customer research

• What is customer research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Types of customer research

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

Quantitative and qualitative data are two types of data.

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

Primary vs. secondary research

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

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

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

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

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

Qualitative vs. quantitative data

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

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

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

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

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

• The best customer research methods

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

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

What do we most need to know about our customers?

What do we not know about our customers?

Are we satisfied that our product has a market?

Do we truly understand our competitors?

Do we deeply understand our target market?

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

Is this product the best possible solution for our customers?

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

Customer surveys

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

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

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

Surveys that follow best practices include the following:

Open-ended questions to get the most information from customers

Consistent ranking scales to avoid ambiguity

Questions that are relevant to the team’s end goal

A short series of questions to avoid overwhelming participants

Customer interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus groups

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

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

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

The benefits of focus groups include the following:

Gaining insights into how users perceive your product

Spontaneous responses you may not have discovered otherwise

Information about key problems and pain points

An understanding of what your users want from a solution

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

Competitor analysis

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

The following are best practices for conducting competitor analysis

Be clear on who your competitors are

Identify your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses

Clarify who holds the largest market share and why

Analyze online presence, reviews, and product information

Speak to competitors’ customers

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

• How to conduct customer research

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

Set clear objectives

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

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

Use multiple methods

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

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

Find the right people

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

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

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

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

Consider incentives

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

Ensure any incentives are meaningful for your target audience.

Develop meaningful insights

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

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

• Surprise and delight your customers

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

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

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

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?

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

Pragadeesh Natarajan

Last Updated: 30 May 2024

12 min read

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

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

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

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

In this article, we break down:

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

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

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

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

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research

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

Secondary research

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

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

Qualitative data

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

Quantitative data

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

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

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

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

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

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Focus Groups

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

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

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

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

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

Competitive Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

Review Mining

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

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

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

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

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

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

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

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Final thoughts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Customer Research

What is customer research.

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

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

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

Literature on Customer Research

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

Learn more about Customer Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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May 24, 2024

Customer research: Methods for better products and happier customers

Learn key types of customer research, how it stands apart from UX and market research, and how to nail it in just five steps.

Armin Tanovic

Only by knowing your customers' pain points, values, and motivations inside and out can you create a product customers actually want to use. In fact, it’s a lack of proper research that former business owners cite as one of the main reasons for startup failure —highlighting just how important customer research is for success.

In this article, we look at exactly what’s meant by customer research, and why it’s vital for your organization’s success. We also run through five steps for conducting customer research, so you can start planning your research initiatives today.

Tap into customer insights today

Conduct customer research, analyze data instantly, and uncover insights to fuel your product development.

What’s the difference between customer research, customer experience research, and market research?

Customer research, customer experience research, and market research may all sound like the same thing, but while overlap exists, each of these terms has its own meaning.

This article’s focus, customer research, is the process of learning your customers’ pain points, motivations, preferences, and needs . It helps you develop an in-depth understanding of your customers—who they are, what their needs and struggles are—so you can create user personas for them, reflect on the customer journey, and tailor your product or user experience to their unique expectations.

Here’s how customer experience research and market research are different from customer research:

• Customer experience research: Looks at all the touchpoints throughout the buyer journey, and helps improve customer experience through insights and customer experience KPIs , such as customer satisfaction scores
• Market research: Collects information on the wider market landscape, including potential customers, industry trends, market needs, and product gaps

Customer research is specifically concerned with who your customers are , while customer experience research is about how they interact with your product. Market research is easier to differentiate, focusing on the market itself, rather than customers.

Why is customer research important?

Customer research is important as it gives your company the insights necessary to tailor your products and services to buyers’ preferences. By thoroughly understanding your customers, you can steer major product decision-making in the right direction, create better products, and fulfill business goals.

Customer research also helps your business attract new customers: over 80% of buyers state they're more inclined to do business with an organization that delivers tailored brand experiences. Alongside this, it helps your business get more referrals—with 70% of buyers more likely to recommend a brand that offers personalized experiences.

When should you conduct customer research?

Customer research is beneficial at various stages of product development . From planning new products and services to personalizing your marketing strategy, here’s some times to conduct customer research:

• When creating buyer personas: By thoroughly understanding buyers, you can create comprehensive user personas with demographics, brand perceptions, behaviors, and pain points
• When you aim to improve products or services: Understanding preferences means you can improve your products or services to match your customer’s expectations
• While crafting brand messaging and content that resonates: Customer research provides clarity on customer motivations and pain points, which you can use to personalize messaging and communicate effectively with your customers
• To identify new opportunities: Discovering new things about your audience opens up the chance to create products, services, and features your team hasn’t considered before
• For guiding your business decisions: Knowing what your customers want, and how they want it, serves as a signpost for making major business decisions—for example, positioning your brand, allocating resources, and signing off on major UX design and development changes

What are the types of customer research?

There’s more than one way to get the scoop on your customer’s deepest desires, expectations and motivations. You might be surprised to learn you can gather useful customer insights from what your users are already saying about your brand. All you need to do is tune in.

Here are the four types of customer research.

1. Primary research

Primary research is research that you conduct alone or with the help of your team. Here, you select your own research methods , design your project, and analyze data to gain specific insights on topics you’ve outlined beforehand.

Primary research is beneficial because it gathers the customer insights and knowledge you need. However, unless you’re conducting guerilla testing and meeting your customers in real-life situations, primary research can be resource-intensive.

This brings us to our second way to do customer research.

2. Secondary research

Secondary research entails investigating data provided by someone else. Yes—you can do that! All you need to do is find the forums, communities, and review sites where your customers hang out and discuss their needs, preferences, and satisfaction levels. You can use Voice of the Customer tools, or one of the easiest ways to get customer feedback is by linking up with your customer success and support teams—tune into client meetings, read up on feature requests, and follow Slack channels to hear on-the-ground feedback.

You can also conduct secondary research by revisiting data from previous research studies your product or UX research team may have conducted, or looking at industry trend studies done by other companies—for example, our Future of User Research Report . If your organization has an existing research operations team or central UX research repository , you can garner a lot of first-hand insights that already exist.

Secondary data can be a quick and easy way to conduct customer research. But since it's done by other parties, you have no control over the amount of data or the exact insights you’re getting. It’s also important to consider any confines of the data you’re looking at—for example, the research questions asked, or research objectives being pursued when the insights were collected.

But what about the different data types that result from customer research?

3. Quantitative research

Quantitative research uncovers numerical data, statistics and trends about your customers. The number-based insights work best for identifying patterns and gathering broad understandings of preferences, opinions, or how many people fall into a certain category.

Quantitative research is best done with UX research methods like heatmaps or UX surveys with Likert scales, close-ended questioning, and multiple-choice questions. It aims to answer ‘what’, ‘where’, and ‘when’ with objective metrics, collected indirectly—often through a UX research tool .

4. Qualitative research

Qualitative research entails collecting and analyzing descriptive, contextual, and interpretive data. This non-statistical data looks at the ‘why’, aiming to uncover customer opinions, viewpoints, and experiences.

Typically obtained through research methods like focus groups, user interviews , and open-ended question surveys, qualitative research helps you get deeper insight into your customers’ motivations and pain points. To give customers space and the opportunity to provide rich, descriptive feedback, qualitative research methods will typically have open-ended ‘why’ questions.

5 Customer research methods for uncovering insights

There are plenty of research methods that can uncover and collect the customer insights you’re looking for. Here’s our top five recommended methods for conducting customer research.

1. Customer interviews and focus groups

Nothing uncovers rich, descriptive, contextual insights better than sitting down with your customers and asking them the questions that matter. That’s exactly what customer interviews and focus groups do.

For interviews, you can prepare a list of open- and closed-ended questions, connect with customers one-on-one, and transcribe your answers with the help of a specialized research tool—like Maze Interview Studies .

With a focus group, you’re sitting down with no more than ten customers to gather a collective opinion of a market segment with representative sampling.

Both interviews and focus groups are especially helpful for uncovering customer:

• Experiences

While interviews and focus groups do go in-depth, conducting them can be time-consuming. If you’re short on time or resources, surveys and questionnaires can save you time and effort.

