customer research types

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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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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.

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

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

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

What is customer research.

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

1. Research Objectives

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

2. Target Audience Definition

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

3. Research Methodology

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

4. Data Collection

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

5. Data Analysis

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

6. Findings and Insights

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

7. Recommendations

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

8. Iteration and Continuous Improvement

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

Types of Customer Research

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

1. Customer Satisfaction Research

Definition:.

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

Key Elements:

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

Implementation:

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

2. Customer Needs and Preferences Research

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

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

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

3. Customer Experience (CX) Research

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

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

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

4. Brand Perception Research

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

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

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

5. Customer Segmentation Research

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

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

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

6. Competitive Research

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

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

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

7. Customer Journey Mapping

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

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

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

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

How to Conduct Customer Research: 10 Key Steps

Conducting effective customer research involves a systematic approach:

1. Define Research Objectives

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

2. Identify Target Audience

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

3. Choose Research Methods

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

4. Develop Research Instruments

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

5. Recruit Participants

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

6. Conduct Data Collection

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

7. Analyze Data

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

8. Interpret Findings

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

9. Communicate Results

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

10. Apply Insights

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

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

Examples of Customer Research Questions

Crafting effective customer research questions is essential. Examples include:

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

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

Best Practices for Customer Research

Following best practices is essential for accurate and valuable insights:

1. Clearly Define Research Objectives

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

2. Use a Mix of Qualitative and Quantitative Methods

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

3. Identify Your Target Audience

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

4. Create Unbiased and Neutral Questions

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

5. Use a Variety of Data Collection Methods

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

6. Engage With Customers at Different Touchpoints

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

7. Maintain Confidentiality and Anonymity

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

8. Analyze and Interpret Data Systematically

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

9. Continuously Iterate and Improve

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

10. Communicate Findings and Take Action

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

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

Enhance Your Research with IdeaScale

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Empowering Businesses Globally: A Comprehensive Guide to Customer Research by Arensic

Welcome to the realm of Arensic International , your strategic partner in unlocking the full potential of businesses on the global stage. As a leading international market research and management consulting firm, Arensic transcends boundaries to deliver strategic solutions that drive informed decisions and foster sustainable growth.

About Arensic International

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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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Ideas, Information & Inspiration

Customer Research: Types, Examples & Best Practices

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

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

Here’s What Consumer Research Really Means

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

Here’s Why Consumer Research Is Important

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

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

Here’s How Consumer Research Can Help Your Business

It puts you in tune with your customers.

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

It helps develop new products and services.

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

It helps fine-tune your existing products and services.

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

The Different Kinds of Consumer Research

Primary Consumer Research

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

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

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

Secondary Consumer Research

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

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

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

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

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

Qualitative Consumer Research

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

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

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

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

Quantitative Consumer Research

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

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

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

3 Consumer Research Tips For Entrepreneurs

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

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

Look for information in unusual places.

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

Be sure to make a plan.

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

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

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

The Right Questions For The Right Customers At The Right Time

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

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

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

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

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

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

Featured Content

Customer Research Methods: Key Strategies for Market Insights in 2024

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

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

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

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

What is customer research?

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

Why is customer research important?

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

Customer research vs. market research

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

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

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

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

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

Primary research vs. secondary research

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

Primary research

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

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

Secondary research

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

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

Types of customer data

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

Qualitative data

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

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

Quantitative data

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

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

Best customer research methods

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

Customer surveys and questionnaires

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

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

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

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

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

Focus groups

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

Observational studies

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

Usability testing

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

Field trials

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

Review mining

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

Types of customer research

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

Competitive research

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

Customer journey mapping

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

Buyer persona research

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

Customer experience research

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

Customer segmentation research

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

Customer needs research

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

Customer satisfaction research

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

Pricing research

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

Brand perception research

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

Designing a research plan

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

Set objectives

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

Identify target audience

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

Recruit participants

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

Choose appropriate methods

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

Sampling techniques

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

Build a continuous process with feedback loops

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

Data collection and analysis

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

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

Quantitative data analysis

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

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

Qualitative data assessment

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

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

Mixing methods

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

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

Interpreting and reporting results

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

Drawing conclusions

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

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

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

Creating actionable insights

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

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

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

Emerging trends in customer research

Conduct market research with ai.

