research tips, customer experience research methods, start conducting your own customer experience research.

Customer experience is the summation of every interaction that a customer has with your company throughout their journey. From a cold call to a service inquiry or a coupon in the mail, each interaction between your company and a customer helps to create individual impressions, perceptions, and behaviors that together make up the customer experience.

Meanwhile, customer experience research represents the actionable steps that your company can take to understand CX. This includes collecting customer data — both pre-and post-sale — and then analyzing that data for trends that can lead to process, product, or service improvements.

Best practices in customer experience research programs include focusing on three core components:

• Development

Image source

Your company's CS research journey starts with a customer experience strategy that lays out your vision of your company's goals and maps out the customer journey as it stands and how you hope it to be.

Once you have a strategy in place, you can then put your ideas into action and develop tools and practices for measuring, organizing, and deciphering the data you'll need to validate any changes you make.

Finally, the research process ends with the tracking and implementation of findings that your company can use as a foundation for continuous improvements to CX design.

Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Experience

To truly understand CX research, we must first take a moment to differentiate customer experience from customer satisfaction. Although the two terms are often used interchangeably, they are actually quite different and should not be conflated with one another.

Customer satisfaction is a measurement used to gauge how happy a customer is with your company's products, services, or brand overall.

It pays to have happy customers, with 89% of consumers admitting that they are more likely to make an additional purchase after a positive customer service experience.

While customer satisfaction aims to measure how a customer feels about your company — whether good, bad, or neutral — customer experience attempts to measure every interaction that your customers have throughout their entire relationship with your company.

Customer experience research can help you tease out key CX data points and measure your company's success against them. A few of those data points are highlighted in the image below.

All of these metrics and more combine to make up the customer experience. With carefully planned and executed customer experience research, your company can glean insights from these interactions that you can then use to enhance your CX design and raise client satisfaction.

There's nothing worse than losing a customer to a competitor due to a poor experience. Unfortunately, this reality is all too common, with 58% of American consumers reporting that they will switch companies because of a negative customer service experience.

Regardless of the industry, CX is highly correlated with brand loyalty, with the customers reporting the most positive experiences also scoring highest on surveys measuring brand loyalty.

On average, there is a 38% difference in likelihood to recommend a company between customers that rated a company's CX as "good" versus customers that rated that company's CX as "poor."

The ROI of conducting customer experience research is well worth the expense, especially when you stop to consider the alternatives.

After all, it's well known that lead generation is one of the most daunting tasks faced by any company. Yet, at the same time, it costs between 5 and 25 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one.

It's no wonder that 48% of customer service professionals state that creating a positive customer experience is a top priority for their team.

There are as many methods to conduct customer experience research as there are ways that customers interact with businesses.

Some companies will choose to use deductive reasoning and use commonly held assumptions and perceptions from the market and their customers to map out the customer experience and make changes from there.

On the other hand, other companies will opt to use inductive reasoning and take small sample sets of observable data and use that information to create their CX map and inform their decision-making.

Whatever route your company chooses, it's important to drill down and identify the essential aspects of what you're hoping to gain from this research.

The questions highlighted in the image below are a great place to start.

These questions and more need to be addressed before your company attempts to analyze a shred of evidence. If you skip the planning and strategizing phase of the CX research process, then you're doomed to fail before you begin, because your company won't know what customer experience research questions it's trying to answer.

Once you've settled on your questions, it's time to start organizing the tools and resources you'll need to actually conduct your research.

Customer Experience Research Tools and Resources

Depending on your goals, you may choose to collect qualitative data that provides in-depth CX insights. However, this type of data is not easy to quantify. For example, long-form customer interviews provide a wealth of information about how customers see your CX but the results are difficult to reduce to actionable insights.

Alternatively, your company may decide to focus on measuring and tracking CX key performance indicators and highlight the collection of quantitative data. Surveys are one of the most commonly used mediums to collect quantitative data, as they allow companies to easily sort and organize responses into groups that can be used for statistical analysis and comparison.

Whatever customer experience research method your company chooses, it's essential that leadership is all on the same page to embrace CX research as a key aspect of your business. With as many as 93% of CX initiatives destined to fail, you want to make sure you're doing everything you can to make sure the time you're investing into CX research is well-spent and not just more money down the drain.

Traditionally speaking, most customer experience research was carried out by large marketing research firms that conducted the interviews, focus groups, and surveys that companies used to make changes to their CX design.

Today, the research landscape also includes data collection firms that help companies collate and store their data for easy retrieval and analysis.

That said, many companies also choose to conduct their own research in-house using a variety of research methods for collecting, organizing, and interpreting data.

As shown in the image above, some of the most common methods of collecting CX research data include:

• Feedback Software

Let's discuss each in more detail.

1. Interviews

Interviews provide a wealth of qualitative data, while surveys are highly customizable, allowing your company to tailor its surveys to collect any type of quantitative data. However, these methods are often more time-consuming and labor-intensive than other methods, so are usually conducted by larger organizations with more resources and time.

Two of the most popular surveys are also among the easiest methods of conducting CX research: NPS and CSAT.

Net promoter score (NPS) is a benchmark used to determine how likely a customer is to recommend your business to someone. NPS surveys are useful, as they measure how a customer feels overall about your brand, which allows your company to gather lots of big-picture information.

Then there's customer satisfaction score (CSAT), which measures customer satisfaction with a particular interaction, product, or service. CSAT surveys allow your company to get quantifiable data concerning every little detail of your business that can then be used to design specific solutions.

3. Feedback Software

In addition, many companies now turn to feedback software to help them collect, organize, and track CX data from multiple sources. These applications make it easy for companies to conduct CX research by bringing sophisticated analysis software and technology support all within one system.

Each type of CX method provides valuable information to the table that your company can use to improve the customer experience. Still, you'll need to make sure that you're following CX research best practices to ensure that you get the most out of your efforts.

Customers are no longer willing to settle for a bad shopping experience to get the best price or a superior product.

The new normal requires successful companies to be sensitive to their customers' needs and smooth pain points when and where they emerge. To do this, companies need to invest in CX research that paints a portrait of the customer journey, identifies areas of improvement, and urges leadership to implement actionable changes.

If your company is serious about prioritizing the customer experience, then you need to do the requisite research. That way, you can turn your assumptions into meaningful solutions that let your customers know you care about them.

And we all know there's nothing better than a satisfied customer.

Don't forget to share this post!

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A Simple Guide for Conducting Customer Research

Growth is the catalyst for any successful business. And key to scaling your business over time is ensuring your brand remains focused and relevant . Successful brands are those that keep a constant finger on the pulse of their customers. They’re growing and changing too, after all. That’s why customer research is so important.

It’s easy to get complacent, but if you’re not checking in with your customers at regular intervals, you could lose them to a competitor for reasons you never imagined. Ongoing customer research can prevent that from happening.

Attracting new customers is no different. To grow your customer base, it’s important to be constantly identifying the motivations, preferences, needs and buying habits of your target customers.

Once you have a solid understanding of what makes your customer tick, you can begin to hone your marketing and sales tactics as well. Let’s look at why customer research is so important, and review some ways to execute a research strategy that gives you a marketing edge with both current and future customers.

What is Customer Research?

Customer research is designed to reveal shared traits within groups, enabling you to segment audiences and define buyer personas for more targeted marketing efforts.

Buyer personas are generalized representations of your target customers. These research-based profiles describe who your ideal customers are, the challenges they face, and how they make purchasing decisions. Buyer personas should be shared internally across your business and should be instrumental in developing your marketing plan.

That’s really the key. Customer research helps focus your marketing strategy, so you can reach more of the right customers—saving time and money while increasing sales.

What Methods Should I Use for Customer Research?

Knowledge, as they say, is power. Research gives you the power to influence consumer behavior by knowing how your brand is perceived by those who experience it. Here are some other tried and true customer research methods that yield actionable insights for smarter business decisions.

The Ultimate Guide to Rebranding

Everything you need to know about rebranding your business-and avoiding costly mistakes.

Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are the building blocks of qualitative research. Qualitative research is designed to reveal customers’ perceptions, beliefs, and motives through nuanced, in-depth exchanges. Reach out to loyal customers as well as lost customers. (It can be painful, yes, but it’s necessary.)

Work with a branding agency skilled in setting up formal, in-person interviews whenever possible. The fact is, people like being heard—it’s human nature. Interviews let you leverage this fact to collect rich user data. Using this data, you can create hypotheses about your customer base that can be tested with wider-reaching quantitative research.

Customer Surveys

While interviews make up the foundation of qualitative research, surveys are the backbone of quantitative research. Quantitative research gives you statistical information from a wider range of participants.

Surveys enable you to ask a large sample size the same questions in the same way. The sample should be representative of the demographics of the broader target market so that those insights can be extrapolated across the audience as a whole.