2. Research surveys and questionnaires

Customer experience surveys and questionnaires are a quick and easy way to gain insights with a list of open- and closed-ended questions . Instead of sitting down with your customers, you can send surveys through channels like email, social media or in-product pop-ups .

Surveys and questionnaires are especially versatile due to the many types of questions you can include; from open-ended questions to collect qualitative data, to close-ended questions, rating scales , and multiple choice for quantitative customer feedback.

3. Usability testing and product analytics

Both usability testing and product analytics are common customer research methods, and should form a big part of your customer experience strategy .

With usability testing , you give customers a task to complete and see how accomplish it with your digital product and service. Note down any friction points: where did customers find it difficult to progress during the digital experience? You can follow up usability testing with a quick survey or longer user interview to gather more context on their experience.

Identifying where customers struggle, and seeing this first-hand, gives you insight into their preferences and needs.

Product analytics show you how customers interact with your product by tracking metrics such as time spent on your product, success rates, heatmaps, and click rates. This analytical data helps you common problems and patterns, and identify which customer segments are having the hardest time using your product.

4. Social media and online review mining

Instead of meticulously creating tests to gather customer insights, social media and online review mining lets you collect already existing data from and about your customers. By finding reviews, comments, and ratings online and through social media, you can hear from customers in their own words, to identify where your product falls short, and where it matches their exact expectations.

So, where will you find this treasure trove of valuable insights? Look toward:

• Public review sites such as Capterra and G2Crowd
• Niche communities and forums where your customers gather such as Reddit, Slack, and Quora
• Comments and hashtags on your company’s social media channels such as LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook

5. Competitive analysis and market research

Customer research helps you understand who your customers are. Competitive product analysis and market research give insights into the space in which you and your customers exist, and provide you with more context on their preferences.

With competitive analysis, you’re not just looking at how customers react to your product but also to your competition . Look for which customer needs or expectations other companies fulfill; where they fall short, and how you can leverage data to understand your customers and create better products and services.

For example, maybe a competitor’s newest helpdesk offer tracks customer resolution times for airline services, but customers are complaining about the platform's lack of reporting options. This could indicate that your product’s major differentiator and competitive advantage should be extensive reporting options and in-depth analytics.

You can also apply your customer research strategy to the market and study bigger industry trends. Market research helps you better understand demand, what customers are willing to pay for a product or service, customer demographics, and segmentation.

How to do customer research: 5 steps for success

Understanding your customers will tell you almost everything you need to know about how to create a product or service that exceeds their needs. It’s the daunting task of collecting these insights that often stops organizations from investing in customer research —but it shouldn’t.

While conducting customer research can feel a lot like navigating a maze, having a solid UX research strategy sets you up for success.

We’ve put together five steps to guide your research process , to ensure you don’t spend valuable resources on dead ends.

1. Define your customer research objectives

As with any other initiative, effective customer research starts with defining the grounds for success. Your mantra to meditate on always starts with: “What do I want to accomplish with these customer insights?”

This question will help you set the course and choose the appropriate method for your customer research project.

Some example objectives:

• I want to create comprehensive customer personas to help us personalize our product
• I want to craft compelling brand content, copy, and communications based on our customers’ biggest pain points
• I want to introduce a new feature that I’m sure customers will want to upgrade their account to use

Once you’ve set your target, defined any specific customer experience metrics you want to track, and gained clarity on what you want to know, it’s time to decide who you’re going to ask.

2. Identify your customer segment

At first glance, it might seem obvious that you’re going to reach out to customers to recruit participants for your research . However, your customer segments may be widely different, each with a unique set of preferences and expectations. Before you conduct research, identify a single segment and tailor your research methodology and questions to them.

Your chosen segment should be large enough to be representative of most of your brand’s customer base. Consider key characteristics in current customer data. What demographic categories do your customers fall into? Are there any preferences and motivations that you already know of?

3. Select a customer research method

The customer research method you opt for should align with your overarching goals. Let’s say you want to understand customer motivations in order to create an empathy map and customer personas.

Such a goal warrants conducting customer interviews and focus groups for contextual, qualitative insights. Perhaps you want to know your customer segment’s single greatest pain point and target that in the next bug-fix sprint. A quick survey with Likert scales and closed-ended questioning may reveal that 87% of your customer segment struggles with inefficient workflows that lead to lost time.

Running low on resources for customer research? Guerilla research tactics are an informal and cost-effective way to gather insights by meeting your customers face-to-face where they’re likely to use your product, and asking them questions in short 5–15-minute sessions.

4. Conduct your customer research

Once you’ve settled on the appropriate testing method, you’re ready to contact customers and begin your research project.

If you’ve chosen surveys or questionnaires, you’ll need to choose a distribution channel such as email or social media. Consider offering customers incentives for completing interview—you can offer free upgrade trials, access to exclusive features, discounts, or brand merchandise.

While conducting research without a tool works, it can be time-consuming. A research tool like Maze lets you create surveys, interviews, and usability tests and automatically analyzes your data for actionable insights. Product analytics capabilities also provide you with heatmaps, click rates, and scroll analytics for an in-depth look at how customers interact with your product.

Using specialized AI tools can also help you streamline tasks throughout conducting research, such as ensuring you don’t ask leading questions.

5. Analyze your data and draw findings

Your customer research will return responses, transcripts, and customer feedback in the form of qualitative or quantitative data. But data by itself is unusable—you need to create UX reportings and conduct data analysis before you can get the insights you’ve been hoping for.

If you’ve done interviews or focus groups, perform thematic analysis or affinity mapping to make sense of these large amounts of qualitative data. For surveys and usability testing, conduct statistical analysis to arrive at insights.

Once you have your insights, highlight key findings, connect them back to your overarching customer research objective, and share with your team.

Get customer research insights with Maze

Customer research opens the door to better products, happier customers, and a more successful business. It may feel like a large task, but breaking it down into bitesize steps and enlisting an all-in-one research tool can turn this large task into part of your everyday workflow.

Not sure where to start?

Maze’s comprehensive suite of user research methods make collecting customer insights (qualitative or quantitative) simple. From Interview Studies to Feedback Surveys , Usability Testing to Card Sorting —it’s a holistic research platform for gathering decision-driving data.

Frequently asked questions about customer research

Who conducts customer research?

Customer research isn’t a strictly defined role for one professional or team. Market research teams most frequently conduct customer research, but it can also be conducted by product management, marketing, and user experience teams.

Why does customer research matter?

Customer research provides decision-makers and product teams with extensive information on customers’ pain points, expectations, desires, and motivations. You can leverage this information to create customer personas, personalize brand messaging, identify new opportunities, and tailor products and services to your customers.

What is consumer research?

Consumer research consists of gathering information on consumer needs and preferences in relation to a product or service. It’s similar to customer research, but a consumer is any person who uses a product or service, while a customer is the person who pays for the product or service.

• Product management
• Collections: Customer research

A complete guide to customer research — with templates

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why should you do customer research?

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

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

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

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

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

How much customer feedback is the right amount?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Primary vs. secondary customer research

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

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

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

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

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

How do product managers gather customer feedback?

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

How to conduct customer research

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

Follow these steps to conduct your own primary customer research:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related: 35+ customer questions for product innovation

Get started with customer research templates

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

Aha! software customer interview template

Customer research planning template, customer interview notes template.

Customer survey template

Customer feedback poll template

Customer focus group discussion template, customer research presentation template.

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

Start using this template now

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

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

Customer research survey template

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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• How to build a customer support knowledge base
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• Daily standup meeting
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• What are the types of product managers?
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Customer Research 101: A Complete Guide! (Importance & Types)

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

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

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

What is Customer Research?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is Customer Research Important?

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

1. Product Development

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

2. Identify Market Trends

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

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

3. Pricing Strategy

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

4. Effective Marketing

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

5. Customer Retention

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

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

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

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

Types of Customer Research

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

1. Qualitative Research

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

2. Quantitative Research

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

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

3. Primary Research

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

4. Secondary Research

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

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

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

Effective Ways To Conduct Customer Research

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

1. Surveys and Questionnaires

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

2. Customer Interviews

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

3. Social Media Monitoring

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

4. Customer Analytics

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

5. Online Forums and Communities

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

6. Competitor Analysis

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

7. A/B Testing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Further Reads:

What is Customer Delight? Learn More!