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

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

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

Social listening

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

Predicting customer behavior

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

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

Survicate for your market and customer research

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

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

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

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

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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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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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How to conduct customer research: the best tools and methods

Let’s talk about what customer research actually is, why it’s valuable to a company, and the best research methods.

What is customer research, why is customer research important, different types of customer research, benefits of surveys:.

• Wide reach with a low-cost
• Quantifiable, trackable data
• Quick to start

Drawbacks of surveys:

• Lacking nuance and detail of more personal approaches
• Fees for incentives to overcome low response rates
• May not be taken as seriously by customers

Potential cost:

• Free/cost of mailing your database, plus an incentive

Focus groups

Benefits of focus groups:.

• Instant feedback
• Deep understanding
• Varied viewpoints

Drawbacks of focus groups:

• Ability to be led by the researcher (bias)
• Cost and time needed
• Disparity between reality and ideals
• High, with room hire, refreshments, researchers, and recruiters. Expect to pay more than £1,000

Customer feedback forms

Benefits of feedback forms:.

• Direct insights
• Appreciated by customers
• Quick and easy to run

Drawbacks of feedback forms:

• Bias: Can be influenced heavily by current use/appreciation of product or service
• Limited structure: May not capture useful insights or ideas
• Analysis complexity: Time-consuming to analyse and unpick responses
• Low-medium, although expenses can scale based on the systems needed to facilitate feedback, as well as costs to encourage responses such as incentives, prizes, pop-up volumes, or additional display channels

Tips for conducting customer research

• Ensure customers feel able to respond in any way, good or bad.
• Have a standardised, approved list of questions to ask, but let them reflect and elaborate.
• Ask one thing at a time, and clarify later on.
• Ask open-ended questions, and let them reflect and elaborate.
• Avoid leading questions such as: ‘What do you think about a helpful chat box here?’
• Start with high-level questions first. Discover their role, challenges, and interests, and get them more comfortable answering before you ask questions related to you and your product.

Customer research: which method is right for you?

Our tip start with a survey, and go from there.

5 surveys every successful company should use

Creating an engaging product survey: the 12-step guide

How to create the most engaging market research survey

The Ultimate Guide to Conducting Customer Research: Tips and Tricks

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

Introduction to Customer Research

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

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

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

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Why Customer Research is Important

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

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

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

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

Types of Customer Research

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

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

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

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

Best Practices for Conducting Customer Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Understand customer market research: What is it and how to do it

Eve Chatfield

Customer research, when done right, can enhance every essential aspect of customer marketing. In this article, we’ll cover:

• What customer research or consumer research is,
• The difference between customer and market research,
• Types of consumer research,
• Some research strategies.

What is customer research?

Customer research or consumer research is a vital component of customer marketing’s most fundamental role: to understand and market to your chosen target audience.

Consumer research definition:

Consumer research is the act of gathering information about your customers’ needs, desires, preferences, and behaviors as it pertains to your product or service.

This type of research can be conducted on current existing customers and/or potential customers. This research seeks to understand why your customers exist in the first place, and why potential customers end up not making a purchase.

In essence, this is about understanding the motivations behind anything your customer does, being able to represent that within your marketing , and how you might be able to influence this in the future.

What is the difference between customer and market research?

Customer or consumer research is most often placed within market research, as a part of a bigger research project. Customer research can also be applied to design research or user research too.

Because customers have such a big influence on how the market, and the businesses within that market, run, it's often the case that, whatever part of the business funnel you are researching, customer research will become a part of the strategy too.

Market research will not exclusively look at your customers, but will analyze and assess the market as a whole. This will include things like competitive intelligence, and analyzing other business models to influence how your own company conducts itself within its chosen market.

Fill out the form to download Intro to Customer Research below to start better understanding your customers.

Types of consumer research

Primary research.

Primary research refers to the act of collecting data from a primary source when you conduct a variety of types of data collection and speak to your customer directly. This will include things like focus groups, surveys, social media interactions, and interviews.

Secondary research

Secondary research is carried out by someone else. Your secondary research relies on data collected by someone else. This will be things like online databases, forums, and industry reports.

Quantitative research

Both primary and secondary research comes in the form of qualitative or quantitative research, which offer different levels of information and are often used for different purposes.

Quantitative research is expressed in numerical values and presents simple yet objective facts about your data set. As a result, the data you get from this type of research is not very in-depth but it means a larger proportion of your chosen data group can be represented.