Focus Groups

Focus groups are a valuable qualitative research method that allows you to ask nuanced questions to a small group of participants, rather than one-on-one. These group discussions are led by a moderator with selected participants who share common characteristics (like, say, a group of professional women in their 30s).

The lively discussions that result from a well-run focus group elicit valuable insights into the perceptions and behaviors of customers within a peer group.

Ethnography

A methodology borrowed from cultural anthropology, ethnographic research has become a valuable tool for branding and marketing initiatives. Ethnography includes observations of consumer behavior in everyday life—either in work, home, or shopping environment.

By assessing user experience in a “natural” setting, ethnography yields insights into the practical applications of a product or service. It’s one of the best ways to identify areas of friction and improve overall user experience.

Brand Survey

Also known as “brand perception surveys,” brand surveys help you understand how your brand is perceived by customers, prospects, and/or internal stakeholders.

The insights that emerge from brand surveys give you a better idea of how your brand is performing within the competitive landscape. Ideally, your brand survey should be designed to glean insight into the four human factors that determine brand affinity:

• Cognition: What ideas do survey respondents associate with your brand?
• Emotion: How do respondents feel about your brand?
• Language: How do respondents talk about your brand? (How would they describe it to others?)
• Action: How do respondents interact with your brand?

Brand surveys give you insight into the strength of your marketing efforts and whether your customers’ experience aligns with your brand narrative.

The Takeaway

Customer research gives you a deeper understanding of what drives customer behavior. With that knowledge, you can begin to develop the business and marketing strategies that deliver results, ultimately saving time and money, and, of course, boosting sales.

Remember, customer research shouldn’t be a one-and-done endeavor. It should be part of your ongoing branding and marketing strategy and even incorporated into your product or service development. After all, understanding your customers and what compels them to act makes reaching and connecting with them that much easier.

Brian Lischer

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Everything you need to know about rebranding your business - and avoiding costly mistakes.

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17 Ways to Conduct Customer Research Right Now & Collect Valuable Feedback

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Whether you’re marketing a brand new startup or a seasoned veteran, there’s no substitute for real customer feedback and research.

After all, you can’t market anything effectively if you don’t know who you’re selling to.

Customer research is such a crucial part of marketing that, when we asked survey respondents how important they considered customer research to be, nearly 93% rated it as “Very Important” or “Crucially Important.”

“Marketers need to conduct customer research at the very least annually. In order to sell to someone, you need to know their needs,” said Tim Brown of Hook Agency .

Brown’s comment got us thinking—if customer research is so important, how often are people doing it? When we asked those same marketers that question, we got some varied responses. But crucially, the majority skewed toward more often, with over 25% reporting quarterly customer research efforts and nearly 20% reporting they conduct customer research daily .

So what are marketers actually doing to conduct that customer research? When we asked our respondents about that, there were 4 clear winners that more than half of the marketers we spoke with reported using:

• Customer interviews
• Email surveys
• Analytics analysis
• Online research

But we also heard about many other creative ways to conduct customer research that we hadn’t thought of before.

On that note, here are the 20 customer research methods marketers shared with us.

1. Leverage Existing Customer Reviews

Brian Jensen of Congruent Digital recommended turning to a familiar source for customer research: online reviews. “We used a tool called Apify to crawl and return all of our client’s reviews into a database. We then put into a text analysis tool to find the top keywords and phrases (attributes) customers used in their reviews.”

Jensen says they used this data to help improve the client’s messaging.

“Once we had the data and knew by occurrences what their customers enjoyed most about their experience, we updated ads and landing pages to better identify with the needs and expectations of prospects.”

2. Spend a Day in Your Customer’s Office

Phil Strazzulla of SelectSoftware shared another customer research method we hadn’t heard about before. Strazzulla recommended spending a full day, in-office with your customer, saying “This allows me to have informal conversations with the key stakeholders I need to market to in order to better understand their challenges, goals, language, and personalities.”

“Simply reach out to a potential or current customer and ask if you can work from their space for a day,” Strazzulla explained. “And have as much free time as you can to walk around and talk to people in the office about what they do and how you can help them with your product.”

3. Turn to Data Analytics

Analytics analysis was one of the top 4 answers we heard—but it’s a broad term, so we were interested to learn more about what marketers do with analytics.

“When we do customer and product research, we start by understanding how customers are using the tool by looking at their data and usage, and then benchmarking it with their industry,” said Supratim Da Dam of CallPage . “This allows us to have a solid idea of how our customers are deploying our solution, the gaps, successes, blockers, and more.”

Robert Baillieul of Lombardi Publishing uses Twitter Analytics to identify topics and pains that resonate with their customers. “Anything that consistently generates engagement rates north of 5% indicates a huge pain point for your customer—sometimes issues they would never admit to out loud. You can then turn these insights into new products, services, or content.”

“We get data from many tools we’re using (email marketing, website analytics, social media, and more),” explained Jonathan Aufray of Growth Hackers . “With the help of a great data analyst and a tool like Google Data Studio, we can quickly analyze our customers.”

Vira Vielmann of Seventh Scout says they turn to social media analytics most often. “We typically utilize social media analytics to learn more about the audience engaging with us. This gives us an amazing insight into their demographics and interests. They also let us know what topics and posts are doing well and which aren’t performing the best, so we can adjust our strategy and editorial calendars as needed.”  

4. Collect Customer Survey Responses

“My favorite way to get customer research is to send out an email survey,” James Pollard of The Advisor Coach said. “I keep it short (about five or six questions) and only ask them the questions that will have the biggest impact on my business.”

Based on the marketers we spoke with, there are more benefits to this type of research to learn the voice of customer than you may expect.

“When you really pay attention to the way that people share information with you,” Amber Vilhauer of NGNG Enterprises said, “you’ll notice your audience using specific verbiage and wording that you can bake into your website. Often times the way that you would describe your services is very different than the way that a customer or prospect would describe those services.”

“Ultimately, people want good products that will serve them well,” Mr. SR of Semi-Retire Plan explained, “so they do have an interest in giving you helpful information to improve your —especially if they’re an existing customer who already has an affinity for your brand.”

That said, marketing consultant Farheen Gill suggests giving customers a little added incentive. “Include them in the last phase of your welcome email journeys, but also offer giveaways for other surveys you need to run throughout the year (i.e. ‘Respond today to be entered into a drawing for a $50 gift card’).”

“What’s important,” said Andrea Loubier of Mailbird , “is that you dig deep with your surveys. Asking generic questions isn’t going to get you very far. Make sure your multiple-choice questions offer diverse answers and don’t be afraid to ask the hard questions. You may be shocked at just how much your customers are willing to share.”

Louis Watton of Shiply suggested another tip for getting insightful, honest answers. “One creative approach we’ve used in customer research is not letting interviewees know the company conducting the research at first.”

Explaining, Watton added, “Often we’ve found that customers will hold back on criticism if they know you work for that company. The most valuable insights and potential improvements we’ve learned have come from asking broader questions about the industry, which allows them to talk freely without worrying about insulting anyone.”

“We launch every new survey or questionnaire with a video,” said Charles Musselwhite of FunLovingCouples . “We don’t ask any more than 12 questions at a time, and we always add in a weird and obscure question or two to keep people on their toes and engaged.”

5. Watch Customers Use Your Product

Samuel Wheeler of Inseev Interactive offered up another top-notch tip, recommending marketers actually watch customers using the product, navigating the website, interacting with content, and more.

“It’s a great idea to ask users to narrate their thought process as they navigate the page and ask them to actually take an action (purchase or form submission). In addition to asking the users to talk through their decision-making process.”

“It’s a great way to get both quantitative and qualitative data,“ Wheeler added.

If you need to understand how customers are using your product to gather feedback, one tool you should consider for customer feedback is Usersnap. This helpful tool allows product managers, software engineers, designers, and marketers to instantly collect information from users on-site through screen captures, screen recordings, surveys, feature requests, menu buttons, in-app forms, visual drawings, and bug reports.

Another  feedback tool  you might consider to crowdsource customer feedback and feature requests is UseResponse. This tool allows you to create feedback communities where customers can post their feedback, while others can comment and upvote it.