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

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

Customer Journey Map: Definition, Importance, and Process!

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

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

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

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Customer marketing: definition, benefits & strategies, customer success management: what is it and why does it matter, how to build a customer success team (steps, roles & insights), customer profile: what is it & how to create it, the ultimate guide to creating sales documents [examples included], retainer agreement: definition, advantages, types & structure.

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Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

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

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

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

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

What is customer research?

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

Why is customer research important?

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

Customer research vs. market research

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research vs. secondary research

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

Primary research

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

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

Secondary research

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

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

Types of customer data

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

Qualitative data

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

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

Quantitative data

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

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

Best customer research methods

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

Customer surveys and questionnaires

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

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

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

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

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

Focus groups

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

Observational studies

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

Usability testing

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

Field trials

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

Review mining

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

Types of customer research

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

Competitive research

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

Customer journey mapping

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

Buyer persona research

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

Customer experience research

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

Customer segmentation research

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

Customer needs research

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

Customer satisfaction research

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

Pricing research

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

Brand perception research

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

Designing a research plan

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

Set objectives

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

Identify target audience

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

Recruit participants

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

Choose appropriate methods

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

Sampling techniques

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

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

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

Data collection and analysis

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

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

Quantitative data analysis

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

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

Qualitative data assessment

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

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

Mixing methods

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

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

Interpreting and reporting results

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

Drawing conclusions

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

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

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

Creating actionable insights

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

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

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

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

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

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

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

Social listening

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

Predicting customer behavior

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

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

Survicate for your market and customer research

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

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

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

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

We’re also there

Customer Research: 5 Ways to Read Your Target Customers’ Minds

The following is a guest post by Priscilla Tan , a freelance content marketer for SaaS and Tech companies that care about making small businesses successful. Certified by SmartBlogger, her works have been spotlighted on places like Forbes, Inc Magazine, and CNBC Make It.

Did this happen to you?

You spent brutal months building your product solely based on your gut.

In a bid to keep your head in the game, you assured yourself, repeatedly, that success is just around the corner.

And yet, when you released your product to the public… it tanked. Sure, you had a few sign-ups, but no one stuck around.

As you slumped your shoulders in defeat, you questioned yourself, what went wrong?

You tweeted for help, hoping to find comfort. And you did. In fact, your tweet even went a little viral.

Founders, developers, and marketers in the SaaS space flocked in to share similar experiences. You read every single one of them, nodding your head along to their demoralizing tales.

Then… horror struck.

It hit you: you built your product based on false assumptions. And so did they.

Just as you were about to close Twitter, you stumbled on this tweet and it straight up punched you in the gut:

And there it is, the guilty culprit of unsuccessful products : the lack of customer research.

What is customer research?

Customer research is different from market research. It’s the heart of your business.

It involves asking your customers questions on an ongoing basis, so you can better understand their actual needs and better predict at what they will do.

To quote Roy Olende in the Buffer blog , it helps you close the gap between what you know and what you think you know.

Customer research is a big deal

Companies that actively conduct customer research enjoy a 55 percent higher retention rate and grow their annual revenue by 48.2 percent than those that don’t.

Customer research helps you figure out if there’s demand for your product or features before you build.

Without it, you target the wrong marketing channels, build a misaligned content strategy , and write a blog post no one reads — and that’s only the best-case scenario.

The worst-case scenario? You build a product no one wants.

What you’ll learn in this article

You’ll discover the 5 ways to read your target customers’ minds and dive into their specific pain points, desired outcomes, and use cases through asking questions and mining reviews.

Before you do that, take a look at the 6 categories below. ( Customer Camp founder, Katelyn Bourgoin, introduced them in her stellar webinar with Forget The Funnel .)

These 6 categories will guide you along as you highlight and save evidence for further analysis:

• Jobs-to-be-done
• Pains with current solutions
• Desired gains or outcomes
• Buying objections/criteria
• User stories
• Swipeable quotes or ideas

If you’re scratching your head, don’t worry! These are several real-life examples peppered in this article to help you in this process.

Let’s begin.

How to do customer research: the 5 ways to read your target customers’ minds

1. attend q&a-focused events.

Rand Fishkin is a fan of this strategy.

In his book, Lost & Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World , the founder of SparkToro and previously co-founder of Moz and Inbound.org (now Growth.org), advocates attending events as they “offer a wide range of experiential cases from which you can gain perspective and insight.”

He’s right.

Events are the best places to be at when you want to better understand the crux of their problems.

Your target customers are attending events to learn from established experts and their peers, so they can solve the problems they face in their businesses.

Here’s how you can start.

Visit event listing sites (e.g. Peatix , Eventbrite , Facebook Events ) and take note of the agenda and learning outcomes. These give you clues at what your target customers care about.

If you’re using Facebook Events, check out the ‘Going’ and ‘Maybe’ list to learn more about the attendees’ background.

Here’s what you want to do: focus on events with Q&A sessions and networking opportunities. Why? Because both put the spotlight on your prospects.

Jot down the most repeatedly asked questions during Q&As.

For example, take a look at the questions below:

• “Are carousel ads better than single image ads?”
• “Where can I find more examples besides AdEspresso?”
• “I have a brand new Facebook page. Should I go for CPM or CPC?”
• “What’s the best audience size?”
• “What’s a custom audience?”

If you notice questions like these constantly popping up during Q&As, this tells you two things: your target customers care about Facebook Ads and need more help in this area.

With insight like this, you can create new content, like a beginner’s guide on Facebook ads. Or add new features to your product.

When you network, avoid asking leading questions (e.g. ‘ You like your iPhone and use it a lot, right ?’).

Instead, ask open-ended questions . A simple one like “What brings you to this event?” helps you uncover unexpected information on your target customers.

Not a fan of events? Webinars work too.

2. Ask questions in your sales demo

You’re not only selling your product in your demo. You’re identifying your prospect’s pain.

Here’s this strategy in action by a SaaS startup.

Referral Rock is a referral marketing software based in Washington, D.C.. In an interview with Indie Hackers , Josh Ho, the founder and CEO, shared his frustration with using text chat for customer support.

One day, Ho got so impatient with the slow-going process of the “single-threaded nature of the conversation” that he asked his customers if they wanted to do video calls so he could help them faster and more effectively.

This subtle change transformed his business for good. Referral Rock soon quadrupled its trial-to-paid conversions and grew into a $70K/month startup.

Why did it work? Ho began to understand what his users were looking for when they shared their struggles and suggestions. Talking to users directly accelerated Referral Rock’s growth.

Consider Ho’s strategy the next time you conduct a sales demo for your target customers. Before you do that, set up a form on your website for customers to schedule a 15 to 30-minute demo call .

As you head into the call, focus on the customer’s needs. Identify their pain and then qualify if your product is a fit to solve it (e.g. ask questions like “What kind of solutions did you try?”, “Why did it not work?”).

Tip: give these customers a heads-up the demos are being recorded. You want to transcribe the video to see how they phrase their words. This is incredibly powerful if you’re looking to rework your copy, like your sales or product’s feature page.

Don’t do sales demos? There are several alternatives. Go through your chat logs or support requests and talk to your sales team to figure out your customers’ questions and objections.

Pro tip: your sales team’s direct feedback can also help shape your bottom of the funnel content .

3. Ask this question in your welcome email

Welcome emails are 86 percent more effective than standard newsletters — they’re another no-brainer if you’re looking for an easy way to reach directly to your customers.

Here’s an example by Forget The Funnel . Forget The Funnel is a SaaS marketing workshop and training community founded by marketing veterans, Georgiana Laudi and Claire Suellentrop .

Notice the red box with the question: “ What was going on that led you to sign up today ?”

It’s an effective open-ended question that elicits a specific response.

Note: you can also use this question in your email subscription thank you page or customer messaging platform to get the most out of your subscribers and website visitors.

