discovering customer needs through research

• ODI Process Overview
• Opportunities
• Segmentation
• Competition
• Positioning
• JTBD Training & Certification
• JTBD History
• JTBD Playbook
• JTBD Theory
• JTBD Framework
• Create a Strategy for Growth
• Build An Innovation Capability
• Be An Innovation Champion
• ODIPro Strategy Platform
• OUR RESULTS
• The Strategyn Innovation Blogs
• ODIpro Login

Customer Needs Research Methods

A prospective client recently asked me why they should conduct customer needs research using the broad range of Outcome-Driven Innovation (ODI) methods instead of pre observational (ethnographic) research. You may know that observational research is in vogue today in some of the most innovative companies. But that doesn’t mean it’s the best method for capturing customer needs .

Many companies understand that they must capture customer needs before  they can generate new product concepts that customers will value. But they don’t know what inputs to capture for innovation. Their enthusiasm for observational customer needs research is based, in part, on the false belief that customers have latent unarticulated needs. There is also a profound misunderstanding about what a customer need really is. If you believe that customers have latent needs that cannot be articulated then, of course, observational research becomes paramount because it provides a way to discover unarticulated needs. But this well-entrenched belief – that customers have unarticulated needs – is simply not true. Customers cannot articulate solutions  but they can articulate their needs once you understand what a need is and don’t confuse it with solutions.

For example, people often think they are proving that customers have unarticulated needs when they say something like: “No customer could have told you that they wanted an iPhone,” “No customer could have told you they wanted Post It Notes,” or “No customer could have told you they wanted a microwave oven.” And this sounds convincing if you don’t distinguish needs from solutions because – it is true – customers could never have articulated these solutions.

But they could have and they can articulate their needs. That is, customers could not have said that they wanted a microwave oven (the solution) but they could certainly have articulated the outcomes (needs) they want when they are preparing a meal. For instance, “I’d like to minimize the time it takes to cook the food, the time it takes to clean up after cook and the likelihood of overcooking a meal.”

Customers can say what jobs they want to get done and they can say how they intuitively measure the successful execution of these jobs – if you know what kind of needs you’re looking for. Once these needs are known, it’s up to the supplier to develop a good solution that addresses them.

The issue is not what customer needs research method to use to capture customer inputs (personal interviews, group interviews, observational research), but what kind of customer inputs to capture . Ethnographic (observational) researchers are just as guilty of capturing the wrong kind of inputs and confusing needs with solutions as researchers who conduct traditional focus groups.

Customer needs research can be a success if needs are captured using any number of different methods – personal interviews, group interviews, telephonic interviews, or observational research – if you know what kind of inputs to capture: desired outcomes. And if you don’t know what kind of inputs to capture, then you will inevitably capture a mish-mash of different kinds of inputs, some needs-oriented and some solution-oriented, that will significantly reduce the likelihood of success no matter what research method is used. Learn more about customer needs .

Tony Ulwick

Tony is the pioneer of Jobs-to-be-Done Theory, inventor of the Outcome-Driven Innovation® (ODI) process, and founder and CEO of Strategyn. Philip Kotler calls Tony “the Deming of innovation” and Clayton Christensen credits him with “bringing predictability to innovation.” Published in Harvard Business Review and MIT Sloan Management Review, Tony is also the author of 2 best sellers: What Customers Want and JOBS TO BE DONE: Theory to Practice.

Newsletter Signup

1550 Larimer St, #877 Denver, CO 80202 866.729.8400 [email protected]

Copyright ©2024 Strategyn LLC. All Rights Reserved. | XML Sitemap | HTML Sitemap

• Business Essentials
• Leadership & Management
• Credential of Leadership, Impact, and Management in Business (CLIMB)
• Entrepreneurship & Innovation
• Digital Transformation
• Finance & Accounting
• Business in Society
• For Organizations
• Support Portal
• Media Coverage
• Founding Donors
• Leadership Team

• Harvard Business School →
• HBS Online →
• Business Insights →

Business Insights

Harvard Business School Online's Business Insights Blog provides the career insights you need to achieve your goals and gain confidence in your business skills.

• Career Development
• Communication
• Decision-Making
• Earning Your MBA
• Negotiation
• News & Events
• Productivity
• Staff Spotlight
• Student Profiles
• Work-Life Balance
• AI Essentials for Business
• Alternative Investments
• Business Analytics
• Business Strategy
• Business and Climate Change
• Design Thinking and Innovation
• Digital Marketing Strategy
• Disruptive Strategy
• Economics for Managers
• Entrepreneurship Essentials
• Financial Accounting
• Global Business
• Launching Tech Ventures
• Leadership Principles
• Leadership, Ethics, and Corporate Accountability
• Leading Change and Organizational Renewal
• Leading with Finance
• Management Essentials
• Negotiation Mastery
• Organizational Leadership
• Power and Influence for Positive Impact
• Strategy Execution
• Sustainable Business Strategy
• Sustainable Investing
• Winning with Digital Platforms

3 Effective Methods for Assessing Customer Needs

• 15 Mar 2022

To be a successful business leader, you have to understand your customers. While many companies focus on acquiring consumers, a strong brand relies on retaining them.

There are several ways you can ensure customers are satisfied with your product or service. One of the most efficient methods is assessing their needs. Here’s an overview of what customer needs are, how to assess them, and why understanding them is crucial for your business.

Access your free e-book today.

What Are Customer Needs?

Customer needs are problems or pain points consumers are trying to solve. They’re usually frustrations or uncertainties surrounding experiences that drive customers to search for products or services that resolve them.

Customer needs fall under one of three categories :

• Functional needs: Needs that focus on achieving a specific task or function. Customers require solutions that allow them to perform these activities.
• Social needs: Needs that fixate on the perception of a product or service. While these needs aren’t at the forefront of a customer’s mind, they can impact their final decision.
• Emotional needs: These needs concentrate on feeling a certain way when using a product or service.

Understanding needs is important because customers' expectations are at an all-time high. According to Salesforce’s “State of the Connected Customer” report , 66 percent of customers expect businesses to understand their needs. You must give customers a personalized experience to stay competitive in the market; understanding their needs is one way to accomplish this.

Addressing customer needs can also translate into loyal, recurring users. Salesforce’s report shows that 91 percent of customers say they're likely to make a repeat purchase after a positive experience, and 71 percent say they’ve made a purchase based on their experience with a company alone.

Methods for Assessing Customer Needs

Several methods can help you effectively identify customer needs; most involve asking important questions about the consumer and their journey.

For example, “What’s the experience structure?” and “Where are opportunities for innovation?”—these questions involve the construction of a customer journey map.

Another question you can ask is, “How can I understand the user experience?” In the online course Design Thinking and Innovation , Harvard Business School Dean Srikant Datar touches on this question through the "Look, Ask, Try" framework.

The best way to understand customer needs is by studying your audience. Start by collecting data and observations around customers’ journeys by placing yourself in their shoes. By considering the perspectives of those you design for, you can understand their pain points and categorize them as explicit or latent.

• Explicit: These are easily identifiable pain points. Customers are aware of their challenges and can clearly define them.
• Latent: These frustrations are harder to pinpoint or recognize. Most customers may not even be aware they exist.

It’s important to note: This framework is especially effective when identifying latent needs. Since this method requires careful, unbiased observation, it produces solutions that focus on how real customers connect with a product or service. Making assumptions can lead to less effective user research and, in turn, solutions.

Consider asking your audience more open-ended questions to uncover new ideas and perspectives. Instead of critical questions, have your audience share insightful observations about your product or service. Questions like “What did you like best about your experience?” or “How did you find out about us?” help get inside customers’ minds.

Don’t confine research to your customers. Involve stakeholders in the conversation and develop innovations around your mutual goal: customer needs. For example, consider brainstorming sessions focused on a particular survey question and examine how team members apply market knowledge to behavioral questions.

If you want to research users more thoroughly, conduct interviews . This method requires more structure than broad queries, but questions should never guide customers to a specific answer. Observations gleaned from leading questions are less likely to yield successful results because the data is shaped by bias. Avoid this by demonstrating patience and a positive attitude.

The best way to understand the user experience is by going into the field and participating in the same process customers do. Innovation can occur during brainstorming sessions and interviews, but putting yourself in customers’ shoes can help you develop empathy for them.

For example, a hospital staff who wants to improve customer experiences in the emergency room should interact with patients at different stages. Interviews may reveal frustrations with the front desk, but this only illustrates a pain point—not a customer need. Sitting in waiting rooms is an excellent way to observe interactions with the front desk and understand what could be improved.

It isn’t always possible to make observations in the field. If you encounter barriers, use props or other physical approximations to mimic reality. This method may not be as insightful as real-world experience, but working through scenarios is crucial to moving past customers’ pain points to their needs.

Meet Customer Needs Through Design Thinking

Once you’ve assessed user needs, find ways to meet them. Although there are several tools you can use to find solutions, design thinking is among the most effective.

Design thinking is a solutions-based, human-centric mindset. It's an empathetic method that involves strategizing and designing innovative solutions based on insights gleaned from observations and research.

In Design Thinking and Innovation , Datar presents design thinking’s principles using the four stages of innovation framework :

• Clarify: This stage focuses on clarifying a problem by conducting research to empathize with your target audience. The goal is to identify key pain points, enabling you to find the right solution.
• Ideate: The ideation stage focuses on idea generation to solve problems identified during your initial research. This stage requires overcoming biases to ensure innovative ideas.
• Develop: The development stage involves exploring potential solutions generated during ideation. Prototyping is used to validate a solution's effectiveness.
• Implement: The final stage is implementation. This involves advocating for a developed idea to stakeholders and encouraging its adoption at your organization.