Qualitative research

Qualitative research is more subjective and opinion-based. This type of research is descriptive and often comes from talking in depth to a small number of people from your data set.

Whilst qualitative research won’t represent all of your data group, it can offer insights into specific scenarios, motivations, pain points, and more.

Research strategies

In our State of Customer Marketing Report for 2022 , we found that most customer marketers spoke to their customers 2-3 times a week (22.2%) and a handful of times a month (22.2%).

Customer marketing research is impossible without this kind of regular contact. Customer marketing is a unique position where it can consistently develop relationships with customer advocates , offering them an immediate resource for qualitative research.

Interaction with your community of customers over social media or forums allows for a similar kind of relationship with a wider audience. In essence, customer marketers can have some customers whom they talk to every single week and others whom they only interact with a few times on social media.

Yet each relationship is invaluable in informing the way you work.

In the same way, your research strategies can vary in the level of contact they need with your customers. Here are a few examples below.

Customer research strategies

A/b testing.

A/B testing is an experiment where your customers are shown two different versions of a page at random. These pages are monitored to see which performs best.

A/B testing can be used to assess the effectiveness of a variety of marketing content and tone including email subject bars, headlines, social media posts, articles, and more.

This is a quantitative measure; results will show things like click-through rate and engagement rate.

• Pros: A/B testing requires very little interaction with your customers and takes very little prep and monitoring.
• Cons: Sometimes it’s difficult to understand why one headline performs better than another. If you’re looking for results that you can then implement into everyday practices, you’ll likely need to talk to customers to get a better understanding of why a chosen word or tone of voice worked better than another.

A case study is a deep dive into a specific customer’s experience with your product and/or organization. Most often, this is referring to a particular instance or instances where the customer you are interviewing interacted with your organization.

Conducting a case study should take you through each stage of the customer’s journey. It will highlight what worked well and what didn’t work well for their specific use case.

This will give you extensive qualitative feedback about specific scenarios within the customer journey which may produce answers for some unique or previously missed pain points.

• Pros: Case studies can not only be used for research but can also be syndicated into other content as testimonials promoting your product to other customers.
• Cons: This can be more time-consuming than other forms of research, and will only account for a small percentage of your audience.

Review mining

Review mining is the process of finding and extracting opinions about your organization and product from online review sites. This research will evaluate users’ sentiments and feedback about your product.

This type of research allows you to collect qualitative feedback in a way that is less intensive and time-consuming; It offers the opportunity to receive feedback without having to reach out to each of these customers individually.

• Pros: Doesn’t rely on customer availability. Could highlight certain complaints customers may not tell you about directly.
• Cons: The level of information provided by reviews can vary a lot. If you’re wanting to learn more about a specific review, you’ll have to reach out to customers individually.

Focus groups

Focus groups gather information by bringing together a small number of customers (usually 6-10) into a room to discuss your organization and product. This can involve your company as a whole, or a specific product, campaign, or concept.

This gives you the unique opportunity to watch and listen to your customers as they interact with each other. Unique qualitative insights may come up that would be missed in a survey or one-to-one interview.

• Pros: Enables you to gather a group of your customers to offer insights that you won’t get from a one-to-one interview or a survey.
• Cons: Heavily monitored type of research. Planning such a group will take more time in order to fit a large number of schedules.

Colleen Johnson goes through a fantastic example of an effective focus group in this episode of Customer Marketing Catch-up:

Personas are fictional profiles used to represent specific groups within your customer base. They will take into account personal needs and pain points, preferred messaging, offers, and products.

• Pros: Can be used as a cheat sheet for any internal persons looking to better understand your audience.
• Cons: Personas will be produced using data from other research you conduct. You will often have to revisit your personas and update them as your customer base, and your understanding of your customer base develops.

The next steps

Customer research is a topic that can be discussed endlessly. It’s always going to be a part of any marketing job, specifically customer marketing. Taking the next steps to perfect your research processes can start with CMA’s Customer Research: Masters.

This course involves:

🧠 Expert insights from a customer research connoisseur.

⏰ 3+ hours of course curriculum content.

🛠 7 tried, tested, and vetted templates that’ll streamline your practice.

🔥 Bonus footage & fireside chats to supplement your learning.

🔖 Official Customer Research certification to show off to your colleagues.

