customer research and strategy

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.

We’re also there

• What is customer research?

Last updated

14 February 2023

Reviewed by

Designing products that both delight customers and solve their problems is essential in a competitive landscape.

But how do you identify what your customers want and need, let alone who your customers really are?

Customer research enables you to learn more about your customers, understand their motivations, and get to grips with their behavior on a deeper level. You can use all this knowledge to create truly user-centric products.

Customer research is how you understand your customers—their needs, pain points, and demographics.

It also allows you to dive into key aspects of customers’ motivations and behaviors. It’s about learning how customers act and what will encourage them to take certain actions.

This is important when developing products. Deeply understanding your customers helps you deliver products that are easy to use, satisfying, and better at solving problems.

You’ll keep designing products that fall short if you don’t know your customers well and can’t see things from their point of view.

• What’s the difference between customer research, market research, and user research

You may have heard the terms customer research, market research, and user research. They might sound similar and have some related functions, but they are distinct types of research.

Market research is generally conducted in the early stages of product creation. Its role is to generate an understanding of the whole market, including what people need and want from products. This type of research typically identifies market readiness, size, competition, and demographics.

While market research is broad, customer research is more specific. It’s a process by which data and information collected during market research are analyzed, grouped, and evaluated. You can think of it as an extension of market research, though some organizations may perform these functions simultaneously.

The focus of user research is generally on understanding what is and isn’t working with current products and where helpful innovation can occur.

• Types of customer research

Primary and secondary research are some of the main types of customer research.

Quantitative and qualitative data are two types of data.

It’s helpful to know the difference between these groups to ensure you collect the right data and information for your project.

Primary vs. secondary research

Primary research is data collected directly by the organization from customers. It is obtained through research methods like surveys, focus groups, or analytics.

The advantage of primary research is having the power to obtain the data that’s most relevant for you. Knowing exactly what data has been collected and how to collate that information into meaningful insights is also more simple.

Secondary research is data collected by external sources, such as research groups, governments, and other companies. You can use it to discover more about customers.

Using data collected by other sources gives you less control, but it can save you money.

Ideally, a combination of both primary and secondary research will help you build a true picture of who your customers are.

Qualitative vs. quantitative data

You also need to understand which type of data will be most helpful for the relevant project.

Qualitative data is obtained directly from users, usually through methods such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, usability testing, and field studies.

This type of data can help designers understand why users do things and gain insights into how to solve their issues.

Quantitative data consists of numeral value measurements gained indirectly from users.

This type of data usually involves measurements like how much, how many, and how many times. Surveys, metrics, and user tests are some of the methods through which it can be collated.

• The best customer research methods

The best customer research method will be the one that’s most relevant and useful for your project. So, what works for one product may not be the best match for another. 

Before deciding on a customer research method, asking the following questions can be helpful:

What do we most need to know about our customers?

What do we not know about our customers?

Are we satisfied that our product has a market?

Do we truly understand our competitors?

Do we deeply understand our target market?

Is our product solving a real-world issue for people? Do we have data to back that up?

Is this product the best possible solution for our customers?

These questions can act as a starting point to discover knowledge gaps. They can also help your team choose the research methods that can plug any of these holes.

Customer surveys

Surveys involve asking customers a series of targeted questions. They’re a popular research method because they can be conducted in several ways, such as with an online questionnaire, phone call, or email.

Surveys can help organizations quickly discover large amounts of useful information. They are also relatively inexpensive, as many free templates are available online.

Keep in mind that a survey is only as good as its questions. Ensure that you’re asking questions that will help you discover the most relevant and helpful data about your customers.

Surveys that follow best practices include the following:

Open-ended questions to get the most information from customers

Consistent ranking scales to avoid ambiguity

Questions that are relevant to the team’s end goal

A short series of questions to avoid overwhelming participants

Customer interviews

Interviewing customers is one of the most straightforward and helpful ways to discover their views, wants, and needs.

Customer interviews include a team member or neutral party having a discussion with a customer. They offer the chance to discover new insights that might not otherwise have been uncovered.

This technique won’t enable you to gather quantitative data, but you will gain new insights into how your customers think and perceive products.

Here are some best practices to follow when conducting customer interviews:

Clarify answers. If there’s any ambiguity in what a customer said, make sure you follow up with further questions to aid true understanding.

Challenge your assumptions. Don’t bring any assumptions to the table. Instead, ask customers how they really think and feel. Having a neutral moderator can help remove any bias the team may bring.

Keep things open. Asking open-ended questions and offering a safe space to share answers are essential steps. Doing so will help you gain real thoughts, not hear what participants think they should say.

The benefit of real data should never be overlooked when it comes to customers. People might say they act in certain ways, but their behavior can show otherwise.

Analytics (in a product dashboard or other data collection method, for example) will reveal a great deal of information about customer behavior. It can help streamline your business, remove areas of friction, and improve the overall customer experience .

Metrics like heat maps, time spent, click tracking, and number of sessions can help you build a picture of your customer’s behavior.

Are customers failing to complete their payment information? Are people landing on your page and immediately clicking away? Is a particular aspect of your experience retaining your customers’ attention? These are just a few useful questions you can ask as you go through your analytics.

Focus groups

Focus groups are a well-known and popular research method. They help teams discover a large amount of information in a short time period.

In a focus group, a small number of people—usually eight or fewer—gather together to discuss products, pain points, preferences, and how they might engage with products.

Focus groups are run by a moderator or a person from the organization who can act neutrally. The moderator will set out a series of questions or topics for the group to discuss.

The benefits of focus groups include the following:

Gaining insights into how users perceive your product

Spontaneous responses you may not have discovered otherwise

Information about key problems and pain points

An understanding of what your users want from a solution

However, focus groups also present some challenges. Louder voices in a group may sway others to agree with the consensus rather than share their real opinions. To combat this, offer all members of the group a safe space to share their thoughts. Encourage varying responses.

Competitor analysis

Competitor analysis helps you dive into what the market is currently offering. It shows what competitors are doing well and what could be done better. This helps you create new products that solve your customers’ problems more effectively.

The following are best practices for conducting competitor analysis

Be clear on who your competitors are

Identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Clarify who holds the largest market share and why

Analyze online presence, reviews, and product information

Speak to competitors’ customers

Competitor analysis isn’t just about discovering information about your competitors; another goal is to turn information into action. You’ll ideally want to improve on what a competitor currently offers and provide a product that’s more satisfying for customers.

• How to conduct customer research

The following key steps will enable you to conduct useful customer research.

Set clear objectives

There’s a broad range of data and information that can be collected with customer research. However, not all of it will be relevant to your specific project. 

That’s why setting clear objectives from the outset is critical. All methods and data should lead back to these objectives.

Use multiple methods

One research method is unlikely to gather enough information for your project. And no one method is perfect.

Conducting multiple forms of research ensures you discover more about your customers and that your team gathers enough helpful data.

Find the right people

Your research won’t be effective if you’re talking to the wrong customer group. But how do you find the right people?

If you already have a product, it would be enormously beneficial to speak to your current customers . They have proven that they’re in your target audience.

Forums, advertising, local groups, and organizations are good ways to identify potential customers to participate.

Let’s say you’re designing a dog-sitting app. In this case, you’ll need to speak to dog owners who would like more flexibility to travel. You could find these people in online groups, through a local meeting, or even at a park that’s popular for dog walking.

Consider incentives

It’s also worth considering incentives. These can encourage the right people to get on board. For example, you might offer participants the chance to win a voucher or give them a small amount of cash to participate.

Ensure any incentives are meaningful for your target audience.

Develop meaningful insights

Collecting a range of data and information from multiple methods is helpful. However, it’s ultimately meaningless if that data isn’t collated into useful insights .

Ensure that data is accurately grouped and represented clearly and concisely so that the entire business can benefit from the learnings. You might need to hire a data analyst.

• Surprise and delight your customers

Keeping customers at the center of what you do is the only way to create products that are helpful for people.

All products should help customers, whether that’s by solving a problem, making their life a little bit easier, or entertaining them in some way. Customers should want to use your product and enjoy the process.

By researching your customers, you can truly understand how they feel , where their pain points are, how they behave in real-life situations, and what solutions would please them. Ultimately, all this helps you better serve your customers.

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

12 February 2024

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

• What customer research is
• Why it’s valuable for your business
• Different types of customer research
• Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

• Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
• What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

• Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
• 56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

• Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
• Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

• Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
• The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
• You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

• Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
• You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
• Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

• Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
• Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
• Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
• Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
• See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
• Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
• Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
• Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
• Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
• Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

I'm a developer turned marketer, working as a Product Marketer at SurveySparrow — A survey tool that lets anyone create beautiful, conversational surveys people love to answer.

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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: The Key to Meeting Customer Needs

Learn how to conduct market research that provides insights into your customers' behaviors, preferences, and pain points.

Digital marketing isn’t just ads and social media posts. Your digital marketing efforts will require you to deeply understand the wants, needs, and preferences of your customers. If you don’t understand your target audience, then your marketing and sales activities will probably suffer exponentially.

Every stage of marketing has something to do with customer research and meeting customer needs. For these and many other reasons, customer research should hold key importance in any marketing or sales effort you intend to embark on now and in the future.

While it’s important to know your customer inside and out, you may have to start from the beginning to figure things out.

For example, it’s a good idea to start with an ideal customer or customer persona that fits the goals of your business, but you might find through your marketing efforts and data collection that the people who gravitate to your brand are nothing like what you assumed.

For these and many, many other reasons, customer research is of the utmost importance. But what does customer research mean for a business? It’s far more than just the sum of the words. Here is a deeper look at customer research and how it forms the key to meeting customer needs.

What is customer research?

The term itself tells you what customer research entails. However, to formalize it, you can consider target market research as gathering and analyzing data about your target market or audience with the goal of learning:

• The needs of your potential customers
• What your customers prefer
• Behavior patterns of your customers
• Common customer problems and pain points

Armed with this information, your business can create effective marketing and sales strategies that target the right people, have a higher level of conversions, and generate far more sales.

No matter the goals of your brand, customer research will help you obtain them faster, more efficiently, and with less required trial and error to do so.

Customer or market research

Customer research and marketing research both help businesses understand their target audience and create effective marketing strategies. You may come across the terms customer research and market research used interchangeably. These are, in fact, two different things.

Customer research (also called target market research) focuses on gathering data about customers' needs, preferences, behavior, and pain points. Marketing research covers a broader area of research and includes customer research under its umbrella.

When researching a market, you will gather data about trends, competition, and various other factors, along with your customer research. That information will also factor into your marketing, sales, and growth strategies.

Benefits of customer research in marketing

Customer research comes along with several benefits, many of them absolutely crucial to your digital marketing or any other type of marketing effort. This is especially true for a new business, product, or service.

• Identifying target audience. You will come to know precisely who your brand should target as customer research will help you learn the demographics, interests, pain points, and behaviors of those people who your brand can benefit most.
• Understanding customer behavior. You will learn the habits and patterns of your ideal customer. What they do, where they hang out online, and what kind of activity they engage in.
• Creating relevant content. Knowing more about your customer will allow you to create marketing materials and content that speaks directly to them.
• Improving customer experience. Customer research allows for greater personalization, which increases the customer experience.
• Increasing conversion rates. Of course, all the benefits of target market research create more qualified leads and better conversions.

Every benefit of customer research creates and builds another benefit of customer research. You may not even know who your customers might be at the start, which is what makes this type of research an excellent place to start.

No matter the size of the business, initiative, or group, there are always benefits associated with customer research and continuing target market research.

Why is quantitative research key to building a business strategy?

Customer research forms a cornerstone of all business, marketing, and sales strategies. If you don’t know who to target, then your campaigns won’t work as intended, or won’t work at all.

Each of the previously mentioned benefits of customer research point to exactly why you should look at this research as key to building a business strategy.

Helps businesses understand customer needs

What does your ideal customer need? And, can your brand provide them with that need? These important questions can help you form the blueprint of your entire business or brand strategy . Understanding the needs of your ideal customer will help you deliver to them precisely what they’re looking for.

Knowing customer needs will also help you craft highly effective campaigns that do far more for your brand or business in both the short and long term.

Delivers insights for improving products and services

As you form your business strategy around the insights gained through your own market research, you can improve your products and services to cater to your ideal customer. This also applies to new products or services as well.

For example, you may find you have an underperforming content marketing strategy. Your customer research insights might inform you that the reason the strategy underperforms is that you’re using generic content, or it’s not speaking to anyone specifically.

Now that you know who your customers are, what they want, and how they consume content, you transform that underperforming content into content that actively engages and converts the potential leads your business needs the most.

Assists businesses to make informed decisions

Business strategy forms based on a series of decisions. If your decisions aren’t backed by data and analysis, then it might not work quite as well as you would like. Primary research insights can help to inform business decisions at every level.

Yes, you can use customer research data to create excellent marketing funnels, but you can also use that data to create full business plans, goals, and growth strategies for the entirety of your organization. This is the type of thing that large corporations do routinely.

A small business or even a single person with a marketable skill can use primary market research data to figure out in which direction they should point the overall efforts of their business.

Increases customer satisfaction and loyalty

People love to feel catered to. Consumer research helps you to facilitate that feeling in people by providing them with solutions to problems and giving them content that speaks directly to them. This process will give your brand satisfied and loyal customers.

Keep in mind that customer satisfaction and loyalty also lead to:

• Repeat business and increased lifetime value
• Cheerleading and positive word of mouth
• Increased reputation

Loyal customers become repeat customers , as they tend to return to brands they trust when it’s time to purchase again. They may stick around for a long time, which can lead to more customers with higher customer lifetime values ( CLV ).

That satisfaction and loyalty will also prompt customers, especially modern-day customers, to write reviews, cheerlead, and spread the good word about your brand or its offerings. Word-of-mouth is actually a viable form of marketing, a powerful one, and one you can passively receive benefits from.

Provides a competitive advantage

Customer research that informs business decisions will help you stay ahead of your competition. You can use consumer research to find more potential leads, but you can also use it to find new opportunities.