Within this framework are parallels between assessing customer needs and design thinking’s clarify stage. Both require research and observation that ultimately lead to empathizing with the consumer. This intersection is why design thinking can be leveraged to develop innovations that serve customer needs.

What Do Customers Want?

After collecting and organizing observations around customer needs and solutions, you can analyze your data for further insights, such as overlooked pain points, latent needs, or new problem framing. This final step is vital to understanding your customers fully. It’s also closely related to creative problem-solving —another effective innovation tool you can leverage to improve customers’ experiences.

Finding ways to make customers happy doesn't have to be complicated. If you solve their problems and give them what they need, they’re likely to not only purchase from you once but multiple times thereafter.

Eager to learn more about how design thinking can help you innovate? Try our online course Design Thinking and Innovation , which will teach you how to apply the design thinking framework to the innovation process. Interested in our other entrepreneurship and innovation courses ? Download our free course flowchart to determine which best aligns with your goals.

About the Author

• 1-800-553-8159 Expand Menu
• Get Support Expand Menu
• Chat with Sales Expand Menu
• Contact Us Expand Menu

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

Four Healthcare Contact Center Trends in 2024

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

Get a Quote

• MARKET RESEARCH

Customer Needs Research

Customer Needs Research, sometimes synonymous with Habits & Practice (H&P) research, helps researchers and product developers understand the needs, wants, and expectations of customers.

• Identify important unmet needs of the customer
• Disprove false assumptions and correct mistaken internal beliefs
• Refine segmentation
• Prioritise future product development initiatives
• Drive growth via customer adoption, loyalty, and advocacy
• Improve ROI

Customer needs research vs. consumer needs research

How customer needs research works

Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

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

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

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

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

What is customer research?

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

Why is customer research important?

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

Customer research vs. market research

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research vs. secondary research

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

Primary research

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

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

Secondary research

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

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

Types of customer data

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

Qualitative data

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

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

Quantitative data

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

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

Best customer research methods

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

Customer surveys and questionnaires

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

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

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

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

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

Focus groups

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

Observational studies

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

Usability testing

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

Field trials

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

Review mining

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

Types of customer research

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

Competitive research

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

Customer journey mapping

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

Buyer persona research

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

Customer experience research

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

Customer segmentation research

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

Customer needs research

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

Customer satisfaction research

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

Pricing research

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

Brand perception research

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

Designing a research plan

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

Set objectives

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

Identify target audience

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

Recruit participants

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

Choose appropriate methods

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

Sampling techniques

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

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

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

Data collection and analysis

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

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

Quantitative data analysis

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

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

Qualitative data assessment

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

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

Mixing methods

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

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

Interpreting and reporting results

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

Drawing conclusions

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

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

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

Creating actionable insights

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

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

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

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

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

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

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

Social listening

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

Predicting customer behavior

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

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

Survicate for your market and customer research

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

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

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

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

We’re also there

16 Types of Customer Needs (and How to Solve for Them)

Published: March 24, 2023

Companies want to stay relevant and innovative and often look at other successful companies, hot industry trends, or new shiny products for inspiration.

However, a vital component to growth is at every business's fingertips — it's customers. Honing in on customer needs can improve the longevity and progress of your business. Happy customers result in higher retention rates, lifetime value, and brand reach as they spread the word in their social circles.

The first step toward creating the types of customer experiences that result in happy customers is by understanding and meeting customer needs.

In this article, you'll learn:

• The Definition of Customer Needs
• The Types of Customer Needs

How to Identify Customer Needs

• What a Customer Needs Analysis Is
• How to Solve for Your Customers' Needs

Types of Customer Service

What are customer needs.

A customer need is a motive that prompts a customer to buy a product or service. Ultimately, the need is the driver of the customer's purchase decision. Companies often look at the customer need as an opportunity to resolve or contribute surplus value back to the original motive.

An example of customer need takes place every day around 12:00 p.m. This is when people begin to experience hunger (need) and decide to purchase lunch. The type of food, the location of the restaurant, and the amount of time the service will take are all factors to how individuals decide to satisfy the need.

Customer-centric companies know that solving for customer needs and exceeding expectations along the way is how to drive healthy business growth and foster good relationships with the people your company serves.

Although customer centricity is not a new concept, the right steps to achieve a customer service focus are still hazy.

Why are customer needs important?

Anticipating customer needs will help you cater to customers before they feel the need to put in a request for a new feature, product, or solution for you. If companies can begin to make changes before their customers' needs aren't fulfilled, this can ultimately lead to growth, innovation, and retention.

Creating a customer-centric company that truly listens to customer needs can be daunting, and there's a steep learning curve if you haven't paid close attention to customers before.

Below are the most common types of customer needs — most of which work in tandem with one another to drive a purchasing decision.

8 Free Customer Profile Templates

Use these free templates to build out your customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

• Long Customer Profile Templates
• Short Customer Profile Templates
• Designed Customer Profile Templates
• Simple Customer Profile Templates

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Customer Profile Templates

Fill out the form to better understand your customer needs., 16 most common types of customer needs.

The types of product needs can be split into two categories: product and service.

Product Needs

1. functionality.

Customers need your product or service to function the way they need in order to solve their problem or desire.

Customers have unique budgets with which they can purchase a product or service.

3. Convenience

Your product or service needs to be a convenient solution to the function your customers are trying to meet.

4. Experience

The experience using your product or service needs to be easy — or at least clear — so as not to create more work for your customers.

Along the lines of experience, the product or service needs a slick design to make it relatively easy and intuitive to use.

6. Reliability

The product or service needs to reliably function as advertised every time the customer wants to use it.

7. Performance

The product or service needs to perform correctly so the customer can achieve their goals.

8. Efficiency

The product or service needs to be efficient for the customer by streamlining an otherwise time-consuming process.

9. Compatibility

The product or service needs to be compatible with other products your customer is already using.

Service Needs

10. empathy.

When your customers get in touch with customer service, they want empathy and understanding from the people assisting them.

11. Fairness

From pricing to terms of service to contract length, customers expect fairness from a company.

12. Transparency

Customers expect transparency from a company they're doing business with. Service outages, pricing changes, and things breaking happen, and customers deserve openness from the businesses they give money to.

13. Control

Customers need to feel like they're in control of the business interaction from start to finish and beyond, and customer empowerment shouldn't end with the sale. Make it easy for them to return products, change subscriptions, adjust terms, etc.

14. Options

Customers need options when they're getting ready to make a purchase from a company. Offer a variety of product, subscription, and payment options to provide that freedom of choice.

15. Information

Customers need information, from the moment they start interacting with your brand to days and months after making a purchase. Businesses should invest in educational blog content, instructional knowledge base content, and regular communication so customers have the information they need to successfully use a product or service.

16. Accessibility

Customers need to be able to access your service and support teams. This means providing multiple channels for customer service. We'll talk a little more about these options later.

With so many types of customer needs, how do you understand which ones apply to your customers specifically? Next, we'll dig into how to identify them.

• Use Existing Data
• Solicit Customer Feedback
• Customer Journey Mapping
• Input from Service Team
• Study Competitors
• Social Media Listening
• Keyword Research

"You've got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology," Steve Jobs notably stated . "You cannot start with the technology and try to figure out where you are going to sell it."

Whether you sell technology or some other product or service, the underlying message he's saying here rings true.

This means understanding where they're coming from when they've chosen to make a purchase, what expectations they're bringing to the table, and what bumps they'll encounter along the way.

Identifying Customer Needs

You can gain more knowledge about what your customers want using a few different strategies.

1. Use Existing Data

Most likely you have some customer data already, especially if you’re using a CRM. This is the best place to start your search. Are there pain points or issues you can glean from just looking at this customer data? Are there any patterns you can identify? Taking note of who your current customers are and their past interactions with your brand to get a better idea of where customers are coming from and if you’re meeting their needs.

2. Solicit Customer Feedback

When trying to identify consumer needs, go straight to the source. This can be done using surveys that live on your site, or sent via email. Additionally you could conduct focus groups to gain more in depth insight to customer needs and their overall experience with your product or service.

3. Customer Journey Mapping

To better understand and assist customers, you’ll need to first know what phase of the customer journey they are in and what they’re looking for. This is where customer journey mapping can help, giving a visual representation of how customers interact with your brand. This exercise will help you create a more proactive customer service approach and improve retention.

Featured Resource: Customer Journey Map Templates

Download the Free Templates

4. Input from Service Team

In addition to getting customer feedback, it’s important to consult those who work with them most — your service team. They’ll often have insights you may not be privy to and can help you anticipate the needs of your customers as well as solve existing issues. They’ll also be able to explain how customers are currently using your product or service and can identify any hiccups in the process.

5. Study Competitors

It’s common to study competitors when conducting market research, but you should also consider them when identifying customer needs. There might be overlap in your target audience, meaning your brand could benefit from reviewing any issues competitors are experiencing and gain insight on how they went about fixing it. You might find that some of their strategies would be worth implementing at your company, or discover gaps in service that your company can fill.

10 Free Competitive Analysis Templates

Track and analyze your competitors with these ten free planning templates.

