quantitative research customer experience

Customer experience: a systematic literature review and consumer culture theory-based conceptualisation

• Published: 15 February 2020
• Volume 71 , pages 135–176, ( 2021 )

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• Muhammad Waqas 1 ,
• Zalfa Laili Binti Hamzah 1 &
• Noor Akma Mohd Salleh 2  

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The study aims to summarise and classify the existing research and to better understand the past, present, and the future state of the theory of customer experience. The main objectives of this study are to categorise and summarise the customer experience research, identify the extant theoretical perspectives that are used to conceptualise the customer experience, present a new conceptualisation and conceptual model of customer experience based on consumer culture theory and to highlight the emerging trends and gaps in the literature of customer experience. To achieve the stated objectives, an extensive literature review of existing customer experience research was carried out covering 49 journals. A total of 99 empirical and conceptual articles on customer experience from the year 1998 to 2019 was analysed based on different criteria. The findings of this study contribute to the knowledge by highlighting the role of customer attribution of meanings in defining their experiences and how such experiences can predict consumer behaviour.

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Waqas, M., Hamzah, Z.L.B. & Salleh, N.A.M. Customer experience: a systematic literature review and consumer culture theory-based conceptualisation. Manag Rev Q 71 , 135–176 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-020-00182-w

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Customer Experience Research 101: A Comprehensive Guide

February 7, 2024

Every customer expects quality treatment from the company they interact with, seeking positive interactions to nurture lasting relationships. The key to ensuring this consistency at every touchpoint lies in customer experience research. By understanding and addressing the customer's journey, identifying gaps, and actively working to fill them, your brand can guarantee a positive experience every single time.

Keep reading to explore more about CX research, understand its importance, and find effective strategies for its successful implementation.

What is Customer Experience Research?

Customer Experience Research is a systematic and comprehensive approach to collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to customers' interactions with a company's products or services. It encompasses various research methods, such as surveys, interviews, and feedback analysis, with the goal of understanding, improving, and optimizing the overall customer experience.

​​CER is essential for enhancing customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and gaining a competitive edge. It empowers businesses to make informed decisions, delivering better-tailored solutions and fostering loyalty. Positive customer experiences, guided by CER insights, not only ensure brand loyalty but also contribute to a favorable reputation, attracting new customers and establishing the company as a customer-centric leader in the market.

Types of Customer Experience Research

Now that we have understood what is customer experience research, let us explore popular customer experience research methods.

Surveys and Questionnaires

Surveys and questionnaires involve structured sets of questions designed to gather quantitative data about customer experiences. These can be distributed through various channels, including online platforms or email.

Benefits: Surveys allow for the collection of large-scale, quantitative data, providing measurable insights into customer satisfaction, preferences, and trends.

When to Use: Surveys are effective when seeking to quantify specific aspects of the customer experience, such as overall satisfaction, likelihood to recommend, or feedback on specific products or services.

Example:  Airbnb utilizes Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to gather valuable feedback from both guests and hosts. By employing this customer-centric approach, Airbnb gains insights into user satisfaction, identifies areas for improvement, and hones in on the elements that resonate positively with their community.

In-Depth Interviews

In-depth interviews involve one-on-one conversations between a researcher and a customer, allowing for open-ended discussions about their experiences. These interviews provide qualitative insights into customer perceptions and emotions.

Benefits: In-depth interviews offer a deep understanding of individual perspectives, motivations, and underlying reasons behind customer behaviors.

When to Use: Use in-depth interviews when you need detailed, nuanced insights into customer experiences, especially for complex products or services.

Example: As per the  State of UX in the Enterprise survey conducted by UserZoom, in-depth interviews have emerged as the preferred UX research method, surpassing A/B testing, surveys, and focus groups. This underscores their effectiveness in capturing valuable insights directly from users.

Customer Feedback and Reviews Analysis

Analyzing customer feedback and reviews involves collecting and interpreting data from various online platforms, such as social media, review sites, and customer support interactions.

Benefits: This method provides real-time, unfiltered insights into customer sentiments, opinions, and concerns, helping businesses stay attuned to customer feedback and make timely improvements.

When to Use: Customer feedback and reviews analysis is valuable for continuous monitoring and responding to customer sentiments. It is particularly useful for identifying emerging issues and trends.

Example: Amazon utilizes advanced Generative AI to analyze extensive customer feedback , identifying patterns, sentiments, and emerging trends in real-time. This technology provides deeper insights into customer preferences, informing strategic decision-making for product development and customer service improvements.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping involves visualizing and understanding the entire customer experience, from the initial interaction to post-purchase support. It helps identify touchpoints, pain points, and opportunities for improvement.

Benefit: Customer journey mapping provides a holistic view of the customer experience, enabling businesses to optimize interactions at each stage and create a seamless and satisfying journey.

When to Use: Use customer journey mapping when you want to identify and improve specific touchpoints within the customer journey or when launching a new product or service.

Example:  Starbucks leverages customer journey mapping to enhance the overall customer experience. By visualizing the entire customer journey, Starbucks identifies and refines key touchpoints, streamlining processes and improving specific interactions. This approach guides informed decision-making, contributing to Starbucks' success in delivering exceptional and seamless customer experiences.

Why Is Customer Experience Research Important?

In the fiercely competitive business landscape, where  companies lose $1.6 trillion annually due to customers switching brands because of poor customer experience (CX), the significance of Customer Experience Research (CER) cannot be overstated. Successful organizations prioritize customer loyalty, understanding that strong correlations exist between delivering exceptional CX and increased sales. A staggering  87% of customers who perceive a great experience with a company express their likelihood to make repeat purchases.

CX Research is crucial for businesses, serving as a strategic tool to gauge satisfaction, identify needs, enhance CX, and foster increased loyalty.

Other key benefits of customer experience research include:

• Increased Customer Retention: CER helps businesses understand the reasons behind customer churn and provides actionable insights to improve customer retention.
• Improved Customer Experience: Through CER, businesses identify customer pain points, enabling the development of targeted strategies for enhancing overall customer experience.
• More Effective Marketing: CER aids in understanding customer behavior, leading to the development of effective marketing strategies.
• Improved Customer Segmentation: CER assists in identifying distinct customer segments and developing strategies to target each segment effectively.
• Increased Sales: By identifying customer needs and crafting strategies based on deep customer understanding, CER becomes a catalyst for increased sales..

Key Metrics in Customer Experience Research

Here are three key  contact center metrics that will help you in customer experience research.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS, or Net Promoter Score®, gauges customer satisfaction by asking, "On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely is it that you would recommend company/organization X to family, friends, or colleagues?" Widely used and recognized, NPS provides a quick snapshot of a brand's overall image. A low NPS score means more Detractors than Promoters, suggesting customers are dissatisfied with a company's overall performance.

​​While NPS provides a valuable numerical benchmark for gauging customer loyalty and satisfaction, complement it with qualitative feedback for a deeper understanding of customer sentiments and actionable insights.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

CSAT measures post-purchase or post-service satisfaction, predicting loyalty and revealing customer experience weaknesses. It uses a quick survey with a simple question like, "How satisfied are you with your recent experience with or purchase from company X?" often employing a five-point scale.

While CSAT offers a prompt measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty, it enhances its effectiveness by incorporating qualitative research through feedback. This deeper insight into customer sentiments provides actionable insights, enriching decision-making and driving continuous improvements.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

CES is an index measuring the effort customers invest in their interactions with your company. Respondents rate their effort on a 5- or 7-point scale. A higher CES is favorable, indicating an effortless experience.

Map Customer Journeys for Targeted Improvements - Identify high-effort points in the customer journey, map these touchpoints, and focus on streamlining processes or providing additional support to enhance the overall customer experience.

How to do Customer Experience Research?

Improve customer experiences with this 7-step guide, offering a thorough and organized approach to successful Customer Experience Research.

Step 1: Team Building

Form a diverse team with members from CX, UX, and market research, fostering collaboration and leveraging varied perspectives.

Step 2: Objective Setting

Clearly define research objectives, outlining what you aim to achieve and the specific information you seek to uncover about the customer experience.

Step 3: Context Establishment

Understand the broader market context to align research objectives with market dynamics, providing a comprehensive understanding of your business landscape.

Step 4: Key Performance Indicators (KPI) Identification

Identify  contact center KPIs such as Likelihood to Recommend, NPS, Overall Satisfaction, Response and Wait Times, and Overall Value Delivered.

Step 5: Timeframe and Scope Definition

Set specific timeframes and scope objectives to maintain focus and ensure a manageable research process.

Step 6: Research Method Selection

Choose appropriate research methods, including surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer feedback analysis, field research, online collection, and data analysis.

Step 7: Data Gathering and Analysis

Implement chosen research methods to collect qualitative and quantitative data. Utilize data analysis tools to identify trends and insights, translating data into actionable strategies for improving customer experience.

This comprehensive guide ensures you can effectively navigate the complexities of understanding and improving customer experiences.

Five9: Your Ally for a Successful Customer Experience Research

Five9, a premier cloud-based contact center solution, is your ally for successful CX research. It ensures efficient and focused customer feedback analysis through:

• A unified platform supporting diverse channel
• Real-time analytics for proactive insights
• Seamless  CRM integration for a holistic customer view
• Predictive dialing optimizing survey data collection
• Workflow automation streamlining processes

Together, these features empower organizations to excel in customer experience research, leveraging comprehensive capabilities of Five9. Discover more about Five9 through  success stories showcasing how companies have elevated their CX. 

Related Articles

9 Best Real-life Customer Journey Map Examples

10 Essential Contact Center Metrics and KPIs to Measure in Healthcare

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Call 1-800-553-8159 to learn more about five9.

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Everything You Need to Know About Customer Experience Research

Updated: January 20, 2023

Published: October 27, 2022

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

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

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

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

What is customer experience research?

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

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

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

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

• Development

Image source

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

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

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

Customer Satisfaction vs. Customer Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Customer Experience Research Tools and Resources

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Feedback Software

Let's discuss each in more detail.

1. Interviews

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

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

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

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

3. Feedback Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don't forget to share this post!

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Successful Customer Experience Research Strategies

Customer experience research is vital for understanding clients and their needs. Use this guide to get started and optimize customer interactions.

Your customers are the most important part of your business. Without them, you wouldn't have a company to run. But unfortunately, far too many small business owners don't realize the importance of their customers. Instead, they don't engage with them at crucial touchpoints or find new ways to enhance their experience.

Your customers' experiences with your brand can impact your business in a significant way. Customers with poor experiences are more likely to voice negative opinions about the business, which may impact sales and customer retention. However, good customer experiences can benefit every aspect of the company, from product development to support, allowing you to meet the needs and demands of clients.

Customer experience (CX) research is the only way to measure the effectiveness of your CX strategies. How happy are your customers at each touchpoint throughout the journey, and are they satisfied after making a purchase? Many companies don't invest in research because it seems daunting or expensive. However, knowing how your clients perceive your business can help you make better decisions and earn more customers while promoting loyalty.

Keep reading to learn about the benefits of customer experience research and how you can begin learning about your customers' experiences.

What is customer experience research?

Customer experience research is the process of collecting and analyzing various types of customer data based on their interactions with a brand. That research can then be used to improve the buyer's journey, leading to more conversions and repeat purchases.

Customers demand a good experience, whether directly interacting with a product or browsing your website. If you can't offer them a personalized experience across channels, they'll look for a business that can. CX research lets you put your clients at the forefront of your organization, allowing you to address their pain points and elevate your company.

How well do you know your customers and what they expect from your brand? CX research provides the data necessary to deliver a quality experience regardless of the touchpoint.

To perform CX research, you need to collect data. Both qualitative and quantitative research is crucial for helping you understand your customers. You can use tools like surveys, net promoter scores, and qualitative insights to learn more about customer expectations and provide them with a better experience.

The ultimate goal of CX research is to provide your company with solutions. For example, how do you attract and retain clients to reduce your marketing and advertising spend? Investing in CX research can help identify needs and expectations to reduce friction throughout the customer journey .

Why is customer experience research important?

Customer experience research is the foundation required to improve your customer experience strategy . It provides insight into customer expectations, allowing you to deliver everything they need to make a purchasing decision.

You already understand the impact of negative reviews. You may have even gotten some on social media or Google Business already. One way to mitigate the risk associated with bad reviews is to learn about your customers' expectations and provide them with a better experience, going beyond traditional customer service to delight them at every touchpoint or stage of the customer journey.

Here are a few of the benefits of CX research:

• Identifies areas for improvement. CX research can help you build a more customer-centric business model to provide your valued customers with personalized experiences. The data provided from customer service research can identify pain points and help you find ways to solve those issues.
• Helps businesses understand customer needs. Your customers have certain expectations and needs when shopping with your business. CX research enables you to understand what customers need from you, whether it's a streamlined checkout process or better communication.
• Increases a business's competitiveness. Customer experience is a requirement for all businesses. Unfortunately, not all business owners realize its importance. If you can improve the customer experience, it might be just what you need to stand out from the competition.
• Improves customer satisfaction. CX research aims to identify ways to improve customer satisfaction. The happier your customers are, the more likely they will become loyal to your business.
• Boosts revenue. Since happy customers are loyal customers, you can expect a boost in sales and revenue.

How do you conduct customer experience research?

Now that you understand why CX research is so important, it's time to roll up your sleeves and begin. Remember, you can't improve the customer experience without data and insights to support your process. Starting with the right data can ensure your customer experience strategy is a success.

Here's how to begin conducting CX research:

Set research goals

Before investing in customer experience market research, you must establish your goals. What type of customer experience are you trying to achieve? You should start with a strong research question defining why you're investing in CX research. For example, your questions could center around negative reviews or specific parts of the buyer's journey, such as checkout. Apart from having a strong research question, you must identify the data and information to help answer it.

Key performance indicators (KPIs) are quantitative metrics described by numbers or values that can help you easily determine your customers' satisfaction. You can use any metrics you see fit, but some of the most common are net promoter score (NPS), overall customer satisfaction score, and likelihood to recommend your brand or its products and services to friends and family.

Create a customer journey map

A customer journey map represents the steps customers take when interacting with your business, ultimately leading to a conversion or purchase. Creating a customer journey map can help you visualize each customer touchpoint and interaction. In addition, mapping the entire customer journey can help you determine where prospects fall out of the funnel and brainstorm ways to prevent it.

Determine your research methodology

There are several customer experience research methods, such as qualitative and quantitative research. The best CX research consists of both to give you a more thorough understanding of your customers' experiences at each touchpoint.

Qualitative CX research can take the form of open-ended customer satisfaction surveys , heat maps, segmentation, and observational studies. In contrast, quantitative data focuses on CX research methods that involve numbers, such as satisfaction ratings or net promoter scores.