For example, your data may point to gaps in the market or underserved segments of people. While your competitors focus on what’s right in front of them, you can start making efforts to capture segments that can often go overlooked. Compare your potential results from these ventures against your competitors and you might see how you can outdistance them in one or more ways.

Enables businesses to establish long-term relationships with customers

As a brand or business, you want customers who will stay with you for the long term. Customer retention starts with a brand understanding their customer. Under most circumstances, people will not stick with a brand they feel doesn’t get them. Identifying needs and offering solutions to problems isn’t something that stays static.

Customer research will help you stay in step with your audience and they, in turn, will stay loyal to your brand. You can only achieve that kind of synergistic relationship through ongoing consumer research.

How to conduct target market research

You can perform customer market research in many ways. At a basic level, practically any effort you take that leads to greater customer insight counts as quantitative research. However, you’ll want to use methods that offer you more quantifiable data that you can use to make actionable decisions.

1. Define the research objectives and target audience

Start with a clear objective and define a target audience. Make a statement that defines why you’re conducting this customer research. What do you hope to accomplish with your research?

As indicated, if you don’t have data of your own to figure out who to target while conducting customer research, you can look to various sources to learn more about the people who may have pain points your brand can soothe.

2. Choose the research method and develop the research questions

With an objective and target audience defined, you can then look at the methods available to you for gathering customer insights.

You can break customer research methods down into several types. Primary research basically means research you conduct directly with your targets. Having a target audience also allows you to choose the type of research method that will serve you and them best. Interviews, surveys, and focus groups represent some types of primary research.

Secondary research comes from third parties. When you dig through the data compiled by and offered by others, you’re conducting secondary research. You should strive to conduct customer research in as many ways as you comfortably can. In this way, you can gain both quantitative and qualitative research data with which to conduct further research and create business strategies.

You may notice that most customer research methods have to do with answering questions. It's important to make your research questions specific and to the point. You want answers you can compare directly between research methods. Craft questions that directly tell you something about the customer.

Some examples include:

• What solutions did you try before you tried our service?
• How can we improve our product?
• What information do you feel our website is missing?
• What kind of promotion featuring our service would you have the most interest in?

Keep your questions focused and use your stated goal or objective to help you figure out which questions to ask and what information to seek from customers.

3. Collect, analyze, and interpret data

Once you have data, you need to analyze and interpret it to see exactly what it all means for your business marketing or sales strategies. Continue to collect and analyze data so that you can build one or more potential solutions for your brand. Look for patterns and common themes in the data and dig out the key insights you can leverage the most.

4. Use the research findings

You have the data; you have the insights, you’ve crunched numbers, identified trends, and know everything you need to know about your target audience. It’s time for implementation.

How that implementation looks will vary from business to business, but, at this point, you’ll want to look at marketing techniques and sales strategies that will work best with what you now know about your target audience.

Also, use your insights for your brand or business as well. Customer research data doesn’t just reveal things about your customers or potential customers, it can also reveal a lot about your business. If you find areas where you can and should improve, then use your data to work on those areas.

What are some customer research best practices?

Customer research will work differently between businesses, but there are a few things every brand or business can do to make the most of customer research.

Use more than one method to conduct target market research

Gain as much information as you can by running different customer research methods. Not all methods work best for all businesses, so it’s a good idea to try more than one method, regardless.

As you’ll want both quantitative and qualitative research data, it’s always more beneficial to conduct research geared toward one or the other. Then, you can combine the data. In addition, you may not know which methods actually work best for you, so you’ll want to test these methods until you find the ones that offer you the most benefit.

Always define your research goals and objectives

Before beginning your research, have a goal or objective. Defining what you want to achieve will always help you choose the research methods and research questions that will best serve your goal. Keep your customer research focused. Without a goal or objective, you can garner poor data, waste time, and waste valuable resources for very little gain.

Use professional tools and resources whenever possible

Many tools, services, and professionals exist specifically for helping brands to conduct customer research and other types of market research. When possible, you should always use those professional and polished assets.

For example, you’ll find a tremendous number of survey and quiz providers you can use for research, but you’ll quickly discover they’re not all built to scale. Some services will certainly have the tools you absolutely need, and some may even already have insight into the types of questions your business should ask the survey participants.

Look for knowledge and expertise when you’re looking for customer research solutions.

Follow up and repeat

Your customers will grow and change. Your customer research efforts will also need to grow in change. Your target market may age out of your product or service, while the new generation that fits that demographic may have no interest. Consider ongoing customer research as an absolute necessity for your brand.

Choose a service with customer research tools that can scale along with your brand while also staying with the times. When looking into how to do market research, you’ll probably notice just how many services you might need to involve.

Mailchimp offers a wide variety of professional audience management and marketing tools, including customer journey roadmaps and professional surveys. If you want to start or elevate a customer research strategy, then MailChimp can give you the tools and resources to give you the results you need.

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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 101: A Complete Guide! (Importance & Types)

Know your customers or perish – over 90% of startups fail due to a lack of market need. Ouch! But fear not, customer research is here to save the day. By truly understanding your target audience, you can create products and messaging that resonate.

In this ultimate guide, we’ll explore the what, why, and how of effective customer research. You’ll learn both quantitative and qualitative methods to uncover real insights from potential and current customers. With the right research game plan, you can identify customer pain points, behaviors, and needs to drive innovation and loyalty.

We’ll cover essential techniques like surveys, interviews, focus groups, and user testing. Whether you’re an enterprise or a scrappy startup, you’ll find proven ways to maximize research on any budget. Ready to get inside the minds and hearts of customers? Let’s dive into the importance of research for business success! This comprehensive guide will equip you with the tools to avoid failure and align your offerings with what buyers want.

What is Customer Research?

Have you ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your favorite companies? The reality is, they spend a lot of time trying to get inside their customers’ heads. Conducting customer research is like doing a deep dive into what real people really want.

Businesses use research tools like surveys, interviews and focus groups to literally ask customers questions.

• “What matters most to you?”
• “Which parts of our product could use improvement?” and
• “What do you hope to see in the future?”

Market research helps too – keeping an ear to the ground on changes happening outside helps adjust to new customer needs. Testing things out with a small group of people before huge launches also saves companies from potential embarrassment!

All this valuable input guides important choices about everything from how things are designed to how customers learn about brands. It’s basically like a customer think-tank to solve problems and fuel innovation.

At the end of the day, customer research is about genuinely understanding perspectives from the user side. It’s how businesses stay in sync with real human desires and build genuine connections worth sticking around for. So speak up – your honest feedback is what keeps brands on their toes!

Now that we’ve covered what customer research entails, the next section will explore why it is so critically important for businesses to conduct thorough customer research on a regular basis.

Why is Customer Research Important?

To truly succeed in business, you need to understand the perspectives and priorities of your customers. Regular customer research provides invaluable insights that can guide strategic decision making. By learning directly from the people you serve, you gain a deeper understanding of their true needs and priorities. Here are 5 key reasons why actively researching customers is so critical:

1. Product Development

Customer feedback is a treasure trove of information that can drive product development . By actively seeking out customer opinions, you can pinpoint the exact features, functionalities, or improvements they desire. This is a more targeted approach than simply guessing what customers might want. Such a strategy can lead to products and services that not only satisfy existing customer needs but also attract new customers. It lowers the risk of product failure and increases the likelihood of customer loyalty and repeat purchases.

2. Identify Market Trends

Market trends can shape the success or failure of a business. Through customer research, you can spot emerging patterns in consumer behavior, preferences, and decision-making processes. This can include shifts in preferences for digital shopping, desire for sustainable products, or emerging technologies. Being able to identify these trends before they become mainstream gives you a competitive edge. You can swiftly adapt your offerings to meet changing demands, thus staying relevant in the market.

Read More:  Market Research 101: How To Conduct Research Like A Pro!

3. Pricing Strategy

Pricing is more than just a cost-recovery mechanism; it’s a powerful tool for communicating a product’s value. Customer research can reveal how much customers are willing to pay for your product and the factors influencing their perception of its value. With this information, you can develop a pricing strategy that maximizes profit while ensuring your product or service still appears attractive to customers. This can involve techniques like value-based pricing, psychological pricing, or price skimming, depending on your findings.

4. Effective Marketing

Understanding your customers’ preferences, habits, and motivations allows you to create more effective marketing campaigns. Knowing which channels your customers prefer (e.g., email, social media, print, etc.) helps you reach them more efficiently. Additionally, knowing their motivations and pain points allows you to craft messages that resonate more deeply with them. This increases the chances of converting prospects into customers and improves the return on investment (ROI) of your marketing efforts.

5. Customer Retention

Acquiring new customers is often more costly than retaining existing ones. Therefore, understanding what keeps customers loyal to your brand is crucial. Regular customer research can uncover the key drivers of satisfaction and loyalty, as well as reasons for customer churn. This can include factors like product quality, customer service, pricing, or brand reputation. By addressing any issues and continually meeting customers’ needs , you can increase customer lifetime value (CLV), which in turn boosts profitability. Regular research keeps you in touch with customer sentiment and helps you maintain strong, lasting relationships with your customers.

Read More:  Customer Loyalty Program: What is it & What are the Benefits? [Examples]

By gaining real customer perspectives, businesses can make more informed decisions to better serve their audiences now and into the future.

Understanding the importance of customer research is key, and there are various methods used to collect important customer data. In the next section, we will explore the different types of customer research that can be conducted.

Types of Customer Research

Customer research is a cornerstone of successful business strategy. It empowers organizations to gain insights into their target audience, understand their needs, preferences, and behaviors, and make informed decisions to improve products, services, and overall customer satisfaction. Four primary types of customer research play pivotal roles in this process: qualitative, quantitative, primary, and secondary research. In this section, we will delve into these four types of customer research, shedding light on their significance and how they can be effectively applied.

1. Qualitative Research

Qualitative research involves gathering non-numerical data and insights. This method includes techniques such as focus groups, in-depth interviews, and ethnographic research. Qualitative research is ideal for uncovering underlying motivations, emotions, and opinions of customers. It provides rich, descriptive information that helps businesses understand the “why” behind customer actions and preferences, allowing for more targeted decision-making.

2. Quantitative Research

Quantitative research, in contrast to qualitative research, focuses on numerical data and statistical analysis. Surveys, questionnaires, and experiments are common quantitative research tools. This approach is essential for collecting data on customer behaviors, preferences, and trends at scale. It provides quantifiable metrics and enables businesses to make data-driven decisions, such as product feature prioritization and pricing strategies.

Read More:  Data-driven Marketing: Steps, Best Practices, Challenges & More!

3. Primary Research

Primary research involves collecting firsthand data specifically for a company’s unique needs. This can be achieved through surveys, interviews, observations, or experiments conducted directly by the business. Primary research is highly tailored and provides up-to-date, relevant information tailored to a company’s specific goals and objectives. It is particularly useful when seeking insights into niche markets or when addressing specific business challenges.

4. Secondary Research

Secondary research involves gathering and analyzing existing data and information from external sources such as industry reports, academic studies, and market research published by others. This cost-effective approach helps companies stay informed about industry trends, competitor strategies, and customer demographics without conducting new research from scratch. Secondary research is valuable for benchmarking, trend analysis, and validating primary research findings.

By employing various types of customer research, including qualitative, quantitative, primary, and secondary research, companies can gain a comprehensive understanding of their customers, markets, and competitors. Armed with these insights, businesses can fine-tune their strategies, create more customer-centric products and services, and ultimately thrive in today’s dynamic and competitive business landscape.

Now that we’ve explored the different types of customer research, the next section will cover effective ways to actually conduct this research.

Effective Ways To Conduct Customer Research

Conducting effective customer research is crucial for businesses looking to understand their target audience, improve their products or services, and ultimately, boost their bottom line. By gaining insights into customer preferences, pain points, and behavior, companies can make informed decisions that drive growth and customer satisfaction. In this section, we will explore 7 effective ways to conduct customer research.

1. Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires are versatile tools for gathering valuable customer insights. They allow you to collect structured data on a wide range of topics, from product satisfaction to demographic information. Ensure that your surveys are concise, well-designed, and easy to complete to maximize response rates. Online survey platforms like SurveyMonkey and Google Forms make it simple to create and distribute surveys to your target audience.

2. Customer Interviews

One-on-one interviews provide an in-depth understanding of your customers’ thoughts and feelings. Conduct both structured and unstructured interviews to dig deeper into specific issues or to uncover unexpected insights. Make sure to create an open and non-judgmental environment where customers feel comfortable sharing their opinions. These interviews can be conducted in person, over the phone, or via video conferencing.

3. Social Media Monitoring

Social media platforms are treasure troves of customer feedback and sentiment. Use social media listening tools to track mentions, comments, and reviews related to your brand or industry. Analyzing this data can reveal emerging trends, customer concerns, and opportunities for engagement. Engage with your audience on social media to build rapport and gain more insights organically.

4. Customer Analytics

Leverage web analytics tools like Google Analytics or customer relationship management (CRM) systems to track user behavior on your website or within your product. Analyze metrics such as click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates to identify pain points and areas for improvement. By understanding how customers interact with your online presence, you can optimize their experience and increase conversion rates.

5. Online Forums and Communities

Online forums and communities dedicated to your industry or niche can provide a wealth of information. Participate in these communities or simply observe discussions to identify common challenges, desires, and preferences among your target audience. Platforms like Reddit, Quora, and specialized industry forums are excellent places to start.

6. Competitor Analysis

Analyzing your competitors can offer valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences. Study their customer reviews, social media engagement, and market positioning to identify gaps in the market or areas where you can differentiate your offering. Understanding why customers choose your competitors over you can help you refine your strategy.

7. A/B Testing

A/B testing involves comparing two or more variations of a webpage, email, or advertisement to determine which one performs better with your target audience. By systematically testing different elements like headlines, images, or call-to-action buttons, you can make data-driven improvements to optimize customer engagement and conversion rates.