Pro Tip: Here Is Your Go-To Dashboard For Measuring the Performance of Your Customer Support Team

No matter your role in customer support – agent, manager, or VP – your core focus is to ensure that customers’ issues, complaints, and information requests are always dealt with promptly and efficiently. But to stay on track, you may have to spend hours manually compiling data from different tools into a comprehensive report. Now you can quickly monitor and analyze your customer service performance data from Intercom in a single dashboard that monitors fundamental metrics, such as:

• New conversations . Track the total number of new conversations your customer support team handles daily, weekly, monthly, or within the specified date range.
• Open conversations by team member . View the total number of conversations in your support inbox that are still open and find out which team members are handling them.
• Leads . Track the number of leads generated by your customer support team within a specified date range. Dig deeper to learn the nature of the messages that help convert visitors to leads, and use your insights to improve future conversations.
• Users by tag name . View the total number of conversations your customer support team has handled over time and see how your team members tagged those messages in Intercom. Using tags makes it easier for anyone monitoring the dashboard to learn more about customer needs, interests, and issues.

Now you can benefit from the experience of our customer support experts, who have put together a plug-and-play Databox template that contains all the essential metrics for monitoring and analyzing the performance of your customer support reps. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in customer service reports, and best of all, it’s free!

You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.

To set up the dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Intercom account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

6. Leverage Publicly Available Data

We talk a lot about gathering and analyzing data these days, but one thing marketers often forget about is the wealth of existing data that are publicly available online. “A lot of people overlook the incredible amount of data that the government and nonprofits collect that can be useful for customer research,” said Jeromy Sonne of Reverb Agency .

“The most creative approach I’ve used to learn more about my customers is public records, which give me additional information about the customer’s location, demographics, behavioral specialties,” added Emily Andrews of RecordsFinder . “Public records have a big database, which helps me to understand how better I can sell my clients’ goods or services.”

Carmine Mastropierro of Mastro Commerce told us about a hybrid customer research process: “One approach I’ve used to learn more about my customers is a mix of online research and market research tools.”

“Studying industry reports,” Mastropierro explained, “allowed me to get a broad overview of who my customers are and how they behave. Then, Google Analytics and other online tools helped me narrow down demographics, interests, and other behaviors to refine my audience.

7. Use Facebook Audience Insights

Casey Hill of Bonjoro also recommended pulling customer data from where it’s readily available already. In Hill’s case, that’s Facebook’s Audience Insights tool.

“It’s a free tool through Facebook,” Hill explained, “and it will give you information on any intended audience.” According to Hill, Audience Insights can help marketers answer questions like:

• What kind of jobs do customers have?
• When are they active online?
• What pages do they follow?

“It’s an incredible tool for customer research that many people aren’t aware exists.”

8. Have a One-on-One Conversation

“I find that doing a 30-minute video call beats every other type of research,” said Corey Haines of Hey Marketers . “With the right questions in hand and a friendly conversational tone, so much can be uncovered that you would never know otherwise.”

Sarah McIntyre of Bright Inbound Marketing agreed with Haines, saying, “Actually talking with people is critically important to understand, not just what they think about your product or service, but how they found you, what the sales process was like, who else they were considering, why they chose you. Unless you actually ask, you’ll be running your marketing based on assumptions.”

According to Renee Bauer, Hello Marketing Agency abides by a similar strategy for customer research. “We do regular NPS surveys for a client, and we ask responders to let us know if they are willing to participate in a one-on-one interview. These interviews serve as a helpful supplement to persona research, and provide actionable information for our client about what’s important to their current customers and how they need to improve their service.”

“Face to face encounters in a more social setting (as opposed to an interview or focus group) will give you the most honest, instinctive, and digestible feedback,” said Kyle Turk of Keynote Search.

“Online feedback methods, although they still provide great feedback, allows the user to spend too much time thinking of a response, and the ability to manipulate their responses. It also really only captures your promoters and detractors. The core customer group that is neutral about your product or service will not engage in the feedback, leaving a large gap in data.”

Anna Kaine of ESM Inbound echoed Turk, noting that “picking up the phone for a talk with customers is always more personal and genuine than just sending out a questionnaire—because you can really probe and show you’re listening. It’s a far more human experience.”

“We are clear and open about the focus of the calls, and they’re always happy to help us – after all, it’s in their best interests for us to focus closer on their pain points,” Kaine added.

Paige Arnof-Fenn of Mavens & Moguls recommended make a tour of customer interviews. “Go on a Listening Tour. Ask a few smart, open-ended questions, then sit back and take notice. Start listening with no strings attached and you’ll be amazed at what you find.”

Ever Increasing Circles ’ Alistair Dodds seconded Arnof-Fenn’s last point, adding, “We’ve found out things that I don’t think would have ever come up in an office or business environment. And it’s helped us to really focus in on how to get the client to their real objective.”

9. Conduct Research With Google

It’s no surprise that the king, queen, and jester of online research is, of course, Google. But the marketers we spoke with noted so many novel ways to use Google search for customer research, including:

• Reading competitors’ customer reviews on Google My Business
• Researching the way customers speak about your product and industry
• Tailoring content toward real customer pain points and questions

“Google is an excellent resource to learn more about your customers, without the use of expensive tools,” said Ben Johnston of Sagefrog Marketing Group . “If you’re in a competitive space, look at your competition’s Google My Business profiles and read the reviews of satisfied and unsatisfied customers to learn what real customers like or don’t like about your direct competition.

Roman Zhyvitsk of Travel SEO Agency touted the importance of using Google to better understand how your customers speak about (and search for) your business. “When you sell your products or services online, it is highly important to know what search phrases people use to find it. Very often it is not as obvious as you might think.”

Johnston also noted how Google can help with ensuring content resonates with your customers, saying, “You can refine your content ideas to actually engage with your customer base by looking at ‘People Also Ask’ or ‘People Also Search For.’ That’s a direct insight into what kinds of questions your customer base is asking and what they’re interested in.”

Set Up Google Alerts for Customers and Prospects

In addition to conducting manual customer research on Google, Carlos Puig of BUNCH shared another pro tip: Google Alerts.

“Right after signing a contract with a new customer, I strongly recommend setting up a Google Alert for the name of the company and the names of the people you closed the deal with. Google will keep pushing relevant information that will help you understand the situation of your client and detect potential upsells.”

10. Ask Customers to Rate Your UX

Much of the advice we heard focused on overall customer information. But Victor Antiu of Sleek Bill says they focus on the micro aspects of customer experiences, too.

“Throughout the app, we marked micro-conversions. When the user finishes one (for example creates and sends an invoice), we show a small rating bar and based on the score he gives us, we either show him a small survey to find out what was hard, or we thank him and ask what we can improve.”

“It’s a similar system to what Skype and Booking.com do,” Antiu explained. “It’s a simple way to find pain points or issues in various funnels.”

11. Use Social Listening

“Social media is probably the best tool that you could use to understand the thought process of your client,” said Harry Gandia of Igniting Movement . “Social media can help a marketer discover what their target audience is thinking in real-time. Not many other mediums can offer that. And it’s totally free.”

Many of the marketers we spoke with invoked one form of social listening or another. After all, social media is where customers hang out—regardless of who your customers are.

Find Their Online Groups and Hangouts

“One approach we use to learn more about our customers,” Kelsey Miller of Pepperland Marketing explained, “is to find the online groups, forums, and communities that they frequent. This can be in the form of Facebook groups, Reddit threads, industry-specific forums, hashtags, and so on. This is helpful in understanding how these people interact with each other, the questions they are asking, the challenges they are facing, and so much more.”

Alexandra Sheehan of Coach Content recommends turning to Facebook Groups specifically. “I love joining Facebook groups that my audience is likely to be a part of and just observing their behavior. This shows you what really makes them tick. The things that annoy them, their true pain points, their sense of humor, little nuances like that.”

“ Find out where your customers are hanging out online,” advised Vinoth AJ of Apoyo Corp , adding, “One proven method is Quora. All we have to do is type a topic and it will display all questions related to that topic. Go ahead and read all the questions related to your market.”

Create Your Own Group

While many marketers recommend going where the customers are, there’s also some benefit to taking the Field of Dreams approach.

“By far the best way to learn more about our customers has been to create a dedicated Facebook group around our products,” said Jonathan Chan of Insane Growth . “Not only does this give us the ability to foster a real sense of community around our brand, but we have routine access to the most highly-engaged members of our audience.”

Jack Paxtone of VYPER echoed Chan, explaining, “Hosting a forum either on our website or on Reddit turned out to be a great way to build a database of feedback from our clients, while also engaging with them to build a strong relationship for our brand.”

“The Vyper Facebook Group is currently our most popular platform for getting to know our customers,” Paxtone added. “We can freely interact with each other, understand their likes and dislikes, and also request valuable feedback when we are beta testing new products and services.”

Jarrod Miller-Dean of Housecall Pro added, “We utilize community outreach in our private Facebook group. For example, by posing a question in the group and asking members for their help and response.”

12. Use Heatmap Tools to Understand How Customers See Your Website

Customer research is about more than just who your customers are. It’s also about understanding how they interact with your brand and your product. That’s why Sneh Ratna Choudhary of Beaconstac recommended using a heat mapping tool to better understand and optimize their website for the customers visiting.