Quantitative CX research will provide valuable insights that can improve the customer journey and monitor success and progress over time. For example, if you're using your net promoter score, you can analyze that number monthly to determine if your modifications have had an effect. On the other hand, qualitative research can give you more actionable insights since it encourages customers to provide direct feedback.

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Collect and analyze data

Regardless of your customer experience research strategies, the goal is to collect and analyze data to make better decisions that directly impact your clients and business.

Best practices for collecting data include:

• Have clear research objectives. Objectives are crucial for understanding and evaluating any data you collect from CX research. With these goals in mind, you can answer your research question to ensure your collected data is valuable.
• Use reliable data. Your data must be reliable to make impactful changes to the customer experience. The best way to ensure reliability is to use customer experience automation and other apps to improve the customer experience . Doing so makes collecting feedback data about the customer journey easy.
• Minimize bias. All data collection methods introduce some bias because a human interprets it. You can reduce bias by using several research methods and tools, such as your website and sales analytics, to collect customer data. A mix of qualitative and quantitative research methods is best because it allows you to support claims with concrete information.
• Ensure participant privacy. When using qualitative data to answer your research question, you should ensure participant privacy. The easiest way to do that is by making surveys anonymous and not sharing their data with other companies or customers.

After collecting data, you can start analyzing it. How you analyze it will primarily depend on the types of data you've collected. In most cases, you should have both qualitative and quantitative data.

There are several ways to analyze the information you collect, such as:

• Regression analytics. Regression analysis is a type of quantitative data analysis that can help you compare dependent and independent variables. For example, you can compare how sales change based on your net promoter score. If your sales increase alongside your NPS, there's a direct connection.
• Qualitative data analysis. Qualitative research analysis is trickier because you're not working with numbers. Instead, you have to find a way to interpret text written by customers. For example, if you used open-ended questions in your survey, you must find the most efficient way to examine the data. The easiest way to interpret this information is to look for themes or use certain words to find patterns.
• Descriptive statistics. Descriptive statistics are another way to analyze quantitative data by summarizing your findings. For example, if you ask all your customers to rate their satisfaction with numbers, you'll add up all their scores and give yourself an average. This average is an example of descriptive statistics because it describes your customer's average sentiment.

Develop actionable insights

What's most important is how you use the data you've collected because it can help you determine areas of improvement and create an action plan for fixing issues. Identify your customers' pain points or problems throughout their journey and brainstorm ways to resolve them. For example, if your clients have complained about shipping times, it might be time to find a new partner who can deliver orders faster without increasing internal costs.

Apply research insights

Having an action plan for reducing friction in the buyer's journey through customer success research is only helpful if you apply the insights you obtain. You must implement changes based on the data you've collected and any conclusions you've drawn while continuing to monitor the impact of those modifications.

Use the same metrics you used to set goals to identify the impact of your CX modifications to ensure a uniform system for analyzing data and applying solutions. Your main goal should be to improve the experience, not necessarily enhance your quantitative metrics like NPS or customer satisfaction numbers. Instead, focus on your customers to meet their expectations, and the results will follow.

How can you improve customer experience with research?

Customer experience research strategies provide you with data and actionable insights that enable you to improve the customer experience by addressing customer pain points and increasing overall satisfaction. For example, let's say you sell accounting software for small businesses and allow users to utilize it through the web or an app on their phone.

In this case, your customers might have issues with the app, which you've noticed because you've analyzed its metrics and seen that they're not using it. CX research can help you pinpoint why customers aren't using the app and brainstorm ways to fix it. For example, you've already used quantitative data to determine your app has fewer users than expected.

Next, you can use qualitative survey data to identify why customers aren't utilizing the application. By using CX research, you might find that customers don't like the interface. So what does this tell you? It means you need to redesign the interface. After doing so, you can measure the impact, determine if more customers are using it with data from your app analytics program, and send a second survey to measure customer sentiment.

Improve customer experience

Customer experience research relies on data to help you learn more about your customers and determine how they feel about your products and services throughout each touchpoint in their journey. In addition, it can help you identify areas of improvement and ensure you have metrics to measure the impact of the modifications you make.

Customer surveys are one of the most straightforward and effective ways to learn about customer expectations. Mailchimp makes it easy to collect client feedback, so you can find ways to improve your business fast. Try Mailchimp today.

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World Leaders in Research-Based User Experience

Quantitative research: study guide.

August 29, 2021 2021-08-29

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The following tables contain links to some of our articles and videos related to quantitative user research. Within each section, the resources are in recommended reading order. 

Quantitative vs. Qualitative UX Research

In UX, we often use qualitative research to gather insights or observations about users. This type of research is useful for discovering problems and determining design solutions. (We also have a study guide for  qualitative usability testing .) 

With  quantitative research , our focus is different. We collect UX metrics — numerical representations of different aspects of the experience. Quantitative research is great for determining the scale or priority of design problems, benchmarking the experience, or comparing different design alternatives in an experimental way.

4-minute video:   Quantitative vs. Qualitative UX Research

In This Article:

Ux benchmarking and return on investment (roi), quantitative usability testing, analytics and a/b testing, card sorting and tree testing, analyzing quantitative data, visualizing and presenting quantitative data.

UX benchmarking  refers to evaluating a product or service’s user experience by using metrics to gauge its relative performance against a meaningful standard. Teams use benchmarking to track improvements to the user experience over time or to compare  against competitors. 

Benchmarking metrics are often also used to the calculate  return on investment (ROI)  of UX work; this type of calculation helps UX professionals prove their value and argue for more resources.

For more in-depth help, check out our report and full-day course. (Unlike the articles and videos in this study guide, these resources are not free.)

Report:  UX Metrics and ROI

Full-day course:  Measuring UX and ROI

In  quantitative usability testing,  researchers collect metrics (like time on task, success rates, and satisfaction scores) while participants perform tasks. This version of usability testing requires more participants and a more rigorous study structure than qualitative usability testing.

Analytics  data describe what people do with your live product — where they go, what they click on, what features they use, where they come from, and on which pages they decide to leave the site or app. This information can support a wide variety of UX activities —  it can help you monitor the performance of various content, UIs, or features in your product and identify what doesn’t work.

While you can use analytics metrics to monitor your product’s, you can also create experiments that detect how different UI designs affect those metrics — either through  A/B testing  or  multivariate testing .

Full-day course:  Analytics and User Experience

Quantitative  surveys  involve asking a large number of users to answer a standardized set of questions. These surveys often involve selecting a response on a rating scales and are used to quantify users’ perceptions. 

Card sorting and tree testing are both useful methods for assessing and improving your product’s information architecture.

In a  card-sorting  study, participants are given content items (sometimes written on index cards) and asked to group and label those items in a way that makes sense to them. This test can either be conducted in person, using physical cards, or remotely using a card-sorting platform. Card sorting can have qualitative and quantitative components.

In a  tree test , participants complete tasks using only the category structure of your site. It’s essentially a way to evaluate your information architecture by isolating it away from all other aspects of your UI.

Full-day course:  Information Architecture

To draw conclusion and interpret quantitative data, you’ll need to understand some statistics and study-design concepts. The following resources will introduce you to those concepts.

These resources won’t give you step-by-step instructions for calculating things like confidence intervals or statistical significance — these are too complex to be covered in a short article. If you want to learn those analysis procedures, please see our full-day course below.

Full day course:  How to Interpret UX Numbers

Related Courses

Measuring ux and roi.

Use metrics from quantitative research to demonstrate value

How to Interpret UX Numbers: Statistics for UX

When research data should be trusted; what statistics to use when

ResearchOps: Scaling User Research

Orchestrate and optimize research to amplify its impact

Related Topics

• Research Methods Research Methods
• Study Guides

Learn More:

Card Sorting: Why & When

Samhita Tankala · 3 min

Product Instrumentation: 3 Benefits

Sara Ramaswamy · 4 min

Between-Subject vs. Within-Subject Study Design in User Research

Raluca Budiu · 5 min

Related Articles:

Between-Subjects vs. Within-Subjects Study Design

Raluca Budiu · 8 min

Collecting Metrics During Qualitative Studies

Kate Moran · 3 min

Should You Run a Survey?

Maddie Brown · 6 min

Data Is More than Numbers: Why Qualitative Data Isn’t Just Opinions

Page Laubheimer · 9 min

Quantitative UX Research in Practice

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The basics of customer experience research

Improving customer experience needs a deep understanding of the entire customer journey and makes structured research the key to success. Customer experience is influenced by multiple online and offline channels, and often happens along a long time frame. These facts make it necessary to carefully evaluate what methods and tools are useful for each specific research and innovation goal.

This article will cover the following questions:

What is customer experience research?

• Why is customer experience research so important?

How to conduct customer experience research?

• Different methods for customer experience research

Customer experience (CX) is your customers entire individual perception of their experience with your brand, product or service. It is influenced by each interaction happening between your company, product or service and its customer. This includes for example ordering a product in your online shop, receiving the product via the counter or receiving a newsletter.

Customer experience research describes the collection and analysis of any type of data relevant to the experience your customers have when interacting with your company. The goal of customer experience research is to increase a company’s competitive advantage by better understanding customers needs and pain points and using these insights to improve the overall customer experience.  

Why is customer experience research important?

Customer experience research is essential for understanding and meeting customer expectations, driving business growth, and building long-term customer relationships. It allows businesses to continuously improve and adapt their strategies to deliver exceptional experiences that delight customers.

More specifically, CX Research helps you with:

• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Achieving competitive advantage
• Generating business growth
• Higher customer retention and reduced churn
• Improved product and service development
• Saving cost

Especially in times of social media, customer experience is becoming a crucial competitive advantage for organizations. Through the quick distribution of information on social platforms, a negative experience can cause enormous harm within a short period of time. At the same time, a positive experience can lead to loyalty and recommendation.

Researching customer experience can provide valuable insights for enterprises and help understanding customer needs, desires or pain points. With this information at hand companies can increase customer satisfaction and develop a customer-centric business model.

It all starts with defining who you want to research and what information you want to gain.

The why: develop a research question and scope

What is your aim with the research? Why are you pursuing this question? The starting point of successful research is a clear research question and a defined aim. You could ask questions like:

• Why do my customers rate the restaurant’s service negatively?
• How do my customers experience the booking process?
• What is the experience like for my employees during the weekend shifts?

Research can also have different scopes. For example: you’ll have a different scope if you look at a service which takes 15 days (e.g., the period from the booking until the flight), than if you look at a specific part of the service that takes 15 minutes (e.g., a customer gets in contact with your customer service in order to solve a problem with their flight booking).

State if you want to research a specific point or if you want to zoom out and look at your offering from a higher level.

Assumption vs. research-based work

Assumption-based work.

This is where the researcher sketches out what they think the customer journey looks like. Assumption-based customer journey maps can be useful as a first draft because they can help you plan your research. It also might help to highlight the assumptions that might have been made concerning a problem. When it comes to making decisions – base them on research.

Research-based work

To create research-based journey maps or personas, draw on the data you have. For example, with a customer based project – chances are you have knowledge about your customer through analytics, order history, CRM databases and so forth. Co-creative workshops with your customer or folks who have profound knowledge or lived experience of the subject matter can also be a way to create research-based personas or journey maps.

Of course, research-based personas or journey maps need more time and resources. Ultimately tools based on valuable research are better to reference when making important decisions and are much closer to reality.

Tip: It’s helpful to write the research question down or post it up in your work space so you can always look back to it and align your research with your aim.

The who: sample

Who are the relevant people for your research? Who will you talk to? Is it users? Customers? Employees? Other stakeholders? Do you want to get information about the interactions between these groups? This decision will make sure that you only get relevant data out of your time and financial resources.

A few aspects to consider when defining a research sample:

• The number of participants: what’s the right size for my purpose?
• The characteristics of participants: do I only want to focus on certain customers?
• Am I mainly interested in people who have used a specific service, during a specific time period?
• The type of technology participants use: are they okay with using a smartphone?
• The amount of time participants have.
• The way you invite participants: sometimes people participate together, e.g. one parent fills in reports representing the family. Also, do you want a random sample or would you prefer picking participants manually? The method with which you invite people will affect that.

Once your research question has been defined and the participants have been identified, you can focus on what research methods suit your subject best..

Triangulation

Triangulation is used in qualitative research to maximize the quality and validity of the research. The idea of triangulation is that every research you do has its advantages and disadvantages. Triangulating methods, data etc. helps you reduce bias and balance the types of learnings you generate. E.g., if one research method leaves some black spots behind, another research methods can help put some light on it. So even if you don’t manage to triangulate everything, make sure to at least have a second source of data that helps verify your findings from a different perspective.

You can triangulate these research methods:

• Methods (e.g., interview, survey, and observation)
• Data types (e.g., text, pictures, and video)
• Participants (e.g., customers, employees, and management)
• Researchers (e.g., customer service, marketing and developers)
• Environmental (e.g., different time/day/season)

Scroll down for a more detailed description of the potential methods.

Deciding a time frame is necessary in order to get valuable data. The time frame of your research will depend on your research question, the scope of your project, and the resources that you can allocate to the project.

Make sure your time frame is long enough to really tackle the research question holistically, but keep it as short as possible so you can start working with the generated data as soon as possible and have a few iterations instead of over-engineering things.

Tip: Qualitative research processes evolve. You might need to dig deeper into a certain area or shift focus once you find a specific user need or problem.

Customer experience research methods

In order to research your customers’ experience you can use qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Whilst qualitative research helps you to get actionable insights and provides your with in-depth knowledge, the quantitative counterparts can help you verify these learnings, check for generalizability and monitor KPIs over time.

The main difference between qualitative and quantitative customer experience research methods lies in the nature of the data collected and the approach used to gather insights. Here are the key distinctions:

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods provide rich, detailed insights into customer experiences and perspectives, using open-ended questions and smaller sample sizes.

• Data Type : Qualitative research methods gather subjective and non-numerical data. They aim to uncover rich, descriptive insights, opinions, and experiences from customers.
• Sample Size : Qualitative research typically involves smaller sample sizes, often consisting of a few individuals or small groups. The emphasis is on depth rather than breadth of understanding.
• Data Collection Approach : Qualitative methods use open-ended questions, interviews, focus groups, observations, or ethnographic techniques to explore customers' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These methods allow for detailed, narrative responses.
• Analysis : Qualitative data is analyzed through techniques such as thematic analysis, content analysis, or narrative analysis. Researchers identify patterns, themes, and recurring ideas to derive insights and develop an understanding of customer experiences.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research methods focus on collecting numerical data from a larger sample size, enabling statistical analysis and generalization of findings. Both methods have their strengths and can be used together to provide a comprehensive understanding of customer experience.