By using surveys, interviews, social media monitoring, analytics, online communities, competitor analysis, and A/B testing, you can gain a 360-degree view of your customers’ preferences and behaviors. This knowledge will enable you to make informed decisions, enhance your products or services, and ultimately, build stronger, lasting customer relationships. Remember that customer research is an ongoing process; regularly revisit these methods to stay attuned to evolving customer needs and market dynamics.

And there you have it – the complete lowdown on customer research! We covered what it is, why bothering to listen to your patrons is pivotal, different ways to gather intel, and tips for doing it well.

While digging deep into customer minds may sound tedious, we hope this guide showed how fascinating and fruitful the process can be. Staying curious about your crew keeps your finger on the pulse of what truly fuels their passions.

So don’t be afraid to spy on them in action, quiz big crowds, chat one-on-one, or analyze clues hidden in the numbers. Customers have a story to share if you make the effort to understand their perspective.

Turning feedback into slick new perks or smoother experiences will wow existing fans and catch the eyes of potential newbies. With an open ear, you can design offerings that resonate authentically instead of going rogue on assumptions alone.

Research may require dedication, but the rewards of truly knowing your people makes it a total blast. Now get out there and start some conversational focus circles, surveys, observations – whatever fire sparks your customer curiosity! The more you explore what makes them tick, the more success you’ll attract.

Further Reads:

What is Customer Delight? Learn More!

Customer Touch Points & How To Identify Them? (Examples & Tips)

AIDA Model: How To Connect & Engage With Your Customers?

Customer Journey Map: Definition, Importance, and Process!

User Persona: What is it & How to Create it?

What is Diversity & Inclusion in The Workplace? (Definition & Benefits)

Social Media Skills: A Quick Guide To Improve Them! (Types & Examples)

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How to build a successful customer success framework, what is customer churn: learn how to calculate & reduce it, customer needs: most common types you should know about, customer loyalty program: what is it & what are the benefits [examples], 9 help desk software every business must use.

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• What is Strategy?
• Business Models
• Developing a Strategy
• Strategic Planning
• Competitive Advantage
• Growth Strategy
• Market Strategy
• Customer Strategy
• Geographic Strategy
• Product Strategy
• Service Strategy
• Pricing Strategy
• Distribution Strategy
• Sales Strategy
• Marketing Strategy
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Organizational Strategy
• HR Strategy – Organizational Design
• HR Strategy – Employee Journey & Culture
• Process Strategy
• Procurement Strategy
• Cost and Capital Strategy
• Business Value
• Market Analysis
• Problem Solving Skills
• Strategic Options
• Business Analytics
• Strategic Decision Making
• Process Improvement
• Project Planning
• Team Leadership
• Personal Development
• Leadership Maturity Model
• Leadership Team Strategy
• The Leadership Team
• Leadership Mindset
• Communication & Collaboration
• Problem Solving
• Decision Making
• People Leadership
• Strategic Execution
• Executive Coaching
• Strategy Coaching
• Business Transformation
• Strategy Workshops
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• Who’s Joe?

CUSTOMER STRATEGY

"There is only one boss. The customer. And, he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else. "

- Sam Walton, Founder of Walmart

Customer strategy is one of the most important types of strategy to master, given the entire business model must be aligned to efficiently and effectively fulfill the customer's needs better than the competition . Learn everything you need to know about customer strategy by an Ex-McKinsey consultant . This extensive guide includes how to develop your customer strategy and target personas, with frameworks, case studies, and examples.

THE BIG PICTURE ON CUSTOMER STRATEGY

1. Who is your Target Customer(s)? The right target customer is key to aligning all of the strategies across a business model .

2. It's All About Customer Value The better you understand your customer, the better you can drive customer value for them.

• 3. Customer Personas The output of a customer strategy are descriptive, insightful and actionable customer personas.
• 4. Customer-Centric Companies Great companies filter decisions and actions through the customer lens.

Customer Strategy is All About Your Target Customer(s)

Customer strategy is solving for your target customer(s), which will serve as a focus for the organization , decision-making, and other strategies.

The typical output of a customer strategy is a customer persona, which outlines salient descriptors of your target customer, which are relevant and helpful in making strategic decisions .

As with most things strategy, the simpler, the better. While I've seen some companies try to navigate up to ten customer segments, typically, those that have defined one, or maybe two target customers do a much better job of customizing their value proposition , go-to-market, and entire business model to their customers' needs.

The below example of a target customer persona (The Jones) for a sporting goods retailer would go a long way in helping shape differentiated strategies to serve "The Jones" better.

A GREAT CUSTOMER STRATEGY ALIGNS AND FOCUSES A BUSINESS MODEL

Truly understanding who your target customers are is a fundamental step to almost any type of strategy. One of the easiest ways to improve a company is to establish and internally publicize the target customer(s) and their persona(s).

If everyone in an organization truly understands who the target customer is then they can:

1. Differentiate the value proposition to the customers' needs

2. Supercharge & align go-to-market strategies to them

3. Customize every facet of the business to the target customers

4. Ultimately, drive better customer and financial value than competitors

There are 2 Strategic Options with Target Customers

The right target customers can unlock the growth potential of a business. Most companies need to focus on their target customers, by better defining and evangelizing their existing target customers, or by reducing the number of customer targets they are pursuing. In some instances, a business has the growth option to expand into new target customers, typically after most other growth options have been exhausted (e.g., new products and services, go-to-market, geographies), since expanding into new customer segments can be one of the most expensive and risky strategic growth options.

Below are the typical conditions that lead to either focusing or expanding customer targets.

• Fragmented business
• Org drowning in complexity
• Lack of compelling value proposition
• Don't understand the customer
• Winning with existing customers
• Superior value proposition
• Clear plan to dominate new target(s)
• High business model synergies

BROOKS SHOES BEGAN THEIR TURNAROUND WITH A CUSTOMER STRATEGY

Brooks, the running shoe company, was founded all the way back in 1914. In the mid-'70s, Brooks became the third-largest running brand behind Nike and Adidas. From 1978 to 1980, sales skyrocketed from $14 million to $43 million. With the growth came significant quality issues, which led to financial mismanagement and bankruptcy in 1982.

After being acquired out of bankruptcy for $1.25 million, the 1980s and 1990s were marred by eight consecutive years of losses, driven by an unsuccessful attempt at following Nike's strategy of expanding into tennis, basketball, baseball, and football with expensive endorsement deals.

The Target Customer - 35-54 Year Old Runners

In 2001, with $65 million in revenue, but yet again on the verge of bankruptcy, Jim Weber took over as CEO of Brooks. As Jim explains it in an Inc. article, "we were everything to everybody and were sixth, seventh, or eighth at everything.”

The foundation of most growth strategies is a focused target customer. One of the first steps Jim took as CEO was to eliminate customer segments from Brooks, including basketball, baseball and tennis players, and the family looking for inexpensive kids shoes. He focused the entire company on the customer target of 35-54-year-old runners.

Not only was the heritage of Brooks in running but there was also a nice macro tailwind in running participation, highlighted by the chart below.

Aligning Brooks Strategy to 35-54 year old runners

Once Jim focused on 35-54-year-old runners, the next step was to align all of Brooks' business model strategies to this target customer, including the value proposition, go-to-market, and operational strategies. He started by focusing the value proposition on $80+ premium running shoes, the sweet spot for 35-54-year-old runners. This customer focus was a dramatic step for Brooks, as Jim had his team cut half of the product line, which was worth $30 million in sales.

The next step was to focus his go-to-market strategy to better serve 35-54- year-old runners. In parallel to eliminating 50% of his product line, he focused his sales team and distribution on specialty running shoe stores, removing discount retailers and low-price sporting goods from distribution, including his largest customer, Big 5 Sporting Goods. Instead of re-marketing the company, he re-directed the marketing budget to fund the design and development of the next line of Brooks' premium running shoes. As Jim said in a NY Times article, “The big brands have huge marketing budgets, but the runner looking for the best shoe is the one in charge.”

Once the premium running shoe line was filled out, Jim then focused his marketing efforts on more than 500 grassroots running events across the country, which were highly attended by his target customer of 35-54-year-old runners.

With the value proposition and go-to-market strategies aligned with the needs of 35-54-year-old runners, Jim aligned his organizational and functional strategies to drive the efficiency and effectiveness of developing and delivering the value proposition and go-to-market strategies. He backed up his goal of building the best running shoes for his target customer, by creating a core competency in technical running shoe product development , with a team of product engineers and an advanced running lab.

Brooks' customer strategy drove 18% annual growth

Brooks focus on serving the needs of 35-54-year-old runners has paid off. Jim and his team grew Brooks' revenue from $65 million in 2001 to $500 million in 2014. In 2014 Brooks was #1 in specialty running stores with 31% market share. In 2004, Russell Athletics acquired Brooks for $115 million. Subsequently, in 2006 Berkshire Hathaway purchased Russell Athletics, and spun out Brooks as a separate operating company.

The World of Potential Target Customers

There are so many ways to think about and describe a target customer, which can be distilled into five dimensions (above). In the case of Brooks, they used demographic (mid-to-high income 35-54-year-olds), affinity (runners), and probably a bit of psychographics (likes technology, doesn't follow the masses) to define their target customer.

What customer dimensions are used to define your target customer?

If you are in a business-to-business (B2B) market, then the dimensions look slightly different. Instead of demographics, there are firmographics, which are attributes of the business, such as industry, size, and location. In B2B, affinity is more about the products and services a company may use. Also, the psychographic dimension deals more with the buying process, decision-makers, and influencers.

What is the right breadth of target customer?

This question trips up a lot of companies, especially small and mid-size companies, which often too broadly define their target customers. They have a tough time tailoring a differentiated value proposition and go-to-market for their customers because they are trying to be everything to everyone. In the 1990s, Brooks was trying to be a mass shoe brand, when it didn't have the scale to pull it off. To turn around the company, they went niche and grew 18% annually for 15 years. Below are some thoughts on niche, broad, or mass target customers.

What is the right number of target segments?

This is another question that trips up many leadership teams. They listen too much to the data scientists who tell them "the cluster analysis created eight distinct segments." While that may be the theory, the reality is most successful companies focus on one or two target customers. Why? Because, all the employees that are making strategic decisions every day, can only really filter those decisions through one, maybe two customer personas. It is challenging to create a differentiated value proposition and align organizational execution for more than two target customers.

Though, when it comes to marketing execution or some digital value propositions , the gold is in micro-segments and one-to-one personalization, which is possible given the current capabilities in data mining, analytics , and highly targeted marketing channels (e.g., email, online advertising , social).

THERE ARE FOUR STEPS TO CREATING A CUSTOMER STRATEGY

Step 1: conduct research on the market & customers.

Step 1 of a customer strategy project is to conduct customer, market and competitive research utilizing both internal and external resources. The goal of the research is to start shaping the architecture of a customer survey, especially the value proposition and go-to-market sections, and scoping out potential areas to deep dive into for further validation and insight.

INTERNAL RESEARCH What internal data & research do we have or can create? What insights are there? Who are our most valuable customers?

Typical analyses include: - Internal Research & Analysis - Pareto , Segmentation & Trend Analysis

EXTERNAL RESEARCH What market & trend research is there on customers? How is the market segmented? Who are competitors targeting?

Typical analyses and tools used include: - Market Research - Problem Solving

HYPOTHESIZE What is important to customers? What are potential customer segments to focus on? Why? How will we decide?

Typical customer research tools include: - Brainstorming - Problem Solving

STEP 2: DESIGN & EXECUTE THE CUSTOMER SURVEY

Regardless of whether you have a defined target customer, conduct a customer strategy survey every few years. We live in a time where dynamics change overnight, competitors pop up from out of nowhere, and generational divides are ever-evolving. We're not going to cover proper survey design and execution (if you need help with that, drop us a note). Instead, let's focus on what you are trying to accomplish with a survey and the major elements to cover.

Too many companies go for the "what sticks on the wall" approach to surveys, as they throw in the entire kitchen sink, while often omitting some key aspects. One retailer I worked with conducted a survey that turned out to be fairly useless. They didn't include their primary vendors as a choice for customers to purchase products from, even though 30% of their vendors' sales were from direct-to-consumer channels (online, factory stores). By omitting vendor channels they didn't generate any insight into one of the largest market and customer dynamics.

Be very thoughtful and strategic in survey design. You have 15, maybe 20 minutes with survey respondents before they start giving you junk and dropping out. Prioritize what is important to ask regarding customer descriptors, the value proposition, and the go-to-market. When you think you are done with the design, go back and be clever about how you can shrink it more, and drive more insight. A well-designed and executed customer survey is the foundation to develop excellent strategies across your entire business model .

DESCRIPTIVE CUSTOMER DIMENSIONS What are the important demographic, psychographic, behavioral, affinity, and value attributes for target customers?

Typical analyses include: - Problem Solving - Brainstorming

VALUE PROPOSITION What do customers value in the products, services & pricing…now vs. in the future? How do we compare vs. the competition ? Typical analyses include: - Polling - Ethnography - Brainstorming

GO-TO-MARKET How do customers learn, decide, buy, use? What are effective marketing, sales, and distribution strategies? What are the trends influencing purchasing decisions?

Typical analyses include: - Research - Problem Solving - Brainstorming

STEP 3: DETERMINE THE RIGHT CUSTOMER TARGET(S)

Once you have executed the survey and cleaned up and normalized the survey data, it is time for the systematic analysis and synthesis of the data. You want experienced data science professionals working alongside business experts to drive the continuous hypothesis creation and validation of insights. While there is much science behind the analysis, the art is in what you are looking for and how best to synthesize the findings.

Once you tease out potential target customer segments from all of the analysis, then you move on to engage the leadership team in problem solving workshops to deliberate and decide on the right target customer to unlock the growth potential of the business.

GENERATE INSIGHTS What are the “aha” insights on customer segments, make-up, value, trends, gaps, and opportunities? Insights on competitors?