Include this question in your welcome email and embed a link to Typeform or Google Forms , so you can easily conduct further analysis .

This strategy may involve new customers, but that doesn’t mean you can’t use it for your target customers. For example, you can use these new responses in your sales copy to attract similar audiences.

What worked for your new customers will likely work for prospects.

4. Hunt on online peer review sites

Your target customers are using your competitors’ products and similar solutions like books, videos, and podcasts.

Start with review sites like Amazon , iTunes , Product Hunt , and G2 Crowd .

Let’s explore how this plays out in real life.

Say, you run a SaaS marketing software for small business owners. You could mine reviews of competitors like Hubspot and Autopilot , but don’t stop there.

You could also search for book reviews on Amazon. Or watch videos on YouTube and go through the comments. Or even look for the most followed question on Quora .

When you’re on sites like Amazon and YouTube, take note of the ‘Helpful’ or ‘Thumbs up’ button. The more helpful or thumbs up a review or comment has, the more you should pay attention to it.

Are you skeptical about this customer research strategy? Here’s a success story that might change your mind.

When Copyhackers founder, Joanna Wiebe, was working on a web copy for a rehab center, she picked 6 books on Amazon that covered the subject matter.

As Joanna was mining the reviews, she came across a quote that grabbed her attention, so much so that she knew she had a winner and turned it into the rehab center’s new headline:

The result of ‘If you think you need rehab, you do’?

It brought in 400% more clicks .

One last tip on mining reviews: take note of the language tone. If you notice reviews are written in a playful tone, you probably don’t want to use stuffy, formal language in your product messaging.

5. Spy in community-focused Facebook groups

Fret not, you don’t even need to go through the pain of starting a Facebook group.

Your action: pick a Facebook group where your target customers hang out.

Facebook groups that screen members (i.e. require answers for entry questions) and enforce community rules are great signs. Both signal a strong, engaging community with zero spam.

Let’s imagine you own a project management software and your target customers are project managers working in the SaaS space.

In this case, you want to join groups like SaaS Products & Marketing and SaaS Growth Hacks .

Go through the new posts every day.

If the posts aren’t within your niche and you require more data, type your keyword (in this case, ‘project management’) into the search box on the right-hand menu.

Play around with the filters. Sort results by top posts or select a new location.

As you go through the posts, jot down the most noteworthy questions and comments. Long threads are a goldmine for digging user stories and swipeable quotes.

Don’t be afraid to chime in if you require clarification. A question like “Hey [Name]. I’m curious to know more. What do you mean by [insert comment]?” could give you a new perspective on your product.

Tip: choose the most recent year to gather the most relevant, timely data.

Final words: do and apply customer research

Most companies fall into the trap of gathering and analyzing data from customer research, but not do anything about it. Don’t be one of them.

As you gather these important data on your target customers, organize them in the 6 categories shared above.

The results from your data can be applied in almost all areas of your business.

You can edit your headline in your homepage and a/b test it. Or add new features to your product. Or send relevant emails in your nurturing campaign. Or even update your FAQs page to address potential objections.

However and whenever you conduct your research, you want to make sure to use it.

If you feel overwhelmed, take a leaf out of Bourgoin’s book — start small. Block off 10 minutes a day in your calendar every morning.

If you’re new and time-strapped, pick your best channel and focus on that.

Over time, as you conduct research and implement actions based on the data you gathered, you’ll not only gain laser-sharp information on your customers.

You’ll also produce better content, enjoy higher conversions, and build an enduring business.

Which of these 5 customer research ways will you try in your business today? Do you have questions? Let us know in the comments below!

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Ben Mulholland

Ben Mulholland is an Editor at Process Street , and winds down with a casual article or two on Mulholland Writing . Find him on Twitter here .

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Customer Research: The Key to Meeting Customer Needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is customer research?

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

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

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

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

Customer or market research

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

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

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

Benefits of customer research in marketing

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

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

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

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

Why is quantitative research key to building a business strategy?

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

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

Helps businesses understand customer needs

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

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

Delivers insights for improving products and services

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

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

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

Assists businesses to make informed decisions

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

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

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

Increases customer satisfaction and loyalty

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

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

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

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

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

Provides a competitive advantage

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

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

Enables businesses to establish long-term relationships with customers

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

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

How to conduct target market research

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

1. Define the research objectives and target audience

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

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

2. Choose the research method and develop the research questions

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

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

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

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

Some examples include:

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

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

3. Collect, analyze, and interpret data

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

4. Use the research findings

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

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

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

What are some customer research best practices?

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

Use more than one method to conduct target market research

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

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

Always define your research goals and objectives

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

Use professional tools and resources whenever possible

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

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

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

Follow up and repeat

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

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

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

Keep customers coming back for more with Mailchimp’s free Customer Retention Kit

Whether you’re looking to improve existing strategies or seeking fresh insights into who your customers are, this kit is a comprehensive collection of resources designed to cultivate lasting relationships with valued customers.

Fill out the form below to receive your free Customer Retention Kit

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

17 Effective Customer Research Tips [+ Examples]

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

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

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

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

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

17 Customer Research Tips

1. identify the target audience.

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

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

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

2. Discover new Opportunities

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

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

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

3. Leverage Online Reviews from Customers

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

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

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

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

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

4. Use Market Research Tools

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

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

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

5. Observe Your Competition

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

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

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

Research the following about competitors:

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

6. Gather and Analyze Data

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

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

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

7. Collect Customer Surveys

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

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

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

8. See How Customers Use the Product

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

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

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

9. Conduct Customer Interviews

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

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

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

10. Use Data Available to the Public

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

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

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

11. Personalize Your Consumer Research for Each Project

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

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

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

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

12. Offer Incentives When Gathering Information

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

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

13. Research the Target Audience on Google Search

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

Performing a Google search allows businesses to:

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

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

14. Try Social Listening

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

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

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

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

15. Ask for Feedback on Product Features

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

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

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

16. Ask Customers to Rate Their Experience with Your Product

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

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

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

17. Make Use of Email Subscribers

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

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

Make sure that the subscribers have a valid email address.

Customer Research Example

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

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

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

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

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

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

How long does it take to conduct customer research?

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

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

Why is marketing strategy necessary?

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

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

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

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

How do primary and secondary market research differ?

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

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

Primary research examples include:

• Focus groups

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

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

Secondary research examples include:

• Government statistics
• Public records
• Industry reports

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

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

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Customer Satisfaction Research: What it is + How to do it?

Customer satisfaction research is essential for businesses looking to build long-term customer relationships. It provides organizations with essential insights into their customers’ thinking and tastes.

Customers who are satisfied with the quality of service are more likely to become loyal customers. In this blog, we will explore customer satisfaction research and how to do it for customer-centric success.

What is customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research is a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data that allows companies to measure the satisfaction level of customers when purchasing a product or service from their brand.

This research is useful to identify satisfied customers who are loyal defenders of your brand and who are dissatisfied to follow up on their demands.

There are many reasons to measure customer satisfaction. Customer satisfaction research offers great insights, so your team can focus on meeting customer expectations or flagging potential issues that may affect your business growth.

Importance of conducting a satisfaction study

Customer satisfaction research allows business managers and owners to discover that keeping current customers costs less than getting new ones.

One way to collect information about customer satisfaction is by conducting online surveys, which will help you make the necessary changes to improve your business and maintain customer loyalty.

Responding to customer complaints and concerns don’t always mean knowing their needs. Satisfaction surveys allow companies to understand what is working, what needs to be improved, and why.

To provide better customer service, it’s important to understand how they feel and allow them to explain why they feel that way. Only then can you adapt your services and offer an experience that makes you stand out from the competition.

Companies carry out satisfaction studies for different objectives. Among the most important uses of this mechanism are:

• Know what are the areas that need to be improved in the business.
• Know the opinion of customers about your brand. 
• Find out what the true needs of customers are.
• Create better customer retention strategies.
• Know if the market strategies that are carried out are working. 
• Meet customer expectations.

How to carry out customer satisfaction research?