• Data Type : Quantitative research methods collect objective, numerical data that can be analyzed statistically. These methods aim to provide measurable and generalizable insights about customer experiences.
• Sample Size : Quantitative research typically involves larger sample sizes to ensure statistical validity and representativeness. The focus is on collecting data from a broader customer base to generalize findings.
• Data Collection Approach : Quantitative methods use structured surveys, questionnaires, or scales to gather data. Questions are often close-ended, allowing customers to select from predefined response options.
• Analysis : Quantitative data is analyzed using statistical techniques such as descriptive statistics, correlations, regression analysis, or inferential statistics. This analysis enables researchers to identify patterns, relationships, and trends within the data.

In general we suggest picking at least one qualitative as well as one quantitative research method. Qualitative methods, like interviews or focus groups, will provide you with in-depth knowledge about individuals, like their expectations or needs. Also they help to bring up topics you did not consider upfront. Quantitative methods will help you verify these learnings to see if the points also apply to other people.

An overview on the most common customer experience reseearch methods

There is a variety of research methods that can be used to collect customer experience data. All of them have their pros and cons, such as a certain bias that each method inherits or the specific types of data that it yields.

To level out potential biases – triangulate. Choose two or three methods that you think are most promising in collecting useful and actionable data.

Data collection

Participants are provided with a questionnaire

paper-based or digital

makes data and respondents comparable

Disadvantages

• static • respondents can only answer the questions that are asked

Researcher’s challenge

• asking the right questions • asking the questions right • participant recruitment

Participants are asked to talk about specific issues or experiences

• structured, semistructured, or unstructured • contextual or non-contextual Advantages depending on the grade of structure, respondents can express what is important to them

• time and cost intensive • interviewer effect: the interviewer influences the situation and consequently could impact the answers

• being aware of when they are guiding or leading the interviewee • remaining objective

Observation

‍ Data collection

Researchers watch and take notice of the behaviors of participants in a certain situation

• participatory, non- participatory, or somewhat in between • covert vs. overtAdvantagesmore objective view on behavior

• time and cost intensive • observer effect: people might behave in a way they think it is expected

• perceiving important information • being aware of the influence one has on the situation

Auto-ethnography

Participants observe themselves and reflect on their behavior, thoughts and so forth

diary studies, photos, videos, audio, artifacts, …

insights into the person’s inner thoughts

• bias caused by researcher’s prior knowledge and experiences • data might be highly subjective or contextual and need direct explanation by the participant

• researcher: briefing the participant correctly • participant: conscious reflection and report of situations

Cultural probes

Participants collect diverse material in the situation of interest

• abstract descriptions become more comprehensible • recall of information is supported

collection might take a lot of effort

collection/report of cultural probes

Mobile ethnography

Participants use their mobile to report experiences in real-time

open vs. structured approach

• mobile device • recall bias minimized through reports in real-time • minimal researcher bias

high effort for participants

You collected so much data, now is the time to structure it! This piece of content will help you to structure your customer experience data.

And now, what's next?

Now it's about implementing what you've just learned: start researching customer experience and create a repository of useful CX insights.

With the customer journey tool Smaply you can create a hub of CX research and take your innovation further from there.

Sign up now, it's free!

Antonia Cramer

Antonia keeps her eyes open for questions people interested in service design are looking to answer, and helps us provide resources to support their learning ambitions. With her background in digital communication she has great knowledge on how to create content that is easy to access and understand.

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Blog Customer Experience

Customer Experience Research: Tools, Methods, and Tips for 2024

29 April 2024

Table Of Contents

• What is CX Research?
• Why is CX Research Important?
• How to Conduct CX Research?
• 3 Tools forCX Research
• 6 Methods for CX Research
• Tips to Effectively Do a Successful CX Research

Final Thoughts

Ever wondered why some brands skyrocket to fame while others fade into obscurity? It often boils down to one thing: understanding the customer’s experience. The heart of CX is about making your customers’ lives easier and growing your business much faster.

In that spirit, let’s dive deep into the world of customer experience research, a field that’s reshaping the future of business.

• 3 Remarkable Tools for CX Research

What is Customer Experience Research?

If the business world were a stage, customer experience research would be the director. It choreographs every interaction between your brand and customers, ensuring an awe-inspiring performance that keeps the audience coming back for more.

In simple terms, customer experience research is the process of gathering and analyzing data relevant to the experiences your customers have with your company, product, or service. It provides an intimate look at your customers’ journey, illuminating their thoughts, emotions, and behaviors at every touchpoint with your business. 

So, what’s the ultimate goal? To improve your products, services, and overall customer experience .

Customer experience research is a business’s sixth sense, a way to anticipate your customers’ needs before they even realize they have them. 

As a wise man once said, “Customers may forget what you said, but they’ll never forget how you made them feel.” 

Why is Customer Experience Research Important?

In a word? Survival.

With customers increasingly empowered and competition heating up, you can’t afford to take your customers’ loyalty for granted. The simple truth is customer experience research isn’t just important—it’s essential.

Many studies show that 58% of American consumers would switch companies after a negative customer service experience. A positive customer experience, on the other hand, fosters brand loyalty and increases the likelihood of repeat business.

Hence, by delving into customer experience research, you can tease out key insights that enhance your overall customer experience design and elevate customer satisfaction . It’s about tuning in to the voice of your customers, understanding their unmet needs and expectations, and leveraging this insight to drive business growth and deliver exceptional experiences that delight customers.

How to Conduct Customer Experience Research?

Imagine you’re an explorer on a voyage to discover the hidden facets of your customer’s experience. Your research journey begins with a clear question: What is our customer experience, and how can we improve it?

There’s no one-size-fits-all method, but successful research typically involves three stages:

• Strategy Development : Craft your vision, outline your goals, and map out the current customer journey.
• Data Collection & Analysis : Gather customer data pre- and post-sale, then analyze it for trends and insights that can drive improvements.
• Tracking & Implementation : Use your findings as a foundation for continuous enhancements to the CX design

A customer experience research expedition may seem challenging, but it’s well worth it. After all, it’s better to journey into the unknown with a map and a plan rather than to wander aimlessly.

 3 Remarkable Tools for Customer Experience Research

To begin with, you’ll need the right tools to get the job done. Fortunately, technology has given us an impressive toolkit to streamline and enhance customer experience research.

To be precise, Surveys are versatile tools to collect varied data from customers, such as satisfaction, opinions on new products, or understanding of customer behavior. Provides qualitative insights into customer experiences.

Here are three types of surveys that can be used for research. 

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges customer loyalty through one simple question, assessing the likelihood of customers recommending your brand on a scale from 0 to 10. It segments customers into Promoters, Passives, and Detractors. This metric is invaluable for understanding overall customer sentiment and loyalty, serving as a predictor of business growth and a guide for improving customer relationships.

How to Calculate NPS?

Customer satisfaction score (csat).

The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures immediate satisfaction with a product, service, or interaction, typically on a 1 to 5 scale. Quick and easy to interpret, CSAT offers instant feedback on specific touchpoints, helping identify strengths and areas needing immediate attention in the customer experience.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Customer Effort Score (CES) evaluates the effort required from customers to resolve an issue or complete an action, asking how easy it was to interact with the company. By identifying points of friction, CES helps companies streamline processes and enhance the overall ease of the customer journey, directly contributing to customer loyalty and satisfaction.

To understand what your customers think and do, using a survey platform like SurveySparrow is key. It helps you make surveys that are more like chats, which people love to fill out.

Plus, it lets you keep an eye on what folks are saying about your brand online. This reminds us that customer experience isn’t just about face-to-face service; it’s also about what happens on the internet.

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6 Customer Experience Research Methods to Boost Your Business

Expanding on the overview of customer experience research methods, let’s delve deeper into each method, highlighting its unique strengths and addressing potential limitations. By weaving these methods together, researchers can construct a rich, nuanced picture of the customer experience, uncovering actionable insights to elevate service and product offerings.

1. Surveys: The Backbone of Quantitative Insight

Surveys are the cornerstone of customer experience research, offering a structured method to gather quantitative data efficiently. The power of surveys lies in their flexibility; they can be distributed widely across various platforms, including email, social media, and websites, allowing researchers to collect data from a broad audience quickly.

Surveys can unveil patterns and trends in customer behavior and satisfaction by employing well-crafted questions, ranging from multiple-choice to Likert scales. However, to mitigate the limitations of superficial data and low response rates, it’s crucial to design concise and engaging surveys and combine survey insights with deeper, qualitative methods.

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2. Interviews: Unveiling the Depth of Customer Sentiments

Interviews are a profound way to gather qualitative data, offering unparalleled insight into the customer’s perceptions, experiences, and emotions. Conducted either in person, over the phone, or via video conferencing, interviews allow for a personal, empathetic connection with customers, fostering open, detailed responses.

The flexibility to probe further into responses can uncover hidden insights that structured methods like surveys may miss. However, the richness of data comes at the cost of time, both in conducting interviews and in analyzing the nuanced responses. Balancing depth with efficiency, selective interviews with key customer segments can enhance understanding without overwhelming resources.

3. Focus Groups: A Lens into Collective Perspectives

Focus groups provide a dynamic setting to explore customer attitudes, beliefs, and reactions in a group context. By facilitating a moderated discussion among a selected group of participants, researchers can observe interactions that may reveal consensus or divergent views, adding a layer of complexity to understanding customer experiences.

The group setting can encourage participants to express thoughts they might not have realized individually. However, the influence of dominant personalities and groupthink can skew data. Careful moderation and a mix of other research methods can counterbalance these limitations.

4. Usability Testing: Observing Real Interactions

Usability testing is an empirical method that involves observing real users as they interact with a product or service. This method is particularly valuable for identifying design flaws or usability issues that may not be evident without direct observation.

Researchers can pinpoint exact moments of frustration or satisfaction by conducting tasks and scenarios that mimic real-life usage. While highly effective for product improvement, usability testing requires careful planning and a representative sample of users to ensure that findings are broadly applicable.

5. Social Listening: The Pulse of the Digital Conversation

Social listening harnesses the power of social media and online forums to monitor and analyze conversations about a brand or product. This method offers real-time insights into customer sentiment, emerging trends, and the broader public perception. By tracking hashtags, mentions, and keywords, companies can quickly respond to feedback, gauge marketing effectiveness, and identify advocacy or discontent.

The challenge lies in filtering the vast amount of data to distill meaningful insights, necessitating sophisticated tools and analytical skills to interpret the nuances of online discourse.

6. Combining Methods for a Holistic View

No single method can provide a complete picture of the customer experience. A strategic blend of quantitative and qualitative methods tailored to the research objectives and the nature of the customer base can offer a comprehensive understanding.

Researchers can craft a multifaceted view of the customer journey by integrating insights from surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, and social listening. This holistic approach enables businesses to identify opportunities for improvement, innovate proactively, and deliver exceptional customer experiences.

In conclusion, the richness of customer experience research lies in the thoughtful combination of diverse methods. By leveraging each method’s strengths and mitigating its limitations through a mixed-methods approach, companies can uncover deep insights into the customer journey, driving strategic improvements and fostering lasting customer loyalty.

4 Tips to Effectively Do a Successful Customer Experience Research

Most importantly, having the right tools is just half the battle.  But you need to know how to use them effectively. Here are some pro tips for successful CX research:

• Understand Your Customers : Develop buyer personas and use them to guide your research. Understanding who your customers are will help you make sense of their behavior.
• Embrace Multiple Data Sources : Combine data from surveys, web analytics, social media, and customer feedback for a well-rounded view of your customer experience.
• Act on Feedback : Use customer feedback to drive improvements. Let your customers see that their voice matters.
• Foster a Culture of Learning : Customer experience research isn’t a one-off event. It’s a continuous process. Foster a culture of learning and adaptation within your organization.

Looking to gather essential customer insights? Explore SurveySparrow, your go-to for top-notch customer feedback.

Sign up for free and see the magic for yourself. You’re going to enjoy it.

Creating a solid customer experience isn’t just good for your customers; it’s good for your entire business.” Customer experience research offers a roadmap to meeting and exceeding customer expectations.

Finally, it’s an exciting journey into the heart of your business, filled with invaluable insights that can drive growth, foster loyalty, and create memorable experiences that keep customers coming back. After all, as we’ve learned from industry leaders, your business doesn’t exist without your customers. 

So, what are you waiting for? It’s time to roll up your sleeves and embark on your customer experience research journey. Your customers—and your bottom line will thank you.

Passionate, eidetic, and a writer at large.

Growth Marketer at SurveySparrow

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Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

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

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

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

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

What is customer research?

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

Why is customer research important?

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

Customer research vs. market research

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research vs. secondary research

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

Primary research

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

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

Secondary research

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

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

Types of customer data

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

Qualitative data

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

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

Quantitative data

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

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

Best customer research methods

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

Customer surveys and questionnaires

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

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

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

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

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

Focus groups

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

Observational studies

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

Usability testing

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

Field trials

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

Review mining

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

Types of customer research

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

Competitive research

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

Customer journey mapping

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

Buyer persona research

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

Customer experience research

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

Customer segmentation research

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

Customer needs research

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

Customer satisfaction research

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

Pricing research

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

Brand perception research

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

Designing a research plan

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

Set objectives

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

Identify target audience

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

Recruit participants

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

Choose appropriate methods

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

Sampling techniques

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

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

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

Data collection and analysis

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

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

Quantitative data analysis

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

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

Qualitative data assessment

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

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

Mixing methods

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

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

Interpreting and reporting results

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

Drawing conclusions

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

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

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

Creating actionable insights

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

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

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

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

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

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

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

Social listening

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

Predicting customer behavior

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

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

Survicate for your market and customer research

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

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

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

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

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Quantitative Market Research: The Complete Guide

What is Quantitative Market Research?

Quantitative Market Research is a technique to ask questions to the target audience in an organized manner using surveys, polls or questionnaires. Received responses can be analyzed to make well-thought decisions for improving products and services, that will in turn help increase respondent satisfaction levels. Well-founded results can be achieved in case a large sample size that represents a population is surveyed.

The age of Information has transformed both selling as well as purchasing habits and norms. “Information” or “data” is now more valuable than gold. Companies rise and fall on the basis of how well they are able to collect and analyze data and make informed decisions based on the gathered insights.

LEARN ABOUT: Marketing Insight

Any evolved customer who makes a purchase online can tell how quickly businesses have become “customer-centric”. And the first step towards becoming a customer-centric business is through customer feedback and research design .

LEARN ABOUT: Market research vs marketing research

For instance, “Based on your overall experience with us, how likely are you to recommend us to a friend or colleague?” – This one question, the Net Promoter Score question, changed the game for businesses across the Globe. With just 1 question, companies are now able to collect real data from real customers on how well their organic word-of-mouth referrals can grow their business and how less/more they have to spend on paid advertising and promotions or which area of their product or service quality requires improvements.