Typical analyses include: - Cross-tabs & Segmentation Analysis - Statistical Analysis - Problem Solving

SYNTHESIZE What are the top potential target customers? Why? What are the decision criteria and scores for the targets?

Typical analyses include: - Decision Matrix - Problem Solving - Storyboarding

DELIBERATE & DECIDE Which target customer(s) provide the most value potential for the company? Why? What are the implications?

Typical analyses include: - Prioritization Matrix - Facilitated Workshops

STEP 4: EMBRACE THE TARGET CUSTOMER IN STRATEGIES & DECISIONS

Once a team settles on a target customer the hard work begins with getting all the employees' minds to embrace the target customer in their thought process , problem solving , strategy development , and decision-making . Evangelizing is the first step, which is change management 101. Commit the resources for a robust internal marketing campaign. Also, reinforce the target customer in communications and throughout the training, materials, and artifacts throughout the employee journey . Put in place the metrics and governance to track success with the target customers. Most importantly, ensure all of the strategies (e.g., business model , value proposition, go-to-market, and functional) align with the needs of the target customers.

EVANGELIZE What is the plan to market the target customer to employees, and drive change management in decision-making?

Typical analyses include: - Marketing Campaign - Change Management - Employee Journey

MEASURE What target customer success metrics should be measured and reported on? Will there be incentives?

Typical analyses include: - Business Intelligence - Governance

ALIGN STRATEGIES How will other strategies align with and differentiate for the needs and persona of the target customer?

Typical analyses include: - Strategic Planning - Brainstorming - Workshops

FINAL THOUGHTS ON TARGET CUSTOMER STRATEGY

The majority of companies we work with either don't have a defined target customer or need to define their target customer better. Once they determine the right target customer, solving the rest of the strategies across a business model becomes easier. Customer strategy projects aren't difficult if you employ the proper methodologies and problem solving. The projects are always full of insight, fun, and impact.

If you want to talk about your customer strategy with an expert, set up some time with Joe Newsum , a Mckinsey Alum, and the author of this content and website.

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Explore other types of strategy.

BIG PICTURE WHAT IS STRATEGY? BUSINESS MODEL COMP. ADVANTAGE GROWTH

TARGETS MARKET CUSTOMER GEOGRAPHIC

VALUE PROPOSITION PRODUCT SERVICE PRICING

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The Ultimate Guide to Conducting Customer Research: Tips and Tricks

Customer research is an important step for businesses to take when attempting to understand their customer base better. By gaining greater insight into the behaviors, preferences and opinions of customers, businesses can develop more effective strategies to improve customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. Knowing how to conduct customer research is key to obtaining invaluable insights that can help businesses grow and adapt to changing customer needs.

Introduction to Customer Research

Customer research is the process of gathering, analyzing, and interpreting data about customers. This data can be collected through surveys, interviews, focus groups, and other market research activities. The aim of customer research is to gain a better understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of customers, as well as their preferences and needs. This information can then be used to inform strategies for improving customer experiences and developing new products and services.

In addition to helping companies better understand their customers, customer research can also provide valuable insights into customer trends, competitor strategies, customer service expectations, customer satisfaction levels, and sales forecasts. By staying up to date on customer insights, businesses are better able to anticipate customer needs, identify new opportunities, and develop strategies for long-term growth.

Customer research can also be used to measure the effectiveness of marketing campaigns and to identify areas of improvement. By understanding customer feedback, companies can make adjustments to their marketing strategies to ensure they are reaching the right audience and delivering the right message. Additionally, customer research can help businesses identify potential new markets and develop strategies for entering them.

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Why Customer Research is Important

Customer research is a valuable tool for businesses that want to remain competitive in today’s marketplace. By taking the time to understand the needs and preferences of their customers, businesses can create more effective marketing campaigns, develop better products and services, provide more personalized customer service experiences, and create more effective loyalty programs.

In addition to helping businesses become more competitive, customer research can also help reduce customer churn. By learning more about what customers enjoy and don’t enjoy about their experience with the company, businesses can make changes or develop new strategies to improve customer satisfaction and increase retention rates.

Finally, customer research can help businesses identify new trends in their industry. By staying up-to-date on the latest market trends, companies can gain a competitive edge by being first to market with new products and services that address customer needs.

Customer research can also help businesses identify potential opportunities for growth. By understanding customer needs and preferences, businesses can develop new products and services that meet those needs and capitalize on emerging trends in the market. Additionally, customer research can help businesses identify new target markets and develop strategies to reach those customers.

Types of Customer Research

There are several different types of customer research that businesses can use to gain more insights into customers. Surveys are one of the most common methods for gathering customer data. Surveys can be used to gather feedback about a variety of topics such as product features, customer satisfaction levels, or marketing campaigns. Surveys can be sent out via email or distributed in person at events.

Interviews are another popular method for conducting customer research. Interviews allow businesses to ask open-ended questions and get in-depth responses from customers. This type of research is best suited for gaining qualitative data about customers’ thoughts and feelings about a product or service.

Focus groups are a popular method for obtaining feedback from a group of customers. In a focus group setting, customers are invited to discuss a particular topic or product in detail. This type of research is ideal for gathering feedback from multiple customers at once as well as gaining insights into interactions between customers.

Observational research is another type of customer research that businesses can use. This type of research involves observing customers in their natural environment to gain insights into their behavior. Observational research can be used to gain insights into how customers interact with a product or service, as well as how they use it in their daily lives.

Best Practices for Conducting Customer Research

When conducting customer research, it’s important that businesses follow certain best practices. First, it’s important to clearly define the research goals so that the results can be used effectively. Knowing what insights need to be obtained before starting the research will help ensure that the right questions are asked and the right data is gathered.

It’s also important to ensure that the methods used to conduct the research are reliable. If a survey is used, it’s important to ensure that the questions are worded accurately and clearly so that the responses are meaningful. It’s also important to ensure that the questions are not leading or biased in any way.

When using interviews or focus groups to conduct customer research, it’s important to ensure that all participants are comfortable with discussing their opinions without any pressure. It’s also important to ensure that all participants are given ample opportunity to express their opinions without being interrupted or steered in any particular direction.

Finally, it’s important to analyze the data collected carefully. By taking the time to analyze the data thoroughly and draw meaningful conclusions, businesses can gain valuable insights into their customers that can help inform future strategies and decisions.

Conducting customer research can provide businesses with invaluable insights about their customers that can help them improve customer satisfaction and engagement. By following best practices for conducting customer research and taking the time to analyze the data collected, businesses can gain the knowledge they need to make informed decisions that will help them grow and adapt to changing customer needs.

It is also important to ensure that customer research is conducted regularly. By conducting customer research on a regular basis, businesses can stay up to date on customer needs and preferences, allowing them to make timely adjustments to their strategies and offerings.

How to Use User Personas to Improve Product Development?

Creating empathetic user personas for better customer understanding, the power of user feedback in improving user experience.

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

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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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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.

Want a free landing page teardown?

We’ll provide a data-driven critique of the usability and effectiveness of your site free of charge.

About the Author

Laura bosco.

Laura Bosco is our Lead Content Marketer at The Good and a phenomenal freelance writer. She helps us translate our thoughts, opinions, and client experiences into written products that are both entertaining and educational. You can learn more about her background and her services at www.laurabosco.com.

7 Steps to create a data-driven customer insights strategy

What is a customer insight strategy, what should you include in your consumer insight strategy, how to create a customer insights framework and strategy: 7 steps, get ahead of the competition with a great customer insights strategy.

A customer insights strategy is your plan for how you will gather and analyze data about your customers, specifically about their needs, preferences, and behaviors. A data-driven strategy allows you to make informed decisions about your products, services and overall customer experience with speed and confidence.

It’s important to emphasize that your customer insight strategy should be driven by data, which will help you lift your decision-making game to the next level. Focusing on real data helps you spot trends, patterns and opportunities that may have been overlooked if were to go ahead based on assumptions or unstructured information.

If you want to sharpen your competitive edge, here’s how you can create your very own data-driven customer insights strategy in 7 simple steps.

Let’s first clarify what we mean by a customer insight strategy.

Businesses collect all kinds of data from their customers all the time. Some do it without clear intention—they just gather and store a bunch of data and hope that when they need some customer insight, they have the data they need. However, some businesses gather and use customer insight proactively. That’s what we like to see!

Having a plan in place for how you will collect customer insights and what you will be using them for, is called having a customer insight strategy—and we highly recommend it.

Your customer insight strategy might involve conducting surveys, analyzing customer reviews, tracking customer behavior on your website and monitoring other data points. You decide at what moments you gather specific data, instead of waiting for data to organically build up.

You could send out surveys to customers who ordered your product 4 weeks ago, or try to fetch NPS scores from users who just signed up for your product.

Check out the top consumer research software for your business

Make smarter decisions for your brand, and show clear ROI on your marketing spend by gathering fast, reliable insights with consumer research software you can trust.

What you’ll ask and when you’ll ask it, is determined by your commercial goals and the specific customer journey that your customers experience.

You might wonder: what makes customer insights different from market research? They are related, but not the same thing. Market research is a much broader term that includes a wide range of research activities. Customer insight strategies narrow it down to gathering data on the needs, behaviors, and preferences of your customers.

Take a lesson from D2C flowers brand Bloom & Wild: they used consumer research to find out what people really thought about red roses on Valentine’s Day.

By carrying out research among their target audience, Bloom & Wild found the results backed up the doubts they’d had internally, which revealed an opportunity to not only to improve the product offering and experience for customers, but also to generate press coverage for Bloom & Wild all under the No Red Roses campaign. This resulted in record sales growth.

We found that 79% of people would prefer to receive a thoughtful gift rather than something traditional, like red roses. 58% of people thought red roses were a cliché. And they actually came bottom as the least favorite gift that people had received for Valentine’s Day. So that gave us confidence that we had correctly sensed growing reluctance towards those sort of Valentine’s Day clichés.

The survey that we ran on Attest really helped give us confidence in the decision to stop selling red roses. But also, with strong stats like that, we were confident that we’d have a compelling story to take to the press that would help us on that goal of being the most talked about brand. Charlotte Langley, Brand & Communications Director at Bloom & Wild

Every customer insight strategy will look a little different, but the best ones all have these elements in common.

Clearly defined objectives

Don’t start asking your customers all kinds of questions if you don’t know what you’ll be doing with the data.

Have a clear understanding of what you want to achieve. This could be anything from increasing sales to improving customer satisfaction.

A broad range of research methods and tools

A robust customer insights strategy involves a complete approach to data collection—just numbers or only written feedback can lead to false assumptions and wrong decisions.

Combine quantitative research methods (such as standard surveys) and qualitative research methods (such as focus groups, in-depth interviews or surveys with open-ended questions) to gain a more holistic understanding of your customers. Like little Moons did, with success.

Our social media following would suggest our audience were late teens/early 20s women. But Attest consumer profiling identified that the people driving most of the volume in premium ice cream are actually affluent 30+ year olds with the disposable income to habitually purchase a premium product like Little Moons. Ross Farquhar, Marketing Director at Little Moons

A strong focus on customer behavior

A winning consumer insight strategy is centered around understanding customer behavior. Don’t get sidetracked by gathering too much information about your product or messaging (there are other surveys and projects where you should totally focus on these areas).

The customer insights will inform that eventually, but you should keep the focus on the consumer! This means identifying customer pain points, motivations and preferences.

Make the most of your data by using our consumer profiling template —our in-house research experts have created this template to give you the perfect starting point for your customer insight project.

Smart use of available technologies and automation

Make the most of the modern times we live in. There’s no shortage of tools out there for data analytics, social media listening, and artificial intelligence to gather and analyze large amounts of customer data.

They can help you identify patterns and trends that would be difficult to detect through manual analysis. Save time, energy and cash by using a tool that means you can use customer insights effectively!

Follow-up roadmaps and action plans

A great customer insight strategy will give you actionable insights. Have a plan of action in place to act on them. That means willingness to change, budget, time and resources: don’t let that data go stale.

Plans for ongoing research

Gathering customer insights should not be a one-time event, but an ongoing process. It’s important to continually gather customer feedback and monitor customer behavior to identify new trends and opportunities.

The right timing

There are several moments to consider for gathering customer insights. Here are a few moments in the customer journey you could jump on:

• Pre-purchase: At this time, customers are still researching products or services, comparing prices and evaluating options. You can gather customer insights by sending surveys, analyzing their search queries, online reviews, social media comments, and customer surveys. For example, you can use Google Analytics to see which pages on your website are getting the most traffic.
• Purchase: At this stage, customers are making a purchase decision. You can gather customer insights by analyzing their purchase history, purchase frequency and purchase behavior. For example, you can use a customer relationship management (CRM) tool to track customer purchases and segment customers by buying behavior.
• Post-purchase: At this spot on the customer journey map, customers have already made a purchase and are using your product or service. You can gather customer insights by analyzing customer feedback, reviews and ratings. For example, you can use social listening tools to monitor mentions of your brand on social media and respond to customer complaints or feedback. This is also a great moment for surveys.
• Loyalty: At this stage of the customer journey, customers have become loyal to your brand and are repeat customers. You can gather customer insights by analyzing their engagement with your brand , their loyalty program participation, and their advocacy.

The advantages of consumer insights

Why go through the process of setting up a customer insight strategy? Because customer data is gold if you use it right.

From improving customer satisfaction for current customers to getting more customers on board: if you get an in-depth understanding of your customer experience, both real and ideal, you will never have to make another decision based on guesswork.

Here are some benefits of a customer-centric data-driven approach for your business.

Your marketing will be a lot more effective

A lot of companies get a creative block when dreaming up new campaigns. But they completely overlook the value of using customer insights in their marketing strategy. Your customers point you towards what they want to see from you, all you have to do is ask.

Next time you’re searching for ideas for your marketing communications, turn to information from customer interviews and other consumer research. Data can spark creativity, too.