Customer satisfaction research takes several steps to get a thorough and accurate insight into your customer experiences and perspectives. Here’s a step-by-step method you can follow for carrying out customer satisfaction research:

Step 1: Define Research Objectives

Defining precise and well-structured research objectives is an essential first step in every customer satisfaction research project. These objectives will guide you through the whole research process and ensure that the research remains focused, relevant, and connected with your business goals.

To define research objectives, follow the steps outlined below:

• Identify the Objectives: Start by identifying the overall objectives of your customer satisfaction research.
• Break Down Objectives: Divide the purpose into specific objectives. Each objective should be specific and address a different component of customer satisfaction.
• SMART Criteria: Make sure your objectives are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound.
• Prioritize: If you have several objectives, prioritize them according to relevance and potential impact.

Step 2: Select Research Methodology

Selecting an appropriate research technique is a vital decision that will define your overall research process. Your approach will influence the type of data you gather, the level of insights you get, and the general validity of your findings. Here are some examples of research methodology.

• Surveys: Surveys are a popular and versatile method for collecting data on customer satisfaction. You can gather qualitative and quantitative data through structured questions.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) is the most straightforward of the customer satisfaction survey methodologies. Surveys are well-suited for measuring customer satisfaction scores, Net Promoter Scores (NPS), and other quantitative metrics.

• Interviews: Interviews will enable you to have in-depth interactions with customers. You can get valuable qualitative insights into customer experiences through phone interviews or in-person chats.
• Focus Groups: In a focus group, a small group of customers shares their experiences, ideas, and impressions in a guided session. This strategy encourages group interactions by allowing participants to respond to each other’s comments.
• Observations: Observational research refers to directly monitoring customers as they interact with your products or services. This strategy will provide you insights into user behavior and reactions in real time.

Step 3: Develop Customer Satisfaction Surveys

Developing well-crafted customer satisfaction surveys is an important stage in customer satisfaction research. It serves as the primary tool for gathering customer data and insights.

A well-crafted customer satisfaction survey will ensure that you get relevant and meaningful data. It will also motivate you to make improvements and increase customer satisfaction. You can develop a robust customer satisfaction survey by following the steps below:

• Define Research Objectives: Before developing survey questions, ensure you understand the research objectives. Determine which aspects of customer satisfaction you want to measure and what insights you want to get.
• Choose Question Types: Remember the research objectives when creating customer satisfaction survey questions. Select appropriate question types that align with your research objectives. It will help you to capture different dimensions of customer satisfaction. To quantify responses, include closed-ended questions with Likert scales, multiple-choice options, and ranking scales. Include open-ended questions. It will encourage your customers to provide thorough comments and insights.
• Order and Flow: Organize the survey questions logically, begin with general questions, and then proceed to more specialized and complicated topics. Keep a balance between qualitative and quantitative questions.
• Avoid Leading Questions: Leading questions will unintentionally influence your respondents and compromise the accuracy of their responses. So, avoid including leading questions and design questions that are neutral and unbiased.
• Incorporate Demographic Questions: Demographic questions (e.g., age, gender, location) will help you to segment responses and analyze satisfaction across different customer segments. So include it.
• Mobile-Friendly Design: Make sure your survey is mobile-friendly and displays properly on different screen sizes.

Step 4: Sampling Strategy

Sampling ensures that the findings are representative of your whole customer base. It will enable you to make correct decisions and judgments. A well-planned sampling method will help you reduce biases and increase your findings’ generalization.

Depending on your research objectives and available resources, you can use a variety of sampling methods . Here are a few common approaches:

• Simple Random Sampling : It ensures that every person in the population has an equal chance of being chosen.
• Stratified Random Sampling : This sampling method divides your population into subgroups based on specified criteria.
• Convenience Sampling : This method selects participants who are easily accessible, such as customers who frequently visit your physical store or online store.

Step 5: Data Collection and Analysis

In this step, you will collect data from your target audience, arrange and evaluate the data systematically, and generate useful insights to make informed decisions.

Use statistical tools to analyze trends, correlations, and distributions for quantitative data. Calculate measures such as averages, percentages, and standard deviations. You can visually represent the findings using graphs, charts, and tables.

Use qualitative analysis tools for qualitative data. Content analysis, thematic analysis, and sentiment analysis are all common methodologies you can use. These strategies will help you identify repeating themes, attitudes, and patterns in open-ended responses.

Step 6: Implement Changes

The implementation phase of customer satisfaction research is where insights and recommendations are implemented. Here, you will turn data-driven findings into real improvements that directly influence the customer experience.

Create a detailed implementation plan for each identified improvement. Implementing changes based on research findings involves careful planning, cooperation, and a dedication to providing greater customer value.

Define specific tasks, time frames, responsible parties, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the effectiveness of each effort. Prioritize the actionable recommendations that are most likely to improve customer satisfaction and retention significantly.

Step 7: Communication and Regular Feedback Loop

Transparency is essential for maintaining trust and credibility with your customers. Share the research’s findings and the responses that were made. Let your customers know that their opinions are taken seriously and have resulted in concrete improvements.

Customer satisfaction will remain a dynamic and changing emphasis of your business strategy if you establish a continual feedback loop. Here are some tips for creating and keeping a consistent feedback loop:

• Scheduled Surveys: Conduct customer satisfaction surveys quarterly, semi-annually, or yearly. 
• Incorporate Feedback Mechanisms: Integrate feedback mechanisms into various touchpoints, such as post-purchase follow-up emails, customer service interactions, or feedback forms on your website.
• Feedback Analysis: Analyze the customer feedback you received from each cycle in detail. Identify recurring themes, popular trends, and problem areas.
• Action Planning: Create action plans for additional improvements based on the newly acquired insight.
• Implementation: Implement the suggested modification and changes in every relevant part of your business.

Advantages of carrying out a satisfaction study

Carrying out a satisfaction study has great benefits for your organization:

• Obtain valuable information from customers

Doing customer satisfaction research allows you to obtain information about your customers, determine how happy they are with your company, and correct what is wrong.

• Establish priorities

The satisfaction study results allow you to discover which areas of your business need more attention, such as customer service, the sales closing process, etc.

• Customer retention

If your customers are satisfied with your products, it is possible that they will stay in your business. Maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction is extremely important to the overall success of your organization. 

• Maintain your reputation

A satisfaction study allows you to interact with consumers and show them that you care about their needs and opinions. In particular, they offer to improve the customer experience if you make the changes.

• Maintain customer loyalty

If you want to maintain customer loyalty, a satisfaction survey will give you the opportunity to listen to their feedback and improve your brand.

• Get new customers

People feel more confident buying from transparent companies, so post the feedback you get from current customers to show that you allow any kind of feedback and value it. 

• An advantage over the competition

There is a lot of competition in the market today, so any advantage you may have needs to be made known. Show current and potential customers the areas in which you excel.

Conducting customer satisfaction research with QuestionPro

One of the best ways to find out the opinion of customers and their needs is through online surveys, which allow you to collect information and perform data analysis to make better business decisions.

With QuestionPro, you can find out how satisfied your customers are by asking a Net Promoter Score question, which will let you know if consumers are promoters or detractors of your brand. 

Other types of questions that will help you gather information for your study are: 

• Multiple Choice Questions
• Closed questions
• Open text questions
• Order and Ranking Questions

You can track customer satisfaction and measure how happy your existing customers are with your business, brand, and customer initiatives by using QuestionPro’s customer satisfaction survey templates and survey questions. These customer satisfaction survey examples help ensure a higher survey completion and response rate for your market research.

Find out what customers think! Carry out customer satisfaction research and collect the necessary information to improve the consumer experience. Contact us and learn how to measure customer satisfaction using QuestionPro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1. Leverage Existing Customer Reviews

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

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

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

2. Spend a Day in Your Customer’s Office

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

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

3. Turn to Data Analytics

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

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

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

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

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

4. Collect Customer Survey Responses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Watch Customers Use Your Product

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Step 1: Get the template 

Step 2: Connect your Intercom account with Databox. 

Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.