This is just 1 in hundreds of such Quantitative Market Research survey questions that have fundamentally and exponentially helped organizations, including nonprofits, charities, educational institutions and business alike, to make decisions that are based on real data!

Organizations are dependent on quantitative analysis for the statistical evaluation of data because it gives systematic, detailed information about the research problem at hand or the target audience. This market research technique revolves around surveys , questionnaires and polls and the data collected is evaluated numerically, statistically, mathematically to form better strategies and marketing plans.

LEARN ABOUT:  Market research industry

But before we dive into the steps that are required to carry out a successful Quantitative Market Research study, let’s look at a few more critical reasons why you need to do so.

LEARN ABOUT: Causal Research

Reasons to conduct Quantitative Market Research

• Research is the first step for a successful marketing campaign, be it a new product launch, sales pitch positioning or conducting a data-oriented statistical analysis .
• By conducting an online quantitative market research, insights about marketing activities like updating the website, social media page management or newsletters can also be received.
• By implementing Quantitative Market Research, questions like “Who are currently buying my products/services?”, “Why are the others not buying my product?”, “How to reach out to my potential clientele?” are answered.
• Quantitative research starts with survey creation, designing, and distribution. After the survey is sent out to the right people, data collection(active or passive data collection ) and analysis has to be done to get desired insights.

LEARN ABOUT: Best Data Collection Tools

Significance of Quantitative Market Research

As the name implies, Quantitative market research focuses on the quantity and structured collection of data. It began with face-to-face techniques and now has evolved into online surveys like those provided by QuestionPro. It is often used to capture data like customer behavior , size of the market, identifying reasons for product repurchase. This type of market research is usually based on a large number of samples.

LEARN ABOUT: Behavioral Research

Characteristics of Quantitative Market Research

The basic characteristics of quantitative market research are:

• The premise that quantitative market research operates on is to confirm the hypothesis of the phenomena of how many.
• The data collected is solely in the form of numbers and statistical formula can be applied to this data to come up quantified actionable insights.
• Data collected and the mode of collection is very structured. It is a mix of questionnaires , surveys etc.
• The research study is designed in a way that the questions are structured and the possible responses to these types of question are also structured. This is laid out well in advance before the study.
• Since the questions are not open ended, they point towards certain answers so the scope for uncertainty is limited.

What is the methodology for creating a successful quantitative market research survey?

Quantitative market research is a highly scientific method of market research. It uses deductive reasoning to come to a conclusion and create actionable insights from the data collected. This research method works on the principle of developing a hypothesis, collecting data and then analyzing that data to further prove or disprove the hypothesis. The milestone based procedure of the quantitative design is:

• Make an observation of something that is unknown to you. Investigate the theory that is related to your issue or the field that requires validation.
• Create an in-depth hypothesis to validate your research and findings and end objective.
• Plan for how to prove or disprove this hypothesis and create a structure to achieve this objective.
• Collect and analyze your data. If your data validates your hypothesis, prepare for final validations and to present findings. If the data disproves your hypothesis, you can either start afresh with a new hypothesis or drop your current research.

The milestones mentioned above fall under 5 quantitative design types namely; survey research , descriptive research , correlational research , causal-comparative/ quasi-experimental research and experimental research .

LEARN MORE: Descriptive Research vs Correlational Research

What are the common techniques to conduct a quantitative market research?

Quantitative market research can be conducted by primary and secondary research types. Some of the Some of the most common ways to conduct a quantitative market research are:

Primary quantitative market research techniques

Primary techniques are the most common forms of conducting quantitative market research. Some of the most common and widely used forms are:

• Cross-sectional research survey:  Cross-sectional market research is a quantitative market research method that analyzes data of variables collected at one given point of time across a sample population. population or a pre-defined subset. This research method has people who are similar in all demographics but the one that is under research.
• Longitudinal research survey:  Longitudinal market research is a quantitative market research method where research is conducted over years or decades on a target demographic markets or certain individuals to collect statistical data. 

LEARN ABOUT: Research Process Steps

• One-on-one Interviews: This quantitative data collection method was also traditionally conducted face-to-face but has shifted to telephonic and online platforms. Interviews offer a marketer the opportunity to gather extensive data from the participants. Quantitative interviews are immensely structured and play a key role in collecting information. There are two major sections of these online interviews:
• Face-to-Face Interviews: An interviewer can prepare a list of important questions in addition to the already asked survey questions. This way, interviewees provide exhaustive details about the topic under discussion. An interviewer can manage to bond with the interviewee on a personal level which will help him/her to collect more details about the topic due to which the responses also improve. Interviewers can also ask for an explanation from the interviewees about unclear answers.
• Online/Telephonic Interviews: Telephone-based interviews are no more a novelty but these quantitative interviews have also moved to online mediums such as Skype or Zoom. Irrespective of the distance between the interviewer and the interviewee and their corresponding time zones, communication becomes one-click away with online interviews. In case of telephone interviews, the interview is merely a phone call away.

Secondary quantitative market research techniques

Secondary techniques to conduct quantitative market research are a means to validating a hypothesis or drawing conclusions from empirical data and primary data. This research method is a form of observational research where historical data helps validate the statistical observations of the primary data. For example: mapping the purchase of snowblowers to the months where sales spike with historical data of inclement weather helps manage supply and demand as well as trained personnel during those months.

LEARN ABOUT:  Test Market Demand

5 steps needed for creating a successful quantitative market research survey:

• Specify the Goal: Why do you want to conduct this market research? There should be a clear answer to this question so that the steps that follow are smoothly executed.
• Have a Plan Sketched Out: Every step that needs to be achieved has to be put to paper like the tools that are required to carry out the research,  survey templates , the target audience etc. This may vary from project to project.
• Collect Data: This is the most crucial step in this market research. Data is collected through 3 main mediums: online surveys, telephone interviews or email surveys .

• Compile Reports: A report consisting of graphs, charts, and tables should be created so that the person in-charge of the report can incorporate the observed changes.  

Learn more about Quantitative Data

Guesswork or limited awareness of numbers can never result in the success of an organization. Quantitative market research offers the perfect medium for researchers to analyze customer behavior and adaptability so that the growth of the organization isn’t hampered.  

Quantitative market research questions – Use and Types

According to the objective of research, the survey creator can decide the type of questions to be used. To put it briefly:

• Quantitative market research questions produce answers for “Who” and “What”.
• Qualitative market research questions produce answers for “Why”.

Quantitative questions are usually close-ended and are simpler to analyze when compared to the qualitative counterparts which are open-ended and much harder to analyze. If you’re looking to obtain statistics and quantifiable results, you can implement quantitative market research questions.

These questions are easy for the respondents to answer. Due to their close-ended nature, a sizeable quantity of questions can be asked without having to worry about whether the respondents will get irritated by them or not.  Quantitative questions can start with “how” or “what” and can be used in questions such as “how frequently” or “how many” or “what are” or “what is the extent”.

The most used quantitative market research questions are:

Net promoter score : This question can be asked to evaluate customer satisfaction and brand shareability. It’s usually a 0-10 scale which provides a very filtered yet efficient perspective about brand recommendation. The respondents are divided on the basis of the provided input.

Likert-scale: It’s a psychometric question to evaluate customer opinions towards a particular situation with two polarities at each end of the scale. The Likert-scale question has a statement and 5, 7 or 9 response options for the respondents to choose from. These questions used for customer satisfaction , employee satisfaction , and academic surveys .

Semantic-scale: Semantic differential rating scale is used to ask quantitative questions about ideologies, products or events with grammatical opposite options at the polar positions of the scale to measure their implicative meaning.  

Multiple-choice: These fundamental components of a survey can be vital in getting the best responses in quantitative research as they provide the exact options that an organization would want their respondents to choose from.

Matrix questions: These are multiple choice questions assembled in form of a matrix. They are extremely convenient for survey makers to create and analyze these kinds of questions and for respondents to construe and answer.

Read more: Survey Questions and Sample Survey Questions

Statistical Analysis in Quantitative market research

Quantitative market research uses a host of statistical analysis techniques to process the response data and derive meaningful and clear insights. These insights gathered from statistical analysis enables researchers to derive the final conclusion of the quantitative research.

LEARN ABOUT:   Statistical Analysis Methods

Here are 5 commonly used statistical analysis techniques:

• Conjoint Analysis:

Conjoint analysis is a method used to identify the value of various attributes such as cost, features, benefits for the customers that lead to the purchase of a particular product or service. With increasing technology implementation features in devices and gadgets, this analysis method has been widely adopted for product pricing, market placement, and product launch.

• TURF Analysis:

TURF (Total Unduplicated Reach and Frequency) analysis allows an organization to gain insights on a combination of products/services that’ll attract the highest number of customers. This is done by producing the reach and frequency of unduplicated data from the obtained responses.

• GAP Analysis:

GAP analysis is used to calculate the difference between the desired and actual performance of a particular product/service. By measuring GAP analysis , an organization can make improvements to mend the gap and make their attributes more appealing to reduce the gap.

• MaxDiff Analysis:

Also known as “best-worst” scaling, MaxDiff is choice-model used to acquire customer preferences of multiple characteristics such as product features, brand images, and preferences, activities around the branding etc. It does have some similarity to Conjoint analysis but is much simpler to implement and analyze.

• Cross Tabulation:

Cross-tabulation is a statistical analysis tool that allows comparison of two or more categories in a brief tabular format for convenient data analysis .

Advantages of quantitative market research:

• Produces numerically rational theories: The result of the quantitative research is based on numbers because of which results are extremely instrumental for an organization to make well-thought decisions to market a product/service in a better manner. The numbers analyzed in this can be then put into charts and graphs for better representation and review.
• Easily calculable and analyzable data: Due to the exactness in the answers received for quantitative questions, it’s extremely favorable for research to evaluate the data.
• Enhanced willingness of respondents: Quantitative research mostly comprises of close-ended questions which are quick and less time-consuming for the respondents to answer. This is an essential reason for high response rates for this market research.
• Less investment to create brand awareness: These days, quantitative research is used for brand awareness which is generally conducted through online mediums. Cost invested in the research is thus reduced to create awareness about the brand.

Disadvantages of quantitative market research:

• Statistical data isn’t always complete: Data could be collected from a huge number of people but there is no way to dig deep down into they “why” of an answer. Data isn’t actionable with just numbers and no concrete explanations to back that data.
• Structured interviews and questionnaires: The biggest strength but also a weakness of quantitative market research questions is the limited scope to digress from a structured answer. Whilst this provides actionable numbers, the research questions do not allow to validate those numbers due to the nature of how the survey is set-up.
• Sample size isn’t indicative of a larger population: If the respondents of the market research survey have attributes that do not match those of a larger demographic, the data collected cannot be equated to a larger sample as the data collected isn’t necessarily a representation of the larger audience.
• Self-report isn’t always trustworthy data: People when given the liberty to respond to a survey are skeptical to give out too much information and if any information provided is incorrect or haphazard, that discounts the complete validity of the survey.

How does Quantitative Market Research  work  using QuestionPro?

QuestionPro offers a string of standard and advanced question types like single select, multi-select, Net Promoter Scale or Van Westendorp etc. that can be chosen to create a powerful survey. The survey has to be branded and personalized as per your company policies and also has to include logic and branching suitably.

Distribution of surveys using the right mediums is an integral part of data collection. You can reach as many people as you wish to by using sources like Emails that can also be scheduled, QR code, Mobile application that allows offline data collection , Automated IVR surveys , and Web intercept surveys .

Responses are updated on a dashboard as and when respondents take the survey. As a survey maker, you can keep an eye on the live updates of the customers who’ve started the survey but not yet finished it or who’ve completed it or who’ve just begun, on the dashboard.

LEARN ABOUT: Level of Analysis

Using techniques like Conjoint Analysis, SWOT Analysis, TURF Analysis, one can obtain a solid statistical understanding of the collected data for organizations and academicians. The updates in analytics are done in real-time using advanced analytics programs.

LEARN ABOUT: 12 Best Tools for Researchers

This marketing research method is used to know how alike do people think about a certain product and derive results for data-oriented decision making. When a new product is being launched or a product is being upgraded, quantitative market research can be put to use to know what the target audience thinks about the change and whether it will be well adapted.

LEARN ABOUT: Average Order Value

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AI at the Top of the Funnel: 10 Methods for Email List Growth and Content Promotion

The accelerating pace of disruption to business models means brands must be agile enough to make informed decisions within days—or even hours. They can thrive or fail based on their ability to make quick, intelligent decisions and outperform competitors by providing superior customer experience .

Customer experience is increasingly the differentiator in a world of commoditized features and benefits, embodying every interaction a person has with a company, including the "whats" (interactions) and the "whys" (perceptions, feelings).

In customer-driven brands, integrated qualitative and quantitative research can answer critical business questions so business leaders can...

• Quickly convert raw data into user-friendly charts, word clouds, heat maps, and other actionable tools
• Improve decision-making across departments, recognizing that customers are no longer the domain of only Product Design or Marketing but, rather, of IT, Operations, Pricing, Merchandising, Support, Governance, and others that constitute the business
• Inspire a customer-centric approach to all projects, discussions, and collaborations by making it easy for people to readily contribute to, and access, customer insights

The integrated qualitative/quantitative approach is an innovation that can create a whole that is greater than the sum of the individual qualitative and quantitative parts.

Combining the two methods can help researchers realize the best of both worlds, while mitigating the weaknesses of each.

The Qual/Quant Symbiosis

The influx of data from social media channels, live chats, discussion boards, photos, and video streams generates many data points about individuals. The filtering of this mass data through integrated research methodologies can give rise to longitudinal, holistic views of customers and their impact on the brand: Quantitative research provides objective, statistical analyses, and qualitative research contextualizes human behavior.

Quantitative research methods are about the "what" of human behavior, gauging quantity through a range of sampling strategies. They project results of a quantitative market survey to the entire marketplace and answer questions such as "Is there a strong market for our product?" and "How many of our target customers care about this benefit?" Methods include various forms of surveys (e.g., online, in-person, and telephone), personal quantitative interviews, customer data, etc.

Qualitative research, on the other hand, is are primarily about the "why" of human behavior, diving into customer motivation and emotion to better understand buyer attitudes and beliefs: How do customers regard a brand, why do they like certain marketing messages and dislike others, and so on. The methodologies for gathering data are usually focus groups, in-depth interviews, and online discussion boards, as well as observational techniques, such as ethnography.

Both methods have benefits and downsides, so it is important to determine in what proportion to use each. For example, insight derived from qualitative studies can, at times, be considered speculative, and results can vary greatly according to who conducts the research and what their biases and perspectives are.

By integrating qualitative with quantitative, it becomes possible to inject quantifiable, reliable data into the research to more reliably provide insight on whatever aspect of human sociology and behavior is being explored.