Improved product development

Customer insights can help you identify gaps in the market and develop products that better meet customer needs.

Note that using customer surveys for this is different from simply launching concept tests. With this customer-centric approach, you let go of the limitations of your product as it is and just let customers dream out loud.

You’ll find incredibly valuable data and ideas to use customer insights that could elevate your products or services to the next level.

Enhanced customer experience

Understanding customer behavior and preferences allows you to deliver a better customer experience from start to finish.

Your business objective should not only be to get more new customers or sell more products, but to create better experiences for your buyers. This will increase customer loyalty and ultimately lower acquisition costs.

Predict and act on trends in customer behavior

Customer insights can help you predict future customer behavior based on past behavior and preferences. This information can be used to make customer focused decisions in the moments that matter most, whether it’s about product development, marketing or even hiring. You’ll always be one step ahead.

Quicker decision-making

Data doesn’t make your organization sluggish if you use it right. If you gather insights in an efficient way and have a smooth way to analyze all the data, you can actually make decisions with more confidence, faster, and with more benefit to your bottom line.

This will give you a competitive advantage compared to competitors who are still guessing what customers are thinking and feeling.

If you want to collect customer insights regularly, it helps to have a strategy in place.

With the steps below you make sure that you continuously feed your sales team and marketers with valuable customer insights.

Step 1: Define your objectives. Realistic, but ambitious ones.

Before embarking on any customer insights project, it’s essential to define your objectives with specificity and granularity. Ensure that your goals are SMART, and actionable.

The goal should never just be to know something you didn’t before. Establish clear objectives that are aligned with your other business objectives, goals and KPIs to make your customer insight strategy worth your while

Step 2: Identify personas and segments.

You don’t want to send the wrong questions to the wrong people at the wrong time. Make every survey and interaction count. That’s why your customer insights strategy should be tailored to the specific personas you want to understand better. It’s time for some customer profiling.

Begin by identifying the primary and secondary personas that are most important to your business, taking into account their demographics, psychographics, purchasing patterns, and behaviors. Here are four types of consumer profiling to give you a headstart.

This will enable you to use targeted and relevant data collection methods that resonate with them and drive meaningful insights.

Step 3: Choose your data collection methods.

Once you’ve identified your target customers and personas, you can begin selecting the data collection methods that are most appropriate for your goals and audience. We’d recommend using tools that allow you to collect both quantitative data and qualitative data, such as surveys.

You can create a better picture using interviews, focus groups, social media listening tools and website analytics. Choosing the right mix of data collection methods will allow you to capture a broad range of insights and ensure that your analysis is comprehensive and, most importantly, actionable.

Step 4: Create laser-focused customer insight surveys.

To collect accurate and meaningful data for your customer insight project, it’s essential to develop well-crafted and optimized surveys. You want to gather specific insights, and get high response rates, so put a lot of thought into what questions you should be asking, and how to ask them.

Pro tip: if you can get some designated research advice to help you create genuinely useful surveys, your customer insights will be even more effective!

Step 5: Conduct customer insights surveys

Once you’ve laid the groundwork, and chose your consumer insights software you can begin gathering customer insights data. Whether that is by analyzing website visitors or social media analytics, conducting surveys or interviews, analyzing customer data or running focus groups.

If you’ve chosen the right tools, you can basically sit back and relax at this point while the data starts coming in.

Step 6: Create an action plan.

Based on your customer insights analysis, create an action plan that outlines specific tactics and strategies for improving your business performance. It’s critical to involve key stakeholders from across your organization in this process to ensure that your action plan is aligned with your business goals and KPIs.

In other words: make sure things will get done. Make sure customer-facing teams can also access the data you’ve gathered about your target market: they are, after all, the ones directly interacting with your customer base.

Step 7: Monitor and refine your strategy.

To maximize the impact of your customer insights strategy, it’s essential to continually monitor and refine your approach. Regularly analyze data to see key metrics to track your (expected!) progress towards your goals. Adjust your data collection methods to ensure ongoing engagement. Fine-tune your action plan to reflect changes in your customer segments, their needs or customer expectations.

Stay agile and responsive, to keep your customer insights strategy relevant and effective over time.

In startups, you have a hypothesis around your audience but it’s fluctuating and changing and evolving. And Attest makes it super easy just to drill into those certain demographics and certain behaviors that you want to really focus on. Georgie Burks, Head of Brand Marketing, Penfold

Understanding your customers’ behaviors and attitudes is the key to keep them coming back for more. There are different moments throughout the customer journey map that are packed with data, and with Attest you can make sure you send focused surveys to the right people, at the right time.

Along with our fast, easy-to-use platform, you’ll get a designated research expert who will guide you through the process to make the most of your data. They can’t wait to meet you! Get started today. 

Choose the right customer insights software for your business

You can make smarter decisions for your business with customer insights from Attest. You get reliable data fast, and your research will be tailored to you with your designated research expert on hand!

Elliot Barnard

Customer Research Lead 

Elliot joined Attest in 2019 and has dedicated his career to working with brands carrying out market research. At Attest Elliot takes a leading role in the Customer Research Team, to support customers as they uncover insights and new areas for growth.

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Home › Product Career › What Does a Product Manager Do? › 17 Effective Customer Research Tips [+ Examples]

17 Effective Customer Research Tips [+ Examples]

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Market research plays a big role in the success of a business, so it is crucial to know what the needs of your target market are. Many companies that enter a market fail because of the lack of customer research.

Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup , says that startups fail because their product has no demand.

Real client feedback and research are excellent sources of actionable information on how to make a product thrive. Market researchers need to study past and current trends to forecast how the market will shift in the future.

This research is essential for business decisions on future campaigns to stay ahead of the curve and appeal to target audiences.

17 Customer Research Tips

1. identify the target audience.

Be aware of the target market’s demographics in order to market to them.

Focus groups, questionnaires, surveys, interviews, and analytical data gathered from online interactions of the business are used to research who the target audience is.

It’s critical to develop a customer profile that considers demographics like age, wealth, and interests, but also unmet needs and potential market shifts over time.

2. Discover new Opportunities

The fact of the matter is that the market is constantly shifting. Due to the ongoing evolution of the industry, researchers must apply their analytical abilities to determine the following:

• Current market trends
• Market size
• Market leaders
• Trend forecasts
• Demographics
• Geographical spread
• Gaps in the market

Understanding the current market and identifying prospects for company strategies, advertising, and goods requires gathering such data, and it also allows for identifying areas for improvement.

3. Leverage Online Reviews from Customers

Online reviews are a rich source of information on how customers feel about different products. Reading customer reviews is an easy and free way to see what people are saying – both good and bad.

Online reviews give business owners direct access to their customers’ thoughts, and they show what the business is doing right and what they’re not doing well. Given that everyone has access to these internet reviews responding to the valuable feedback from bad reviews is critical.

It is also important to remember to validate reviews. If someone mentions something about a product, that doesn’t mean it’s true. As such, recurring feedback is the most important.

Depending on the size of the company’s customer base, there may be too many online reviews to read, and the practice becomes redundant.

The way forward is to employ a software tool to gather all reviews onto a database and perform a keyword search to find recurring feedback on the product. Be sure to notice a pattern and take action to keep customers happy.

4. Use Market Research Tools

Market research tools are the way to go when on a tight budget, when resources do not allow hiring a market researcher, or if the data needs to be available sooner.

There are several market research tools. Like any software tool, some cater to the company’s needs better than others. They gather real-time data on customers, current market trends, demographics, market size, etc.

For its ease of use and accessibility, Google Trends gets the job done most of the time. However, there are more comprehensive market research tools out there that give a more detailed picture of the market.

5. Observe Your Competition

Entering an established market is far from easy. However, it does present an opportunity to learn from the market leader. Performing market research to find the most successful companies in your company’s industry can help to catapult the business to the top.

Now, this doesn’t mean you should copy the model used by others. But, learning their strengths and weaknesses gives customers a clear image of what they want.

Once a few companies have been researched, trends of what they’re doing right and what they’re doing wrong begin to surface. The next step is to adapt the business’ product to provide the perfect solution to its customers. In doing so, the company attracts new customers away from the market leaders.

Research the following about competitors:

• Market position
• Price/quality
• Average revenue
• Product range
• Target customers
• Strengths and weaknesses

6. Gather and Analyze Data

Although gathering data is a critical step in the process, it is even more crucial to evaluate and identify trends and changes that affect or may soon affect the business.

Data gathering and analysis must be ongoing processes that occur at every stage. Even if you conduct thorough research before releasing products, follow-ups, collecting client feedback, and market data need to continue.

In addition, make an effort to evaluate the success of marketing campaigns to inform subsequent campaigns.

7. Collect Customer Surveys

Not sure how customers feel about your product? Ask them.

A great way to gather customer feedback is through an online survey. It’s essential to keep these online surveys short and simple; nobody wants to fill out a 30-minute questionnaire about a business or product.

Save time by asking direct, meaningful questions that provide valuable information and will help to better understand customers’ needs. Open-ended questions are more useful for in-person interviews where the interviewer probes for a clear explanation of the customer’s thoughts.

8. See How Customers Use the Product

Watching how customers use products gives valuable insight into the customer’s views. More often than not, this feedback technique helps identify pain points customers face when using the product.

For example, when customers visit a company’s website, watch how they navigate through the site. Ask them to try to purchase something if it’s an e-commerce site and pick out any difficulties that the customer experiences. There’s nothing worse than trying to buy something online with a complicated purchasing process.

Another option is using heat mapping tools to track customers’ navigation of your business’ site. Once again, take action when recurring patterns of bottlenecks occur.

9. Conduct Customer Interviews

Market research involves interacting with people through in-person interviews, online focus groups, telephone surveys, digital questionnaires, etc.

Getting honest client feedback through interviews is a quick and easy way to learn more about their needs.

Participants must be aware of the purpose of the interview and how you will use their data. Be honest and sincere. Failure to do so has adverse effects in the future as it can distort statistics if participants don’t express their genuine opinions.

10. Use Data Available to the Public

Another great source of information is public data. It’s not always necessary to collect data, as government statistics are a wealth of information for market research.

Public records provide information like demographics, location, and behaviors which are vital to researchers looking to identify customer segments. This information then goes to marketing teams, who decide on a strategy for each element, and this is all from public data.

Public records or industry reports give a general overview of a business’s customers and how they behave. To take it a step further, employ market research tools like Google Analytics that pinpoint buyers’ persona.

11. Personalize Your Consumer Research for Each Project

Each project needs to be separate.  There is no one-size-fits-all method for finding solutions to issues relating to various market segments.

Consider the company’s goals every time a survey goes out if that’s how the business plans to collect most of the data for market research. Don’t do a single survey and distribute it to everyone.

Instead, make inquiries specific and address them to particular individuals. Customers taking part in a brand awareness survey mustn’t receive a duplicate of a customer satisfaction survey. It is also best to avoid sending out a single study to both groups that include questions about both subjects.

Market research is more accurate if it approaches each project independently and uses individualized problem-solving techniques.

12. Offer Incentives When Gathering Information

Consider the driving forces behind the respondents who supply the data when looking for strategies to improve market research. Offering incentives is a great way to attract more participants for data collection. Examples of incentives are discounts on their next purchase, the chance to win a prize or even the possibility to test out a product’s beta version.

Remember that the people giving the data value their time just as much as the business does. Think about the audience and the most effective incentives to encourage maximum involvement. For example, rewards intended for an older age group won’t be as attractive to younger age groups, and vice versa.

13. Research the Target Audience on Google Search

It’s as easy as that! Googling competitors is one of the most effective ways of researching the target audience.

Performing a Google search allows businesses to:

• read competitor’s customer reviews
• find out what customers say about their brand and product or service
• shape their online content to answer customer questions and difficulties

Google is an inexpensive tool for gathering customer data. It’s also important to see how customers find the product online because it’s never straightforward organic website traffic. Instead, using Google shows if customers arrived at your site via a link or social media post.

14. Try Social Listening

Most customers are on social media. The average person spends 2 hours and 25 minutes on social media a day, where they are free to be themselves.

This is a goldmine for consumer research because, besides being free, it’s a place where consumers feel comfortable speaking their minds.

Customers tend to feel pressured to answer questions during an online survey and thus aren’t always being honest to avoid insulting the company conducting it.

Therefore, reading what customers say on social media via a poll or throughout the comments section helps to paint a better picture of how they feel.

15. Ask for Feedback on Product Features

Product feature research must be a part of customer research before committing to expensive costs like large-scale production and advertising. 

If practical, consumer input on concepts and prototypes discloses design defects, packaging problems, and other concerns that save time and money.

The easiest way to collect information from beta testers is through qualitative data research methods like usability testing, a focus group, interviews, and open-ended survey questions.

16. Ask Customers to Rate Their Experience with Your Product

Many customer researchers gain valuable customer feedback through continuous rating bars as they navigate their website or tool.

For instance, after every Zoom call, the online video-call platform asks to rate the quality of the call. If the call is not up to standard and receives a low rating, they can take a short survey to fill out what went wrong, like a “low sound quality.” If the rating is high, the customer can thank you for your time and move on.

This data collection technique finds faults in products and services since the information presents as real-time customer feedback.

17. Make Use of Email Subscribers

Reaching out to email subscribers helps get feedback from multiple sources of existing customers. Whether they’ve been with the company for years or subscribed a week ago, these customers support and want to help the business.

Ask customer-focused questions regarding the product which aims to benefit them. Post a survey and offer incentives. 

Make sure that the subscribers have a valid email address.