• SWOT Analysis
• Battle Cards
• Feature Comparison
• Strategic Overview

6. Use Social Media

Chances are, your customers use a variety of social media platforms in their day to day. Take advantage of that by using it as a way to listen in on what customers are saying about your products and your competitors. Are people asking questions under your posts? What sorts of comments are they making? Are they giving praise, asking for assistance, or do they want new features? Using a social media monitoring tool like Hootsuite will help you identify trends, mentions, and hashtags relevant to your brand to better inform your strategy.

7. Keyword Research

People turn to the internet for most things, so Google is an excellent resource for figuring out customer needs. How are customers finding your brand online and what are they typing into the search box to find it? Doing keyword research can give you a broad overview of what your customers need based on search data. Keyword research will also help you optimize your site for search engines by aligning the content of your site with what customers are searching for.

If you design your process with these things in mind, you'll be able to uncover consumer needs at any stage of their lifecycle. You can take a deeper dive into their needs by conducting a customer needs analysis.

What is a customer needs analysis?

A customer needs analysis is used in product development and branding to provide an in-depth analysis of the customer to ensure that the product or message offers the benefits, attributes, and features needed to provide the customer with value.

To conduct a customer needs analysis successfully, you need to do the following:

1. Customer Needs Analysis Survey

The customer needs analysis is typically conducted by running surveys that help companies figure out their position in their respective competitive markets and how they stack up in terms of meeting their target customers' needs.

The survey should primarily ask questions about your brand and competitors, as well as customers' product awareness and brand attitudes in general.

Questions can include:

• Questions about positive and negative word associations with your brand
• Questions asking customers to group your brand in with similar and/or competing brands
• Questions comparing and sorting brands according to their preferences for usage

You can learn more about which questions to ask in this survey in our guide and this guide from dummies.

2. Means-End Analysis

Once you've conducted the customer needs analysis survey, you can use the answers to get a fuller picture of the reasons why your customers purchase from you, and what makes your product or service stand apart from your competitors.

A means-end analysis analyzes those answers to determine the primary reasons why a customer would buy your product. Those buyer reasons can be divided into three main groups:

1. Features: A customer buys a product or service because of the features included in the purchase. If the customer were buying a computer, for example, they might buy it because it's smaller and more lightweight than other options.

2. Benefits: A customer buys a product or service because of a benefit, real or perceived, they believe it will offer them. The customer might also buy the computer because it syncs easily with their other devices wirelessly.

3. Values: A customer buys a product or service for unique, individual values, real or perceived, they believe it will help them fulfill. The customer might think the computer will help them to be more creative or artistic and unlock other personal or professional artistic opportunities.

As you might imagine, these reasons for purchasing something can vary from customer to customer, so it's important to conduct these customer surveys, collect the answers, and group them into these three categories. From there, you can identify which of those motivating factors you're solving for, and which you can improve on to make your product or service even more competitive in the market.

3. Customer Feedback

If you want to know what your customers think about the experience of working with your company, ask them. Interviewing your customers and members of your service team can contribute to a customer needs analysis and improvements to your customer lifecycle .

As you gather data from your customer needs analysis, it's important to identify the points of friction that your customers experience and the moments in their journey that provide unexpected delight.

• What can your company change?
• What are the elements that you can build from?
• What parts of the experience needs to be worked on?

Asking these questions can lead you to valuable insights as you work to solve for your customers.

How to Solve for Customer Needs

The first step to solving for your customers is to put yourself in their shoes: If you were the customer when we purchase your goods, use your technology, or sign up for your services, what would prevent you from achieving ultimate value?

Your customer needs analysis is a good starting point for getting in the mind of your customer, especially when it comes to identifying common pain points. From there, you can build a proactive plan to implement your customer-first values throughout the customer lifecycle. Here are some tips for doing so:

1. Offer consistent company-wide messaging.

Too often customers get caught up in the "he said, she said" game of being told a product can do one thing from sales and another from support and product. Ultimately, customers become confused and are left with the perception that the company is disorganized.

Consistent internal communications across all departments is one of the best steps toward a customer-focused mindset. If the entire company understands its goals, values, product, and service capabilities, then the messages will easily translate to meet the customers’ needs.

To get everyone on the same page, organize sales and customer service meetings, send out new product emails, provide robust new employee onboarding, and require quarterly training and seminars or staff-hosted webinars to share important projects.

2. Provide instructions for easy adoption.

Customers purchase a product because they believe it will meet their needs and solve their problem. However, adoption setup stages are not always clear. If best practices aren't specified at the start and they don't see value right away, it's an uphill battle to gain back their trust and undo bad habits.

A well-thought-out post-purchase strategy will enable your products or services to be usable and useful.

One way companies gain their customers' attention is providing in-product and email walkthroughs and instructions as soon as the customer receives a payment confirmation. This limits the confusion, technical questions, and distractions from the immediate post-purchase euphoria.

A customer education guide or knowledge base is essential to deliver proper customer adoption and avoid the ‘floundering effect' when customers are stuck. Other companies provide new customer onboarding services, host live demos and webinars and include events and promotions in their email signatures .

3. Build feedback loops into every stage of the process.

Lean into customer complaints and suggestions, and it will change the way you operate your business. Criticism often has negative connotations. However, if you flip problems to opportunities you can easily improve your business to fit the customer's needs.

Just as you solicited customer feedback in your needs analysis, you can keep a pulse on how your customers feel at scale with customer satisfaction scores , customer surveys , exploration customer interviews, social media polls, or personal customer feedback emails.

If you're able to incorporate this into a repeatable process, you'll never be in the dark about the state of the customer experience in your organization, and you'll be enabled to continue improving it.

Take customer suggestions seriously and act on those recommendations to improve design, product, and system glitches. Most customer support success metrics are paramount to the customer experience and this mentality should trickle down to every aspect of the organization.

4. Nurture customer relationships.

When a customer buys a product or service, they want to use it right away and fulfill their immediate need. Whether they are delighted within the first hour, week, or a month, it's important to constantly think about their future needs.

Proactive relationship-building is essential to prevent customers from losing their post-purchase excitement and ultimately churning. If customers stop hearing from you and you don't hear from them this can be a bad sign that they are about to churn .

Companies solve for customer relationships with a combination of customer service structure and communication strategies. Solve for the long-term customer need and create a customer service team dedicated to check-ins and customer retention , show appreciation with rewards and gifts to loyal customers, host local events, highlight employees that go above and beyond and communicate product updates and new features.

5. Solve for the right customer needs.

Excluding customers from your cohort of business can seem counterintuitive to solve for your customers' needs. However, understanding whose needs you can fulfill and whose you cannot is a major step toward solving the right problems. All customers' needs can't be treated equally and a company must recognize which problems they can solve and ones that aren't aligned with their vision.

To find the right customer priorities, create buyer personas and uncover consumer trends, look at customer's long-term retention patterns, establish a clear company vision, provide premier customer service to valuable customers and communicate with your ideal customer in their preferred social media space to capture questions, comments, and suggestions.

Successful startups, brick-and-mortar shops, and Fortune 500 companies solve and prioritize customer needs to stay ahead and establish industry trends.

6. Provide great customer service.

If a problem arises, your customers want to get it resolved and feel heard in the process. This starts with being able to meet their needs with empathy, but along the way, the process for obtaining support should be easy and on a channel that's convenient for them.

Some customer needs are time-sensitive and require immediate interaction via phone or chat. Others are less critical and can be resolved at a more casual pace. Let's break down the types of customer service and how each optimizes your team's ability to fulfill customer needs.

• Social Media
• Call Back Service
• Customer Self-Service
• Interactive Virtual Assistant
• Integrated Customer Service

Email is one of the most fundamental forms of customer service. It allows customers to fully describe their problems, and it automatically records the conversation into a resourceful thread. Customers only have to explain their issue once, while reps can reference important case details without having to request additional information.

Email is best used with customer needs that don't need to be resolved right away. Customers can ask their question, go back to work, and return to the case once the service rep has found a solution. Unlike phones or chat, they don't have to wait idly while a rep finds them an answer.

One limitation of email is the potential lack of clarity. Some customers have trouble describing their problem, and some service reps struggle to explain solutions. This creates time-consuming roadblocks when the issue is overly complex. To be safe, use email for simple problems that require a brief explanation or solution.

When customers have problems that need to be answered immediately, phones are the best medium to use. Phones connect customers directly to reps and create a human interaction between the customer and the business. Both parties hear each other's tone and can gauge the severity of the situation. This human element is a major factor in creating delightful customer experiences.

Phones come in handy most when there's a frustrated or angry customer. These customers are most likely to churn and require your team to provide a personalized solution. Your team can use soft communication skills to appease the customer and prevent costly escalations. These responses appear more genuine on the phone because reps have less time to formulate an answer.

The most common flaw with phone support is the wait time. Strive for shorter wait times as 33% of customers are frustrated by being waiting on hold. Customers hate being put on hold, and it's a determining factor for customer churn .

Chat is one of the most flexible customer service channels. It can solve a high volume of simple problems or provide detailed support for complex ones. Businesses continue to adopt chat because of its versatility as well as the improvement in efficiency it provides for customer service reps.

When it comes to solving customer needs, chat can be used to solve almost any problem. Simple and common questions can be answered with chatbots that automate the customer service process. For more advanced roadblocks, reps can integrate customer service tools into their chat software to help them diagnose and resolve issues.

The limitations of chat are similar to those of email. However, since the interaction is live, any lack of clarity between the two parties can drastically impact troubleshooting. As a former chat rep, there were plenty of times where I struggled to get on the same page as my customer. Even though we resolved the issue, that miscommunication negatively impacted the customer's experience.