Conversely, qualitative methods can offset the weaknesses of quantitative, especially in cases where a subject of study is hard to measure or quantify. Integration with qualitative can contextualize human behavior—keeping events in their real-world settings and taking into account the effects or variables that are not typically included in a quantitative model.

The hybrid of quantitative and qualitative methods can give researchers a way to draw out insights—statistics-by-themes and side-by-side comparisons—creating a more complete picture throughout the planning, development, implementation, and evaluation phases of programs.

Succeeding With the Integrated Approach

As with any method of research, the success of an integrated qualitative/quantitative approach will depend on the level of engagement of the people being surveyed or researched. Often, a one-sided approach can leave respondents and subjects feeling frustrated or confused about the purpose or value of what they provided or contributed. That often taints the volume and integrity of the data.

To ensure the best results, conduct the research in a way that makes subjects feel they are part of a community. Its members should feel they are contributing to a brand that is giving them something in return for their input. The symbiosis comes from making customers and study participants part of a "tribe," by giving feedback on how their input has had or will have an impact the brand, after having received something of value (their participation and input). Someone who is engaged and is given incentive to influence the brand will offer better quality data than someone who is not engaged or clear about the value.

The success of the hybrid approach will also depend on the ability of the researcher or research team to embrace both methodologies: Most marketers who conduct research are more comfortable with either qualitative or quantitative, but not both simultaneously.

In qualitative models, researchers are an instrument of data collection, and results can vary greatly depending on who conducts the research. In quantitative models, researchers regard the world as being outside of themselves and consider an objective reality independent of any of their own observations.

To succeed, researchers must question their theoretical perspectives, the strategies they intend to use to inform their methods, and the methods they will use to collect and analyze information. They have to be aware of any bias they might bring to the research and how it will affect the outcomes.

If these factors are carefully thought out, the use limitations of one type of research are more likely to be balanced by the strengths of the other, making it possible to...

• Enrich the research by obtaining, through qualitative research, the information on variables not obtained by quantitative surveys
• Build hypotheses from qualitative work to be tested through quantitative approaches
• Qualify or disqualify unanticipated results from quantitative research
• Verify or reject results from quantitative data using qualitative data, or vice versa

When a balance is struck between qualitative and quantitative findings, marketing programs are better informed and executives can have more confidence in the actions they take based on those results.

The depth and clarity this hybrid model can bring to marketing programs will help businesses better understand their customers and their customers' perceptions as well as keep pace with the changes that ultimately affect the brand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mai Kang is vice president of client services at FUEL CYCLE , where she leads teams on the design and analysis of quantitative surveys, qualitative discussion boards, and online focus groups.

LinkedIn: Mai Kang

Market Research Articles

You may like these other MarketingProfs articles related to Market Research:

• Surveys, Polls, Forms, and Progressive Profiling: How to Write Questions That Deliver Valuable Insights
• How to Recruit Top-Notch Tech Pros for Qualitative Research
• How to Design Surveys to Make Better Business Decisions [Infographic]
• The Perils of Relying on Self-Reported Survey Respondents [Infographic]
• Market Research for B2B Marketing Success | Marketing Smarts Live Show
• Perceptual Maps and Competition: How to Understand and Improve Your Position in the Market

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Customer Experience Research (CX)

Our process, customer experience research.

A central component of the customer experience in many organizations is the monitoring of the user experience as well as customer satisfaction and its drivers. Set up either as ad hoc studies, periodic tracking studies, or continuous transaction-based surveys, this type of research requires in-depth knowledge of the client organization and customer touchpoints.

We work with our clients to accurately capture all variables that have an impact on the customer experience and the business operation. Our goal is to provide insights to help develop customer acquisition and retention programs.

Why You Should Do It

More than ever, we are living in an experience economy. As technology helps to commoditize many products and services, and competing on price can lead revenue and profits to a spiral downward, companies need to find differentiation in the experience they offer their customers.

Customers, in turn, are exposed to diverse experiences across many different product and service categories. These become conscious or unconscious benchmarks for their expectations. The customer experience is often the result of internal comparisons of expectations against perceptions in the context of the emotions triggered during the experience. Consequently, relying on data analytics to monitor customer behavior through transactional data is not enough.

Data analytics will show what customers do, but not why they do it. In order to correct direction and improve the customer experience, companies need to monitor different satisfaction metrics by talking directly with their customers, using both qualitative and quantitative research.

A common metric many companies use is the Net Promoter Score ( NPS ), which was “the metric” to measure for quite a while. Fortunately, many organizations are realizing that the  NPS  doesn’t tell the complete story. When it comes to customer satisfaction and retention, we need to look at the customer from different perspectives along their customer journey.

The Approach

Ideally, customer satisfaction research should be conducted with a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods.

We can use qualitative research to explore needs, perceptions, and expectations. This type of research can enable us to investigate the key drivers of satisfaction, the likelihood for a customer to recommend a product/service and the prospect to buy again.

Alternatively, quantitative research using survey methodology is used to validate and identify the key drivers, and related satisfaction and retention metrics. These are customized for each client’s business structure, internal  KPI s and customer journey(s).

In most cases, we recommend including a sample of customers and non-customers in the research to help us glean valuable insights into the different phases of the customer acquisition and retention cycle:

• Key  driver identification
• Development and implementation of the retention program
• Key performance metrics monitoring for own brand and competitors
• Development and implementation of the acquisition program
• Customer acquisition

Qualitative research is conducted as needed to identify and/or get a deeper understanding of key drivers. Among the qualitative methods we use are:

• Focus groups (online and offline)
• One-on-one interviews (online and offline)
• Text analytics

Target Audience Recruitment

Relevant Insights can recruit qualified B2C and B2B participants through our sample provider partners for both qualitative and quantitative research. With your permission, Relevant Insights can also recruit participants from your customer database. If we decide to include your customers or clients, we will implement procedures to protect their identifiable personal information.

Another option is for you to recruit directly from your own customer database if data privacy restrictions don’t allow for customer data sharing. In this case, we provide the necessary data collection tools or work with your data collection tools (i.e. survey tools) if the data is required to remain in the account.

After discussions with your team, we determine the sample parameters and assist with developing screeners. We also manage participant incentives.

Implementation

In direct collaboration with your team, relevant insights will:.

• Recommend the data collection mode depending on sample parameters and the industry in which your company operates. Surveys can be conducted online, by phone, by mail or with a hybrid approach.
• Develop survey questions and metrics to support an analytical plan that meets the project’s business and research objectives.
• Discuss recommendations for sample size and sample sources. Sample size requirements will depend on the product category, target audience, and incidence rates, among other factors.
• Program, test, and host the surveys. In addition to testing the programmed survey for errors before launch, the survey is deployed in a “soft-launch” mode to a small sample to detect any potential issues with actual participants before its distribution to a large sample.
• Monitor the field and provide daily reports on its progress and any issues that may arise.

If qualitative research is required, Relevant Insights will:

• Recommend the most appropriate qualitative research data collection method for the target sample.
• Develop discussion guides.
• Moderate focus groups and in-depth interviews.
• Rent facilities or online platforms.

Analytical Plan

Different multivariate statistical techniques are used to identify key drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction, usage and recommendation (Net Promoter Score – NPS), which can be used as key metrics, monitored in scorecards.

Among the techniques we use are:

• Regression Analysis.
• Correlation Analysis.
• Gap Analysis.
• Latent Class Analysis.

The most common metrics collected in this type of research are:

• Overall satisfaction.
• Likelihood to recommend.
• Likelihood to buy/use again.
• Satisfaction with product/service attributes.
• Preference for product/service benefits.
• Satisfaction with specific areas of the business, depending on customer touchpoints.
• Company and product perceptions.
• Customer behavior.

Relevant Insights can provide different levels of reporting based on budget and time constraints including:

• Raw data only.
• Simulators (for MaxDiff studies).
• Cross-tabulated tables by key variables.
• A short summary report with key findings.
• A full, detailed report with analysis, charts, tables, quotes, and graphics in an appealing format.

Typical Project Duration

Four to six weeks. If a preceding qualitative phase is included, add three to four weeks.

Factors that can affect project duration include:

• The incidence rate of the target sample: The lower the incidence rate, the longer we need to stay in the field to gather the required data.
• Client team responsiveness: A delayed response to requests for feedback at different steps of the project will stall a project and affect the delivery date.

The cost will vary depending on:

• Data collection method (online, phone, mail).
• The analytical plan selected.
• Sample specifications and sample size.
• Reporting requirements.
• Inclusion of qualitative research.

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What is customer experience? How to craft a CX that wins and retains clients

Customer experience (CX) examines the actions in a potential customer’s shopping journey. In this guide, we cover why it’s crucial for businesses to foster an excellent CX, how to measure it, ways to improve the customer experience and explore customer experience management. 

What is CX?

CX concerns every facet of a customer’s interactions and experiences with an organization during the client journey. This includes aspects, such as initial awareness of a product or service; touchpoints with team members; and the feelings, emotions, and perceptions a client has about a company. 

Why is customer experience important?

Consumer-facing businesses must strive to build an exceptional CX to drive sales, retain customers, and forge a positive reputation for their brand. Here are a few reasons why a top-notch CX is paramount: 

• Competition: Most organizations face fierce competition in their market. Having a strong CX makes you stand out from the crowd because customers can expect to be heard and taken care of. 
• Reputation: Customers leave reviews and talk about the experiences they have with brands. When someone Googles your company, you want them to read about positive impressions others have had with your brand so they feel comfortable trusting you to meet their needs. Plus, having a great reputation fosters word-of-mouth referrals that drive more customers to your business. 
• Customer loyalty and retention: When customers know they can expect an unparalleled experience, they are less likely to move to a competitor. This helps companies build clientele and grow revenue while reducing churn rates .

Insights from Pam Dodrill, Chief Customer Officer at Reputation

“Customer experience is the most important opportunity for business growth and brands must prioritize it to remain competitive. Consumers lead their buying experiences and no longer trust a sales pitch or a traditional brand message. They conduct research via reviews and social media, expecting a seamless experience. If they aren’t happy with their experience, they’re not afraid of telling the world. Delivering a strong customer experience is your best chance at gaining both repeat and new business.”

How to measure customer experience

Teams must measure their customer experience with various methods to ensure it is steadily improving and meeting customer’s needs and expectations. Here are some of the top ways to measure CX: 

• Net Promoter Score (NPS): This is a survey companies use to analyze customer loyalty using a scale of 1-10 that measures the likelihood a client will recommend the business to others. A higher NPS score indicates a better CX. 
• Customer churn rate: This measures the percentage of customers who stop using your products or services during a set period. Companies seeing an increasing churn rate should examine strategies for improving their CX. 
• Mapping customer journeys: Analyzing the touchpoints in the customer journey, or sales pipeline , allows teams to visualize particular pain points and work on methods to streamline parts of the buying process. For example, if leads get stuck for weeks in the negotiation phase of the purchasing process, it could be that sales representatives don’t answer questions about pricing during this period and hot leads become cool. 
• Customer satisfaction surveys (CSATs): CSAT surveys measure CX by asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction on a scale of 1-5. Often, they are administered after a purchase or after solving a customer service inquiry.

Many customer relationship management (CRM) systems offer integrations that track CSAT and NPS scores automatically, putting some CX and customer retention measurements on autopilot.

How to improve customer experience

Consider the following tips to foster an exceptional customer experience that helps brands stand out from competitors: 

• Leverage omnichannel support tools: Make it simple for clients to reach out however they prefer. Be accessible via email, live chat, chatbots, phone, and social media. Teams often use customer service tools that streamline communications in one platform to ensure customer inquiries don’t fall through the cracks. 
• Invest in employee training: Businesses must make a customer-focused culture part of their mission and train employees to put the customer first by solving client issues proactively and promptly, answering customer queries efficiently, and relying on data. 
• Be receptive to customer feedback: Companies that listen when customers express problems and aim to solve them are the ones that level up their business. Teams can analyze customer feedback with tools like social listening tools and surveys. 

Insights from Robert Blake, vice president of Digital Marketing at Arkansas Federal Credit Union

“Website chatbots can improve your customer experience whenever customers need help. The key is having relative content, help, and support pages to build the chatbot’s knowledge base. If your customers still want human interaction, a chatbot can easily pass them off to a representative.”

What is customer experience management (CXM)?

CXM involves the tools and strategies teams use to measure and improve the experiences customers have with their business. The main objective of a CXM strategy is to foster customer satisfaction and retention while building brand loyalty, leading to an overall increase in customer lifetime value (CLV) . 

CXM vs. CRM: What’s the Difference?

CXM is heavily focused on what the company looks like in the view of the customer themselves, including their feelings, emotions, and behaviors. CRM involves how the customer appears in the company’s eyes and is often measured with a CRM system that tracks customer engagements and purchase history. 

CXM strategies utilize Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs and tools that measure customer sentiments. Typically, CRM programs involve adopting software focused on outreach and sales that drive revenue. 

The takeaway  

Customer experience involves analyzing every interaction a customer has with an organization. That information is then used to create an unbeatable CXM strategy that meets customer’s needs, solves pain points, and fosters an environment where the customer is always put first. It’s crucial for companies to measure customer satisfaction and retention consistently, listen to customer feedback, and implement ongoing improvement strategies to delight customers, earn referrals, and drive revenue. 

EDITORIAL DISCLOSURE : The advice, opinions, or rankings contained in this article are solely those of the Fortune Recommends ™ editorial team. This content has not been reviewed or endorsed by any of our affiliate partners or other third parties.

Product development: Leveraging qualitative research to meet customer expectations

Explore four stages in product development where implementing qualitative research can provide deep insights, guiding companies to better meet consumer needs and stay ahead of the competition.

Tips for collecting customer feedback  

Editor’s note: Kimberly Pate is managing director, corporate research, at Arlington, Va.-based market research firm Hanover Research. This is an edited version of a post that originally appeared here . 

Customer expectations for their products are higher than ever, and companies are struggling to keep up.

A recent survey found that one in three consumers is struggling to find products that meet their needs. Companies that do not gather customer insights and incorporate them into product development will lose customers to their competitors. In fact, that same survey showed that 72% of customers are willing to try new products to find one that meets their needs.

Companies have several options for collecting customer feedback on products, the most common of which are customer surveys. However, there are a few stages of the product development process where companies can benefit from going beyond a survey by gathering qualitative data. This data allows companies to discover rich and valuable insights that can direct areas for future research or development.

What is qualitative product feedback?

Qualitative product feedback involves asking customers questions directly. The two most common formats are customer interviews and focus groups. This approach allows companies to gather in-depth feedback and ask follow-up questions to delve deeper into the reasoning behind responses. The open-ended questions center on a product’s value, features and product experience allowing companies to build products and features customers want.