Customer Research Example

Suppose you want to start a company that manufactures natural chemical-free cleaning products. The first step is to identify buyer personas and separate them into different segments. Then determine the following:

• New mothers who need to clean baby bottles
• Homeowners looking for an alternative cleaning solution
• Businesses/factories who worry about harsh chemicals getting into their water supply

Next, conduct consumer research and attempt to answer the following questions:

• What characteristics best describe this persona?
• What values does this persona hold dear?
• How does this persona purchase something?
• How does the consumer experience look?
• What are the main goals of this persona?
• What is the size of the market?
• What are this persona’s demographics?
• Where does this customer live?
• What expenses does this persona have?
• How often does this persona engage with you?
• Whose viewpoint does this persona value?
• Which media are appropriate for contacting this persona?
• What factors does this persona value while making a decision?
• Why does this persona select a specific product or brand?
• How do you affect this persona?
• What alternatives does this persona take into account?
• What kind of budget does the individual have for a solution?
• What difficulty does this persona have?

Once most of those questions have been answered, you can begin to form a clear image of the buyer persona of each segment.

The company’s marketing team then takes the information from the consumer research and develops marketing strategies to appeal to each segment.

Market Research FAQs

How long does it take to conduct customer research.

The primary market research gives an idea of what potential customers look for. Are there gaps in an untapped market that everyone else overlooks? 

While market research answers many concerns concerning an industry’s state, it may take weeks or even months for researchers to portray the commercial environment after looking into several aspects of the industry.

Why is marketing strategy necessary?

Having a marketing strategy is a vital part of any business’s plan. A marketing strategy enables the company to produce goods and services with the highest likelihood of turning a profit.

The ideal marketing strategy begins with market research, which considers the perfect target market, what competitors do, and potential future trends.

Market research is the process of obtaining data on target audiences and customers to confirm the success of a new product. It assists the team in refining an already-existing product or understanding brand perception that expresses the value of the organization.

With the help of this data, businesses can work out the benefits customers and clients seek, the price range at which they’re ready to spend, and how they set their product apart from the competitors.

How do primary and secondary market research differ?

Primary research involves performing analysis or hiring someone to do it for the company. It entails going to a source, such as current and potential clients in the target market, to gather information.

Primary research often costs more, takes longer to complete, and produces definitive results.

Primary research examples include:

• Focus groups

Gathered, organized, and published research by others is secondary research . It comprises research and reports from government organizations, industry trade groups, and other companies.

Most research is often secondary for small businesses because it is faster and cheaper to obtain than primary research.

Secondary research examples include:

• Government statistics
• Public records
• Industry reports

Conducting market and consumer research is worth it as it gives invaluable insight into a business’s customers and their needs. Their feedback drives the product; without it, it won’t sell.

After all, the product’s goal is to satisfy the target market’s needs and desires.

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8 Key Stages in the Consumer Research Strategy

July 8 2022

• Table of content

What Is Consumer Insights Research And Why It's Important For Any Brand?

Consumer research process and steps, how does peekage run market research, how to optimize the process of conducting consumer research.

If you want to catch and keep your consumer's attention , you really need to peruse the options available on your menu and give them something smart based on their preferences.

Your marketing strategy should not be based on your hunch but solid verifiable facts. In order to grow as a business, you need to know how your products & services are performing with your target audiences, how those consumers are responding to your campaigns, and how these customers feel about your brand.

Customer research can provide you with the missing information.

In today's consumer-centric world, research is key to personalization of products & services, and consistently delivering an excellent experience to your customers comes with a number of benefits, such as:

• Increased purchase frequency
• Higher average order values
• Better referrals and cheaper acquisitions

Additionally, acquiring insights on consumer needs gives you a strategic position over the race on delivering customers what they want -more personalized products and experiences. This way you stay ahead of your competitors and remain in line with consumers' needs.

At its core, consumer research focuses on understanding your consumers by exploring their attitudes, needs, motivations, and behavior as they relate to your brand & products. This helps you to better identify, understand, investigate and hold your customers.

It's nothing unexpected that the majority of professional advertisers make their strategic decisions after a phase of extensive consumer research process.

Read also: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research

Consumer insights research is the process of recognizing the inclinations, attitudes, inspirations, and purchasing behavior of the targeted consumers. Utilizing consumer research strategies on this data, shared characteristics among consumer groups are distinguished and classified into client segments and buyer personas. This information then used to make promoting campaigns focusing on a particular fragment or persona.

Consumer research is the key to enhancing your products & services and effectively advertising to clients who want to do commercial enterprise with you. Interviews, surveys, and other consumer research techniques are your dearest companions with regards to aiding your organization reliably to increment its income year on year.

Consumer research strategy is the procedure of gathering facts to first identify the target audiences and afterward focus on their inclinations, insights, attitudes, and shopping drivers for an item, service, or brand.

The main purposes of consumer research are:

• Formalize the ideal customer personas
• Upgrade brand positioning 
• Discover new or similar consumers
• Get feedback on current products & services
• Mapping the customer decision-making procedure

Customer research is a part of market research that uses research techniques to provide actionable information about what clients need. Utilizing this data businesses can make changes in their items and services, making them more client-centric thereby expanding consumer loyalty.

Consumer research helps brands understand consumer psychology and create purchasing behavior profiles for them.

A business that has an in-depth comprehension of the client decision-making process is most likely to design an item, decide on a certain price for it, establish a distribution path and promote a product based on customer research insights such that it produces increased consumer satisfaction and loyalty.

The ultimate goal of consumer research is to make a more profound understanding of your target client. You need to know what they care about and what impacts them to make purchasing decisions. This helps you to target them with more customized and significant brand experiences.

Consumers are now inundated with various options & choices and they have boundless data about these products readily available. In fact, they have power over their choices and want only the best.

So how do you make an unforgettable customer experience? By research!

By identifying the needs and inclinations of your clients, you can develop effective methods and strategies to use in your marketing plan. This will help you:

• Leverage your brand positioning compared to the competitors
• Help empower your marketing and product strategy
• Exclude weak points and lessen redundancies
• Remain in line with client opinion ahead of new product launches
• Draw in more clients
• Set the optimized price for your products
• Produce the proper marketing message
• Increase how much your clients spend
• Increase how frequently your clients spend
• Increase your sales
• Decrease your costs
• Refine your approach to customer support.

Now that you know what consumer research is and you understand its importance in developing your business, let's take a closer look at how it's done; the process & steps of conducting consumer insight research.

Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

The consumer research process began as an extension of the market research process. Just as the results of market research are used to further develop the decision-making potential of a brand or business, so is consumer research.

Consumer research is a sequential procedure. It must be well organized, tied together by the proper method, and upheld by supporting facilities and tools. Without these considerations, you may get into research chaos.

Therefore, you need a framework for conducting consumer research. The consumer research process can be divided into the following steps:

1. Develop research goals

Developing research goals is actually answering the question; "why is the research being conducted? to find out what?" A statement of consumer research objectives can help emphasize the purpose.

2. Define your research personas

A target consumer addresses the specific client segments and ideal buyer personas you wish to analyze.

3. Select your research methods and tools

Before you jump into the research phase, you should create a supporting "foundation". That is to distinguish your key method for gathering information and data.

Consumer data comes in two structures:

Quantitative - data, in the form of numbers

Quantitative consumer research includes extracting facts and statistics from customer opinions. By posing questions like, "how many", "how often", or "how likely", you can record customer needs and inclinations as specific numbers.

Utilizing a qualitative research method, you can gather information around measures such as duration, price, amount, length, etc. You can then utilize this information to shape your product's marketing.

Qualitative - non-numerical data that describe and characterize

A qualitative consumer research strategy gathers the conversational voice of customers (VOC), making sense of the inspirations behind customer behaviors. Open-ended questions, conversations, and observations can help us answer the whats, whys, and hows of consumers' decisions. Furthermore, develop a better comprehension of the consumers' attitudes, beliefs, and values.

Also read: Seven Consumer Research Methods; 2022 Version

4. Collect secondary data

Secondary research tries to interpret your audience's behaviors by utilizing internal and external data. CRM or social media analytics, and different kinds of BI tools come to use here. Utilizing external information such as trend reports, market statistics, and public polls can also help obtain a more accurate image of your target clients.

Secondary research is a strong method to analyze the competition, understand your actual position in the market, and discover new secondary consumers.

Collect secondary data as the earliest stage of your research, it helps finding out if the research has been conducted before and if there is any information that can be used by your business to make informed decisions regarding customers.

Secondary research adds additional background information to your brand strategy. By discovering what your competitors do and finding out what other factors and variables affect the demand on the market, you can refine your brand differentiation on the market.

Thus, as part of customer research, you need to assess the competition. Specifically, collect data about:

• Competition market positioning
• Brand differentiators
• Macro market trends
• Niche market trends

5. Primary research

Primary research can be an exploratory and explicit phase of your consumer research. In the principal case, you are projecting a wider net to comprehend the general customer opinion and market trends. Exploratory research is helpful for consumer segmentation and buyer persona development.

Explicit consumer research plans put the magnifying lens on distinguished areas of interest like brand preference or product usability. For this situation, it's a good idea to work with a specific consumer segment and ask questions related to a specific issue.

In primary research brands or businesses collect their own information or employ a third party to gather information for them. This kind of research utilizes different data collection methods (qualitative and quantitative).

6. Collect and analyze information

Data is gathered and analyzed and inference is drawn to comprehend client behavior and purchase pattern.

7. Prepare a report

At the final stages of your consumer research process, a report is prepared based on all the findings by analyzing information collected so that businesses are able to make informed decisions and think of all probabilities related to customer behavior. By incorporating the study, businesses can become more customer-centric and provide products or services that will help them achieve customer satisfaction.

8. Put consumer research to action

The ultimate objective of consumer research is to illuminate your actions. There are numerous excellent ways of utilizing customer research information:

• Refine your brand positioning and brand statement
• Develop strategies for engaging with secondary clients
• Foster new creative and collateral for advertisement campaigns
• Refine your advertisement targeting to lessen promotion waste
• Expand into new markets with more confidence

Utilizing its app-based platform, Peekage conducts market research by product sampling .

Clients share their information through the application and then the Peekage team discovers the right users to test your product or services and provide you feedback. This strategy is the most efficient way to invest the market research budget and gain actionable insights from your target market.

Read Also: Ultimate guide: product sampling strategies, methods & techniques

By providing proper consumer research insight, strategies that are utilized to draw in customers can be improved and brands can make a profit by knowing what customers need exactly. It is also important to understand the buying behavior of customers to know their attitude towards businesses and products.

Artificial intelligence helped advertisers & marketers with accomplishing precise targeting, effective optimizations, better analysis, and so much more. However, before these items come into play, understanding the customer is on top of any advertiser's list.

Optimizing consumer research can really make the entire procedure more effective, saving businesses tons of time assembling and analyzing data that is of little worth. 

There are 4 different ways AI can optimize the consumer research process. 

Recruitment Efficiency 

Your customer base is expanded. Panel recruitment parameters that expanded properly in one place may not function admirably in an alternate situation. And with steadily developing markets, checking only a couple of fundamental parameters like age, ethnicity, and education is hard enough for a team of staff to work on for weeks or even months. 

businesses need niche parameters. For example, interests, work profiles, income level, language proficiency, and more to draw significant insights that give them an upper hand in the market. This kind of information uncovers sweet spots in the target clients that have a high chance of a conversion.

Panel Relevancy Map

Words usually can't do a picture justice. In advertising, this image is worth thousands of hours of man work. In fact, we are discussing the times when advertisers analyze various segments and try to find similar client bases that can be clustered together. AI can do this in a matter of seconds, if not real-time. It analyzes millions of psychographic and demographic elements alongside other incidental factors and makes a relevancy map. This helps the advertiser with building panels of relevant clients based on the targeting variables that the research requests.

Statistically Accurate Panel

You can simply not include all of your clients for research purposes. Yes, you can do it by taking a representative sample of your consumer's society. This means your panel will contain at least one or more clients from each segment of your overall target client. This way you have a panel that is statistically the most accurate representation of your clients.

Engagement Efficiency 

While a statistically accurate panel is of importance, the research can only be called effective and successful if the optimal number of consumers take part in the research. Here, the AI helps the advertiser get the maximum number of research respondents at the minimum cost. Engagement patterns help the AI to rank the quality of client segments. The higher the engagement with the research, the higher the quality of the client. 

Research that creates impact

In fact, finding out what the client is thinking is technically impossible. businesses can still be very accurate by using the agility and scalability of AI. Making accurate and reliable client panels, running AI-led agile research, and developing strategies based on them is the guaranteed plan for successful consumer research.

Consumer research is a significant endeavor; however, the payoffs are extravagant too. Learning who your consumers are, how they think, and what prompts them to buy your products or services is essential to improving your market presence, growing brand value, and of course income numbers.

Utilizing the above eight steps, you can figure out how to coax clarity out of the tumultuous pile of analytics data and spoken customer insights. Keep in mind: a clear and optimal research method, succinct hypothesis, and supporting tools are the frameworks you need to run effective consumer research.

What customers need should be a part of market research and ought to be carried out routinely. Consumer research provides you with in-depth data about the needs, wants, expectations, and behavior of consumers.

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3 Solid Customer Research Strategies to Get Personal With Your Consumers:

In today’s customer-centric world, research is key to inform personalisation and shape an experience that converts (read: engagement, sale, etc.).

What’s more, gaining crucial insights puts you in a strategic position. You stay ahead of your competitors and most importantly, stay in tune with customer’s needs.

It’s no surprise that 40% of marketers drive their decision making after extensive research.

Bottom line? The more you know your customers, the better you can position yourself and your brand to serve them, but without research, you’ll be simply shooting arrows in the dark. 

So in this article, I will break down customer research, it’s benefits and further share actionable strategies so you can connect better with your audience. 

Let’s get started…

Why Is Customer Research Important?

Today’s consumers are bombarded with a variety of options—and they have limitless information at their fingertips. They’re empowered and want only the best. 

Now, what’s ‘best’ can vary (think: price, USPs, etc.). However, what’s extremely powerful is how your brand connects to them, and in general, how their experience with your brand (aka customer experience). 

Source: SuperOffice

And how do you create a memorable customer experience? Research.

For customers to build a favourable brand image of you in their minds, you have to get to know them better and then use the insights from your research to deliver a personalised customer experience they won’t forget. 