4. Social Media

Social media is a relatively new customer service channel. While it's been around for over a decade, businesses are now beginning to adopt it as a viable service option. That's because social media lets customers immediately report an issue. And since that report is public, customer service teams are more motivated to resolve the customer's problem.

Social media is an excellent channel for mass communication, which is particularly useful during a business crisis. When a crisis occurs, your customers' product and service needs become the primary concern of your organization. Social media is an effective tool for communicating with your customers in bulk. With a social media crisis management plan , your team can continue to fulfill customer needs during critical situations.

Social media is different from other types of customer service because it empowers the customer the most. Customers tend to have more urgent needs and expect instant responses from your accounts. While this type of service presents an enormous opportunity, it also places tremendous pressure on your reps to fulfill customer demand. Be sure your team is equipped with proper social media management tools before you offer routine support.

5. In Person

As the oldest form of customer service, you're probably familiar with working in person with customers. Brands who have brick-and-mortar stores must offer this service for customers living near their locations. This fulfills a convenience need as customers can purchase and return a product without having to ship it back to the company through an online service.

In-person customer service is great for businesses with strong service personnel. Without dedicated employees, your customer service team won't be able to fulfill your customers' product or service needs. Successful teams have reps who are determined to provide above-and-beyond customer service .

5. Call Back Service

Sometimes it's not about how quickly your business can provide a solution, but rather how efficient you can make the service experience. For example, say a customer has a simple question about pricing that should only take a few minutes to answer, but their expected wait time for phone service is over 15 minutes. Rather than making this customer spend more time on hold than actually speaking with a representative, you can offer a call back service where your team reaches out to the customer as soon as the next rep is available.

Another situation where this type of service comes in handy is with text-based mediums like email and live chat. In some cases, these channels aren't ideal for troubleshooting and can lead to friction if the case isn't transferred to another platform. Having a call back service available allows customers to schedule time to speak directly with reps, particularly when they feel like they aren't gaining progress on their case. Instead of having to create a completely new support ticket , call backs seamlessly transition the conversation to a more effective channel.

6. Customer Self-Service

Self-service teaches your customers how to solve problems independently from your support team. Rather than calling or emailing your business whenever they need assistance, customers can navigate to your knowledge base and access resources that help them troubleshoot issues on their own. Not only does this get customers faster solutions, but it also saves them from having to open a ticket with your team. This makes the experience feel much less like a formal support case and more like a quick roadblock that your customers can handle on their own.

Self-service is advantageous for your team's productivity as well. If more customers use your knowledge base, less will call or email your team for help. This will free your reps up more to focus on complex service cases that require a longer time commitment.

7. Interactive Virtual Assistant

Chatbots are no longer novelties that customer service teams use to show off their technological prowess. Now, they're integral pieces of support strategies as they act more like interactive virtual assistants than simple, question-and-answer bots. Today's chatbots are powered by innovative AI technology that interprets customer needs and can walk people through step-by-step solutions.

Image Source

The image above shows a perfect example of how useful today's virtual assistants can be. In this situation, the customer is learning how to use their new car — a product that typically offers a lot of unique features and an extensive operator's manual. To help new users navigate the car's basic features, this brand offers an augmented reality tour hosted by a virtual assistant. The user simply has to scroll their camera over different parts of the car and the chatbot will tell them everything they need to know.

Interactive features like this show that you're investing in more than just product development. You're thinking about how you'll support customers and what services you can adopt that will make their lives easier. Customers pay attention to this type of customer service and it can often be a reason why many will return to your business.

8. Integrated Customer Service

Integrated service can be described as all of the little things your brand does to remove pain points from the customer experience. Some of this is proactive, like sending customers an automated newsletter that informs them about major updates or announcements, and some of it is reactive, like pinging a customer success manager whenever someone submits negative feedback to your team.

Even though these pain points may seem small, they add up over time if left unchecked. The best way to remove most of these points of friction is to adopt automation as you grow your customer base. Automated customer service tools like ticketing systems, help desks, and workflows help your team keep pace with increasing customer demand. This technology lets you maintain that same level of personalized customer service even as more people reach out to your business for support.

There's no "best" type of customer service. Each medium complements the other and optimizes your overall performance when used together. This creates an omni-channel experience for your customers which will keep them coming back for more.

What do customers want from a typical customer service situation?

It’s important to note that customer service is reactive. That said, there are a few things to keep in mind to ensure you’re providing excellent customer service.

• Listen : While it’s normal to want to quickly get customers in and out of your service queue, it’s important to actually listen to what their issue is before giving them a solution. They may have a more nuanced issue that a boilerplate response can’t provide. There’s nothing more frustrating than providing customers with a canned response that doesn’t actually solve their issue. Automation is great, but just ensure that it is helping customers.
• Don’t Make Customers Repeat Information: No one wants to answer or submit the same questions repeatedly . Not only is it inconvenient, it shows the customer that no one is listening or paying attention. If you have a ticketing system, review the customer’s history or profile to get familiar with their situation before responding.
• Be Pleasant: Tone is much harder to convey over written communication and can unintentionally come across as cold. To convey some warmth you could introduce phrases like “I’d be happy to help with that,” or “Hope your day/week is going well.”
• Be Responsive : Not only do customers want their problem solved, but they prefer it’s resolved quickly. If you can’t solve their issue easily when they first contact you, set expectations around when it will be resolved (24hrs, 2 business days?) and keep them in the loop. Don’t ghost them.

What Customers Want

• Simple Solutions
• Personalization
• Transparency
• Accessibility

Each customer has their own unique needs, but there are a few that are universal.

1. Simple Solutions

While your product or service may run using a complex set of algorithms and procedures, customers don’t need to know that. They simply want a solution that resolves their issue with as little fuss as possible. Keep your messaging simple and focus on how your brand will solve the customer’s problem.

2. Personalization

Treat your customers like people and not numbers on a spreadsheet. Zendesk found that 54% of customers expect all experiences to be personalized. Use their name in communications and tailor your messaging to the buyer persona they most closely align with. Adding a personal touch when it comes to marketing lets customers know that their needs are at the forefront of your brand’s mission.

Does your product or service outperform the competition or provide a more cost effective solution for consumers? If so, drive that point home in your messaging. Explain how and why they should choose your product or service over others on the market. How will customers benefit when they choose your brand?

4. Transparency

One of the easiest ways to build trust with consumers is to be transparent. No one wants to feel duped by disingenuous, bait-and-switch advertising. Be honest about your product or service’s capabilities and pricing whenever possible.

5. Accessibility

While it is always encouraged to empower customers to help themselves with features like a knowledge base, getting extra assistance when they need it shouldn’t be difficult. Whether it’s phone, email, or chat support, it’s important to be responsive to consumer needs. At the beginning of this article we identified accessibility as one of the most common types of customer needs. If your team is unresponsive to their needs, customers will trade your brand in for a competitor that fills the gap.

Understanding Customer Needs and Expectations

One of the best things you can do is continue learning based on the types of issues that come up so that you can proactively address consumer needs and continue improving on the experience.

While the process requires quite a bit of legwork, the results will be instrumental in the success of your brand. Once you understand customer needs and expectations, you can work towards delighting them with your product.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2020 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Don't forget to share this post!

Related articles.

6 Companies That Saw Customer Acquisition Soar (And How They Did It)

4 Customer Acquisition Challenges You Might Face This Year

POS Reports: How to Use Them To Grow Your Customer Base

The Hard Truth About Acquisition Costs (and How Your Customers Can Save You)

What’s a Subscription Business Model & How Does It Work?

What is a Good LTV to CAC Ratio?

How to Build a Strong Customer Referral Program in 2024 [Ideas & Examples]

Customer Acquisition Cost: How to Calculate CAC [+Benchmarks & Formulas to Know]

Customer Acquisition vs. Retention: Where Should You Focus in 2023?

How to Ask for a Referral From a Client [+ Best Email Templates]

Free templates to build customer profiles for your marketing, sales, and customer service teams.

Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

• Media Center
• E-Books & White Papers
• Knowledge Center

How to Use Market Research for Identifying Customer Needs

by Kyle SoloRio , on October 10, 2012

Market research can be used in identifying customer needs , as well as who they are. You have to ask the right questions though. If you don’t really know your customers you will not retain them leaving you constantly chasing after new ones. Don’t just follow your instincts as many companies do. Use market research reports, focus groups and market surveys. Take the time too really get to know them. Ask the right questions; get the facts; and discover how to motivate your customers.

We are motivated by two things, praise or reward. It’s kind of funny, whether you are 3 years old or 43 years old, it’s the same. I can make my son do chores or homework without a fight simply by offering him ice cream. I know I am willing to go the extra mile for an adult version of ice cream (for me that’s the latest teckie gadget). Oh heck… who am I kidding? Real ice cream still works for me too. The point is how do you motivate your customers?

For example:

• How do you define which customers to talk to?
• How do you decide on a format for your research?
• How do you know what type of questions to ask to get to know your customers?
• What attributes or demographics are important in getting to know your customers?
• How do you use the data once it is collected?

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of a few strategies to really get to know your customers:

Surveys are the staple of market research, however you have to know how and when to use the three types of questions: Opened-Ended, Closed-Ended and Strategic.

Opened-ended questions can provide a lot of information, but often they do not provide all the detail you need.

The short answers you get from Closed-Ended questions can often grind a conversation to a halt.