Though asking interview questions may seem straightforward and relatively easy, it is critical to enlist an experienced facilitator. A skilled moderator ensures that questions are asked in a way that gets the desired insights without influencing customers’ responses. They also need to correctly code and accurately interpret the responses without bias or assumptions.

By gathering and incorporating qualitative product feedback companies can:

• Understand customer perceptions and preferences on various aspects of the company and its products.
• Gather unanticipated feedback that would not be collected from a formatted survey.
• Clarify customers’ opinions by asking for follow-up questions that provide more context.

Understanding when to collect product feedback

There are four key stages of product development where qualitative feedback is critical: initial product development, product refinement, pre-launch and post-launch. 

1. Initial product development.  Qualitative research can help narrow and refine potential product concepts during the initial idea-generation phase of product development. Its approaches can produce a detailed picture of customers’ experiences with a product and reveal unmet needs and untapped opportunities.

For example, a company looking to update a product can interview current customers about the existing product and gather opinions on potential features. Gathering direct feedback at this stage allows companies to identify the products and features customers are most interested in and why.

2. Product refinement.   Customer feedback is also critical in the product refinement stage. Even if you confirmed a product is in demand in earlier development stages, your produced product may not align with what customers are willing to buy.

Gathering feedback on proposed elements (features, pricing, etc.,) and allowing customers to beta test and evaluate products helps companies determine if the proposed product is viable and identify what additional refinement is necessary.

In this phase, engaging an audience that spans different age groups, ethnicities, income levels and genders is critical to take cultural differences and considerations into account that may not be top of mind for design or marketing teams.

3. Pre-launch.   Companies need to fine-tune how they will market the new product before releasing it. Qualitative feedback at this stage can help companies identify what themes and elements of the product resonate most with customers.

A common example is focus groups that are shown new messaging or ads before launch. This allows researchers to collect a group’s reaction to new concepts and spark conversation on what resonates and what’s falling off the mark. Not only does collecting direct customer feedback help companies optimize their messaging, but it can also produce customer quotes that can showcase the product’s value, enhancing marketing and sales strategies.

4. Post-launch.   Most rigorous post-launch reviews include some type of customer experience survey to evaluate the product’s performance. By conducting follow-up qualitative research, companies can collect additional data and context to clarify the results of the post-launch surveys.

For example, if a typically loyal and engaged customer segment expresses dissatisfaction with functionality or a lack of desire to buy a new product, qualitative research can uncover the reasons why and allow a company to direct future product improvements.

Qualitative feedback can uncover potential product pitfalls

While it is hard to foresee every potential product pitfall, a well-designed research plan that includes qualitative feedback can identify potential concerns with product features at different stages in product development and bring to light new perceptions and interpretations that companies can leverage to further enhance their products.

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Reflections On Qualtrics X4: AI-Powered Research Is Promising If We Stick To The Research Basics

Senem Guler Biyikli , Analyst

Qualtrics introduced its AI-powered Strategy & Research suite at its summit, X4 , and launched its “Strategic UX” product — officially entering the experience research space . The new product supports various UX research methods like video feedback, unmoderated usability testing, card sorting, and tree testing, and it leverage s AI to generate insights and recommended actions. Adding UX research to its experience management solutions, Qualtrics aims to support organizations’ research efforts at scale with a single platform.  

Qualtrics AI was the highlight of the event as it aims to help users get deeper insights through interactive dashboards, data analysis, and recommendations on next steps. These are strong promises, and other leading firms in the experience research space are also similarly improving their AI capabilities and expanding their research toolset. UserTesting, one of the leaders in experience research, recently added AI-powered surveys to its toolset to collect feedback at scale and introduced the Feedback Engine .  

What do these AI integrations and the research platforms’ expansion of their toolset tell us about the future of experience research? The conversations I’ve had with our clients and attendees at X4 drive me to conclude that experience research will unlock AI’s true potentia l — a s long as the research expertise plays the key role in shaping research strategy. That means:  

• AI is not a replacement for research . AI is changing how we ideate, analyze, and synthesize research findings by creating efficiencies (e.g., lowering mundane tasks, summarizing interviews, etc.), but interpreting those findings in the broader context of the user is on us. Determining the right approach to the right problem is still what drives impact. Therefore, while AI accelerates the research workflow, companies still need a collaborative, rigorous research process to produce high-impact research that supports decision-making.  
• AI facilitates democratization of research — but it needs guardrails. As AI has potential to accelerate the research workflow, it also brings new possibilities to democratize research. For instance, AI-generated tools (e.g., AI-generated interview templates) help novice researchers conduct research and improve their skills. However, when executed poorly, democratization can do more harm than good  and can lead to the wrong approach or poor interpretations of data, which is even more important with AI because it can sometimes produce biased outputs. To democratize research responsibly, institute a process with guardrails. For instance, one of the speakers at X4, who is working to democratize research in their product teams, mentioned that only people with a proven track of high-quality research get permission to contribute to the research repository, so they can keep its quality high and use it to inform their AI.
• Companies’ research needs vary. Consolidation of research tools benefits companies looking for all-in-one solutions, but companies with specialized research needs and limited budgets must explore alternatives. For instance, firms primarily conducting research with their own community of users do not need research platforms with robust recruitment capabilities. Assess your current research needs and consider your future research plans (e.g., how your practice will grow) to pick a research platform that best suits your needs.

If you are a Forrester client and would like to discuss this topic further or have questions about experience research landscape, set up a conversation with me.

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Your ultimate guide to quantitative research.

12 min read You may be already using quantitative research and want to check your understanding, or you may be starting from the beginning. Here’s an exploration of this research method and how you can best use it for maximum effect for your business.

You may be already using quantitative research and want to check your understanding, or you may be starting from the beginning. Here’s an exploration of this research method and how you can best use it for maximum effect for your business.

What is quantitative research?

Quantitative is the research method of collecting quantitative data – this is data that can be converted into numbers or numerical data, which can be easily quantified, compared, and analyzed.

Quantitative research deals with primary and secondary sources where data is represented in numerical form. This can include closed-question poll results, statistics, and census information or demographic data .

Quantitative data tends to be used when researchers are interested in understanding a particular moment in time and examining data sets over time to find trends and patterns.

To collect numerical data, surveys are often employed as one of the main research methods to source first-hand information in primary research . Quantitative research can also come from third-party research studies .

Quantitative research is widely used in the realms of social sciences, such as biology, chemistry, psychology, economics, sociology, and marketing .

Research teams collect data that is significant to proving or disproving a hypothesis research question – known as the research objective. When they collect quantitative data, researchers will aim to use a sample size that is representative of the total population of the target market they’re interested in.

Then the data collected will be manually or automatically stored and compared for insights.

Free eBook: The ultimate guide to conducting market research

Quantitative vs qualitative research

While the quantitative research definition focuses on numerical data, qualitative research is defined as data that supplies non-numerical information.

Quantitative research focuses on the thoughts, feelings, and values of a participant , to understand why people act in the way they do . They result in data types like quotes, symbols, images, and written testimonials.

These data types tell researchers subjective information, which can help us assign people into categories, such as a participant’s religion, gender , social class, political alignment, likely favored products to buy, or their preferred training learning style.

For this reason, qualitative research is often used in social research, as this gives a window into the behavior and actions of people.

In general, if you’re interested in measuring something or testing a hypothesis, use quantitative methods. If you want to explore ideas, thoughts, and meanings, use qualitative methods.

However, quantitative and qualitative research methods are both recommended when you’re looking to understand a point in time, while also finding out the reason behind the facts.

Quantitative research data collection methods

Quantitative research methods can use structured research instruments like:

• Surveys : A survey is a simple-to-create and easy-to-distribute research method , which helps gather information from large groups of participants quickly. Traditionally, paper-based surveys can now be made online, so costs can stay quite low.

Quantitative questions tend to be closed questions that ask for a numerical result, based on a range of options, or a yes/no answer that can be tallied quickly.

• Face-to-face or phone interviews: Interviews are a great way to connect with participants , though they require time from the research team to set up and conduct.

Researchers may also have issues connecting with participants in different geographical regions . The researcher uses a set of predefined close-ended questions, which ask for yes/no or numerical values.

• Polls: Polls can be a shorter version of surveys , used to get a ‘flavor’ of what the current situation is with participants. Online polls can be shared easily, though polls are best used with simple questions that request a range or a yes/no answer.

Quantitative data is the opposite of qualitative research, another dominant framework for research in the social sciences, explored further below.

Quantitative data types

Quantitative research methods often deliver the following data types:

• Test Scores
• Percent of training course completed
• Performance score out of 100
• Number of support calls active
• Customer Net Promoter Score (NPS)

When gathering numerical data, the emphasis is on how specific the data is, and whether they can provide an indication of what ‘is’ at the time of collection. Pre-existing statistical data can tell us what ‘was’ for the date and time range that it represented

Quantitative research design methods (with examples)

Quantitative research has a number of quantitative research designs you can choose from:

Descriptive

This design type describes the state of a data type is telling researchers, in its native environment. There won’t normally be a clearly defined research question to start with. Instead, data analysis will suggest a conclusion , which can become the hypothesis to investigate further.

Examples of descriptive quantitative design include:

• A description of child’s Christmas gifts they received that year
• A description of what businesses sell the most of during Black Friday
• A description of a product issue being experienced by a customer

Correlational

This design type looks at two or more data types, the relationship between them, and the extent that they differ or align. This does not look at the causal links deeper – instead statistical analysis looks at the variables in a natural environment.

Examples of correlational quantitative design include:

• The relationship between a child’s Christmas gifts and their perceived happiness level
• The relationship between a business’ sales during Black Friday and the total revenue generated over the year
• The relationship between a customer’s product issue and the reputation of the product

Causal-Comparative/Quasi-Experimental

This design type looks at two or more data types and tries to explain any relationship and differences between them, using a cause-effect analysis. The research is carried out in a near-natural environment, where information is gathered from two groups – a naturally occurring group that matches the original natural environment, and one that is not naturally present.

This allows for causal links to be made, though they might not be correct, as other variables may have an impact on results.

Examples of causal-comparative/quasi-experimental quantitative design include:

• The effect of children’s Christmas gifts on happiness
• The effect of Black Friday sales figures on the productivity of company yearly sales
• The effect of product issues on the public perception of a product

Experimental Research

This design type looks to make a controlled environment in which two or more variables are observed to understand the exact cause and effect they have. This becomes a quantitative research study, where data types are manipulated to assess the effect they have. The participants are not naturally occurring groups, as the setting is no longer natural. A quantitative research study can help pinpoint the exact conditions in which variables impact one another.

Examples of experimental quantitative design include:

• The effect of children’s Christmas gifts on a child’s dopamine (happiness) levels
• The effect of Black Friday sales on the success of the company
• The effect of product issues on the perceived reliability of the product

Quantitative research methods need to be carefully considered, as your data collection of a data type can be used to different effects. For example, statistics can be descriptive or correlational (or inferential). Descriptive statistics help us to summarize our data, while inferential statistics help infer conclusions about significant differences.

Advantages of quantitative research

• Easy to do : Doing quantitative research is more straightforward, as the results come in numerical format, which can be more easily interpreted.
• Less interpretation : Due to the factual nature of the results, you will be able to accept or reject your hypothesis based on the numerical data collected.
• Less bias : There are higher levels of control that can be applied to the research, so bias can be reduced , making your data more reliable and precise.

Disadvantages of quantitative research

• Can’t understand reasons: Quantitative research doesn’t always tell you the full story, meaning you won’t understand the context – or the why, of the data you see, why do you see the results you have uncovered?
• Useful for simpler situations: Quantitative research on its own is not great when dealing with complex issues. In these cases, quantitative research may not be enough.

How to use quantitative research to your business’s advantage

Quantitative research methods may help in areas such as:

• Identifying which advert or landing page performs better
• Identifying how satisfied your customers are
• How many customers are likely to recommend you
• Tracking how your brand ranks in awareness and customer purchase intent
• Learn what consumers are likely to buy from your brand.

6 steps to conducting good quantitative research

Businesses can benefit from quantitative research by using it to evaluate the impact of data types. There are several steps to this:

• Define your problem or interest area : What do you observe is happening and is it frequent? Identify the data type/s you’re observing.
• Create a hypothesis : Ask yourself what could be the causes for the situation with those data types.
• Plan your quantitative research : Use structured research instruments like surveys or polls to ask questions that test your hypothesis.
• Data Collection : Collect quantitative data and understand what your data types are telling you. Using data collected on different types over long time periods can give you information on patterns.
• Data analysis : Does your information support your hypothesis? (You may need to redo the research with other variables to see if the results improve)
• Effectively present data : Communicate the results in a clear and concise way to help other people understand the findings.

How Qualtrics products can enhance & simplify the quantitative research process

The Qualtrics XM system gives you an all-in-one, integrated solution to help you all the way through conducting quantitative research. From survey creation and data collection to statistical analysis and data reporting, it can help all your internal teams gain insights from your numerical data.

Quantitative methods are catered to your business through templates or advanced survey designs. While you can manually collect data and conduct data analysis in a spreadsheet program, this solution helps you automate the process of quantitative research, saving you time and administration work.

Using computational techniques helps you to avoid human errors, and participant results come in are already incorporated into the analysis in real-time.

Our key tools, Stats IQ™ and Driver IQ™ make analyzing numerical data easy and simple. Choose to highlight key findings based on variables or highlight statistically insignificant findings. The choice is yours.

Some examples of your workspace in action, using drag and drop to create fast data visualizations quickly:

Related resources

Market intelligence 10 min read, marketing insights 11 min read, ethnographic research 11 min read, qualitative vs quantitative research 13 min read, qualitative research questions 11 min read, qualitative research design 12 min read, primary vs secondary research 14 min read, request demo.

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eCommerce Customer Research Analyst

Posted 21 May 2024

Burlington, Massachusetts - United States

Req Id 275248

Work Your Magic with us!  Start your next chapter and join MilliporeSigma.

Ready to explore, break barriers, and discover more? We know you’ve got big plans – so do we! Our colleagues across the globe love innovating with science and technology to enrich people’s lives with our solutions in Healthcare, Life Science, and Electronics. Together, we dream big and are passionate about caring for our rich mix of people, customers, patients, and planet. That's why we are always looking for curious minds that see themselves imagining the unimaginable with us.

This role does not offer sponsorship for work authorization. External applicants must be eligible to work in the US. 