“We’ve been using Hotjar to understand the exact pain points of users to implement a human-centered design.”

“For instance,” Choudhary explained, “our free QR Code Generator tool was receiving visitors, but there weren’t any real conversions. We looked at Hotjar videos only to find out that we had way too many CTAs to begin with. Upon realizing this, we scaled down our CTA to include only 3 major CTAs and our visitor-to-trial conversion rate is currently hovering at 15.6%.”

13. Keep It Informal

For some, customer research can feel like a weighty, formal undertaking—but it doesn’t have to be, and many of the marketers we heard from reminded us of that.

“So many business owners and entrepreneurs think that market research is this big, complicated thing,” Carla Williams Johnson of Carli Communications pointed out. “And, while you can conduct structured surveys and questionnaires, you can also simply ask your customers directly what they think of an idea that you may have.”

“Sometimes that direct, informal approach can give you the best feedback,” Johnson added.

Liz Courtney of BBMG took that idea to the next level, saying, “To get more realistic and meaningful insight into consumers’ needs, aspirations and behavior, we try to connect with them on their own turf. Visiting them in their homes, going shopping with them, or chatting with them in pairs with a friend rather than forcing them into unnatural settings like sterile focus groups or relying only on multiple-choice surveys.”

14. Tap Your Network for Feedback

Kathleen Marrero of First Fig Marketing & Consulting emphasized the effect an existing relationship can have on the kind of customer research and feedback you end up with, suggesting your network is a great place to start.

“I have found the best way to learn more about potential customers is to open up a friendly dialogue with connections I have on social media platforms. I have reached out to numerous connections on sites like LinkedIn and asked for a real, honest conversation about whatever space I am gathering information within, the good and bad and any other information that would help me better serve the community.”

“I have found that people are very willing to offer insight if there is no sales pitch,” Marrero added.

15. Leverage Your Email Subscribers

“Reaching out to email subscribers to ask what’s bothering them is one of the most effective ways to learn more about customers,” said Priscilla Tan of Content Kapow .

“Two weeks ago,” Tan shared, “I was struggling to write a blog post. I didn’t know which topics to focus on. Rather than going with my gut, I asked my subscribers. I gave them 3 options and picked the one with the most number of votes. Not only did it help with topic development, but it also helped me to dig deeper into the pain points they’re facing at work.”

16. Offer a Beta Version of Your Product in Exchange for Feedback

One common thread throughout the responses we heard was that, while customers do have an incentive to help you create a better product for them, that isn’t always enough to entice feedback or survey responses.

To combat that problem, Carsten Schaefer of Crowdy.ai suggested offering a beta or paired-down version of your product in exchange.

“We launched a beta for 100 days before going live with our product. We gave our beta users all the features completely free in exchange for one thing: feedback about our product and how they used it for their business,” Schaefer explained. “It has brought us incredible insights which we used in the final iteration of the product.”

17. Learn from Live Chat and Support Interactions

If there’s one painfully overlooked source of customer research, it’s the support team. Few other teams within a business have the kind of direct contact with customers that customer support pros see every day.

Zack Naylor of Aurelius said, “I make it a point to answer every single live chat we get on our website for product questions and requests. Often what happens is that I get to learn a lot about potential customers from what they’re looking for and end up being able to schedule a live call to dive deeper and learn more.”

Get to Know Your Customers

Customers are the lifeblood of every successful business, and finding business traction and growth depends on your ability to get to know and understand your customers.

Whether you’re ready to go big with a large, organized customer survey or simply want to chat one-on-one with a few customers, you’ll emerge better equipped to serve their needs and grow the business.

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Customer Research: A Guide To The Ultimate Startup Cheat Code

Corey Haines on July 01, 2019

Table of Contents

More founders journey articles.

Remember how much easier a video game became once you found a cheat code? 

If you’re looking to build a product people love, sell it the way your customers would prefer, and grow your business, you need to invest in customer research.

It’s the ultimate startup cheat code.

In today’s market, features are mostly undifferentiated, there are more options to choose from than ever, and new startups pop up every day. The only difference between you and the next business is how well you know your customers .

And while customer research is a popular topic in the startup-sphere, the reality is that many are doing much more preaching than they are practicing. 

Not only that, but there are absolutely right ways of conducting customer research and a multitude of wrong ways. 

What Is Customer Research?

Customer research is the act of learning more about your current and prospective customers in order to better serve them with your products and services. 

Customer research is often synonymous with market research, user research, customer development, and other terms. And while there are certainly some nuances, for the sake of this article we’re going to generally treat them as the same. 

Ask yourself this question, “How well do I know my customers?”

If the most you can say about them is their job title, industry, age, and company size, you might not know them at all. I would go as far as to say that most “personas” or “customer profiles” don’t even qualify as customer research.

Customer research helps you thoroughly answer key questions like:

• Who is the best fit for my product(s) and service(s)?
• Where can we find and communicate with them?
• What are they trying to achieve?

Not only should you know their job title, industry, age, and company size, you should also know their biggest challenges, their goals, how they make decisions, who they trust for advice, where they go to learn, which communities they’re a part of, who they see your competition as, why they chose your product, and much more.

That is customer research. 

Why Is Customer Research Necessary?

Sure, you could make your best guess, assume some things based on what you know, or just operate based on past experience. But the fact is that we all know less than we think we do. 

Your guesses, assumptions, or past experience could even be dead wrong . And that’s a scary place to be in.

The magic of customer research is that you don’t have to guess. In fact, your customers will tell you everything you need to know. You just need to ask. 

“I find helping people over chat excruciatingly painful as I get very impatient with the single-threaded nature of the conversation while waiting and watching them type responses. So I started asking people if they wanted to do screenshares/calls so I could help them faster. Lo and behold, paid conversions started going up. Way up. We quadrupled trial-to-paid conversions. Talking to users directly helped me establish a connection and improve my understanding of what they were looking for.” — Josh Ho of Referral Rock

Customer research helps you close the gap between what you know and what you think you know. Don’t you want to be able to predict what your customers will do or say, instead of just guessing?

A lack of customer research can be the cause of many startup woes:

• Customers are signing up but they’re churning out just as fast as they come in.
• Marketing experiments are expensive, inconclusive, or under-performing.
• Prospects are expressing a lot of interest but just aren’t closing into customers.
• New features and products don’t seem to be making a difference to revenue growth or product/market fit.

Customer research is necessary for every aspect of the business: product, marketing, sales, customer success, growth, operations.

Types Of Customer Research

Customer research can be done in two ways:

• Primary : Data you collect yourself, which could include face to face conversation, phone call, video conference, surveys, email thread, or social media interaction.
• Secondary : Data publicly available or collected by someone else, which could include industry studies and reports, online lists or databases, forums or online communities, social media chatter, and analytic tools.

Both have advantages and disadvantages, but generally, you want to get as close to the source as you can. Talking to people one-on-one is the ideal way to conduct customer research, although sometimes it’s just not possible.

Both primary and secondary research can be broken down into two types of data:

• Qualitative : Concerned with understanding human behavior and assumes a dynamic and discoverable reality. Usually in the form of themes, summaries, and descriptions. Examples include quotes, word clouds, and written reports.
• Quantitative : Concerned with discovering facts about social phenomena and assumes a fixed and measurable reality. Usually in the form of numerical comparisons and statistical analysis. Examples include charts, graphs, and tallies.

In the First Round article on Qualitative Research , Jesse Caesar recommends “If you want to know what your target is doing or how much , then go for quantitative research. But if you want to know why they’re doing it, or why they believe what they believe, qualitative research can get you that depth of perspective.”

This article will mostly focus on qualitative research, but it’s important to note that most of the qualitative research gathered can be turned into quantitative research as well by tallying themes and patterns.

How To Do Customer Research

The following are a few general principles that can be applied to any business.

The first rule of customer research: You do not talk about customer research

Keep it casual. It’s not a “meeting,” it’s a conversation.

If you’re talking to people who aren’t your customers yet, telling them that you’re doing research for your new product or company immediately introduces bias. Even if you’re talking to people who are your customers, it’s best to follow the same principle and keep the conversation focused on themselves, not your product or company. 

The goal of customer research is to test your assumptions, not to validate your assumptions. If anything, your aim should be to prove yourself wrong rather than to prove yourself right.

The typical method of customer research is to explain that you’re doing research for a new product your building, give them the pitch, describe or show the product, and then ask questions like “What do you think?” or “Would you buy it?” or “Is there anything you’d change or add?”

But most people are nice. People lie. People are agreeable. And their feedback is likely more harmful than it is helpful. People want to be supportive, so it’s difficult to get unbiased feedback during customer validation.