6. Leverage Publicly Available Data

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

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

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

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

7. Use Facebook Audience Insights

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

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

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

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

8. Have a One-on-One Conversation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

9. Conduct Research With Google

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

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

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

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

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

Set Up Google Alerts for Customers and Prospects

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

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

10. Ask Customers to Rate Your UX

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

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

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

11. Use Social Listening

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

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

Find Their Online Groups and Hangouts

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

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

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

Create Your Own Group

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13. Keep It Informal

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

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

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

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

14. Tap Your Network for Feedback

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

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

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

15. Leverage Your Email Subscribers

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

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

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

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

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

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

17. Learn from Live Chat and Support Interactions

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

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

Get to Know Your Customers

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

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

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Market Research: A How-To Guide and Template

Discover the different types of market research, how to conduct your own market research, and use a free template to help you along the way.

MARKET RESEARCH KIT

5 Research and Planning Templates + a Free Guide on How to Use Them in Your Market Research

Published: 02/21/24

Today's consumers have a lot of power. As a business, you must have a deep understanding of who your buyers are and what influences their purchase decisions.

Enter: Market Research.

Whether you're new to market research or not, I created this guide to help you conduct a thorough study of your market, target audience, competition, and more. Let’s dive in.

Table of Contents

What is market research?

Primary vs. secondary research, types of market research, how to do market research, market research report template, market research examples.

Market research is the process of gathering information about your target market and customers to verify the success of a new product, help your team iterate on an existing product, or understand brand perception to ensure your team is effectively communicating your company's value effectively.

Market research can answer various questions about the state of an industry. But if you ask me, it's hardly a crystal ball that marketers can rely on for insights on their customers.

Market researchers investigate several areas of the market, and it can take weeks or even months to paint an accurate picture of the business landscape.

However, researching just one of those areas can make you more intuitive to who your buyers are and how to deliver value that no other business is offering them right now.

How? Consider these two things:

• Your competitors also have experienced individuals in the industry and a customer base. It‘s very possible that your immediate resources are, in many ways, equal to those of your competition’s immediate resources. Seeking a larger sample size for answers can provide a better edge.
• Your customers don't represent the attitudes of an entire market. They represent the attitudes of the part of the market that is already drawn to your brand.

The market research services market is growing rapidly, which signifies a strong interest in market research as we enter 2024. The market is expected to grow from roughly $75 billion in 2021 to $90.79 billion in 2025 .

Free Market Research Kit

• SWOT Analysis Template
• Survey Template
• Focus Group Template

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Why do market research?

Market research allows you to meet your buyer where they are.

As our world becomes louder and demands more of our attention, this proves invaluable.

By understanding your buyer's problems, pain points, and desired solutions, you can aptly craft your product or service to naturally appeal to them.

Market research also provides insight into the following:

• Where your target audience and current customers conduct their product or service research
• Which of your competitors your target audience looks to for information, options, or purchases
• What's trending in your industry and in the eyes of your buyer
• Who makes up your market and what their challenges are
• What influences purchases and conversions among your target audience
• Consumer attitudes about a particular topic, pain, product, or brand
• Whether there‘s demand for the business initiatives you’re investing in
• Unaddressed or underserved customer needs that can be flipped into selling opportunity
• Attitudes about pricing for a particular product or service

Ultimately, market research allows you to get information from a larger sample size of your target audience, eliminating bias and assumptions so that you can get to the heart of consumer attitudes.

As a result, you can make better business decisions.

To give you an idea of how extensive market research can get , consider that it can either be qualitative or quantitative in nature — depending on the studies you conduct and what you're trying to learn about your industry.

Qualitative research is concerned with public opinion, and explores how the market feels about the products currently available in that market.

Quantitative research is concerned with data, and looks for relevant trends in the information that's gathered from public records.

That said, there are two main types of market research that your business can conduct to collect actionable information on your products: primary research and secondary research.

Primary Research

Primary research is the pursuit of first-hand information about your market and the customers within your market.

It's useful when segmenting your market and establishing your buyer personas.

Primary market research tends to fall into one of two buckets:

• Exploratory Primary Research: This kind of primary market research normally takes place as a first step — before any specific research has been performed — and may involve open-ended interviews or surveys with small numbers of people.
• Specific Primary Research: This type of research often follows exploratory research. In specific research, you take a smaller or more precise segment of your audience and ask questions aimed at solving a suspected problem.

Secondary Research

Secondary research is all the data and public records you have at your disposal to draw conclusions from (e.g. trend reports, market statistics, industry content, and sales data you already have on your business).

Secondary research is particularly useful for analyzing your competitors . The main buckets your secondary market research will fall into include:

• Public Sources: These sources are your first and most-accessible layer of material when conducting secondary market research. They're often free to find and review — like government statistics (e.g., from the U.S. Census Bureau ).
• Commercial Sources: These sources often come in the form of pay-to-access market reports, consisting of industry insight compiled by a research agency like Pew , Gartner , or Forrester .
• Internal Sources: This is the market data your organization already has like average revenue per sale, customer retention rates, and other historical data that can help you draw conclusions on buyer needs.
• Focus Groups
• Product/ Service Use Research
• Observation-Based Research
• Buyer Persona Research
• Market Segmentation Research
• Pricing Research
• Competitive Analysis Research
• Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research
• Brand Awareness Research
• Campaign Research

1. Interviews

Interviews allow for face-to-face discussions so you can allow for a natural flow of conversation. Your interviewees can answer questions about themselves to help you design your buyer personas and shape your entire marketing strategy.

2. Focus Groups

Focus groups provide you with a handful of carefully-selected people that can test out your product and provide feedback. This type of market research can give you ideas for product differentiation.

3. Product/Service Use Research

Product or service use research offers insight into how and why your audience uses your product or service. This type of market research also gives you an idea of the product or service's usability for your target audience.

4. Observation-Based Research

Observation-based research allows you to sit back and watch the ways in which your target audience members go about using your product or service, what works well in terms of UX , and which aspects of it could be improved.

5. Buyer Persona Research

Buyer persona research gives you a realistic look at who makes up your target audience, what their challenges are, why they want your product or service, and what they need from your business or brand.

6. Market Segmentation Research

Market segmentation research allows you to categorize your target audience into different groups (or segments) based on specific and defining characteristics. This way, you can determine effective ways to meet their needs.

7. Pricing Research

Pricing research helps you define your pricing strategy . It gives you an idea of what similar products or services in your market sell for and what your target audience is willing to pay.

8. Competitive Analysis

Competitive analyses give you a deep understanding of the competition in your market and industry. You can learn about what's doing well in your industry and how you can separate yourself from the competition .

9. Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty Research

Customer satisfaction and loyalty research gives you a look into how you can get current customers to return for more business and what will motivate them to do so (e.g., loyalty programs , rewards, remarkable customer service).

10. Brand Awareness Research

Brand awareness research tells you what your target audience knows about and recognizes from your brand. It tells you about the associations people make when they think about your business.

11. Campaign Research

Campaign research entails looking into your past campaigns and analyzing their success among your target audience and current customers. The goal is to use these learnings to inform future campaigns.

• Define your buyer persona.
• Identify a persona group to engage.
• Prepare research questions for your market research participants.
• List your primary competitors.
• Summarize your findings.

1. Define your buyer persona.

You have to understand who your customers are and how customers in your industry make buying decisions.

This is where your buyer personas come in handy. Buyer personas — sometimes referred to as marketing personas — are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers.

Use a free tool to create a buyer persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

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8 Key Stages in the Consumer Research Strategy

July 8 2022

• Table of content

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

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

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

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

Customer research can provide you with the missing information.

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

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

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

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

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

Read also: Differences Between Market Research and Consumer Insights Research

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

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

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

The main purposes of consumer research are:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also read: How Consumer Insights Help Your Business Grow

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

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

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

1. Develop research goals

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

2. Define your research personas

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

3. Select your research methods and tools

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

Consumer data comes in two structures:

Quantitative - data, in the form of numbers

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

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

Qualitative - non-numerical data that describe and characterize

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

Also read: Seven Consumer Research Methods; 2022 Version

4. Collect secondary data

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Primary research

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

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

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

6. Collect and analyze information

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

7. Prepare a report

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

8. Put consumer research to action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Recruitment Efficiency 

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

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

Panel Relevancy Map

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

Statistically Accurate Panel

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

Engagement Efficiency 

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

Research that creates impact

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

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

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

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

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Better customer interactions: new insights from hbr study.