The Customer Research Team in the Digital & eCommerce Customer Experience organization is seeking an experienced customer researcher and insights professional with a robust quantitative skillset and experience. In this role, you will partner with stakeholders to identify research needs – both responding to gaps they have identified and anticipating additional areas of research that would be beneficial for the business. Your primary responsibilities will include developing comprehensive and detailed research plans, conducting primary and secondary research with customers and the market, analyzing data for various disparate data sources, and developing reports with cohesive stories. The ideal candidate will be able to go beyond the data to identify and convey actionable insights and recommendations from the research that help meet business goals and objectives and improve the overall experience for our customers. Key accountabilities include:

Quantitative Research and Analysis:

• Identify research needs through conversations with product owners, business partners, and business leads.
• Identify appropriate methodologies to use to ensure that the research output delivers the desired value and impact.
• Assess and utilize the appropriate data sources to develop cohesive and holistic analyses.
• Conduct data modeling for effective data visualization and interpretation.
• Analyze customer feedback data to identify areas for improvement across all touchpoints.
• Recommend data-driven solutions to enhance customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
• Research and analyze the competitive landscape, identifying market trends, competitor strengths and weaknesses, and potential new market opportunities.

Team Building and Collaboration:

• Work with the team to ensure interconnectedness of insights and identified opportunities, while building off already existing learnings.
• Sharing best practices and identifying opportunities for improving the quant research process for the team.
• Building relationships and working closely with cross functional partners to understand the business needs and partner objectives in detail.
• Guide partners and stakeholders towards the best approach(es) to collect data to help shape the product, CX, and overall digital strategies.

Report Development, Communication, and Presentation:

• Tailor content in reports at differing levels of detail and differing areas of focus for various audiences ranging from product managers to senior executives.
• Develop impactful reports with compelling visuals that convey often complex data and results in an easy-to-understand manner.
• Tell the story for what we learned, why it is important, and how we can improve our CX
• Present learnings to the rest of the Customer Research team as well as business partners and senior business leaders.

Business Acumen and Curiosity:

• Understand business objectives and design studies to discover current and prospective customers’ preferences, needs, and pain points.
• Draft hypotheses to test based on understanding of the business and other research that has been completed.
• Be curious and continue the ask the “why” behind results, especially those that are unexpected.
• Anticipate challenges and gaps in understanding to proactively suggest studies and shape business team roadmaps.

Who you are:

Minimum Qualifications:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Marketing, Economics, Engineering or other business discipline.
• 5+ years of experience in marketing insights & strategy roles.
• 1+ years of experience with survey administration tools (e.g., Qualtrics, Medallia, etc.) and survey data analysis tools (e.g., Q, Marketsight, Jump, SPSS, etc.).

Preferred Qualifications

• Master’s Degree in Marketing or MBA.
• Proficiency with commercial data analysis tools (e.g., Tableau, BI Tools, Palantir, Looker Studio, Big Query, etc.) for data processing, data modelling, and advanced data analysis to handle datasets of 30-100 million+ rows.
• Experience with eCommerce and designing digital experiences.
• Experience developing insights for multinational corporations within an enterprise-level direct to consumer or B2B landscape.
• Experience analyzing Google analytics data to identify trends, conduct funnel analysis, and uncover growth opportunities.
• Experience with detailed and complex quantitative analyses.
• Ability to understand and adapt to different cultures and approaches for different markets / geographies.
• Research agency or consulting background.
• Proven track record of collaborating cross-functionally, educating, and influencing teams to achieve common goals.
• Familiarity with qualitative research techniques.
• Familiarity or experience with product management principles and working with product Researchteams.
• A passion for innovation and a desire to get to the root cause (the why).
• Experience with agile principles and execution.

What we offer: We are curious minds that come from a broad range of backgrounds, perspectives, and life experiences. We celebrate all dimensions of diversity and believe that it drives excellence and innovation, strengthening our ability to lead in science and technology. We are committed to creating access and opportunities for all to develop and grow at your own pace. Join us in building a culture of inclusion and belonging that impacts millions and empowers everyone to work their magic and champion human progress!   Apply now and become a part of our diverse team!

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• Published: 21 May 2024

Long-term care staffs’ experience in facilitating the use of videoconferencing by cognitively impaired long-term care residents during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed-methods study

• Marie-Soleil Hardy 1 ,
• Chaimaa Fanaki 1 ,
• Camille Savoie 1 ,
• Machelle Wilchesky 2 ,
• Marie-Pierre Gagnon 1 ,
• Maude Laberge 3 ,
• Vincent Couture 1 ,
• André Côté 3 ,
• Clémence Dallaire 1 ,
• Philippe Voyer 1 ,
• Maria Cecilia Gallani 1 ,
• Bernadette Dallaire 4 &
• Éric Gagnon 4  

BMC Health Services Research volume  24 , Article number:  646 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

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During the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous long-term care (LTC) homes faced restrictions that prevented face-to-face visits. To address this challenge and maintain family connections, many LTC homes facilitated the use of electronic tablets to connect residents with their family caregivers. Our study sought to explore the acceptability of this practice among staff members and managers, focusing on their experiences with facilitating videoconferencing.

A convergent mixed method research was performed. Qualitative and quantitative data collection through semi-structured interviews to assess the acceptability of videoconferencing in long-term care homes and to explore the characteristics of these settings. Quantitative data on the acceptability of the intervention were collected using a questionnaire developed as part of the project. The study included a convenience sample of 17 staff members and four managers.

Managers described LTC homes’ characteristics, and the way videoconferencing was implemented within their institutions. Affective attitude, burden, ethicality, opportunity costs, perceived effectiveness, and self-efficacy are reported as per the constructs of the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability. The results suggest a favorable acceptability and a positive attitude of managers and staff members toward the use of videoconferencing in long-term care to preserve and promote contact between residents and their family caregivers. However, participants reported some challenges related to the burden and the costs regarding the invested time and staff shortage.

Conclusions

LTC home staff reported a clear understanding of the acceptability and challenges regarding the facilitation of videoconferencing by residents to preserve their contact with family caregivers.

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Introduction

Long-term care (LTC) homes in Canada were heavily shaken by the COVID-19 pandemic crisis. In Canada, around 80% of deaths during the first wave (March through August 2020) were among their residents [ 1 ]. To curb the spread of the virus, authorities implemented strict policies, such as social distancing and visit restrictions in LTC homes that inadvertently put residents at increased risk for loneliness [ 2 ]. A recent study highlighted how quarantine negatively impacted older adults with cognitive impairment [ 3 ], who represent more than 80% of LTC homes’ residents [ 4 ]. Existing literature highlights the deleterious effects of COVID-19-related isolation on older adults [ 3 , 5 , 6 ] and consequences for family caregivers [ 3 ]. The latter authors report acute deterioration in cognitive and behavioral function among residents during the first wave of the pandemic.

Family caregivers provide emotional and care support for older adults, especially those suffering from chronic and complex health conditions [ 7 ]. They play a vital role in supporting their older relatives as care recipients. Their involvement in the older adults’ decision-making has been associated with positive effects for family well-being [ 8 ].

To promote the presence of family caregivers despite visit restrictions, we proposed that LTC homes could benefit from technology like videoconferencing, using mainstream communication platforms (e.g., Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams) [ 9 ]. Technology use, supported by values of empowerment, respect for individuals and their right to self-determination, is considered as being a key factor to enable comprehensive person-centred care [ 10 ]. Studies show that the use of electronic devices to promote contact with loved ones significantly reduces feelings of loneliness in seniors, improves physical abilities and vitality, and promotes pain management [ 11 , 12 ]. To maintain family support, LTC home staff facilitated electronic tablets ‘use by residents to maintain the communication with their caregivers and loved ones, especially during the first waves, where in-person visits were prohibited. This experience brought different challenges and efforts of adaptation for the LTC homes’ staff members who were responsible for integrating these tasks into their work schedule and care routine. However, to our best knowledge, there has been no previous study in Canada that has evaluated the implementation of similar innovative technologies aimed at alleviating negative consequences among cognitively impaired seniors in LTC homes in the context of a pandemic. The aim of this article is to describe the acceptability of videoconferencing facilitation by LTC staff members and managers.

Study design

We conducted a convergent mixed method research, where we collected both quantitative and qualitative data, which were then integrated for the interpretation of the overall results [ 13 ]. This study is part of a larger research project aimed at evaluating the implementation process, viability, and acceptability of interventions to support the presence of family caregivers, as well as to examine the effects on residents and their family caregivers and related costs.

Setting and sample

Four LTC homes in the province of Quebec, Canada participated in our project. The diversity regarding their environment (urban, rural) or their organization status (public, private) enabled us to understand the various factors that can influence the degree and variability of implementation.

With the help of promotional posters and presentations of our research project that were diffused across settings, we have recruited a convenient sample consisting of 17 staff members and 4 managers.

Staff members were approached by the recruited managers and had to:1) be 18 years of age or older; 2) work in the LTC homes for at least 3 months; 3) be a member of the team providing services to residents (nurses, physiotherapists, occupational therapists, specialized educators, recreational activities technicians, etc..). In addition, the participating staff members had to facilitate videoconferencing communication between residents and their family caregivers. Managers had to be involved in the management and the direction of the LTC homes care activities.

Intervention

Each LTC was required to ensure the weekly occurrence of at least one videoconference meeting between residents and their relatives, over a three-month period. All staff members received written information on strategies for assisting residents that suffered from major neurocognitive problems and their loved ones during a videoconference.

Data collection methods

Following the instructions of public health limiting access to LTC homes, data collection was done virtually by research assistants from March 2021 to October 2021. Separate and different data collection were done with staff members and managers through an hour-long individual interviews where research assistants took detailed notes in the form of real time verbatim without any audio recording due to the need to produce results within a constrained timeframe to inform our partners and deliver key findings as stipulated by the funding terms. All identifiable data were anonymized to safeguard the privacy of the participants.

Staff members’ qualitative and quantitative data were collected at an interval of three months between (T1) and (T2) for each LTC. Semi-structured individual interviews were conducted by research assistants with all staff members using an interview guide inspired by the Theoretical Framework of Acceptability (TFA) and its six constructs [ 14 ] that were presented on Table 1 . We did not include the construct “Intervention coherence” of the Sekhon et al. [ 14 ] model because it did not apply to our intervention (which is the use of tablets).

Interviews were designed to explore staff members’ experiences in assisting residents and caregivers with videoconferencing, as well as the challenges and resources (facilitators) during intervention implementation and use. Interview guides were presented to two partner healthcare professionals before the beginning of data collection. Modifications were made following their comments to facilitate participants’ understanding of the questions.

Quantitative data on the intervention’s acceptability were collected at the same time as the interviews. Staff members rated each of the six TFA constructs (Table  1 ) on a scale from 0 to 10, where 10 indicates highest level of acceptability of the intervention (except for the constructs pertaining to « Opportunity cost» and « Burden», where the scale was inverted).

Only qualitative data were collected with managers at T1 through a semi-structured individual interview to provide an overall understanding of the philosophy, physical environment, clinical and quality of life programs, work organization, staffing and technology use in each LTC home.

Sociodemographic data from all participants were collected at the beginning of the interview at T1.

Data analysis

For qualitative data, we have used a deductive approach by building an analytical framework on an excel table based on the six constructs of the TFA. Two research assistants then analyzed data independently. They later met with the principal investigator to reach consensus and validate the themes. Quantitative data were analyzed using IBM SPSS Statistics version 28 software. The sociodemographic and construct data were analyzed descriptively, and frequency distributions, means, and medians were calculated.

Once the qualitative and quantitative data were analyzed, the findings from both approaches (quantitative and qualitative) were merged to observe convergence and divergence between the findings.

Ethical considerations

The protocol was approved by the CISSS Chaudière-Appalaches Ethics Board (2021–846—ESMO-ESLD). Permission for the research was given by the Direction Soutien à l’autonomie des personnes âgées – CISSS Chaudière-Appalaches (QC). All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations and Declaration of Helsinki. Due to social restriction measures during the pandemic, the research assistant contacted all participants, read and sent a copy of the consent form by email. All participants provided a verbal informed consent to participate in the research project which was approved by the ethics board.

First, participants’ sociodemographic characteristics are presented. Next, managers’ interviews results are presented. Finally, staff members’ acceptability of videoconferencing is presented in terms of qualitative and quantitative results.

Participants’ characteristics

Participant’s sociodemographic characteristics are presented in Table  2 . Three out of four LTC home managers were women. The sample represented a wide age range. They were occupying their position for an average of 7.3 years.

17 staff members participated at T1 and 12 at T2 since five members left their position during the study. Most staff members were female, with a mean age of 37.1 years. Participants occupied diverse job positions and had been working in their LTC home for an average of 8.8 years. The majority worked full time during the day shift. The “other” category of job title includes, but is not limited to, trainees, recreational services coordinator, and animation assistants.

Description of LTC home by managers

All managers described their LTC home as a personalized living environment, where they tried to match with each resident’s past lifestyle as closely as possible. “ We proceed with an approach where the resident has to feel like they are at home ”. (Etab1_GEST01). All managers placed great importance on the presence of the family and on maintaining a good relationship with them: “ Families are very present in the decisions we make. We are a transparent environment. We consult family members for all kinds of situations; we are truly in partnership in the decision-making process. ” (Etab4_GEST01). To this end, several spaces had been set up in LTC homes for meetings between residents and their loved ones, such as the residents’ rooms, common lounges, dining rooms, corridors, and outdoor courtyards. Some facility spaces were restricted due to COVID-19 to limit the spread of the virus.

Managers also highlighted the effect of the presence of the family in their settings on residents’ well-being. A manager explained how the lack of visits took a toll on residents: “ It had a very big impact… We saw impacts on the health and mental state of the residents .” (Etab4_GEST01).

To maintain communication through videoconferencing, managers reported that they adapted the care schedule as much as possible to the residents’ needs, habits, and routines. Family caregivers were aware of the care schedule and could plan the meeting time, beforehand. While different staff managed meetings and communications, including nurses, nursing assistants, and special educators, recreational technicians were mostly in charge supervising videoconferencing. Most managers reported that they had to solicit the aid of additional staff members to keep up with the increased demand for videoconference meetings during the pandemic.

The assigned staff were responsible for planning: “ Recreational technicians will plan the meeting, they will send the teams link to the relative by email, they will do a test in the office with the relative and to see if it works ” (Etab2_GEST01). One manager specified that some calls were initiated spontaneously if residents had a particular or urgent need. Before meetings, staff members also prepared residents and made sure that they were in a suitable setting to ensure smooth communication: “ We’re going to prepare the resident, so, proceed with the hygiene, make sure the resident has their hair/makeup done that the resident is in a well-lit environment, that the resident is in a nice place to make the call .” (Etab4_GEST01). Staff members also ensured the support and the good progress of the meetings: “ It is the recreational technicians who will hold the tablet, and make sure that the camera remains in front of the user. The staff member will also sometimes intervene in the meeting, for example, if the resident does not speak. He will sometimes speak with the caregivers to give news .” (Etab2_GEST01).