Which is why it’s important to have the right approach in order to garner the right feedback from the right people. This is something Ben Orenstein and Derrick Reimer experienced first-hand and talked about on their podcast with the author of The Mom Test , Rob Fitzpatrick. 

Note: The Mom Test makes for a fantastic follow-up resource.

Start from a place of empathy and curiosity

Curiosity is the desire to know and learn from others. Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Customer research without curiosity or empathy will give you brief, shallow insights into your customers that may not be helpful at all. Treating customer research like a chore will not result in good data. 

Curiosity and empathy are the keys to customer research that’s actually insightful and useful. Remember that you’re not just trying to get answers, you’re trying to truly understand the motivations and desires of someone. 

A great way to cultivate this empathy and curiosity is to use a framework called Jobs To Be Done .

By thinking about your product in terms of the “jobs” your customers hire it for, you’re forced to step inside their shoes and experience the world as they would.

“The marketer’s task is to understand what jobs periodically arise in customers’ lives for which they might hire products the company could make. If a marketer can understand the job, design a product and associated experiences in purchase and use to do that job, and deliver it in a way that reinforces its intended use, then when new customers find themselves needing to get that job done, they will hire that product.” — Clayton Christensen

What started as a goal to increase milkshake sales has turned into an actionable framework for using customer research to drive product innovation and more effective marketing.

Jobs to be done is entirely dependent on practicing empathy and curiosity, getting inside the heads of others to understand how they think. A common framework to put this to action is to think of it in four different parts:

• Push of the situation : What was it about their situation that led them to look for a new solution?
• Pull of the new solution : What was it about the new solution that led them to try it?
• Habits holding them back : What habits do they have that held them back from trying a new solution?
• Anxieties of the new solution : What anxieties do they have about the new solution?

Talking to customers with this framework in mind helps you round out a complete customer journey and explore territory you may not have ventured to without it.

Ask the right questions

Still, even with the right mindset and frameworks to use, it all comes down to asking the right questions. 

Asking the right questions eliminates bias and prevents you from asking leading questions. Some of the best practices for asking the right questions include:

• Ask open-ended questions
• Don’t ask yes/no questions
• Don’t ask leading questions (asking a question that suggestions or even injects the answer that you want or expect)

Here’s a list of questions to ask both prospective customers and active customers that fits into the jobs to be done framework without introducing bias.

For prospective customers:

• What are the most persistent and painful problems you experience? 
• How have you tried to solve this problem in the past?
• How did some products work for you and others fail you?
• What happens if you don’t solve this problem?
• If you could wave a magic wand and create the ideal solution, what would it allow you to do? How would it work? How would it help you?

For active customers:

• What was going on in your world when you started looking for something like our product?
• How did you try to solve this in the past?
• Why didn’t those solutions work out?
• Why did you originally decide to try our product?
• Why did you decide to go with our product rather than others you’ve tried?
• What is the primary benefit that you have received from our product?
• How would you feel if you could no longer use our product? Why?
• What would you likely use as an alternative to our product if it were no longer available?
• Have you recommended our product to anyone? If so, how did you describe it?
• What other roles or titles besides yours do you think would get a big benefit from our product?
• How could we improve our product to better meet your needs?

Great questions to ask, regardless:

• What are your favorite blogs, newsletters, podcasts, or websites to keep up with?
• Who do you look to for inspiration or advice?
• Which events, online communities, or forums do you spend time in?

Of course, questions can be personalized to your specific business or industry. These are merely a starting point. Adjust the phrasing and exact words to fit your own style and voice.

Keep asking why (dig deeper)

The single most powerful question you can ask in tandem with any of the questions above is, “Why?” 

Often when someone answers a question, they’re only telling you about 25% of everything they could tell you. We tend to hold back because we don’t want to seem like we’re talking too much.

But in this situation, the more the better, always.

So when they answer your question, always follow up with another clarifying question or asking them to tell you more about that. 

For example, if you ask them what their most painful and persistent problem has been in the last few months and they tell you that it’s ‘the challenge of attributing leads and customers to certain marketing channels,’ ask them why that’s an important problem to them. And if they tell you because they need to know which channels are working and which ones aren’t, ask them why again. Maybe they tell you that they just got a bit of funding and need to know where to invest, and now you’ve really gotten down to the root of it.

There’s so much more to explore than what’s at face value. Keep channeling your empathy and curiosity to dig into the true motivations and desires of someone. Usually two or three “why?”’s get down to the real answer.

And if they don’t respond right away, don’t be afraid of the silence. Avoid copping them out with “that’s okay if you don’t know…” because the reality is that many of these questions are very thought-provoking and may not conjure an answer right away.

Silence is avoided like the plague nowadays, but you can use it to your advantage to get a more honest answer from someone if you just give them a few seconds to think critically.

How To Find The Right People To Talk To

Talking to the right customers and prospective customers is just as important as talking to customers in the first place. Basing critical decisions on feedback from the wrong customers could send you in a direction that could be devastating.

But don’t let that discourage you from trying to find the right customers. They’re there, you just have to know where to look.

One of the best sources of customer research is going to be to identify your “best” customers from your user base.

Just based on looking in your CRM or database, you could curate a list of top customers to talk to based on finding segments with one or a combination of these characteristics: 

• The highest average deal size
• Short sales cycles (the time from sales conversation to close is small)
• Lowest churn or longest retention

You could also talk to your sales team (or maybe you’re the sales team) and ask them questions like:

• What were some of the largest deals we closed in the last year?
• Which customers were the easiest for us to close? Why was that?
• Who typically bought our product or service? Or in other words, what was the most common title of the person buying our solution?
• Who were other decision makers that were involved in the buying process?
• When you’re on a sales call with a prospect, is there any situation or circumstance that indicates someone is more likely to buy? For example, are there any tell-tale situations or scenarios whenever you see it, you know this lead will close? (Or this lead will never close).
• For the companies that bought our product/service, what was the most common reason they bought?

Your customer success and support team will also be a great source for identifying customers to talk to by asking questions like:

• Which customers or groups of customers have a low support headache?
• Which customers really see the value of our product or service?
• Who are our largest accounts?
• Who do you view as our “best customers?”
• What companies have we been able to sell additional products or services to? Why?

One final method for identifying who you should be talking to is to ask a simple question at the end of each conversation with someone: “Who else should we talk to that you think would get immense value out of our ?”

It may take a minute for them to think about it and identify someone, but this can be a great way to get a warm introduction to another company like them that’s either already your customer or has the potential to become a customer.

Once you have a list of at least 10-20 customers to talk to, it can be as simple as sending an email asking if they have 30 minutes to spare for you to get to know them better so you can make a better product for them. 

Thanks to tools like SavvyCal , Acuity, Zoom, and Appear.in, it’s easier than ever to talk with your customers. Make sure to thank them for their time, smile, and reassure them that there are no right or wrong answers — you’re just looking to get to know them better.

As you explore each avenue and take notes on what you find, patterns and commonalities will emerge. Make sure to list them out and suss out what these commonalities have to do with being a great customer for you.

How To Do Customer Research Without Physically Talking To Customers

While talking to customers directly is the best primary source of data, you can get equally insightful data from secondary sources as well. 

And just because you’re not directly talking to customers doesn’t mean that none of the principles apply anymore. Still, don’t mention that you’re doing customer research, start from a place of empathy and curiosity, ask the right questions, and keep asking why.

Another great primer to conducting secondary research is to practice what Amy Hoy’s Sales Safari . Think of it as a mission: your job is to collect as much data from relevant sources as you can to uncover the triggers, motivations, fears, and desires of people.

As you go through each source, record patterns and trends you see. Write down the exact words and phrases people use. Categorize what you find as you go along to surface the trends.

Surveys tend to be pretty polarizing. You either love them or hate them. They work for you or they don’t. 

Surveys make for a great research tool if you:

• Can gather enough responses to deem it statistically significant or insightful
• Want to discover ideal customers or prospective customers to talk to directly
• Don’t have time or energy to talk directly with all the customers or prospective customers that you could
• Have a large audience you can tap into, such as a community, email list, or social media following

Many of the same questions mentioned above can also be used in a survey format. In some cases, the person you’re talking to directly may not be able to recall the specifics of something to answer your question, but they’d be able to take the time to go back and jog their memory to give a really insightful answer via a survey.

For example, if you ask someone directly what their favorite blogs, newsletters, and podcasts are, they may list a few off the top of their head and then you’d have to pry some more to get them to list some more. Whereas if you ask someone this same question through a survey, they may be inspired to pull out their phone to list all their favorite podcasts, dig through email to find newsletters, and look in their browser bookmarks to find favorite blogs and websites.