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There's a gap between the importance of customer interactions and how successful companies are in ... [+] delivering very positive ones, a new study from HBR and Tata Communications shows.

A recent study by Harvard Business Review, conducted in collaboration with Tata Communications, reveals some unexpected news and at least one unwelcome trend in customer experience.

Despite the widespread adoption of digital tools intended to enhance customer experience (CX), the study found that a mere 38% of those surveyed thought their organization was very successful at delivering positive customer interactions. Even that number could be high. Past research has shown companies often wildly overestimate the quality of their customer experience.

Clearly, simply implementing digital solutions isn’t enough; they must be thoughtfully integrated to truly benefit the customer.

About the HBR/Tata Study

The study surveyed 264 members of the Harvard Business Review Audience, all of whom were familiar with their company’s approach to customer interactions. Typically, these were senior executives and customer experience leaders across various industries worldwide.

The participants represented all major global regions and were primarily from large organizations with significant customer interaction needs. Industries included telecommunications, finance, retail, and healthcare. The study attempted to capture a comprehensive view of current CX challenges and strategies by gathering insights from those directly responsible for shaping and implementing customer interaction initiatives within their companies.

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Best 5% interest savings accounts of 2024, cx matters: it’s (almost) unanimous.

How important are customer interactions and CX? Fully 92% of the participants said that every customer interaction impacts customer experience. And, 93% agreed that CX impacts the organization's ability to succeed.

The only surprising thing about this finding is that apparently 7% of those surveyed think CX is unimportant . Who are those people? Cable and internet provider executives? Pharma bros?

Complexity and Confusion: The Downside of Too Many Channels

One significant finding was the impact of having too many customer interaction channels. While offering multiple channels seems like a good way to meet customers where they are, the study indicates that it can actually lead to increased confusion and frustration.

Mauro Carobene, VP and Global Head of Customer Interaction Suite at Tata Communications, highlighted this issue in an exclusive interview , noting that often changing channels means starting over. “A bad interaction is when you repeat the same experience, the same information... You contact technical support, you go through a number of menus, explain your problem, and so on. And at the end, you switch to an agent and you need to start again from scratch.”

Carobene emphasizes the importance of seamless interactions, even when customers change channels or encounter new representatives.

Chatbots vs. Humans

A major shift in customer interactions is looming as companies deploy chatbots to assist and/or replace human representatives. At the moment, customer opinion on chatbots is split. While they appreciate instant, 24/7 availability, many feel frustrated by their interaction with chatbots. We’ve all encountered useless chatbots that seem to serve mainly to delay or prevent human interaction.

In my conversation with Carobene, I stated my belief that people didn’t dislike chatbots per se, but rather disliked bad chatbots. I suggested that as AI-driven chatbots improved, they would displace millions of call center workers.

Carobene’s take was different. “Chatbots represent one of the biggest opportunities today to interact better with customers,” he said. He notes that to be truly useful, LLM-based chatbots will need extensive training to understand what customers are experiencing. For example, a non-technical customer might say their wi-fi wasn’t working when in fact the problem was their 5G data. Nuance is necessary, and fixed interaction flow charts will have to become dynamic.

Ultimately, Carobene sees chatbots as useful partners to human representatives, particularly in offering instant availability. “People forget when they were waiting for 20 minutes, or even hours, for an agent to be available.”

Carobene is optimistic on chatbot improvement. “AI will move from solving maybe 5% of the problems today automatically with bots to maybe 80%. And that will represent big savings for the company, but also huge time savings for customers.”

Customer Experience vs. Employee Experience

Customer experience doesn’t stand alone. In the study report, Carobene states, “In a hyperconnected ecosystem, enterprises need to think about creating superior experiences for their employees, customers, partners, and users.”

In our conversation, he pointed out that experience must be seamless for both employees and customers. A tech support person, for example, who is unhappy, upset, or struggling to find information will create a negative experience. A happy representative delivers positive energy and a good interaction.

“Successful companies,” he notes, “manage to increase their engagement internally and externally.”

CX Will Get Better

Perhaps the best news from the study is that 97%. of the respondents said their organization is focused on making one or more improvements to customer interactions over the next 12 months.

At the top of the list for improvements are making interactions more seamless (55%), enhancing personalization (50%), and delivering a more consistent experience (50%). Nearly as many are working on improving marketing messaging (48%) and making interactions more seamless for employees (45%).

While these projects don’t actually guarantee that customer experience will improve, they indicate an understanding that CX has plenty of room for improvement and a commitment to making it better.

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10 Customer Service Skills & How to Develop Them

AI, effective communication, and more — see the customer service skills that make the biggest difference for your business.

Have you ever called customer support only to speak with someone who can't help you? Or they were oblivious to your frustration? The interaction not only makes you angry at the customer service agent, but it also alters your trust in the company.

This is why good customer service & incident management is so critical. It improves customer satisfaction, retention, and even revenue. And in today's competitive marketplace, when companies offer exceptional customer service, they stand out. Positive interactions and a reputation for excellent customer service can attract new customers and retain brand loyalty. That’s why it’s important to identify the top customer service skills that help agents provide above-and-beyond customer experiences.

Whether you’re a leader who’s looking for ways to improve customer service hiring and training — or a contact centre agent who’s looking to excel in the role — it’s important to know how to harness the power of both hard and soft customer service skills. Let’s get to it.

Take the first step with Service Cloud.

Deliver personalised customer service at scale. Bring all of your support needs onto one platform so you can decrease costs while increasing efficiency.

What is customer service?

Customer service is the support and assistance businesses provide to their customers before, during, and after a purchase or interaction. It's how companies solve problems, offer guidance, and ensure satisfaction with their products or services.

Dig into our latest customer service research.

High-performing service organisations are using data and AI to generate revenue while cutting costs — without sacrificing the customer experience. Find out how in the 6th edition of the State of Service report.

Why are customer service skills important?

Customer service skills are crucial because they directly influence customer satisfaction and loyalty, brand reputation, and revenue. Good customer service can turn simple questions or challenging situations into opportunities to gain customers' trust and create positive experiences.

It's not just about resolving issues; it's about responding promptly, meeting customer needs and expectations, active listening, and empathy for customer concerns. Hitting those marks creates connections that encourage customers to come back and recommend your business to others.

These changing customer expectations — 88% of consumers now demand fast, consistent, and personalised interactions with every engagement — impact the types of skills required for the job. Customers favour brands that not only deliver excellent products and services but also use tools such as AI to improve their overall experience. By prioritising customer service and the skills needed to excel, businesses don't just gain a competitive advantage; they create loyal customers who feel deeply appreciated.

What are the best customer service skills?

The most effective customer service happens when hard and soft skills come together to create an experience that leaves the customer feeling valued and understood. This combination of technical skills and a human touch can turn a simple inquiry or a more complex case into a positive interaction. Let's look at a few examples at how technology can help:

Provide continuity: Customers do not appreciate having to explain their situation over and over. They expect consistent interactions between touch points. A customer relationship management (CRM) systems helps agents and chatbots quickly access customer information, purchase history, and previous interactions. They all have the same information, so your customers won't have to repeat themselves and will get seamless, personalised service.

Offer omni-channel support: It's important to offer prompt, convenient, and connected support on different customer service channels . This means being available for voice, chatbot, email, live chat, and social media conversations — whichever of those methods the customer prefers — and making sure these channels are connected. With the right omni-channel approach, your customers will always have a consistent experience — no matter how they contact you.

Use automation: Provide fast service to customers using automated workflows. Not only can workflows guide agents through the steps to complete a process quickly and efficiently, they can do the same for your customers. You can set up those routines on your self-service channels to help customers help themselves with simple matters. For example, use automated workflows to guide a customer through the return-initiation process.