Strategic questions tend to treat the customer as the expert and lead to a deeper conversation which in turn helps you really know how you can help that customer. Giving the customer more freedom in answering your question lets them provide you with their agenda (not yours).

All three types of questions serve a purpose and are helpful. An experienced researcher knows how to use them all to help you gather the best information about your customer.

Some things to avoid in surveys are leading questions. This type of question drives customers to answer in a very specific or biased way which doesn’t actually allow them to tell you how they really feel. Also keep in mind that surveys are really good at gathering data such as how much or how often, but they fail to convey your customer’s feelings and emotions.

Of course you don’t want to ask the wrong questions on your survey either. Figuring out the right questions may require some research of its own.

2. Focus Groups

Focus Groups are also an essential part of market research and here too it is important to use researchers that are well skilled in moderating and interpreting conversations. You will find that experienced focus group facilitators have developed a sort of sixth sense about what’s up when watching or talking to a participant. Focus groups are great because they can really help you understand how your customer interacts with your product.

Look out for dominators in a focus group. You really don’t want the most talkative person to mask the voices of the others in the group. A skilled moderator will be able to hear all the voices in the group and prevent the most extroverted participants from forcing the less talkative to feel like they have to agree with them.

Just like with surveys, be careful not to lead members of the group to an answer. You want their unbiased opinions.

3. Ethnographic Studies

Ethnographic Studies are in depth interviews with your customers. They have some major advantages over surveys and focus groups in terms of understanding consumers for the simple reason that they allow liberal variations and follow up questions.

With this type of research the company actually observes the participant, which gives you 1st hand knowledge about your customer.

This type of data gathering is tricky as it takes someone with great skill to correctly interpret the ethnographic data. If the analysis is incorrect, you’ll find you haven’t learned much about your customer or even worse what do you learn may be misleading.

Now, for the cherry on top of the ice cream, you simply have to analyze the data. Easy, right!  As long as you have skilled researchers that know how to interpret the data correctly you will find that through market research you can know everything you need to know about your customers. If you know your customers, you will know how to motivate them towards your end goal! 

To learn more about how market research can help your company achieve success, download our free eBook .

About This Blog

Our goal is to help you better understand your customer, market, and competition in order to help drive your business growth.

Popular Posts

• A CEO’s Perspective on Harnessing AI for Market Research Excellence
• 7 Key Advantages of Outsourcing Market Research Services
• How to Use Market Research for Onboarding and Training Employees
• 10 Global Industries That Will Boom in the Next 5 Years
• Primary Data vs. Secondary Data: Market Research Methods

Recent Posts

Posts by topic.

• Industry Insights (827)
• Market Research Strategy (272)
• Food & Beverage (134)
• Healthcare (125)
• The Freedonia Group (121)
• How To's (108)
• Market Research Provider (91)
• Manufacturing & Construction (81)
• Pharmaceuticals (80)
• Packaged Facts (78)
• Telecommunications & Wireless (70)
• Heavy Industry (69)
• Marketing (58)
• Profound (57)
• Retail (56)
• Software & Enterprise Computing (54)
• Transportation & Shipping (54)
• House & Home (50)
• Materials & Chemicals (47)
• Medical Devices (46)
• Consumer Electronics (45)
• Energy & Resources (42)
• Public Sector (40)
• Biotechnology (37)
• Demographics (37)
• Business Services & Administration (36)
• Education (36)
• Custom Market Research (35)
• Diagnostics (34)
• Academic (33)
• Travel & Leisure (33)
• E-commerce & IT Outsourcing (32)
• Financial Services (29)
• Computer Hardware & Networking (26)
• Simba Information (24)
• Kalorama Information (21)
• Knowledge Centers (19)
• Apparel (18)
• Cosmetics & Personal Care (17)
• Social Media (16)
• Market Research Subscription (15)
• Advertising (14)
• Big Data (14)
• Holiday (11)
• Emerging Markets (8)
• Associations (1)
• Religion (1)

MarketResearch.com 6116 Executive Blvd Suite 550 Rockville, MD 20852 800.298.5699 (U.S.) +1.240.747.3093 (International) [email protected]

From Our Blog

Subscribe to blog, connect with us.

• Deutschland
• Asia, Australia & New Zealand
• Europe, Middle East & Africa
• United States & Canada
• Latinoamérica

Ask a researcher: How do needs drive intent?

Share this page.

Needs spark consumer journeys. But how can marketers identify those consumer needs and address them? Google’s Head of Research and Insights Justin De Graaf talks about the emotions behind need states and what marketers can do to put this information to use.

People don’t wake up in the morning and say, “I have intent.”

It’s not a thing, people don’t talk like that.

They do say, “I need something.”

or “I want something.”

My name is Justin De Graaf, I am the head of research and insights at Google.

When people come to Google.com, there are six need states they are actually looking

to solve for.

The first is thrill me.

The next is impress me, educate me, reassure me, help me, and surprise me.

When a person realizes that they need something, so they might need to find things to do for

their kids this weekend.

They might turn to Google and search for “jumpy houses near me.”

The thing is, behind that, the need beneath that is, they actually want to be helped and

help their family connect and have a moment together.

Those are the pieces that are actually motivating their behaviors.

What they search is trying to solve that.

But people don’t say that.

They type “things to do near me.”

The ways it can show up, and how marketers can use it best, things like creative development.

Educate me is a great example.

It’s a big need state.

People are coming to us to get information, and then move on.

If you’re looking for “safest automobile” or “safest small SUV,” you want information.

You don’t want a sales pitch.

You don’t want a big scene of creative.

You want to know rank order.

Give me the facts of what’s safest.

Marketers in that moment can be more efficient, more direct.

What’s interesting is that the needs are what spark a journey, as people move, and

they expand and contract a consideration set.

All along that, their needs are trying to be met.

And they’re going to keep going in their journey until they feel like their needs are

That’s when you make the purchase.

That’s when you book your trip.

That’s when you know it’s done.

And there’s a lot of delight that comes from being done.

And so solving for those needs is such a paramount element of humanity, really.

It’s a way to be there and have a relationship with the people who are buying your things.

Others are viewing

Marketers who view this are also viewing

Inclusive ads are affecting consumer behavior, according to new research

Data from: inclusive ads are affecting consumer behavior, according to new research, how consumer needs shape search behavior and drive intent, the ai handbook: resources and tools for marketers, build better creative for your performance marketing, what will marketing look like in 2030, the update: how google creates human-first mobile experiences, what the latest changes to google search will mean for advertisers, others are viewing looking for something else, complete login.

To explore this content and receive communications from Google, please sign in with an existing Google account.

You're visiting our United States & Canada website.

Based on your location, we recommend you check out this version of the page instead:

16 top customer insight tools for effective customer research

Last updated

16 March 2024

Reviewed by

Gone are the days when you were left wondering why your customers weren’t more engaged, why they didn’t respond well to a new product, or why they dropped off before paying for their shopping cart.

With advanced customer insight tools readily available, there’s no reason to wonder. It’s simpler than ever to deeply understand your customers, discover new insights, and ultimately deliver better experiences.

• What is customer research?

Customer research offers insights into your customers, helping you gain a deep understanding of their wants, needs, and pain points. It allows you to recognize their key motivations and behaviors so that you can deliver better, more satisfying products.

While there are some similarities, it’s important to recognize that customer research is distinct from market research and user research.

Market research is typically conducted in the early stages of product development to understand market readiness, size, competition, and demographics.

User research focuses on a specific subset of product users or aspects of a product. This helps product teams develop user-centric products.

Customer research is the process of gathering and analyzing customer data and information to gain key insights for more customer-centric products and services.

• What are customer insight tools?

Your customers leave a trail behind them every time they perform an action. This trail helps you better understand them, including their wants, needs, and preferences, so that you can continually evolve your business and boost customer centricity.

Customer insight tools (or consumer insight tools) are technologies that can gather, store, and analyze information about customer behaviors and preferences.

Here are some common types of customer insight software:

Survey tools

Online surveys are a common way to better understand your customers’ wants and needs.

Whether it’s a pop-up questionnaire that appears after a customer interaction, a mailout, or a post-purchase survey, these tools can help your team get into your customers’ minds at key parts of the purchasing journey.

Analytics tools

Analytics, in general, can reveal more about your customers, helping you improve your offering.

Web analytics tools analyze website visits in terms of demographics, visit duration, pages visited, and more. This helps highlight patterns and trends among your customers and can inform essential website improvements over time.

Diagnostic analytics tools can help reveal issues and areas of friction where customers may be slowed down unnecessarily. Meanwhile, predictive analytics tools offer insights into future customer behavior, helping you plan and forecast more effectively.

Heatmap tools

Heatmap and click-tracking tools enable you to discover your customers’ movements on your website or app. These are visual representations of the customer’s journey as they interact with your product, helping your team discover what is and isn’t delivering sales conversions.

Usability testing

Tools that allow your team to test user experiences with your products can be very helpful for launches and post-launch optimization.

Usability testing tools can collate and analyze data on areas of friction in products, helping highlight where you can offer more seamless and meaningful experiences.

Customer feedback

Some tools can analyze customer feedback (through the net promoter score, for example) to help your team discover overall sentiment toward the product and business. This can help you better understand customers and make improvements at a more rapid pace.

Social media listening

Social media listening tools can help you understand current trends, mentions, commonly asked questions, and overall sentiment toward your business.

These tools analyze comments and mentions about the business and its products, providing insights that can lead to positive actions.

Many new artificial intelligence (AI) tools can assist with consumer insights.