In fact, a recent study by Super Office revealed that customer experience is predicted to overtake price and product as the stand out differentiator by 2020.

But it’s not just CX, the benefits of engaging in customer research go well beyond that and also include:

• Improve your brand positioning versus competitors 
• Help strengthen your marketing and product strategy
• Eliminate weak points and reduce redundancies 
• Stay in tune with customer sentiment ahead of new product launches

Bottom line? Marketing that’s executed without sound research is a pretty risky gamble as you’ll be implementing expensive campaigns that may not even work. 

3 Customer Research Strategies to Know Your Customers 

You might be thinking, “So all I have to do is get to know my customers better? That’s easy!” That’s where you’re wrong.

Although the process of gaining data and customer responses might seem easy, analysing the results and building actionable insights is where the challenge lies. 

This is why building effective research campaigns that are best suited for your product and brand are important. 

Read on to discover a few basic strategies you can start with and flesh out as per your brand’s needs. 

1. Conduct Customer Interviews

Customer interviews are one of the primary and most data-heavy forms of customer research. Gaining direct responses from your customers is naturally one of the best ways to obtain the answers you are looking for. Click To Tweet

Michael Aagaard , senior conversion optimiser at Unbounce, says, “In my experience nothing beats actually talking to your target audience. The insight you get is priceless, and no amount of quantitative data will let you reach the same level of understanding”.

Live/telephonic interviews beat customer surveys in this regard because they are personal. The interviewer’s skills deeply affect the response as well. 

Source: Map & Fire

The money lies in your questions. They have to be well positioned in such a manner to get your customers talking.  

Your customers should feel like they are having an easy-going conversation with you, not like they are in the middle of an interrogation.

For example, depending on your needs, you can structure your questions around: 

• The use case for your product with each customer
• Their restrictions in making a purchase
• The phrases/image they attach to your brand
• Their inner motivations driving their needs/purchases

Tips to keep in mind when you are building your customer interview include: 

• Be straightforward : your customers’ time is valuable and they appreciate honesty from your brand. Being upfront and genuine about what you want to learn from them will also build accurate responses. 
• Be specific : what is the objective of your interview? What are you trying to learn? Outline your plan in a measurable manner – be it quantitative or qualitative – to avoid confusion during the interview and get reliable answers.
• Leave space for improvisation : scripting your calls or having guidelines to go by is helpful but shouldn’t limit you from reaching the full potential of an interview with a customer that goes a different way. Getting different and varied insights is just as important. 
• Talk less, listen more : ask the right questions and then listen – show them that you’re fully committed and interested to hear their opinions. Customers share more when they feel they are being genuinely engaged with. 

2. Leverage Social Media Forums 

Social media is booming and overflowing with customer data and analytics. Depending on your customer demographic, you can target the relevant social media platforms to get to know your customers better. 

Source: Netbase

Compared to other forms of market research, social media is also preferred due to the high ROI it offers, the mass tools available for analysis and the immediate results it offers.

No matter the platform you choose to use, be it Facebook Groups, Twitter hashtags or Quora forums, here are some generic steps you can follow to make sure you’re headed in the right direction.

1. Define your goal

What information are you looking for? Do you wish to gain behavioural insights into your customers or are you building buyer personas? Depending on your goal, the target demographic and type of data you choose to collect will differ. 

2. Set data parameters

Quantitative data is measurable data and can come in the form of, for example, number of likes, retweets or shares, followers and engagements. Qualitative data represents emotive insights and can be collected through live sessions, comments and mentions. 

3. Choose the right platform

Choosing the right channel for your analysis is important. Do you already leverage or connect greater with your customers on one social media channel over another? If so, collecting data from there may make more sense. 

However, understanding the demographic options of the different channels is also important, as pictured below for Instagram’s usage in the US.

Source: Sprout Social

Reddit is also considered a ‘ customer research goldmine ’. A thriving community filled with valuable qualitative information, most marketers head over to the forums to do their research. It covers a number of demographics and is a good option for most customer research campaigns.

Source: Salesforce

4. Choose the right tools

There are a number of social media analytics tools available for your disposal online, like Hootsuite and Unamo but it’s important to choose the one that works best for you. 

Using a project planning template to keep track of your campaign and research can also come in handy. Monday offers a variety of customisable templates to help you with the same. 

5. Analyse your results and draw conclusions 

Equipped with the right tools, you will be able to analyse the vast amount of data you collect from your social media analyses. 

This will, in turn, help you to draw helpful conclusions and generate actionable insights about your customers. 

It’s important to also stay objective and unbiased. Sometimes the insights you arrive at may not be the ones you were expecting or entirely favourable, but it’s good to take that feedback in your stride and develop your brand strategy accordingly to suit customer requirements. 

3. Focus groups

Conducting a focus group is one of the most valuable sources of information into customer research. A little more on the challenging side but very effective if done right, focus groups can provide insightful perceptions that can help you further your business strategy.

Source: The Balance

How do you go about it?

Gather together a group of people, representative of your key demographic, and engage with them in topics of discussion that can drive the insights you’re looking to get. 

Focus groups differ from interviews in the sense that they allow the members to interact and influence one another, observing the group mentality effect and providing a varied perspective in your customer research campaigns. 

It’s important to conduct multiple focus groups with different participants to get as many insights as you can. They provide sizeable qualitative results and can bring out the inner emotive perceptions of prospective customers. 

Tips to keep in mind for successful focus groups include:

• Ensure that the questions/topics introduced are not rigid but allow smooth flow of conversation and insights between the participants
• The moderator of the group should not influence the outcome but act as a proxy and coordinator to guarantee healthy discussions
• The environment the focus group is conducted in should be neutral to all participants and keep participants at ease
• The protocol for the focus group should be decided and planned for in advance to reduce inconsistencies

The success of a focus group can be easily swayed by the participants themselves and the surrounding factors. 

That’s why it’s important to put in enough time and effort to build a reliable group to yield useful insights.  

Bonus: Manage your Customer Research Campaign 

Researching your customers is no easy feat. You’ll have to go through different channels, leverage different tools and if you’ve got a large target audience, manage a team of researchers.  Basically, customer research is an intensive project and so, you’ll need to have the right plan and strategy before you even start.

So here are a few important areas to look into before starting your campaign:

• Firstly, make sure you know your target audience. After all, you don’t want to spend precious resources on the wrong target. I highly recommend creating buyer personas to help inform your marketing. 
• Leverage S.M.A.R.T goal-setting framework to go about your project in an effective and efficient manner. 
• Delegate management to an experienced project management guru and make sure to integrate your entire campaign with intuitive project organiser.  
• Make sure you’ve allocated the necessary budget and resources before taking up the project as you don’t want to halt the project due to some bottleneck. 

Bridge the Gap with Research

Conducting regular and insightful customer research is important to build a sustainable brand. Customers are 97% more likely to be loyal to you if you show that you’re willing to implement feedback in a substantial way. Click To Tweet (Source: GetVoIP )

In the current environment, customer needs and psyches are constantly evolving. To stay ahead of your competitors and on top of your own offerings, you have to keep an ear to the ground and know what your customers expect of you. 

There is an abundance of data available at your fingertips. Using the right tactics to shape them into insights can make all the difference in bridging the gap between you and your customers. 

Over to you:

How well do you know your customers? Do you leverage customer research strategies? If yes, what strategy has worked best for you? 

Did this article have everything you were after? Still want more? Check out: 

• Customer Avatar: Find and Reach Your Target Market
• Instagram Reach: How to Reach More users in 202 (9 Killer Strategies )
• The Most Complete Guide to Creating Winning Facebook Ads Anywhere!
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How to do market research in 4 steps: a lean approach to marketing research

From pinpointing your target audience and assessing your competitive advantage, to ongoing product development and customer satisfaction efforts, market research is a practice your business can only benefit from.

Learn how to conduct quick and effective market research using a lean approach in this article full of strategies and practical examples. 

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A comprehensive (and successful) business strategy is not complete without some form of market research—you can’t make informed and profitable business decisions without truly understanding your customer base and the current market trends that drive your business.

In this article, you’ll learn how to conduct quick, effective market research  using an approach called 'lean market research'. It’s easier than you might think, and it can be done at any stage in a product’s lifecycle.

How to conduct lean market research in 4 steps

What is market research, why is market research so valuable, advantages of lean market research, 4 common market research methods, 5 common market research questions, market research faqs.

We’ll jump right into our 4-step approach to lean market research. To show you how it’s done in the real world, each step includes a practical example from Smallpdf , a Swiss company that used lean market research to reduce their tool’s error rate by 75% and boost their Net Promoter Score® (NPS) by 1%.

Research your market the lean way...

From on-page surveys to user interviews, Hotjar has the tools to help you scope out your market and get to know your customers—without breaking the bank.

The following four steps and practical examples will give you a solid market research plan for understanding who your users are and what they want from a company like yours.

1. Create simple user personas

A user persona is a semi-fictional character based on psychographic and demographic data from people who use websites and products similar to your own. Start by defining broad user categories, then elaborate on them later to further segment your customer base and determine your ideal customer profile .

How to get the data: use on-page or emailed surveys and interviews to understand your users and what drives them to your business.

How to do it right: whatever survey or interview questions you ask, they should answer the following questions about the customer:

Who are they?

What is their main goal?

What is their main barrier to achieving this goal?

Pitfalls to avoid:

Don’t ask too many questions! Keep it to five or less, otherwise you’ll inundate them and they’ll stop answering thoughtfully.

Don’t worry too much about typical demographic questions like age or background. Instead, focus on the role these people play (as it relates to your product) and their goals.

How Smallpdf did it: Smallpdf ran an on-page survey for a couple of weeks and received 1,000 replies. They learned that many of their users were administrative assistants, students, and teachers.

Next, they used the survey results to create simple user personas like this one for admins:

Who are they? Administrative Assistants.

What is their main goal? Creating Word documents from a scanned, hard-copy document or a PDF where the source file was lost.

What is their main barrier to achieving it? Converting a scanned PDF doc to a Word file.

💡Pro tip: Smallpdf used Hotjar Surveys to run their user persona survey. Our survey tool helped them avoid the pitfalls of guesswork and find out who their users really are, in their own words. 

You can design a survey and start running it in minutes with our easy-to-use drag and drop builder. Customize your survey to fit your needs, from a sleek one-question pop-up survey to a fully branded questionnaire sent via email. 

We've also created 40+ free survey templates that you can start collecting data with, including a user persona survey like the one Smallpdf used.

2. Conduct observational research

Observational research involves taking notes while watching someone use your product (or a similar product).

Overt vs. covert observation

Overt observation involves asking customers if they’ll let you watch them use your product. This method is often used for user testing and it provides a great opportunity for collecting live product or customer feedback .

Covert observation means studying users ‘in the wild’ without them knowing. This method works well if you sell a type of product that people use regularly, and it offers the purest observational data because people often behave differently when they know they’re being watched. 

Tips to do it right:

Record an entry in your field notes, along with a timestamp, each time an action or event occurs.

Make note of the users' workflow, capturing the ‘what,’ ‘why,’ and ‘for whom’ of each action.

Don’t record identifiable video or audio data without consent. If recording people using your product is helpful for achieving your research goal, make sure all participants are informed and agree to the terms.

Don’t forget to explain why you’d like to observe them (for overt observation). People are more likely to cooperate if you tell them you want to improve the product.

💡Pro tip: while conducting field research out in the wild can wield rewarding results, you can also conduct observational research remotely. Hotjar Recordings is a tool that lets you capture anonymized user sessions of real people interacting with your website. 

Observe how customers navigate your pages and products to gain an inside look into their user behavior . This method is great for conducting exploratory research with the purpose of identifying more specific issues to investigate further, like pain points along the customer journey and opportunities for optimizing conversion .

With Hotjar Recordings you can observe real people using your site without capturing their sensitive information

How Smallpdf did it: here’s how Smallpdf observed two different user personas both covertly and overtly.

Observing students (covert): Kristina Wagner, Principle Product Manager at Smallpdf, went to cafes and libraries at two local universities and waited until she saw students doing PDF-related activities. Then she watched and took notes from a distance. One thing that struck her was the difference between how students self-reported their activities vs. how they behaved (i.e, the self-reporting bias). Students, she found, spent hours talking, listening to music, or simply staring at a blank screen rather than working. When she did find students who were working, she recorded the task they were performing and the software they were using (if she recognized it).

Observing administrative assistants (overt): Kristina sent emails to admins explaining that she’d like to observe them at work, and she asked those who agreed to try to batch their PDF work for her observation day. While watching admins work, she learned that they frequently needed to scan documents into PDF-format and then convert those PDFs into Word docs. By observing the challenges admins faced, Smallpdf knew which products to target for improvement.

“Data is really good for discovery and validation, but there is a bit in the middle where you have to go and find the human.”

3. Conduct individual interviews

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. They allow you to dig deep and explore their concerns, which can lead to all sorts of revelations.

Listen more, talk less. Be curious.

Act like a journalist, not a salesperson. Rather than trying to talk your company up, ask people about their lives, their needs, their frustrations, and how a product like yours could help.

Ask "why?" so you can dig deeper. Get into the specifics and learn about their past behavior.

Record the conversation. Focus on the conversation and avoid relying solely on notes by recording the interview. There are plenty of services that will transcribe recorded conversations for a good price (including Hotjar!).

Avoid asking leading questions , which reveal bias on your part and pushes respondents to answer in a certain direction (e.g. “Have you taken advantage of the amazing new features we just released?).

Don't ask loaded questions , which sneak in an assumption which, if untrue, would make it impossible to answer honestly. For example, we can’t ask you, “What did you find most useful about this article?” without asking whether you found the article useful in the first place.