In addition to tablets, other technological equipment such as bigger screens were used in some settings to project the image during the call: “ We have televisions, which we can use to broadcast the video call on a larger screen than the tablet. This is a very popular trick to accommodate our residents, especially those with severe cognitive impairments, as residents sometimes have difficulty focusing well on the small screen of the tablet ” (Etab1_GEST01). Unfortunately, not all settings (one out of four) had access to an Internet network, which was limiting. Some LTC homes also bought a telephone handset to connect it to the tablet. The handset helped some residents with hearing problems to follow the conversation, or for the sake of familiarity, making them feel like they were talking on the phone.

Staff members’ acceptability of videoconferencing

Quantitative results of staff members’ acceptability of videoconferencing are shown in Fig.  1 . The scores obtained showed stability between T1 and T2.

Mean scores of acceptability of videoconferencing by staff members

Qualitative and quantitative findings are presented below for each TFA construct.

Affective attitude

Staff members showed a positive attitude toward the use of videoconferencing to preserve contact between residents and their caregivers (mean score around 8 out of 10). Most staff members had a positive experience when assisting residents during their videoconferences with families. Videoconferencing helped to keep residents connected to their loved ones, to increase interaction between them, and to create unique moments. For example, one staff member described the caregivers as their clients as much as the residents themselves “ In general, I think it’s great to be able to do this for the families and for the residents. Sometimes I feel like I’m doing it more for the residents, sometimes I’m doing it more for the family, but I consider both to be my clients. I realized that for the families, to see them, it makes a difference. It’s important for people because it allows them to keep a connection .” (Etab1_PROF03).

On the other hand, some staff members mentioned that the resident’s mental state affected how the videoconferences were conducted. For instance, certain residents faced challenges in recognizing their family members, some became upset during video calls as they couldn't physically touch their loved ones through the screen. A few residents would even fall asleep during the calls. To this end, most staff members perceived that videoconferencing was beneficial primarily for families.

Almost all staff members reported that assisting residents during videoconference required a lot of effort (scores of 6,4 and 6,2 out of 10). Most residents required continual assistance due to their cognitive and other impairments. One staff member explained: “ For people who are more independent, it doesn’t take much effort because you just have to set up the tablet. However, for people who are less independent, you have to set them up, be with them during the meeting, stimulate them, which is more demanding. You have to keep the resident awake. We are a communication support .” (Etab4_PROF04). Moreover, some staff and family caregivers weren’t comfortable using videoconference platforms or tablets. For example, one staff member added: “ In terms of the technology, we had to adapt to that and show the family how to do it. We had to be patient and accommodating. Sometimes it took two people. It took a lot of energy .” (Etab1_PROF04). Eventually, it caused an overload of work by adding extra tasks to the staff’s schedules: “ It still fits into our schedule but it’s too busy too so we’re tight, our daily routine didn’t change but we were adding more tasks each time! ” (Etab1_PROF01). Sometimes this could lead to cutting other activities, which some of them deemed more useful for the stimulation of many residents.

The intervention was also a good fit with their value system (scores of 8.4 and 7.9 on ethics variable). However, some staff members mentioned that this mode of communication did not match with their values at all, as they preferred face-to-face visits. Several participants reported the lack of privacy: “ For sure, the in-person visits were better because the families stayed with the residents longer without us being there, so they had more privacy and direct interaction with the residents ” (Etab5_PROF02). To this end, several staff members characterized videoconferencing as a default means of communication considering the restrictions on visitations, related to the COVID-19 pandemic: “ Sure it would be better with face-to-face visits, but we can’t, so it’s better than nothing. It’s a good alternative ” (Etab1_PROF06). Finally, a few staff members mentioned the importance of videoconferencing, as it was important for them to maintain relationships and contact between residents and their loved ones: “ I can understand that a family feels helpless when they can’t see them in person. You can’t be against this means of communication when you see the reaction of the relatives ” (Etab5_PROF02).

Opportunity costs

Average cost scores are 5,9 and 6,0, reflecting a certain amount of costs related to videoconferencing across different settings. Indeed, the analysis of the staff interviews showed that several adjustments were required for the integration of videoconferencing within work routines. First, it required scheduling adjustments to fit it into the care schedule, as one participant noted: “ It takes a lot of time (…). So, if we have a lot of requests during the day, I’ll be forced to focus on the calls and not on my other duties. ” (Etab5_PROF02). In addition, it was difficult to balance the time spent on videoconferencing with that spent on other leisure activities: “ It was the main activity, we dropped everything else. So, in this context where that’s all we do, well, it fits in well. It was the only thing to do. Now that we’re offering other activities again, it’s harder to integrate .” (Etab5_PROF01). Indeed, adding videoconferences into the care schedule was reported as a challenge by several staff members: “ We have time slots that we try to keep up with, but sometimes these meetings can play on the actual planning to devote more time for meetings. ” (Etab4_PROF03).

In doing so, most participants reported that integrating videoconferencing via tablets required a notable time investment. “ It takes a lot of time. The residents are not able to do it on their own. […] You must do everything. It’s everything from planning the call to getting off the phone. Some residents I leave alone in the room with the tablet during the call, but sometimes it’s hard. There are some that tap the tablet, so they end up with windows and pictures ”. (Etab1_PROF03). Other staff members reported that the time investment depended on the resident’s ability to stay alone during videoconferences: “ It's variable, it depends, for some you have to be with them all the time and some I can leave once the zoom is set up. It’s different from one resident to another ” (Etab2_PROF01).

Perceived effectiveness

Videoconferencing seems to achieve its purpose to preserve contact, with a score around 7.0 in T1 and T2. According to participants, videoconferencing keeps residents connected to their loved ones, especially when family caregivers were restricted from visiting residents. One staff member said: “ I think we hit that target. You have to put it in the context that the loved one can’t see [the residents] so the video was a solution to keep the connection and communication between the residents and their loved ones. I’ve seen a lot of things exchanged and shared through these communications, like showing newborns, recipes and stories being shared, etc . For people with severe [cognitive] disorders, even though we can’t assess the situation, we still see reactions and emotions come out during these calls. ” (Etab4_PROF01). For some residents, videoconferencing helped to maintain their psychological health: “ Everything that was mediated, the anxiety rose for the most lucid. The more affected ones didn’t understand why there was no more activity, they felt abandoned. So, videoconferencing was a stimulating activity. I think it helped them with their psychological health. That’s a problem we had for a while; morale was low among our residents. ” (Etab5_PROF01). It also helped to stimulate even the most cognitively impaired residents: “ Another lady this morning, she was asleep, so I sat down next to her and called her son, so I put him on the speaker. When the son started talking, the lady woke up and started making sounds. I think that with what I’ve seen since we started doing this, no matter what stage the patient is in, it awakens the residents, it touches something, that’s for sure. ” (Etab1_PROF03).

On the other hand, a few participants reported that videoconferencing remained a default means of communication, compared to in-person visits. One staff member said: “ Face-to-face interactions are more beneficial than the other means, you can touch them for example, while it’s not possible using the videoconferencing .” (Etab1_PROF01). Finally, some participants reported that it was difficult to judge the usefulness of videoconferencing in maintaining quality contact and breaking isolation because residents have severe cognitive impairment. One participant said: “ It’s because of their neurocognitive impairment. I find that these people have less or no interest in looking at a camera, sometimes they don’t even understand. So, it takes a physical presence to be able to be stimulated. For other residents who have no or little [cognitive] impairment, these interventions are more beneficial because they are always happy to talk to their loved ones.” (Etab5_PROF04).

Self-efficacy

All staff members interviewed reported feeling confident and competent to assist residents with their communication with the tablet, with a score around 9 out of 10 in self-efficacy. In addition, professionals reported that their sense of competence improved over time: “ At first, I didn’t feel competent at all. It got better over time. ” (Etab1_PROF04).

The present study aimed to describe the acceptability of videoconference by the staff members and managers of four LTC homes. Across different LTC homes, managers and staff members acknowledged the importance of the family’s presence in their settings and their role in the residents’ lives and well-being. They consider the residents’ families to be as much as their clients as the residents themselves. They involve them in decision-making and in their relative’s care. In Canada, family caregivers spend many hours caring for their relatives in LTC homes, especially those suffering from cognitive problems. They promote and provide emotional support, social engagement, advocate for their relatives, oversee their care and contribute resources and ideas to the LTC home community [ 15 ]. Following the restriction of visits during the pandemic, managers and staff members noticed how the absence of family caregivers impacted the mental and physical health of their residents. To maintain communication and to counter the potential adverse effects that these restrictions might inflict, LTC homes turned to videoconferencing as an alternative strategy. Social isolation was associated with negative deleterious outcomes, including an increase in depression, cognitive decline, and behavioural symptoms of dementia [ 16 ]. Several studies have shown how the withdrawal of different social activities and the restrictive measures that were put in place created confusion among these residents [ 17 , 18 ]. These results were similarly reported by our participating LTC home managers and staff in our study and applies particularly to residents with severe cognitive impairment. Moreover, videoconference was generally perceived positively by all the staff and managers, similarly to our previously published findings that report on acceptability by caregivers and residents [ 9 ]. The videoconferencing intervention purpose fit within the culture and philosophy of LTC homes that strive to embrace a person-centred care model that prioritizes personhood and quality of life, by creating and supporting collaborative relationships among workers, family caregivers, and residents. Personalizing the means of communication and their frequency according to family needs and resident characteristics could be considered to ensure adherence and the desired effects.

The use of tablets for videoconferencing was newly introduced to these LTC homes during the pandemic. Most sites, however, were not ready or equipped to properly organize and manage their implementation. First, most settings had only few tablets, which wasn’t practical to serve the high demand for videoconferences. They didn’t have access to a public Wi-Fi network, so staff could not easily connect and commute across different rooms and areas. Moreover, the reported absence of practice standards and guidelines for such interventions in long-term care left the whole process arbitrary (i.e., up to each care home), which explains the variability in the implementation approach across sites. For example, different sites assigned different staff members to organize videoconference sessions with families and to support residents when needed. However, data from managers and staff show that this intervention is interdisciplinary and involves multiple activities to ensure a positive experience for everyone. As such, a variety of healthcare professionals were involved in the management of videoconferences (e.g., nurses, recreational activities technicians, special educators). The videoconference significantly mobilizes the staff since several steps are necessary for videoconference success. For example, the staff must plan the meeting with the family beforehand, they must dress the resident, take him/her to a quiet place, support the family in technical difficulties, assist the resident during the videoconference, etc. In doing so, videoconferencing represents a significant additional workload for staff; much more than in-person visits, for which staff have no special preparation. On the other hand, videoconferencing requires less effort for caregivers since they connect remotely for a few minutes from their home. It is not surprising, therefore, that when we compare the ‘burden’ scores of family caregivers from our previous study [ 9 ] and staff, we see that the score is higher for staff than for family caregivers.

Managers mentioned that their sites have adequately adapted and personalized work routines and care schedules to allow for smooth integration of videoconferencing. Staff members, however, reported a somewhat different reality. In fact, integrating this new role within their usual daily routine was challenging, especially in the context of staff shortage and turnover faced in this setting during the pandemic. Staffing shortages are not new to LTC homes, as this was already a challenging reality before the pandemic [ 17 , 18 ]. Thus, to support tablet use and organize videoconference meetings, staff members had to divide their work time between all residents, hindering or cancelling other activities that were perceived as being important and beneficial for the stimulation of those who were cognitively impaired. To be able to promote stimulation and increase contact rates, LTC homes need to be equipped with technologies and environments that are more adapted to the needs of the elderly with neurocognitive disorders.

Limitations

While conducting the study during the COVID-19 pandemic was a strength, it also presented challenges, especially due to the restrictions in long-term care settings at that time. The small sample size in this study may impact the external validity of the quantitative data. The generalizability of the findings is limited due to the small sample size. Additionally, real-time transcription of qualitative data, instead of recording, could potentially raise issues regarding its credibility and confirmability. However, the triangulation of qualitative and quantitative data enhances the rigor of the study and enables valid conclusions to be drawn.

The results suggest a favorable acceptability and a positive attitude toward the use of videoconferencing in long-term care to preserve and promote contact between residents and their family caregivers. Videoconference implementation in these settings faced some challenges, both for staff members and for managers, especially in terms of the burden and opportunity costs regarding the invested time and staff shortage that must be tackled to achieve a sustained implementation. Videoconferencing is a complementary option to face to face visits. LTC homes should consider the use of such technology since it creates an opportunity to stimulate residents with major neurocognitive problems and increase their contact with loved ones.

Availability of data and materials

The datasets generated and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to ethical concerns and restrictions imposed by the ethics committee, and prior agreements with participants, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Abbreviations

Long term care

Theoretical Framework of Acceptability

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Acknowledgements

We want to thank Mrs. Micheline Harvey, translator, for the English language review. We would also like to thank Mr. Stéphane Turcotte, biostatistician, for statistical consultation and analysis.

This research project was funded by Canadian Institutes of Health Research with a partnership with Healthcare Excellence Canada [SL3-174031].

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Faculty of Nursing Science, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

Marie-Soleil Hardy, Chaimaa Fanaki, Camille Savoie, Marie-Pierre Gagnon, Vincent Couture, Clémence Dallaire, Philippe Voyer & Maria Cecilia Gallani

Department of Family Medicine and Division of Geriatric Medicine, McGill University, Montreal, QC, H3S 1Z1, Canada

Machelle Wilchesky

Faculty of Administration, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

Maude Laberge & André Côté

Faculty of Social Sciences, Université Laval, Québec, QC, G1V 0A6, Canada

Bernadette Dallaire & Éric Gagnon

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Contributions

MSH, MP and VP designed the project and defined the overarching scientific aims of the project and conceptualized the operationalization of study methods and the data analysis process. MW, ML, VC, AC, CD, MCG, BD and EG reviewed and commented the research protocol. MSH, CF and CS participated at the collection, analysis, interpretation of data and finalizing the last version of manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marie-Soleil Hardy .

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Ethics approval and consent to participate.

The study was approved by the CISSS Chaudière-Appalaches Ethics Board (2021-846 - ESMO-ESLD). Permission for the research was given by the Direction Soutien à l’autonomie des personnes âgées - CISSS Chaudière-Appalaches (QC) prior to the commencement of the study. Each participant was asked to provide a verbal informed consent prior to the interview after the research assistant explained and sent them the consent form by email. All methods were carried out in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

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Not applicable.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Hardy, MS., Fanaki, C., Savoie, C. et al. Long-term care staffs’ experience in facilitating the use of videoconferencing by cognitively impaired long-term care residents during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mixed-methods study. BMC Health Serv Res 24 , 646 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-11095-9

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Received : 26 June 2023

Accepted : 09 May 2024

Published : 21 May 2024

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1186/s12913-024-11095-9

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