⏳ Lifetime access to all the course content.

Written by:

Eve is a Junior Copywriter at Customer Marketing Alliance. She has been writing for as long as she can remember and enjoys creating content that helps others with their career goals.

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Customer Research: The Most Underappreciated Strategy In Your Toolkit

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

These ecommerce scenarios all have something in common:

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

The answer: good customer research. 

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

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

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

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

The rest of this articles outlines how to:

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

What is customer research?

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

Why is it especially important for ecommerce? 

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

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

Customer research gets you outside the jar

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

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

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

But that’s not the only benefit. 

Customer research helps you identify data-backed improvements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This ties into the third major benefit for ecommerce brands.

Customer research shows you how to build better customer experiences

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

And better experiences pay off:

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

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

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

Here’s how to get started. 

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

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

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

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

Below are each of those pieces in more detail.

What are your goals for customer research? 

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

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

• A research goal
• A business goal

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

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

Who is going to be doing the research?

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

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

How will you find customers or prospects to talk to?

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

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

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

1. Identifying who to talk with 

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

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

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

And that’s just to name a few. 

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

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

2. Outlining how you’ll engage them

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

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

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

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

What types of research make the most sense?

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

Here’s one helpful framework:

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

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

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

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

Non-interview research options 

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

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

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

In those scenarios, non-interview options include: 

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

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

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

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

How to Conduct Customer Research to Improve Customer Experience

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

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

There are a few ways to benchmark this:

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

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

How to conduct effective 1:1 customer interviews

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How many people do I reach out to? 

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

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

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

Do I use incentives? 

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

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

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

How do I qualify research participants? 

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

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

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

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

What do I say when I email people? 

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

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

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

How do I schedule it all? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Pre-interview prep
• During interview guidelines 

Pre-interview prep: formulating questions  

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

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

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

To find those insights, many interviewers ask questions about: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Also, a quick note on taking notes: 

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

The final result looks like a treasure map. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How to map research data to real brand opportunities 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Consolidate, organize, and socialize 

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

Consolidate: create a home for the research

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

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

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

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

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

Organize: make the research easier to consume

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some pointers for developing your approach:

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

Socialize: share what you find with others

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

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

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

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

Identifying real insights 

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

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

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

Look for customer segments or personas

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

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

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

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

Two related perks of building rich ideal customer segments: 

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

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

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

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

Map observations to areas of the business

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

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

This involves:

• Hypothesizing potential improvements
• Prioritizing and testing those improvements

Hypothesizing improvements

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

Some common applications include:

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

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

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

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

Prioritize and test potential improvements 

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

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

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

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

Start with what customers prioritize

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

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

Work on your Peak-End Moments

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

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

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

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

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

Go ahead, kick off your research project

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

Then, tell us the most interesting thing you learned! 

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

If you still aren’t sure where to start with your research, we can help identify areas on your website that aren’t converting. Or try building a research plan based on the identified pain points in a custom 5-Factors Scorecard™ .

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

About the author, laura bosco.

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

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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Customer Research: A Guide To The Ultimate Startup Cheat Code

by Corey Haines. Last updated on November 28, 2023

Table of Contents

More founders journey articles.

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

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

It’s the ultimate startup cheat code.

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

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

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

What Is Customer Research?

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

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

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

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

Customer research helps you thoroughly answer key questions like:

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

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

That is customer research. 

Why Is Customer Research Necessary?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Types Of Customer Research

Customer research can be done in two ways:

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Do Customer Research

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Start from a place of empathy and curiosity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask the right questions

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

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

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

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

For prospective customers:

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

For active customers:

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

Great questions to ask, regardless:

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

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

Keep asking why (dig deeper)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Find The Right People To Talk To

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Do Customer Research Without Physically Talking To Customers

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

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

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

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

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

Surveys make for a great research tool if you:

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

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

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

Some widely-accepted survey best practices include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook Groups

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Niche online communities, forums, and review sites

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How To Use Customer Research

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

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

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

For example, take an audit of:

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

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

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

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

No more guessing. Now you can predict .

The company who knows their customers best wins.

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

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

Corey Haines

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

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

17 Effective Customer Research Tips [+ Examples]

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

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

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

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

17 Customer Research Tips

1. identify the target audience.