Some widely-accepted survey best practices include:

• Make the survey about them , not you: Put yourself in the perspective of someone taking your survey and think about why they would want to take the time and energy to take it. Orient the survey around how their responses will benefit them. A great survey makes someone feel understood, appreciated, and achieved for helping you.
• Minimize the length and time required as much as you can: Data shows that the longer a survey is, the less time respondents spend answering each question. There’s a careful balance between length and brevity. Too few questions won’t give you the insight you need. Too many questions won’t give you the quality of insights you need.
• Order questions from easiest to most demanding: To support respondents to complete the survey and give the best answers they can, consider starting your survey with easier questions and then gradually increasing the difficulty of the questions. Starting with easier questions gets respondents engaged and encouraged so that when they get to the more demanding questions, they are more likely to give a sufficient answer.
• Design questions and potential answers to be as easy to understand as possible: Both super-specific and immensely vague questions are difficult to understand. Surveys can get over complicated very quickly. The goal is not to create the most intricate survey; the goal is to create the most insightful survey.

For more on survey design, Stripe Atlas’s Principles of effective survey design and Zapier’s survey design guide are both great resources.

Reddit offers a unique opportunity for anyone looking to do customer research with its enormous size and breadth of content. As of this writing, Reddit is the 5th most popular website in the United States and the 17th most popular website in the world. And according to the last available estimates, there are over 330 million users and over 1.2 million subreddits.

Len Markidan’s guide to irresistible content ideas using Reddit can also be translated for customer research. He explains a simple process to mine Reddit for relevant data:

• Find the most relevant subreddits: Use the search bar to input keywords and phrases related to your product or service. Reddit will suggest subreddits based on your query that you can search through.
• Search for specific keywords and phrases: Once in a specific subreddit, use the search function again to search for keywords and phrases like “how to,” “help me,” “struggle with,” “figure out,” and more variations. 
• Scan posts and comments: Sort the results by comments and search through each relevant post and the top voted comments to quickly surface what people are saying and feeling.
• Engage the community: For any recent posts or comments, practice digging deeper by asking commenters to elaborate on what they mean or what they’re experiencing. You may even share an experience of your own.

Be careful not to comment on old posts or abuse any of the rules of each subreddit. Although it can be tedious to search through each subreddit with keyword or phrase variations, there are tons of insights to mine from Reddit.

Facebook Groups

Facebook Groups offer similar advantages as Reddit with over 2.3 billion users, and while the exact number of Facebook Groups is unknown, it’s safe to estimate that there are hundreds of millions of Facebook Groups.

Mining Facebook Groups for customer research is similar to Reddit, with a few nuances:

• Find the most relevant groups: Use the Facebook search bar to input keywords and phrases related to your product or service and then click on “Groups” to only see groups. 
• Visit or request to join groups: On the left side, select “Public Groups” under “Show Only” to visit groups without having to join them. Then select “Closed Groups” under “Show Only” and request to join groups that will have to approve you before you can see any of the group content.
• Search for specific keywords and phrases for each group: Use the search function inside each group for indicative terms like “how to,” “help me,” “struggle with,” “figure out,” and more variations. Filter by most popular, most recent, or even by year posted.
• Scan comments and conversations: Expand posts with a lot of comments to see what others are saying how they’re responding to each post. 

Spend your time wisely with Facebook Groups as you could end up in a few rabbit holes that make you wonder where your last three and a half hours went. Focus on the most promising groups and quickly scan for insights instead of methodically working through every post and comment.

The latest estimates state Quora has over 300 million monthly users and have hundreds of thousands of “Topics,” one of the main features of the platform where questions and answers are categorized and made available for users to follow.

One of the unique characteristics of Quora is that it can be searched and organized by questions, answers, posts, profiles, topics, blogs, and spaces. Many of these can be followed, which notify users of new activity. 

Here’s how to make the most of Quora for customer research:

• Start with searching for broad keywords and phrases: Search for short keywords or broad phrase to see which bring the most promising results to look into.
• Work through different types of search results: Once you’ve found the keywords and phrases that give you the best results, filter by “Type” and work through the results to find the content you want to investigate.
• Follow or note the most relevant results: Quora automatically sorts results by follower count or relevance to your search so your only job is to investigate each one from the top down to see what you can learn. Quora also does some of the work for you in being able to follow or save the content you want to note.

Quora is specially fit to get data on both questions and answers. Note the tone of how users ask questions, give context to their situations, and how users answer. 

Niche online communities, forums, and review sites

For every subreddit, Facebook Group, and Quora topic, there’s a niche online community, forum, or review site. You can apply the same general process of searching for relevant keywords and phrases, filtering results, and then investigating content to most other platforms.

Here are a few ways to find more places to look:

• Use Google: A plain search with variations like “ communities/forums/groups/membership” let’s Google do its job to try to find you what you’re looking for. More advanced search operators can help you with more specific searches, like finding related websites by using the related:”yoursite.com” operator for example.
• Find Slack communities: Slofile curates Slack communities and allows you to search by category, language, and region. This Airtable also has a pretty comprehensive list you can sort by topic or location.
• Find Mighty Networks : Mighty Networks are free and paid online memberships that allow creators to create an online community for anyone. You can also search for specific topics or type of people using their Explore feature .
• Search through Review Sites: Sites like G2 and Capterra are ripe with insight about what customers love and hate about certain software products.
• Search through customer communities: Many large companies have customer communities and forums to foster engagement amongst customers and better collect feedback. Want to get inside the heads of Salesforce users? Check out the Trailblazer Community . Want to learn about HubSpot users? Check out the HubSpot Community . Want to better understand Webflow users? Check out the Webflow Forums .
• (Soon) use Sparktoro : SparkToro is a new software company from Moz founder, Rand Fishkin, working on a product to make it easier to discover the websites, blogs, podcasts, social accounts, and publications that reach your audience.

You can also discover niche online communities by simply asking! Whether it’s directly in a conversation or captured in a survey, asking which online communities they’re a part of can surface ones you may not have discovered otherwise.

Twitter has over 330 million monthly active users and has traditionally been the social media platform of choice for much of the tech world. The challenge with Twitter is the vast amount of noise. With the limitation of 280 characters per post, users are encouraged to post often. The Twitter feed can feel like drinking from a firehose of information. 

But if you know how to wield it, it can also be a great source for customer research:

• Use Twitter’s advanced search : Search for specific keywords or phrases, see what people are saying about certain accounts, and monitor hashtags. 
• Lookout for popular threads: Every blue moon, a thread blows up and garners hundreds or thousands of comments. Industry thought-leaders, experts, and public figures often tweet things that evoke a response from followers. Users could also ask a question or run a poll that gives you data you probably wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else, like this tweet from Hiten Shah .
• Create lists to monitor accounts: Lists are the secret weapon of power users to find the signal in the noise of the normal Twitter feed. Not only can you create your own public or private lists to follow certain accounts and hashtags, but you can also subscribe to other lists that have already been curated. You can easily find Twitter lists to subscribe to by visiting someone’s profile and seeing which lists they’re a part of, subscribed to, or created.

Twitter is a bit more difficult to search for and find relevant content since there’s so much to sift through, so it’s better to treat Twitter as an ongoing source of customer research you can monitor.

How To Use Customer Research

So you’ve talked to customers directly, scoured the internet for more insights, and wrapped it all up in a massive document… now what?

What do you do with customer research? How do you turn this data into actionable insights?

Katelyn Bourgoin likes to begin this process by asking a “How might we…?” question. Ask yourself and whoever you’re working with a question like, “Given our conversations with customers and the patterns we noticed in our research, how might we use this for ____?” and then fill in the blank with any part of your product, support, marketing, and sales process.

For example, take an audit of:

• The words you use and how you communicate
• Every process and workflow you have in place
• How you consider and build new features
• The way you respond to and educate customers
• Your website and the intended action you want users to take
• Your user onboarding experience and setup
• How you position yourself and who you target in your market
• Your pricing and plans

You might find that some parts of your business haven’t been reevaluated since the day you started. Or that some things don’t match the experience you want to deliver at all.

Try to be as objective as possible. If you can’t, loop someone in who can be. Look at everything through the eyes of your customers and ask, “Does this make sense? How can we make this better?”

You’ll find so many amazing ideas you may have never thought of before. And there will be virtually zero doubt about why you’re implementing these ideas because your customers have already validated them for you .

No more guessing. Now you can predict .

The company who knows their customers best wins.

Customer research is your competitive advantage if you use it right. Being able to predict what users want and why will give you a leg up on anyone else vying for their business.

Remember, customer research is underutilized. Take the time and energy to keep a close ear to your customers and prospective customers and the rest will take care of itself. What to build, how to sell it, what to do next, where to spend your time… it all becomes more clear with customer research.