Machine learning tools, for example, can process large amounts of data and help teams predict future customer behavior and anticipate trends.

They can also surface key data quickly, facilitating prompt action. This can boost proactive decision-making and help the business plan more efficiently for the future.

• Why are customer insights platforms crucial for businesses?

Deeply understanding your customers helps you deliver much better experiences for them. Customer insights software and platforms can make the process of learning about your customers significantly faster, easier, and more effective.

A customer insight platform can help in several essential areas:

Data accuracy

Advanced tools can help researchers collect, store, and analyze data for faster and more accurate insights. This helps boost the amount of data that researchers can gather, improving accuracy.

Optimized experiences

Teams can use the insights obtained from large datasets to optimize customer experiences.

Detailed data from a website checkout, for example, can help teams understand where there are areas of friction and then streamline those experiences for better conversions. Obtaining this amount of data is rarely possible without advanced tools.

Better decision-making

Relying on larger datasets, more accurate data, and tools such as machine learning and predictive analytics tools enables you to anticipate trends and consumer behavior. With these insights, you can make better and more informed decisions, boosting business success over time. 

Personalization

Customer data allows you to unlock more in-depth details and better understand each customer, meaning you can personalize their experiences to make them more satisfying.

Boosted customer engagement

Data that helps teams streamline and optimize the customer experience tends to boost customer engagement, satisfaction, and loyalty, upgrading overall business performance.

• What should you look for in a customer insight tool?

The customer insight tool should help you deliver optimized experiences by providing data and information that tells you more about your customers’ needs, preferences, and frustrations. Assessing the tool’s usefulness in this respect is the most important part of deciding whether it’s right for you and your business.

Here are some other key considerations:

The right customer insight tool will be relevant and helpful. It should align with your overall business (or project) goals.

Scalability

As your business grows, the tools you use should be able to scale with you, providing more detailed insights. If the tools you onboard don’t scale, you’ll be forced to migrate to new platforms, which can be a time-consuming, convoluted, and expensive process.

When dealing with data, especially personally identifiable information (PII), your systems must be highly secure and compliant with all regulations. For multinational companies, this can mean being compliant across multiple jurisdictions.

Choosing platforms and tools that are both secure and compliant is essential. Examples include systems that offer AI protection, complex password protection, encryption, and other security measures.

Keep in mind that only the necessary people should be able to access the data to minimize risk.

User-friendliness

Ease of use is another key factor to look out for. In today’s world, people expect the highest level of user experience from whatever they use, whether that’s smartphones, websites, or software. As a result, the technologies your business adopts should provide the same level of usability.

All tools and platforms should be simple to use and obtain results effectively to save the team time and avoid any unnecessary friction.

Cost-effectiveness

Any platforms or tools your business uses should be cost-effective. Performing a cost–benefit analysis can be helpful to assess the overall advantages a tool may provide over time. This can allow you to understand whether the initial investment will eventually pay off as well as the different tiers and costs that will be available to you as you scale. 

Positive customer support

The company behind that platform must be able to support your team as you use their tool. Having multiple points of contact—through live chat, phone calls, emails, and more—is important to ensure you get the guidance and answers you need to keep your workflows running smoothly.

High ratings

Before onboarding new tools, read reviews from impartial customers to gauge their opinions and experiences. This will help you determine whether the tool will help progress your business goals or cause problems later on.

• Best customer insight platforms for customer research

Here’s a roundup of the customer insight tools we think are most effective for customer research. Bear in mind that the best tool for one business will be different than for another.

Google Trends

One of the most commonly used insight tools is Google Trends. This free tool helps users understand and analyze search terms over time, compare searchers, drill into regional data, and access real-time data to spot patterns.

Google Trends can also help researchers and marketers better understand what’s currently trending, what consumers are paying attention to, and what search terms are more important than others.

You can use information from Google Trends to boost website metadata, create compelling content that draws consumers in, and develop products that are highly relevant in today’s world.

Google Analytics

Another well-known Google tool is Google Analytics. It allows researchers to track and analyze user interactions on websites and apps. This can provide key insights into users’ behavior when interacting with your company’s online content.

Google Analytics covers a range of areas, including demographics, conversions, webpage visits, page drop-offs, sources of website traffic, and specific user data. The platform also provides real-time data and custom reports to help researchers understand what’s working and where improvements can be made.

Dovetail is our all-in-one platform that helps teams streamline their customer research and reach actionable insights faster.

The platform offers visually engaging dashboards and concise summaries that cater to the needs of various stakeholders to boost communication and collaboration across teams. These reports translate raw data into actionable insights.

Additionally, flexibility allows for customization, ensuring that the reports align with specific objectives for strategic planning and continuous improvement.

Exploding Topics

Exploding Topics was created to predict trends before they occur. With this tool, users can understand what’s growing in popularity and interest across the internet to jump on new and trending topics.

Within Exploding Topics’ searchable database, users can view categories and niches, identify trends, and gain data-driven insights.

The platform is popular with marketers, creators, and researchers who use the information gathered to create content that draws in internet users.

Hotjar provides a range of tools to better understand how users interact with websites and apps. The tool takes you beyond the numbers to offer heatmap technology that tracks users’ website activity to highlight areas of interest and friction. It also has recording capabilities.

Feedback allows businesses to hear thoughts from real-life users, while surveys bring the voice of the customer into the design and development process.

All of this information can be used to optimize the web and app experience for increased engagement and loyalty.

Companies can access real-time analytics with Mixpanel. This tool helps you measure and then optimize customer engagement across mobile and web.

Use Mixpanel to track and gain insights into customer behavior, including scrolling, button clicks, and page visits. You’ll be able to access live updates, create metrics by which to measure growth and retention, and slice and dice data to spot key patterns and trends. This increases the quality of data-led decisions across your product offering.

Zendesk offers businesses increased connectivity with their customers alongside customer research tools that unlock new insights. Built-in customer satisfaction surveys, for example, give you the chance to track how customer support teams are performing.

Zendesk also allows you to make the most of the customer data you collect through the customer service process to drive more accurate decision-making and positive change across the business.

Kissmetrics

Teams can improve their metrics with Kissmetrics, a tool that allows you to see, identify, and understand analytics to make essential changes. This can help drive better product and marketing decisions.

The platform simplifies tracking customer behavior through a business’s web offering, spotting where customers are dropping off, reducing customer churn, and boosting revenue through optimization.

Kissmetrics also makes it easy to test user flows to identify the sequences that work and those that don’t, ultimately offering the best possible user experience.

Typeform makes sending engaging quizzes and surveys to customers simple. The platform’s user-friendly survey design can help boost engagement and make providing feedback more interesting for customers.

Easy embedding allows teams to include surveys at opportune moments to obtain relevant reactions and feedback. This essential data can then be used to make critical changes across the business.

Typeform users appear to be highly satisfied with the product, with 96% of customers saying they had a better brand experience after making the switch.

Numerator offers first-party consumer-sourced data to help organizations better understand their customers. Teams also gain the ability to interact with customers to learn about their attitudes and opinions, improving decision-making.

Some Numerator use cases include analyzing shopper behavior in relation to demographics, utilizing data to show brand value for investors, and better understanding media consumption to develop more relevant products.

Flame Analytics

While most customer insight tools and platforms focus on optimizing customer experiences in the digital world, some also help enhance in-person experiences. Whether it’s a sports venue, a shopping mall, a promotional pop-up, or a physical store, analytics can prove very useful.

Flame Analytics unlocks traffic information about a user’s physical space and key data for boosted planning, optimization, and best practices. These advanced analytics then seamlessly integrate with other sources, allowing businesses to act on key insights.

Trymata’s research tools can help you and your team better understand customers through usability testing, enabling you to improve the website experience.

You can use the tool to conduct A/B testing, utilize data to drive design decisions, identify the best user experience flows, gain insights from real users, and conduct real-time tests to spot pivotal friction points.

Hootsuite Insights

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that helps businesses stay connected with their customers across all their social channels.

The platform will allow your business to research its social media audience and gain key insights. This involves gathering demographic data to understand who makes up your company’s audience, discovering which social media platforms your audience prefers, and using surveys to validate and better understand customers.

With Hootsuite, you can also analyze the content your competitors are creating to understand how your business is performing in relation to them and where improvements could be made.

SurveyMonkey

Surveys are a common way to gain key insights into customers’ thoughts, opinions, and sentiments toward a business. SurveyMonkey provides answers to more than 20 million questions every day, enabling organizations to gain a competitive advantage.

Through SurveyMonkey, teams can deploy online surveys and forms to gain key data about customers and then make relevant decisions to improve their experiences.

UserTesting

The UserTesting platform allows you to gain direct input from users early in the development process. You can then embed that feedback into product development.

Through UserTesting, teams can more easily identify areas of friction, potential roadblocks, and aspects of products that aren’t working well for users. This valuable feedback can help teams optimize products to be more meaningful and solve customer problems.

Customer success software platform Totango is designed to help businesses reduce customer churn, increase revenue, and boost team efficiency, ultimately helping them retain and grow a healthy customer base.

The platform offers tools and solutions to track customer engagement, monitor the adoption of products or services, and analyze customer data to drive retention and growth.

Totango allows businesses to integrate data from multiple sources to get a clearer view of customers, better determine risk, and make data-led decisions. Customer segmentation also helps teams deeply understand customer segments to deliver more relevant experiences.

• Customer insights for boosted customer engagement

With advanced tools and platforms designed to facilitate customer research and provide customer insights, understanding how your customers feel about your product or brand is easier than ever before.