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

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

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

2. Discover new Opportunities

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

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

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

3. Leverage Online Reviews from Customers

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

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

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

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

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

4. Use Market Research Tools

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

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

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

5. Observe Your Competition

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

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

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

Research the following about competitors:

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

6. Gather and Analyze Data

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

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

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

7. Collect Customer Surveys

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

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

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

8. See How Customers Use the Product

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

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

Another option is using 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 Research Methods

Customer research process

Customer research can be time-consuming and complex, but it’s ultimately worth it. Before beginning any research, you must first develop the objectives and define the goals for the process. Then it is essential to formulate a plan. You can choose any one of the multiple customer research methods. Now it is time to conduct the research.

The customer research process does not end with collecting information. The main job is analyzing your collected data, deriving actionable insights, and making changes to your product, service, and marketing tactics. Knowing what makes your customers tick helps create content and products they want. Although a deep dive into understanding customers can provide many benefits, good customer research isn’t overnight work and requires effort upfront before reaping any rewards.

Customer research methods

There are a variety of methods to conduct customer research. Here are some of the most popular and effective ones:

Customer Research Application

Now that your research is done, it’s time to analyze and act. Customer research data can be used by different departments in a company to improve their business processes in the following ways:

Customer research data can help the marketing department understand customer preferences, behaviors, and opinions about their brand, product, or service. This information can be used to develop more targeted marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement.

Customer research data can help the sales department identify customer needs, pain points, and buying behaviors. This information can be used to develop more effective sales strategies, improve customer relationships and close more deals.

Product Development

Customer research data can provide valuable insights into customer opinions about the company’s products. This information can inform product development and improve the overall customer experience .

Customer Service

Customer research data can help the customer service department understand customer needs and identify areas where the customer experience can be improved. This information can be used to develop more effective customer support strategies and improve customer satisfaction.

Customer research data can help the operations department understand customer needs and preferences and identify areas where business processes can be optimized to better meet customer requirements. This information can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Different departments can work together to improve the overall customer experience and drive business growth by utilizing customer research data.

When it comes to customer research, there are a lot of different approaches you can take. But to maximize your chances for success, follow these five essential steps: define your goals, identify your target market, choose the suitable research method, collect and analyze your data, and use your findings to improve your business. By following these simple tips, you can set yourself up for success and ensure your customer research is as effective as possible.

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13 common customer types

Last updated

29 April 2023

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You can assess the needs of a customer or potential customer by identifying the ‘type’. By creating a buyer persona , you can see your target consumer at a glance.

There are different subsets of customers that may come through your virtual or real-world door. While market research identifies your target market, a keen eye and attention to buyer behavior can help you identify their motivation and what it will take to retain them as a customer.

Let’s look at how to identify each customer type.

• Types of customers and how to cater to their needs

We've identified 13 types of customers that can be part of any business. These customers all have slightly different needs and expectations. Understanding these will allow you to customize your offerings to provide a more pleasant experience and help attune your marketing messaging to attract your target customers.

Browsing customers

Also known as lookers or potential customers, browsers aren't your customers yet, but they are interested in your products or services. They want to explore their options before purchasing and are in the middle of the sales funnel .

While they are showing an interest in your product or service, it is up to you to explain how it can meet their needs. This customer type expects a great first impression with solid design and positive user experience , both of which demonstrate overall value.

Rather than a hard sales pitch, engage this customer type via testimonials and white papers to show how your product or service has helped other customers. Encourage customers to complete a contact form and nurture that lead with additional information, a compelling offer, and warm and engaging customer service.

Impulse buyers

The impulse buyer is quick to decide on purchasing what you offer. They don't do much, if any, research, and there is no need to coax them through the sales funnel. Impulse buyers need to be left to their own devices to complete their journey.

There are, however, a few helpful ways to influence their decisions. Impulsive customers need things to be simple and enjoyable; streamline the purchase experience and don't interrupt them with unnecessary distractions.

They may be open to upselling, but only if it doesn't take away from their primary purchase journey. Self-service is perfect for impulse buyers.

Researchers

‘Researcher’ customers have already compared you with other equivalent brands or services; a pretty website and simple promotion likely won’t cut it for them. To cultivate this type of shopper, you need to provide evidence of your product’s or service’s value via testimonials.