How to improve customer service skills

Improving your customer service skills starts with showing empathy to the the people you're helping. The goal should always be to make every customer interaction a positive and memorable experience that encourages loyalty and positive word-of-mouth. Here are few ways to improve:

Hard customer service skills

Hard skills — often referred to as technical or specific skills — are the practical abilities and capabilities that an individual can demonstrate in a measured way. Hard customer service skills are abilities that agents can learn to perform job-specific tasks to improve the customer experience. When customers know they are speaking with a knowledgeable agent, they feel they’re in good hands. This builds trust and leads to customer loyalty.

These are hard customer service skills that have the most impact:

Product Knowledge

Having in-depth knowledge of the products or services being offered is a crucial customer service skill. This involves understanding the features, specifications, and benefits of the offerings. It also means being able to address customer inquiries and provide accurate information.

The right training starts with a deep-dive on product features, benefits, common issues, and troubleshooting steps. This can include virtual or in-person classes, knowledge base articles, product manuals, and hands-on practice. Create a buddy system where new hires shadow experienced agents.

And if you’re an agent, ask about learning opportunities to expand your knowledge. Don’t be afraid to admit when you don’t know something, even if it’s during an interaction with a customer, so that you can escalate it through the proper channels. This lets leadership know you need additional training and helps to build trust with customers.

Technical Expertise

It's important that your agents are proficient with your technology. Encourage them to share their experiences to identify any blockers that may be impacting their success.

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is used to improve the customer experience and create more efficient interactions. Automation and chatbots can help streamline workflows, address customer requests faster, and proactively anticipate customer needs.

Omnichannel Awareness

For example, social media and text messages are more informal and agents can use emojis, while email communication should state full sentences for clarity. Provide ongoing training for agents about new and emerging platforms and the appropriate communication styles for each to improve the online customer experience.

Multilingual Skills

Many companies operate in diverse markets and cater to customers from different language backgrounds. Multilingual skills allow customer service representatives to communicate effectively with customers who prefer or require assistance in their native language. This enhances the customer experience and builds rapport.

In addition, using a customer's native language allows agents to provide a more personalised and tailored customer service experience. They can engage in meaningful conversations, ask relevant questions, and offer assistance specific to the customer's cultural context and preferences. This personalised approach builds trust and strengthens the customer-agent relationship.

Soft customer service skills

While technical knowledge will always be important, soft skills — or interpersonal skills — are equally essential. These customer service skills determine how an agent interacts with customers and makes them feel. For example, was the agent empathetic and understanding? Were they respectful throughout the interaction?

To improve customer service soft skills, here’s what to master:

Effective Communication

According to recent research , 60% of customers say it generally feels like they’re communicating with separate departments, and 66% often have to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives. To make sure your agents are hitting a high note during every interaction, coach them to use clear, straightforward language, and stay focused on the customer throughout the conversation. One way to hone this skill is to review and evaluate recorded customer interactions as a training exercise.

Active Listening

To improve this critical customer service skill, practice makes perfect. Conduct group activities where agents practice active listening with their colleagues. This can help them develop their skills and learn from each other's experiences. Encourage agents to provide feedback to their peers on their active listening techniques.

You can also share examples of active listening in customer service scenarios. Use role-playing exercises or video demonstrations to illustrate how active listening can positively impact customer interactions. Highlight both verbal and nonverbal cues that indicate active listening, such as nodding, maintaining eye contact, and summarising or paraphrasing the customer's concerns.

In customer service, empathy is the capacity to affirm a customer's feelings and understand their frustration — even if the problem is out of your control. In fact, 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations, yet 56% say most companies treat them like numbers.

Demonstrating empathy is an essential customer service skill. Train agents on understanding customer emotions, and handling difficult or irate customers. Share strategies and techniques for de-escalating conflicts, managing complaints, and turning negative experiences into positive ones. For example, provide agents with a list of empathetic phrases like, “I understand how you feel” and “I hear you,” while offering a solution and next steps. Use results from sentiment surveys after service interactions to see if agents are making customers feel heard.

Adaptability

Adaptability is a soft customer service skill that means easily adjusting to changing circumstances. Every customer service agent must be able to adapt to change.

As a leader, foster a positive team culture that encourages collaboration, knowledge sharing, and support among agents. Conduct team-building activities, encourage open communication, and create an environment where agents feel comfortable seeking help and sharing experiences.

And agents: remember, your managers are always there for support. Be sure to ask for additional customer service training on adaptability if needed and also keep leaders in the loop if you need to escalate an issue. Part of honing soft skills is bringing in your team for help.

Time Management

Effective time management allows customer service representatives to respond to customer inquiries promptly and efficiently. By prioritising tasks and allocating time effectively, representatives can provide timely assistance, minimising customer wait times and reducing frustration. This is especially important as service teams often face high call volumes or a large influx of inquiries. Yet, 78% of agents say it’s difficult to balance speed and quality .

Master your customer service skills

Customer service is an evolving field, and it’s important to keep up with the latest developments. Encourage your agents to participate in continuous training and professional development opportunities to keep their customer service skills fresh. This can include workshops, webinars, industry conferences, or online courses to enhance their skills and stay updated with industry trends.

In addition, use this list of customer service skills in this article as a checklist when hiring new agents. Although all agents have different strengths, the ones that tend to be strong in the above areas are more likely to turn out to be high performers.

For agents, the biggest takeaway for you is to work to improve these critical customer skills, so you can excel in your role. This will not only help to improve customer experience, it will also help you advance your career. Your skills can only take you so far if you don’t have the right technology in place. Use My Service Journey to discover the right service products based on your business goals.

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

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• West Virginia American Water Launches Web-Based Customer Assistance Program Finder

Customers can research and determine financial assistance for water, wastewater bills

West Virginia American Water Release

Charleston, W.Va., (Aug. 15, 2024)  – West Virginia American Water has launched  an online survey  designed to help customers research and determine their eligibility for various financial assistance programs to help manage their water and/or wastewater bills. “We understand that customers can face challenging situations when paying their bills,” said Rob Burton, president of West Virginia American Water. “This tool is the first of its kind for any water or wastewater utility in West Virginia and offers a convenient way for customers to research and find financial assistance programs that are the right fit for their current situation.” The survey , accessible on the “Customer Assistance Programs” page under the “Customer Service & Billing” tab on the company’s website, allows customers to enter basic information about their billing status and financial situation. After completing the survey, customers will receive information on the assistance programs for which they may qualify. West Virginia American Water collaborates with state and county agencies to connect customers with several utility assistance programs, including:

• H2O Help to Others Program Qualified customers may be eligible for $350 in utility assistance every six months.
• Low Income Tariff Rate (SRRRS Reduced Rate) Qualified customers may be eligible for a reduced monthly rate.
• Low-Income Household Water Assistance Program (LIHWAP) Water and wastewater bill assistance for qualifying low-income households.
• Special Residential Reduced Rate Discount Program (SRRRS Reduced Rate + Low Income Discount) A 20% discount on current residential water and wastewater rates for qualifying customers.

Additionally, West Virginia American Water offers installment plans and budget billing options for residential customers. An installment plan allows customers to extend the time they have to pay a past due balance. Budget billing provides customers with a predictable monthly bill amount. For more information about West Virginia American Water’s customer assistance programs or to determine eligibility, please visit the Customer Assistance Programs page on the company’s website under “Customer Service & Billing.”

About American Water

American Water (NYSE: AWK) is the largest regulated water and wastewater utility company in the United States. With a history dating back to 1886, We Keep Life Flowing® by providing safe, clean, reliable and affordable drinking water and wastewater services to more than 14 million people with regulated operations in 14 states and on 18 military installations. American Water’s 6,500 talented professionals leverage their significant expertise and the company’s national size and scale to achieve excellent outcomes for the benefit of customers, employees, investors and other stakeholders.

For more information, visit  amwater.com  and join American Water on  LinkedIn ,  Facebook ,  X  and  Instagram .

About West Virginia American Water

West Virginia American Water, a subsidiary of American Water (NYSE: AWK), is the largest regulated water utility in the state, providing high-quality and reliable water services to approximately 600,000 people.

Assistance Program Jobs & Hope WV West Virginia American Water

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