Corey Haines

Corey is a marketing-first entrepreneur whose mission centers around assisting individuals with exceptional products, services, and content to gain the recognition they deserve. He adopts a stair-stepping approach to entrepreneurship, aiming to build a portfolio of small bets that prioritize autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Corey's journey towards becoming "default alive" involves key projects like Conversion Factory, Swipe Files, and SwipeWell. He has a notable track record of working with numerous startups on marketing and growth strategies, including engagements with companies such as Cordial, Baremetrics, SavvyCal, Bonsai, Evercast, Riverside.fm, Holloway, Beamer, and Timetastic.

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The first CRI auto dealership clients were established in 1967. Today, CRI provides the US automotive industry and many other verticals with leading BDC contact center services, CSI measurement, and reputation enhancement solutions.

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Mystery shopping.

With deep roots in the automotive industry, CRI now works closely with businesses of all sizes, in all industries. What began as purely a CSI measurement service has evolved into a robust solution that pushes out customer feedback in the form of reviews that enhance online reputation. CRI has moved seamlessly from the forefront of customer satisfaction indexing to the forefront of the online reputation space. CRI offers an array of marketing services designed to drive revenue - from mining customer data to pure conquest. Coupling contact center services with effective multi-channel communication, CRI achieves results that exceed expectations.

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How to understand your customer and unlock success.

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Tony Nicolaidis is the Chief Commercial Officer for Origin AI . He drives growth through strategic business development initiatives.

If you don’t understand your customer, you will fail. In business development, I see salespeople make the mistake of going into customer meetings ready to rattle off the features and benefits of the product they’re selling. They don’t put in the work to listen and get to the bottom of the problem the customer wants to solve.

Research from Salesforce shows that nearly 60% of business buyers say sales reps don't take the time to understand their needs, though 86% say they'd be more likely to buy if their goals were understood.

If you’re a B2C company, being customer-obsessed will get you far. If you’re a B2B company, you need to understand the overall market and the end customer inside and out. Does your product solve their pain points or address a need? That will help solidify a deal.

The following strategies can help you research, understand your customers and develop data-backed strategies to help propel your business forward.

1 Dead And 26 Hurt In Overnight Shooting In Akron, Ohio

Samsung documents confirm missing galaxy z fold 6 feature, trump falsely claims he didn t back lock her up chants targeting clinton while warning of breaking point if he s jailed, start with segmentation.

Segmentation is the first step in understanding the customer you’re targeting. When introducing a new product, especially a technology product, it’s important to understand the five adopter categories.

• Innovators: These customers are the first to try new things, and they love taking risks.

• Early Adopters: This group finds new ideas exciting and is willing to advocate for them.

• Early Majority: Influenced by feedback from innovators and early adopters, these customers are more deliberate in adoption. They'll wait and see what others think before trying it.

• Late Majority: These customers are skeptical of innovations and won't adopt new things until the majority has tried them.

• Laggards: This is the last group to adopt a new idea or innovation. They tend to resist change and need strong reasons to try something new.

Each one of these represents a different segment of customers. Too often, tech companies talk more to early adopters than other segments when conducting research and bringing a product to market. This is a trap and gives tech companies a false sense of what the product should be. Early adopters are excited about new tech and more likely to rally around it. This enthusiasm is important, as is their feedback, but early adopters represent a small group compared to the rest of the market—the people who can make or break you.

I recommend prioritizing the needs of the early majority—the larger group of customers who will ultimately determine the success of a product or service. Work with reputable research firms or leverage existing research to understand the needs of the early majority and what problem your offering solves for them.

In today’s competitive market, presenting a product that incrementally improves an issue is not enough. What you’re doing must have a certain magnitude of significance, or it’s not going to matter to the early majority or the market. Thorough research can help you determine whether your product or service goes far enough to meet customer needs in a radical way.

Focusing on the early majority first is key to capturing market share. Once established, you can expand to research and understand the late majority, making product adjustments to suit their preferences.

Dive Deep Into the Market And Target User

Once you’ve segmented your customer base, it’s time to dive deeper and discover who your customer is. Here are some core details you’ll want to uncover.

• Pain Points And Problems: Identify your customer’s problem, pain points and frustrations, and pinpoint how exactly your product solves them. Work to quantify the magnitude and costs of the problem to the customer to more strongly emphasize the value of the solution.

• Usage: How often do they use similar products or services? How do they currently use them? What features do they use most?

• Attitudes: What are their perceptions of your brand and industry?

• Motivations: What motivates them to buy? What steps do they take when evaluating and purchasing a product or service?

• Price Sensitivity: Are they price-conscious, or will they pay a premium for specific features?

• Demographics And Psychographics: Examine factors like age, gender, income, education level, family structure, lifestyle, values and interests.

• Critical To Quality (CTQ): CTQ is the quality of a product or service in the eyes of the customer. Businesses need to understand their customers' CTQ factors and make any necessary changes.

Once you know what to look for, you need to get your hands on actionable data. Look to reputable research firms, but go beyond readily available sources. If possible, conduct your own research. Conduct both qualitative and quantitative research. Drilling down and uncovering new market insights will give you a competitive edge, especially in a crowded sector.

Build A Partnership Around End Customer Research

Especially for B2B companies, involving customers in the process of end customer research can strengthen the partnership, solidify trust in your solution and help improve the product.

In B2B tech, you'll need to know your customer's customer inside out. Collaborate with your B2B customers on the research and make sure they're in the loop. Lead focus groups and interviews. Listen to the customer talk about the problem you can solve. Collaborate with your partner on survey questions and field research for quantitative data.

Be your B2B customer’s guide to make sure your technology, product or service will be successful when integrated. Once you're both clear on the product direction, start go-to-market discussions: What will they charge? How will they get to their customer? Is that in line with the research results? Use the research to iterate your product and strategy if needed.

Protect Your Know-How

After you’ve conducted research and your product is set to transform the market, you’ll need to “build a moat” around your ideas. Take measures to ensure no one can rip you off. The number one way to protect your business’ innovations is through patents. Patent early and often. However, when you file a patent, everyone can sneak a peek at your product, including elements you may want to keep secret. You’ll want to keep some things under lock and key and not risk any proprietary “know-how” going public if it would affect your place in the market. This is how you maintain a competitive edge.

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The state of AI in early 2024: Gen AI adoption spikes and starts to generate value

If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI) , 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey  on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year , with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.

About the authors

This article is a collaborative effort by Alex Singla , Alexander Sukharevsky , Lareina Yee , and Michael Chui , with Bryce Hall , representing views from QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and McKinsey Digital.

Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value.

AI adoption surges

Interest in generative AI has also brightened the spotlight on a broader set of AI capabilities. For the past six years, AI adoption by respondents’ organizations has hovered at about 50 percent. This year, the survey finds that adoption has jumped to 72 percent (Exhibit 1). And the interest is truly global in scope. Our 2023 survey found that AI adoption did not reach 66 percent in any region; however, this year more than two-thirds of respondents in nearly every region say their organizations are using AI. 1 Organizations based in Central and South America are the exception, with 58 percent of respondents working for organizations based in Central and South America reporting AI adoption. Looking by industry, the biggest increase in adoption can be found in professional services. 2 Includes respondents working for organizations focused on human resources, legal services, management consulting, market research, R&D, tax preparation, and training.

Also, responses suggest that companies are now using AI in more parts of the business. Half of respondents say their organizations have adopted AI in two or more business functions, up from less than a third of respondents in 2023 (Exhibit 2).

Gen AI adoption is most common in the functions where it can create the most value

Most respondents now report that their organizations—and they as individuals—are using gen AI. Sixty-five percent of respondents say their organizations are regularly using gen AI in at least one business function, up from one-third last year. The average organization using gen AI is doing so in two functions, most often in marketing and sales and in product and service development—two functions in which previous research  determined that gen AI adoption could generate the most value 3 “ The economic potential of generative AI: The next productivity frontier ,” McKinsey, June 14, 2023. —as well as in IT (Exhibit 3). The biggest increase from 2023 is found in marketing and sales, where reported adoption has more than doubled. Yet across functions, only two use cases, both within marketing and sales, are reported by 15 percent or more of respondents.

Gen AI also is weaving its way into respondents’ personal lives. Compared with 2023, respondents are much more likely to be using gen AI at work and even more likely to be using gen AI both at work and in their personal lives (Exhibit 4). The survey finds upticks in gen AI use across all regions, with the largest increases in Asia–Pacific and Greater China. Respondents at the highest seniority levels, meanwhile, show larger jumps in the use of gen Al tools for work and outside of work compared with their midlevel-management peers. Looking at specific industries, respondents working in energy and materials and in professional services report the largest increase in gen AI use.