Be cautious when asking opinions about the future (or predictions of future behavior). Studies suggest that people aren’t very good at predicting their future behavior. This is due to several cognitive biases, from the misguided exceptionalism bias (we’re good at guessing what others will do, but we somehow think we’re different), to the optimism bias (which makes us see things with rose-colored glasses), to the ‘illusion of control’ (which makes us forget the role of randomness in future events).

How Smallpdf did it: Kristina explored her teacher user persona by speaking with university professors at a local graduate school. She learned that the school was mostly paperless and rarely used PDFs, so for the sake of time, she moved on to the admins.

A bit of a letdown? Sure. But this story highlights an important lesson: sometimes you follow a lead and come up short, so you have to make adjustments on the fly. Lean market research is about getting solid, actionable insights quickly so you can tweak things and see what works.

💡Pro tip: to save even more time, conduct remote interviews using an online user research service like Hotjar Engage , which automates the entire interview process, from recruitment and scheduling to hosting and recording.

You can interview your own customers or connect with people from our diverse pool of 200,000+ participants from 130+ countries and 25 industries. And no need to fret about taking meticulous notes—Engage will automatically transcribe the interview for you.

4. Analyze the data (without drowning in it)

The following techniques will help you wrap your head around the market data you collect without losing yourself in it. Remember, the point of lean market research is to find quick, actionable insights.

A flow model is a diagram that tracks the flow of information within a system. By creating a simple visual representation of how users interact with your product and each other, you can better assess their needs.

You’ll notice that admins are at the center of Smallpdf’s flow model, which represents the flow of PDF-related documents throughout a school. This flow model shows the challenges that admins face as they work to satisfy their own internal and external customers.

Affinity diagram

An affinity diagram is a way of sorting large amounts of data into groups to better understand the big picture. For example, if you ask your users about their profession, you’ll notice some general themes start to form, even though the individual responses differ. Depending on your needs, you could group them by profession, or more generally by industry.

We wrote a guide about how to analyze open-ended questions to help you sort through and categorize large volumes of response data. You can also do this by hand by clipping up survey responses or interview notes and grouping them (which is what Kristina does).

“For an interview, you will have somewhere between 30 and 60 notes, and those notes are usually direct phrases. And when you literally cut them up into separate pieces of paper and group them, they should make sense by themselves.”

Pro tip: if you’re conducting an online survey with Hotjar, keep your team in the loop by sharing survey responses automatically via our Slack and Microsoft Team integrations. Reading answers as they come in lets you digest the data in pieces and can help prepare you for identifying common themes when it comes time for analysis.

Hotjar lets you easily share survey responses with your team

Customer journey map

A customer journey map is a diagram that shows the way a typical prospect becomes a paying customer. It outlines their first interaction with your brand and every step in the sales cycle, from awareness to repurchase (and hopefully advocacy).

The above  customer journey map , created by our team at Hotjar, shows many ways a customer might engage with our tool. Your map will be based on your own data and business model.

📚 Read more: if you’re new to customer journey maps, we wrote this step-by-step guide to creating your first customer journey map in 2 and 1/2 days with free templates you can download and start using immediately.

Next steps: from research to results

So, how do you turn market research insights into tangible business results? Let’s look at the actions Smallpdf took after conducting their lean market research: first they implemented changes, then measured the impact.

Implement changes

Based on what Smallpdf learned about the challenges that one key user segment (admins) face when trying to convert PDFs into Word files, they improved their ‘PDF to Word’ conversion tool.

We won’t go into the details here because it involves a lot of technical jargon, but they made the entire process simpler and more straightforward for users. Plus, they made it so that their system recognized when you drop a PDF file into their ‘Word to PDF’ converter instead of the ‘PDF to Word’ converter, so users wouldn’t have to redo the task when they made that mistake. 

In other words: simple market segmentation for admins showed a business need that had to be accounted for, and customers are happier overall after Smallpdf implemented an informed change to their product.

Measure results

According to the Lean UX model, product and UX changes aren’t retained unless they achieve results.

Smallpdf’s changes produced:

A 75% reduction in error rate for the ‘PDF to Word’ converter

A 1% increase in NPS

Greater confidence in the team’s marketing efforts

"With all the changes said and done, we've cut our original error rate in four, which is huge. We increased our NPS by +1%, which isn't huge, but it means that of the users who received a file, they were still slightly happier than before, even if they didn't notice that anything special happened at all.”

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Market research (or marketing research) is any set of techniques used to gather information and better understand a company’s target market. This might include primary research on brand awareness and customer satisfaction or secondary market research on market size and competitive analysis. Businesses use this information to design better products, improve user experience, and craft a marketing strategy that attracts quality leads and improves conversion rates.

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

With Hotjar, they did things differently . Long story short, they conducted market research in the early stages to figure out what consumers really wanted, and the team made (and continues to make) constant improvements based on market and user research.

Without market research, it’s impossible to understand your users. Sure, you might have a general idea of who they are and what they need, but you have to dig deep if you want to win their loyalty.

Here’s why research matters:

Obsessing over your users is the only way to win. If you don’t care deeply about them, you’ll lose potential customers to someone who does.

Analytics gives you the ‘what’, while research gives you the ‘why’. Big data, user analytics , and dashboards can tell you what people do at scale, but only research can tell you what they’re thinking and why they do what they do. For example, analytics can tell you that customers leave when they reach your pricing page, but only research can explain why.

Research beats assumptions, trends, and so-called best practices. Have you ever watched your colleagues rally behind a terrible decision? Bad ideas are often the result of guesswork, emotional reasoning, death by best practices , and defaulting to the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion (HiPPO). By listening to your users and focusing on their customer experience , you’re less likely to get pulled in the wrong direction.

Research keeps you from planning in a vacuum. Your team might be amazing, but you and your colleagues simply can’t experience your product the way your customers do. Customers might use your product in a way that surprises you, and product features that seem obvious to you might confuse them. Over-planning and refusing to test your assumptions is a waste of time, money, and effort because you’ll likely need to make changes once your untested business plan gets put into practice.

Lean User Experience (UX) design is a model for continuous improvement that relies on quick, efficient research to understand customer needs and test new product features.

Lean market research can help you become more...

Efficient: it gets you closer to your customers, faster.

Cost-effective: no need to hire an expensive marketing firm to get things started.

Competitive: quick, powerful insights can place your products on the cutting edge.

As a small business or sole proprietor, conducting lean market research is an attractive option when investing in a full-blown research project might seem out of scope or budget.

There are lots of different ways you could conduct market research and collect customer data, but you don’t have to limit yourself to just one research method. Four common types of market research techniques include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and customer observation.

Which method you use may vary based on your business type: ecommerce business owners have different goals from SaaS businesses, so it’s typically prudent to mix and match these methods based on your particular goals and what you need to know.

1. Surveys: the most commonly used

Surveys are a form of qualitative research that ask respondents a short series of open- or closed-ended questions, which can be delivered as an on-screen questionnaire or via email. When we asked 2,000 Customer Experience (CX) professionals about their company’s approach to research , surveys proved to be the most commonly used market research technique.

What makes online surveys so popular?  

They’re easy and inexpensive to conduct, and you can do a lot of data collection quickly. Plus, the data is pretty straightforward to analyze, even when you have to analyze open-ended questions whose answers might initially appear difficult to categorize.

We've built a number of survey templates ready and waiting for you. Grab a template and share with your customers in just a few clicks.

💡 Pro tip: you can also get started with Hotjar AI for Surveys to create a survey in mere seconds . Just enter your market research goal and watch as the AI generates a survey and populates it with relevant questions. 

Once you’re ready for data analysis, the AI will prepare an automated research report that succinctly summarizes key findings, quotes, and suggested next steps.

An example research report generated by Hotjar AI for Surveys

2. Interviews: the most insightful

Interviews are one-on-one conversations with members of your target market. Nothing beats a face-to-face interview for diving deep (and reading non-verbal cues), but if an in-person meeting isn’t possible, video conferencing is a solid second choice.

Regardless of how you conduct it, any type of in-depth interview will produce big benefits in understanding your target customers.

What makes interviews so insightful?

By speaking directly with an ideal customer, you’ll gain greater empathy for their experience , and you can follow insightful threads that can produce plenty of 'Aha!' moments.

3. Focus groups: the most unreliable

Focus groups bring together a carefully selected group of people who fit a company’s target market. A trained moderator leads a conversation surrounding the product, user experience, or marketing message to gain deeper insights.

What makes focus groups so unreliable?

If you’re new to market research, we wouldn’t recommend starting with focus groups. Doing it right is expensive , and if you cut corners, your research could fall victim to all kinds of errors. Dominance bias (when a forceful participant influences the group) and moderator style bias (when different moderator personalities bring about different results in the same study) are two of the many ways your focus group data could get skewed.

4. Observation: the most powerful

During a customer observation session, someone from the company takes notes while they watch an ideal user engage with their product (or a similar product from a competitor).

What makes observation so clever and powerful?

‘Fly-on-the-wall’ observation is a great alternative to focus groups. It’s not only less expensive, but you’ll see people interact with your product in a natural setting without influencing each other. The only downside is that you can’t get inside their heads, so observation still isn't a recommended replacement for customer surveys and interviews.

The following questions will help you get to know your users on a deeper level when you interview them. They’re general questions, of course, so don’t be afraid to make them your own.

1. Who are you and what do you do?

How you ask this question, and what you want to know, will vary depending on your business model (e.g. business-to-business marketing is usually more focused on someone’s profession than business-to-consumer marketing).

It’s a great question to start with, and it’ll help you understand what’s relevant about your user demographics (age, race, gender, profession, education, etc.), but it’s not the be-all-end-all of market research. The more specific questions come later.

2. What does your day look like?

This question helps you understand your users’ day-to-day life and the challenges they face. It will help you gain empathy for them, and you may stumble across something relevant to their buying habits.

3. Do you ever purchase [product/service type]?

This is a ‘yes or no’ question. A ‘yes’ will lead you to the next question.

4. What problem were you trying to solve or what goal were you trying to achieve?

This question strikes to the core of what someone’s trying to accomplish and why they might be willing to pay for your solution.

5. Take me back to the day when you first decided you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this goal.

This is the golden question, and it comes from Adele Revella, Founder and CEO of Buyer Persona Institute . It helps you get in the heads of your users and figure out what they were thinking the day they decided to spend money to solve a problem.

If you take your time with this question, digging deeper where it makes sense, you should be able to answer all the relevant information you need to understand their perspective.

“The only scripted question I want you to ask them is this one: take me back to the day when you first decided that you needed to solve this kind of problem or achieve this kind of a goal. Not to buy my product, that’s not the day. We want to go back to the day that when you thought it was urgent and compelling to go spend money to solve a particular problem or achieve a goal. Just tell me what happened.”

— Adele Revella , Founder/CEO at Buyer Persona Institute

Bonus question: is there anything else you’d like to tell me?

This question isn’t just a nice way to wrap it up—it might just give participants the opportunity they need to tell you something you really need to know.

That’s why Sarah Doody, author of UX Notebook , adds it to the end of her written surveys.

“I always have a last question, which is just open-ended: “Is there anything else you would like to tell me?” And sometimes, that’s where you get four paragraphs of amazing content that you would never have gotten if it was just a Net Promoter Score [survey] or something like that.”

What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative research?

Qualitative research asks questions that can’t be reduced to a number, such as, “What is your job title?” or “What did you like most about your customer service experience?” 

Quantitative research asks questions that can be answered with a numeric value, such as, “What is your annual salary?” or “How was your customer service experience on a scale of 1-5?”

 → Read more about the differences between qualitative and quantitative user research .

How do I do my own market research?

You can do your own quick and effective market research by 

Surveying your customers

Building user personas

Studying your users through interviews and observation

Wrapping your head around your data with tools like flow models, affinity diagrams, and customer journey maps

What is the difference between market research and user research?

Market research takes a broad look at potential customers—what problems they’re trying to solve, their buying experience, and overall demand. User research, on the other hand, is more narrowly focused on the use (and usability ) of specific products.

What are the main criticisms of market research?

Many marketing professionals are critical of market research because it can be expensive and time-consuming. It’s often easier to convince your CEO or CMO to let you do lean market research rather than something more extensive because you can do it yourself. It also gives you quick answers so you can stay ahead of the competition.

Do I need a market research firm to get reliable data?

Absolutely not! In fact, we recommend that you start small and do it yourself in the beginning. By following a lean market research strategy, you can uncover some solid insights about your clients. Then you can make changes, test them out, and see whether the results are positive. This is an excellent strategy for making quick changes and remaining competitive.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

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• Product management
• Customer research plan

Clarify research goals, identify customer segments, and choose your methods

About the customer research plan template

Understanding customers is essential to building a lovable product. The more you know what customers need, the more equipped you are to solve their problems.

This template provides a central place to capture your overall strategy and plans for customer research. With sections for identifying objectives, focus areas, target customers, research methods, and more, you will be well-positioned to conduct research in a way that is thoughtfully considered and data-driven.

Research might not be able to tell you where to go next, but it can help you confirm or deny assumptions about what your customers want, how they use your product, and their overall experience. Collecting, consolidating, and analyzing all the information in one place helps to illuminate the right opportunities to pursue.

Best practices

Establish a customer research plan that will help you make more informed product decisions.

Start with objectives Get clear on what you want to achieve — setting goals that are purposeful, measurable, and support the overall direction of your product. The insights you gather are only beneficial if you know what decisions they will influence.

Specify areas of focus Narrow in on the areas of focus that you want to include in your research efforts — such as a group of related ideas or upcoming features.

Concentrate on the right customers Identify the target personas, customer segments, and organizations that will gain the most value from the ideas and features you want to research. Layer in other information, like product usage data, to further inform who you reach out to.

Select research methods and set your timeline Aim to balance quantitative and qualitative methods so you can consider hard numbers alongside human insights as part of your analysis. Note the activities that will make up your research, what needs to happen, and when. @mention teammates in the template to keep everyone aligned on the plan.

Summarize and analyzing your findings Distill learnings into a concise summary that the team can digest and capture any action items you need to follow up on.

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