The right tools can reveal what your customers like and dislike about your offering, how likely they are to stay loyal to your company, and whether or not they would recommend you to other people.

These insights can help your business develop the best possible products that fulfill your customers’ needs, eliminate friction points, boost your marketing and sales efforts, and improve user and customer experience.

What are the six techniques to gain customer insights?

Many tools and techniques can be used to gain customer insights. Here are six of the most common techniques:

Customer surveys

Focus groups

Website analytics

What is a consumer insight example?

A consumer insight (or customer insight) occurs when an observation based on customer data turns into a conclusion about that information.

Here’s an example: by gathering data, an organization discovers that a product is performing best with a younger demographic. The reason for this, as they deduce by analyzing the data, is the product’s environmental friendliness.

This knowledge encourages the team to develop more environmentally friendly products and processes and communicate about them. This will get better results from the younger demographic, increasing overall business performance as a result.

Should you be using a customer insights hub?

Do you want to discover previous customer research faster?

Do you share your customer research findings with others?

Do you analyze customer research data?

Start for free today, add your research, and get to key insights faster

Editor’s picks

Last updated: 22 April 2023

Last updated: 30 April 2024

Last updated: 8 May 2023

Last updated: 18 July 2023

Last updated: 20 March 2024

Last updated: 21 March 2024

Last updated: 13 May 2024

Last updated: 23 March 2024

Last updated: 18 April 2024

Last updated: 13 January 2024

Latest articles

Related topics, .css-je19u9{-webkit-align-items:flex-end;-webkit-box-align:flex-end;-ms-flex-align:flex-end;align-items:flex-end;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:row;-ms-flex-direction:row;flex-direction:row;-webkit-box-flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;-webkit-box-pack:center;-ms-flex-pack:center;-webkit-justify-content:center;justify-content:center;row-gap:0;text-align:center;max-width:671px;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}}@media (max-width: 799px){.css-je19u9{max-width:400px;}.css-je19u9>span{white-space:pre;}} decide what to .css-1kiodld{max-height:56px;display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}@media (max-width: 1079px){.css-1kiodld{display:none;}} build next, decide what to build next.

Users report unexpectedly high data usage, especially during streaming sessions.

Users find it hard to navigate from the home page to relevant playlists in the app.

It would be great to have a sleep timer feature, especially for bedtime listening.

I need better filters to find the songs or artists I’m looking for.

Log in or sign up

Get started for free

REVE Chat Version 4.0

Version 4.0

Upgrade your website to an IM platform & beyond

Blending the strengths of im and live chat, upgrade your website to an instant messaging platform and beyond.

10 Common Types of Customer Needs & Examples

Table of Contents

Customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers.

Being customer-focused helps in understanding customers better and aligning products and services to create great value. You can not persuade consumers without knowing what they are looking for.

Identifying and meeting customer needs should be the focal point of every business’s efforts to build a solid customer base. 

Once you have clear knowledge about the same, you can further use it to persuade your customers. We have outlined the techniques to identify customer needs, methods, and analysis to win more customers.

What Is Customer Need?

Customer needs are defined as the influential factors that trigger them to buy your product or service. To identify customer needs, it is important to understand the reasons behind their decision-making.

To understand customer needs better, it’s very important to know who your customers are. By defining your target audience and segmenting them based on their industry or other attributes, you not only get a clear view of what’s your selling proposition but also identify their needs. 

Here are four simple steps to follow to meet customer needs successfully.

• Identify – Follow customer needs analysis via surveys, interviews, focus groups, or social listening.
• Distribute – Once you have identified the needs, you can distribute it across the right teams and departments.
• Create – Tailor product features, and create detailed content that speaks about customer needs.
• Collect – Obtain customer feedback regularly to learn how your efforts meet their expectations.

Note: Customer experience is an essential part of meeting customer needs. Learn more about how you can build a successful customer experience strategy to achieve your goals.

What is a Customer Needs Analysis?

It is a systematic process of gathering and evaluating information about customers’ requirements, preferences, and expectations to better understand and meet their needs effectively. Customer needs analysis involves analyzing various aspects of customer behavior, demographics, psychographics, and feedback to identify patterns and insights. These can inform decision-making and strategy development.

Here’s a breakdown of the key components of a customer needs analysis:

• Data Collection: In this stage, you’ll have to gather relevant data from various sources such as customer surveys, feedback forms, online reviews, social media interactions, and sales data.
• Segmentation: After collecting customer data you’ll have to divide your customer base into distinct segments based on common characteristics such as demographics, psychographics, behavior, or needs-based segments.
• Identify Needs and Pain Points: Now it’s time to analyze the data to identify common needs, desires, and pain points among different customer segments.
• Gap Analysis: Compare the current state of your offerings with the identified customer needs and pain points to identify any gaps or areas where your offerings fall short.
• Solution Development: In this stage, you’ll have to develop strategies and initiatives to address the identified gaps and meet customer needs more effectively. This may involve product/service enhancements, process improvements, or adjustments to pricing and packaging.

Why Is It Important To Identify Customer Needs?

Businesses are taking strides to understand customer needs and meet them as early as possible to align with internal teams.

76% of customers expect companies to understand their needs.

Businesses operate under a cyclical process of anticipating and meeting customer needs. You can have quick and positive results. Before your business promotions or product launches , it is vital to know your customer’s needs and wants. Conducting market research can greatly help you understand your potential customers.

The more you know about your customers, the better you can define your brand positioning around their needs and help your business in the following ways: 

• Provide faster solutions – One of the common things customers want is real-time support. By identifying the needs of your customers, you can provide faster and more effective support. 
• Improve your products & services – Customer research helps understand the motives behind the buying process. You can learn about the areas you are missing and create an effective USP. The consumer marketing insights can be used to enhance the products or services to satisfy customer needs.
• Reduce the number of support tickets – Building products and services considering the needs of the target customers ensures effective solutions to customer issues.

How to Identify Customer Needs? 

How to understand customer needs? Identifying customer needs includes deep research across your industry and asking your customers lots of specific questions. It is very important to gather in-depth details from your customers through regular communication and be sure you can deliver on their individual needs.

Understanding customer psychology can act as a catalyst for your business to deliver better customer service, build long-lasting relationships, and maintain a consistent source of revenue. 

The key way to anticipate is through a thorough analysis of the needs and wants of customers.

How to Meet Customer Needs?

It involves understanding what customers want and delivering products, services, and experiences that fulfill those wants effectively. Here are some steps to help you meet customer needs:

• Understand Your Customers: You should invest time in understanding your target audience. You can gather data through surveys, feedback forms, social media listening, and analytics to understand their preferences, pain points, and expectations.
• Segment Your Audience: Try to recognize that not all customers have the same needs. You need to segment your audience based on factors like demographics, psychographics, behavior, and preferences. This allows you to tailor your offerings more effectively.
• Develop Quality Products/Services: You can create high-quality products or services that address specific needs or solve problems for your target market. Focus on features that add value and differentiate your offerings from competitors.
• Provide Excellent Customer Service: You have to offer exceptional customer service at every touchpoint. You should train your staff to be knowledgeable, helpful, and responsive to customer inquiries, concerns, and feedback.
• Personalize the Experience: You’ll have to use customer data to personalize the customer experience. Don’t forget your marketing messages, product recommendations, and service interactions to match individual preferences and behavior.
• Communicate Effectively: Always keep customers informed about your products, services, and any updates or changes that may affect them. You need to use clear, transparent communication to manage expectations and build trust.
• Seek Feedback Continuously: Create an environment to encourage customers to provide feedback on their experiences with your brand.

What is Customer Requirement?

Customer requirements are the particular demands, anticipations, and preferences of an individual or group of individuals with a good, service, or solution. Any company or organization that wants to provide goods or services that satisfy clients and acquire a competitive edge in the market must meet these objectives.

Customer Need vs. Customer Requirement

We sometimes use the two words need and requirement without understanding the difference. In a business setting, needs and requirements are two different things. Let’s see some differences between customer needs and customer requirements:

What Is The Customer Needs Analysis?

It refers to a comprehensive analysis that can benefit your business by helping you understand what value your customers want from your products or services. It provides valuable insights about your target audience that can be inculcated into the brand positioning to make sure it delivers great customer value.

Effective customer needs analysis depends mainly on two factors. Firstly, to create customer personas and identify what customer inputs are needed to create breakthrough products, and second, to know how to capture customer inputs and feedback.

Conducting customer research to understand the factors that influence purchasing decisions can be done by:

• Customer interviews – It is one of the most direct ways of collecting customer data and input. You can interact directly with customers who are using your product or who have chosen to buy it. It is considered more reliable than other ways of acquiring inputs. 
• Focus groups – Focus groups comprise a small group, and the focal point is a specific product or topic. The groups emphasize qualitative or quantitative surveys because they provide more opinions and motivations.
• Surveys – The analysis done through surveys helps businesses get a picture of their position in the market in terms of fulfilling the needs of their target customers.

The case study video speaks about the importance of identifying customer needs:

Types of Customer Needs 

Businesses ought to understand customer needs, as it is vital to match the competitive marketplace. Broadly, customer needs are about delivering a better experience by exceeding their expectations. When you anticipate what your customers want, you can create content , and expand your product features or services to meet those needs. However, customer needs can be bifurcated into two verticals.

1. Functional Needs

These are the basic requirements a customer has for a product or service to fulfill its intended purpose. For example, a customer might need a smartphone for making calls, sending texts, and accessing the internet.