Investments in gen AI and analytical AI are beginning to create value

The latest survey also shows how different industries are budgeting for gen AI. Responses suggest that, in many industries, organizations are about equally as likely to be investing more than 5 percent of their digital budgets in gen AI as they are in nongenerative, analytical-AI solutions (Exhibit 5). Yet in most industries, larger shares of respondents report that their organizations spend more than 20 percent on analytical AI than on gen AI. Looking ahead, most respondents—67 percent—expect their organizations to invest more in AI over the next three years.

Where are those investments paying off? For the first time, our latest survey explored the value created by gen AI use by business function. The function in which the largest share of respondents report seeing cost decreases is human resources. Respondents most commonly report meaningful revenue increases (of more than 5 percent) in supply chain and inventory management (Exhibit 6). For analytical AI, respondents most often report seeing cost benefits in service operations—in line with what we found last year —as well as meaningful revenue increases from AI use in marketing and sales.

Inaccuracy: The most recognized and experienced risk of gen AI use

As businesses begin to see the benefits of gen AI, they’re also recognizing the diverse risks associated with the technology. These can range from data management risks such as data privacy, bias, or intellectual property (IP) infringement to model management risks, which tend to focus on inaccurate output or lack of explainability. A third big risk category is security and incorrect use.

Respondents to the latest survey are more likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider inaccuracy and IP infringement to be relevant to their use of gen AI, and about half continue to view cybersecurity as a risk (Exhibit 7).

Conversely, respondents are less likely than they were last year to say their organizations consider workforce and labor displacement to be relevant risks and are not increasing efforts to mitigate them.

In fact, inaccuracy— which can affect use cases across the gen AI value chain , ranging from customer journeys and summarization to coding and creative content—is the only risk that respondents are significantly more likely than last year to say their organizations are actively working to mitigate.

Some organizations have already experienced negative consequences from the use of gen AI, with 44 percent of respondents saying their organizations have experienced at least one consequence (Exhibit 8). Respondents most often report inaccuracy as a risk that has affected their organizations, followed by cybersecurity and explainability.

Our previous research has found that there are several elements of governance that can help in scaling gen AI use responsibly, yet few respondents report having these risk-related practices in place. 4 “ Implementing generative AI with speed and safety ,” McKinsey Quarterly , March 13, 2024. For example, just 18 percent say their organizations have an enterprise-wide council or board with the authority to make decisions involving responsible AI governance, and only one-third say gen AI risk awareness and risk mitigation controls are required skill sets for technical talent.

Bringing gen AI capabilities to bear

The latest survey also sought to understand how, and how quickly, organizations are deploying these new gen AI tools. We have found three archetypes for implementing gen AI solutions : takers use off-the-shelf, publicly available solutions; shapers customize those tools with proprietary data and systems; and makers develop their own foundation models from scratch. 5 “ Technology’s generational moment with generative AI: A CIO and CTO guide ,” McKinsey, July 11, 2023. Across most industries, the survey results suggest that organizations are finding off-the-shelf offerings applicable to their business needs—though many are pursuing opportunities to customize models or even develop their own (Exhibit 9). About half of reported gen AI uses within respondents’ business functions are utilizing off-the-shelf, publicly available models or tools, with little or no customization. Respondents in energy and materials, technology, and media and telecommunications are more likely to report significant customization or tuning of publicly available models or developing their own proprietary models to address specific business needs.

Respondents most often report that their organizations required one to four months from the start of a project to put gen AI into production, though the time it takes varies by business function (Exhibit 10). It also depends upon the approach for acquiring those capabilities. Not surprisingly, reported uses of highly customized or proprietary models are 1.5 times more likely than off-the-shelf, publicly available models to take five months or more to implement.

Gen AI high performers are excelling despite facing challenges

Gen AI is a new technology, and organizations are still early in the journey of pursuing its opportunities and scaling it across functions. So it’s little surprise that only a small subset of respondents (46 out of 876) report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of gen AI. Still, these gen AI leaders are worth examining closely. These, after all, are the early movers, who already attribute more than 10 percent of their organizations’ EBIT to their use of gen AI. Forty-two percent of these high performers say more than 20 percent of their EBIT is attributable to their use of nongenerative, analytical AI, and they span industries and regions—though most are at organizations with less than $1 billion in annual revenue. The AI-related practices at these organizations can offer guidance to those looking to create value from gen AI adoption at their own organizations.

To start, gen AI high performers are using gen AI in more business functions—an average of three functions, while others average two. They, like other organizations, are most likely to use gen AI in marketing and sales and product or service development, but they’re much more likely than others to use gen AI solutions in risk, legal, and compliance; in strategy and corporate finance; and in supply chain and inventory management. They’re more than three times as likely as others to be using gen AI in activities ranging from processing of accounting documents and risk assessment to R&D testing and pricing and promotions. While, overall, about half of reported gen AI applications within business functions are utilizing publicly available models or tools, gen AI high performers are less likely to use those off-the-shelf options than to either implement significantly customized versions of those tools or to develop their own proprietary foundation models.

What else are these high performers doing differently? For one thing, they are paying more attention to gen-AI-related risks. Perhaps because they are further along on their journeys, they are more likely than others to say their organizations have experienced every negative consequence from gen AI we asked about, from cybersecurity and personal privacy to explainability and IP infringement. Given that, they are more likely than others to report that their organizations consider those risks, as well as regulatory compliance, environmental impacts, and political stability, to be relevant to their gen AI use, and they say they take steps to mitigate more risks than others do.

Gen AI high performers are also much more likely to say their organizations follow a set of risk-related best practices (Exhibit 11). For example, they are nearly twice as likely as others to involve the legal function and embed risk reviews early on in the development of gen AI solutions—that is, to “ shift left .” They’re also much more likely than others to employ a wide range of other best practices, from strategy-related practices to those related to scaling.

In addition to experiencing the risks of gen AI adoption, high performers have encountered other challenges that can serve as warnings to others (Exhibit 12). Seventy percent say they have experienced difficulties with data, including defining processes for data governance, developing the ability to quickly integrate data into AI models, and an insufficient amount of training data, highlighting the essential role that data play in capturing value. High performers are also more likely than others to report experiencing challenges with their operating models, such as implementing agile ways of working and effective sprint performance management.

About the research

The online survey was in the field from February 22 to March 5, 2024, and garnered responses from 1,363 participants representing the full range of regions, industries, company sizes, functional specialties, and tenures. Of those respondents, 981 said their organizations had adopted AI in at least one business function, and 878 said their organizations were regularly using gen AI in at least one function. To adjust for differences in response rates, the data are weighted by the contribution of each respondent’s nation to global GDP.

Alex Singla and Alexander Sukharevsky  are global coleaders of QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey, and senior partners in McKinsey’s Chicago and London offices, respectively; Lareina Yee  is a senior partner in the Bay Area office, where Michael Chui , a McKinsey Global Institute partner, is a partner; and Bryce Hall  is an associate partner in the Washington, DC, office.

They wish to thank Kaitlin Noe, Larry Kanter, Mallika Jhamb, and Shinjini Srivastava for their contributions to this work.

This article was edited by Heather Hanselman, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Atlanta office.

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Implementing generative AI with speed and safety

Pillars of Customer Retention in the Services Sector: Understanding the Role of Relationship Marketing, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Loyalty

• Published: 20 May 2024

Cite this article

• Mazhar Hussain 1 ,
• Asad Javed   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4630-3595 1 ,
• Samar Hayat Khan 2 &
• Muhammad Yasir 1  

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This research aims to examine the impact of relationship marketing on customer retention, as well as the moderating role of customer loyalty and the mediating role of customer satisfaction by means of relationship marketing theory. In today’s business climate, companies of all sizes and types prioritize customer retention and acquisition. Customer retention, satisfaction, and loyalty are essential for a company’s profitability and growth, whereas building strong, long-term relationships with customers is at the core of relationship marketing. Developing trust, commitment, communication, and conflict management skills are all essential components of fostering these relationships, which ultimately result in increased customer satisfaction and retention. The study population consisted of 5276 employees working at different courier services offices across the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, Pakistan. A sample size of 385 was calculated using the Krejcie and Morgan sampling formula, and data were collected through self-administered questionnaires adapted from previous studies. The data-driven results indicate a positive relationship between relationship marketing, customer satisfaction, and customer retention in the services sector of Pakistan. Additionally, customer satisfaction mediates this relationship, while customer loyalty moderates it. These results have significant implications for companies seeking to retain and satisfy their customers.

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Hussain, M., Javed, A., Khan, S.H. et al. Pillars of Customer Retention in the Services Sector: Understanding the Role of Relationship Marketing, Customer Satisfaction, and Customer Loyalty. J Knowl Econ (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-02060-2

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Received : 30 April 2023

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/s13132-024-02060-2

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