Researchers are more interested in overall value, so show them how your item will give them superior value and provide the most effective solution to address their pain points. Comparing your product’s features with those of competitor products is also a good way to show, at a glance, how your product or service can benefit users in ways that others can't.

Bargain hunters

Also known as discount customers, bargain hunters are the opposite of impulse buyers. They focus heavily on cost, and while they desire the product or service and know it is what they want or need, they will search for the lowest price before they buy.

It is hard to turn these customers into loyal shoppers, but not impossible. To cultivate bargain hunters, make sure your whole team knows your promotional deals inside and out, so you can offer this group added value that they may not get anywhere else.

New customers

New customers have made their first purchase from you and have just started their relationship with your company. They are likely to be more receptive to your marketing at this stage of the relationship. Finding any customer at this stage is a chance to build loyalty and repeat business. 

Offer high-quality customer service and useful information, a proper welcome to make them feel appreciated, and ensure they have resources available by way of blogs, demonstrations, and other product tutorials.

By ensuring their questions are answered and that they feel valued, you're sowing the seeds for a long-term relationship with your new customers.

Confused customers

This customer subset has questions or concerns about your product or service. They need information to make a decision one way or another on whom to buy from. By acknowledging their confusion and creating ways for them to obtain answers, you can convince confused customers to buy.

FAQs are a good start, but having a live chat, or chatbot service, is another useful tool. Offer your customers the option to talk with a real person to get their questions answered. This level of customer service will make them feel valued and will give them the information they need to make a purchasing decision.

Uncertain customers

Uncertain customers are a cross between confused customers and browsers. They don't know whether your product or service is right for them, but they are weighing up their options. 

To win over uncertain customers, offer immediate contact options such as live chat or a chatbot. If these unsure customers can see the value of your product or service, how it is a solution to their pain points, and your accessible, high-quality customer service, they will turn into buyers.

Angry customers

No matter how well you operate your business, you will get an ‘angry’ customer from time to time. These types of customers provide a learning experience about what not to do and how to improve your company. If you find out what is causing their frustration and correct it, you can transform a volatile situation into one that could convert them into a satisfied return customer .

Be empathetic to their situation, acknowledge their problem or issue, and try your best to resolve it. The resolution should address the customer’s frustration; refunds and replacements are your best tools here. Your team should be trained on handling an angry customer with grace and confidence.

People who don’t speak the same language

Non-English speaking customers want accessibility. They don't speak the language and are discouraged if purchasing journeys are only in English.

To encourage sales from this group, offer translation services so your website and shopping pages can be translated into their language. Providing a language drop-down menu on the contact form can help you identify this customer type, allowing you to create better emails that make them feel valued and supported.

Loyal customers

These customer types are repeat buyers and already fans of your product or service. There isn't a need to "sell" it to them; you just need to continue to provide them with quality service. Retention is your goal for loyal customers.

To retain them, consider loyalty programs such as reward points and repeat purchase bonuses. You can learn about their experience through feedback forms which can give you valuable data to positively tweak and optimize your product or service for future customers.

Former customers

Former, or lapsed, customers were once customers but are not any longer. If you realize they’re a former customer before it’s too late, you can bring them back.

A customer service complaint file or a feedback form may tell you what went wrong and give you hints about how to fix the problem. Reaching out, apologizing for the issues, and offering ways to fix the situation, can help address any lingering problems and get former customers back on your side.

Referred customers

These people have been referred to you by other customers. They may not know much about you, your company, or your product or service, but you were recommended to them. Word-of-mouth advertising goes a long way, but you still will have the final task of winning them over.

By providing a smooth, informative, and clear procedure to feed them into your sales funnel, you can retain their interest and ensure they become a loyal customer. Interacting with them to figure out their personal pain points and needs can help you align your benefits and value proposition with referred customers.

Competitors’ customers

We’re not suggesting you go after your competitors' customers! We’re referring to people who are already putting out feelers because they’re looking to switch. They are already interested in similar products, but the fact they’re looking elsewhere indicates they are dissatisfied.

By finding out why they are unhappy, you can show them why your solution can alleviate their dissatisfaction. Discover what is missing, fill that need, and show them great customer service to help win them over.

There are several different customer types, and we’ve looked at 13 of the most common ones that can apply to most businesses. By pinpointing the types of customers that your business has, you can tailor your marketing and customer service to appeal to people at different stages of the customer journey and increase your chances of selling to them.

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