2. Emotional Needs

These are related to how a product or service makes a customer feel. Customers often seek products or services that evoke positive emotions such as happiness, security, or excitement. For instance, a luxury car may fulfill a customer’s need for status or prestige.

3. Social Needs

Customers may have needs related to their social interactions or relationships. This could involve products or services that help them connect with others, belong to a group, or maintain relationships. Social media platforms fulfill this need by allowing users to interact with friends and family.

4. Convenience Needs

They often seek products or services that make their lives easier or more convenient. This could include factors such as accessibility, ease of use, and time-saving features. For example, a grocery delivery service fulfills the need for convenience by saving customers a trip to the store.

5. Psychological Needs

These are related to a customer’s mental and emotional well-being. Customers may have psychological needs for self-expression, personal growth, or self-esteem. Products like fashion items or self-help books can fulfill these needs.

6. Economic Needs

They have needs related to their financial well-being, such as finding products or services that offer value for money or help them save money. Discount offers or budget-friendly products cater to these needs.

7. Environmental Needs

With increasing awareness of environmental issues, customers may seek products or services that are eco-friendly or sustainable. This could include products made from recycled materials or services that minimize environmental impact.

8. Cultural Needs

Customers may have needs influenced by their cultural background, beliefs, or values. Businesses must understand cultural nuances to effectively cater to these needs. For example, dietary preferences or religious considerations may impact food choices.

9. Safety and Security Needs

They have a fundamental need for safety and security, both physically and emotionally. Products like home security systems or insurance services fulfill these needs by providing protection and peace of mind.

10. Health and Wellness Needs

Customers increasingly prioritize products and services that contribute to their physical and mental well-being. This could include fitness equipment, healthy food options, or mindfulness apps.

Good Examples to Meet Customer Needs  

Addressing customer needs is critical for any business that focuses on customer retention to create good examples. Because, as important as the discovery phase is, knowledge about what your customer needs from you is only as good as the way you use it. 

Let us discuss the best practices for meeting customer needs and building stronger relationships.

1. Deliver Quality Customer Support

Not always “good product quality” is what customers look for. Customers prefer brands that offer real-time support. So, your support teams should focus on providing a frictionless service experience and improving customer handoff. 

66% of customers believe that valuing their time is the most important thing in any online customer experience. Resolving customer queries faster is a cornerstone of good customer service.

When customers get exactly what they need, there is an increase in satisfaction. If you focus on putting extra effort into exceeding customer expectations , it will certainly be worthwhile . You can delight your customers with excellent service. 

How can you enhance the quality of your customer support?

• Provide real-time support – You can connect with your customers with l ive chat to deliver real-time assistance for sales and support queries. 
• Use live assistance solutions – By using tools like co-browsing and video chat, you can provide faster solutions by reducing the number of touchpoints.
• Automate your customer support – Use a chatbot template for information collection to engage with customers 24×7 and answer their simple queries promptly.

REVE Chat is a great omnichannel customer communication platform that helps you learn about your client’s expectations. Sign up with REVE Chat and know your needs and deliver the support they expect.

2. Map Your Customer Journey

A great way to meet customer needs is by understanding the different customer touchpoints and how they interact with your business across these contact points. You can map your customer’s journey to get a visualization of the process they go through when engaging with your products or services. 

Mapping journeys include multiple phases and touchpoints the customer goes through, from prospect to loyal customer . It helps you streamline fragmented efforts and identify points of friction and opportunities for improvement.

Identifying and meeting customer needs throughout the whole journey is all about providing a delightful experience that will further cultivate loyalty. 

3. Measure Customer Satisfaction Regularly

To know how happy your customers are with your overall business you need to measure it regularly. Choosing the right communication channels and customer satisfaction metrics is crucial. 

The key KPIs are customer satisfaction score (CSAT), net promoter score (NPS), and customer effort score (CES) to help in measuring performance, monitoring, and analyzing satisfaction levels in the overall customer journey. 

How does measuring customer satisfaction help you meet your customers’ needs?

• It provides deep insights into your overall business performance. Based on that, you can improve in the areas where you are doing well and have loopholes.
• CSAT scores can help team leaders identify coaching opportunities to improve agent performance and give agents visibility into their individual performance to encourage self-correcting behavior.

Based on the inferences, you can restructure your products and services to reduce customer churn by boosting the satisfaction rate.

4. Be Consistent In Customer Communication

Inconsistent customer service is among the top frustrations reported by customers. If your representatives are unable to deliver consistent assistance, there are chances that consumers will feel confused and alienated.

It takes no time to create a negative impression on your customers and shows that your business strategies are not organized. You can meet your customers’ requirements if you make the right efforts to understand the goals and capabilities of the company.

Use every possible strategy for effective customer service communication .

Here are some strategies you can follow:

• Focus on building an omnichannel customer service strategy to deliver consistent support across all channels.
• Train your support team in customer service etiquette to meet customer needs effectively.
• Provide real-time assistance to your customers with live customer engagement tools.

Note: When communicating with your customers, make sure your brand voice and brand image are consistent. If you are communicating with your customers across multiple channels, you have to retain your unique voice so your customers will understand your message thoroughly.

5. Develop A Customer-Centric Culture

One great way to meet your customer’s needs is to create a company culture that is focused on customer experience at every touchpoint.

The customer experience (CX) is the major differentiator for every business, but creating a great CX isn’t that easy. It includes visualizing interactions through every touchpoint from the customer’s perspective: What are the expectations, what makes sense, and where do you have a chance to surprise and delight someone?

And all these moments won’t happen at once. 

What can be done to build a customer-centric culture?

• Align your company culture to focus on the customer experience first. Your employees make or break most customer touchpoints, so be clear on your brand’s values and what makes the experience delightful. 
• Empower your support representatives to be proactive, thoughtful, and creative in making it practically happen. 

6. Enhance The USP of Your Product

Every business needs a reason for its customers to buy from them over their competitors, which is known as a Unique Selling Proposition (USP) . Your USP can change depending on the changes in your business and for different types of customers .

A good product is anything that can be offered to a market for attention, acquisition, or consumption that satisfies customer needs. Product quality is the characteristic that bears on its ability to satisfy implied customer needs. The USP of your product can be an effective way to differentiate your brand when customers are making their buying decisions .

The product quality speaks for itself. If your products are built around helping customers resolve their issues faster, it will attract them and keep them coming back. 

To maintain a smooth process, you need to follow certain tips:

• Conduct customer research to identify customer needs and analyze them to serve them much better.
• Ask for customer feedback and categorize it further to implement improvements to the brand value to match customer needs.

7. Ask Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a vital ingredient for the success of every business. It helps to enhance your products and services to better suit the needs of your customers. This will then increase the chances of people purchasing your improved products or services.

You must always choose the right time to ask for honest customer feedback like after the chat session. Further, the feedback can be analyzed to generate valuable insights. The insights can help recreate better products as per their needs.

Essentially, once you receive customer feedback, you need to follow certain steps that give you opportunities to meet customer needs .

• Analyze the data using quality customer feedback analysis tools and according to internal & external customers’ needs and expectations, and enhance it.
• Figure out the gaps between your business and customers. Set up new plans and strategies to reduce the gaps.
• Make all the team members part of the discussion and give their views about customer needs and wants.

Final Thoughts 

When you start prioritizing customer needs, you need to successfully identify them in your products and services. Customers are highly satisfied When they can relate your brand to their needs. Being able to deliver a great experience grows your base of loyal customers. 

Having good knowledge of customer needs and wants not only helps to add constructive value but also levels up the overall brand’s recognition. It gives your business a competitive advantage and keeps you a step ahead in the market. 

REVE Chat offers you an exclusive live chat platform that helps you better understand your customer’s needs and offer them personalized service. Sign up today!

Start using REVE Chat now!

Start a 14-day free trial, no credit card required

AUTHOR’S BIO

Snigdha patel.

Snigdha Patel is a customer experience researcher, author, and blogger. As part of REVE Chat, she focuses on helping organizations maximize customer experience using omnichannel messaging and conversational AI.

She creates contextual, insightful, and conversational content for business audiences across a broad range of industries and categories like Customer Service, Customer Experience (CX), Chatbots, and more.

Serving as the lead content strategist, Snigdha helps the customer service teams to leverage the right technology along with AI to deliver exceptional and memorable customer experiences.

Being a customer service adherent, her goal is to show that organizations can use customer experience as a competitive advantage and win customer loyalty.

Start converting your website visitors into customers today!

Share this post.

REVE Chat Blog

Stay updated with the latest trends and ideas we share, what is voice of the customer (voc): a detailed analysis.

Consumers today are more demanding than ever. They have more choices than ever. As a result, they expect more from...

24 Facebook Marketplace Scams You Must Know to Stay Alert!

Facebook Marketplace is an amazing place to find great deals on everything from furniture to electronics. But with amazing bargains...

What is a Lead Funnel and How to Create One

Yes, you have a business, and you need customers to run it successfully. Different marketing campaigns, social media strategies, and...

Get Started

• Respond to customer queries in real time
• Qualify leads automatically
• Reduce the number of support tickets
• Deliver better conversational experience
• Boost customer satisfaction

• 12 Facebook
• More Networks

The more customer needs you meet, the more you achieve as a business. Use our smart customer engagement platform to give your customers a Wow experience on multiple channels.

Say No to customer waiting times, achieve 10X faster resolutions, and ensure maximum satisfaction for your valuable customers with REVE Chat.