6 Learnings For Better Customer Research

I’m often asked, in which business areas it makes most sense to do customer research. Being the user advocate I am, my immediate response is “In all of them!” Which, while making a valid point, probably isn’t the most helpful answer. So, let’s break this down. I believe customer research is an incredibly powerful tool to make informed decisions in a huge variety of business areas. To underline this, below are a few projects where I’m confident doing customer research will lead you to better outcomes.

For which kind of project should you do customer research?

• developing a new product
• evolving an existing offerring
• adding new features to your product
• merging two brands
• deciding on the future direction of your company
• designing your company strategy
• creating a vision or mission for your company
• improving your product or service experience
• designing a website
• creating your communications strategy

In all of these scenarios (and more), thorough customer reseach can help you make more informed and thus, better decisions. I’m by no means saying customer research results should be your only source of information. It is quite a vualable one, though. That’s why I try to always make user research an integral part of the work I do - even if I sometimes need to find some workarounds to integrate user research into a project.

And while I still learn something new in every research project I do, I’ve gathered a lot of learnings over the years. I’d like to share some of these learnings in the hope to give you a bit of a headstart on your next user research project.

1. Leverage both qualitative and quantitative research methods

This is definitely my number 1 learning to share. Combining both qualitative (qual) and quantitative (quant) research is incredible valuable and will definitely increase the depth and quality of your insights immensly. Why? Because it enables you to identify both what people want, need, or do as well as why they want, need or do it.

Here’s an example: In one project we worked on launching a new internal tool for a company. It was supposed to facilitate communication & collaboration across teams, business units and countries. Adoption rates were below benchmark, so we looked at the data (quantitative research… well, -ish) and saw that some features weren’t used. Especially the ones that allowed users to share their work and collaborate on it with other departments. As these are also the slightly more complex features, we figured that it must be a usability issue. Thus, we initiated a training series to teach people how to use these features. We also used these trainings to talk to people (qualitative research) and it turned out, using the features wasn’t the core issue at all. In most cases, people were concerned about sharing their work & thoughts openly for the whole organization to see. So, instead of a usability issue, we were dealing with a change management issue. An insight quantitative research alone could have not told us.

Another important advantage of combining qualitative and quantitative research is the possibility to create hypothesis and then test & validate them. For example, you could start your research process by doing an explorative customer focus group. In this session you can identify first themes and form hypothesis based on these. Let’s say in this focus group you identified a specific pain point these customers shared. Next, you create a larger quant survey with your customers to validate that this is a more widely spread pain point. Next, you go back to another focus group (ideally with the same people) with a few potential fixes for this problem and co-create the best solution with them.

2. Integrate internal and external perspectives.

Involving internal stakeholders in the research process is such an essential part of any research project. It holds 2 key potentials: First, it enables you to form better hypothesis. This means you’ll start the external research phase more informed and better equipped to look for the insights you actually need.

For example, in one of my projects I worked for a technology company helping them to improve the customer experience of their product. We kicked off the process by interviewing different internal stakeholders, amongst others, the engineers who actually built the product. They were able to tell us about a great number of technical constraints and reasons why they had decided to not offer functionalities X and Y in the app. If we hadn’t known this information, we might have come back from the research with a brilliant insight to implement functionalities X and Y, only to be told “been there, not done that”.

Side note: sometimes its still worth while exploring the need for exactly these functionalities, which you were told absolutely can’t be implemented. Maybe they’re an actual dealbreaker for some customers. Maybe competitors have implemented them. Maybe we can understand the actual need behind the functionality and find other technical ways to cater to this need?

Secondly, involving internal stakeholders early in the research, creates immense buy-in throughout the process. If people from different teams know the objectives for the research and understand the process on how to reach these objectives, that will help manage expectations. It also ensures information is passed on effectively between departments, enabling a broader part of the organisation to benefit from the information gathered.

This means, if everyone comes together wearing a different hat, you’ll be able to understand and cater to different stakeholder’s needs. Thus, you will build better products, services & brands.

Also, involving different stakeholders doesn’t have to be a boring, time consuming task. It can be done in an engaging workshop for example. There are many workshop tools that help you get the input you need while also making the session fun and engaging.

3. Combine different research methods.

There are so many different research methods out there. Focus groups, individual interviews, prototype testing, even customer co-creation sessions are a form of customer research. Why only use one of them? As already touched on above, integrating different perspectives makes for richer research results.

Let’s assume you want to create an app to go with your consumer health care product, an electric tooth brush. Instead of just building the app and then throwing it out there, you could do a small online questionnaire with your existing customers. Just to ask them if there’s anything about their tooth brushing experience, that they are unhappy with. A.k.a. are there any pain points? Let’s assume, people tell you they are annoyed that they never know if they “do a good job” at brushing their teeth. Now, that’s an insight you can work with. You develop the idea of an app that acts as a “coach” to help people get better at brushing their teeth based on their actual brushing behaviour. You could even aggregate this data over time and improve recommendations based on this. Amazing idea! Now, instead of just going ahead and building this “coach app”, you validate that it will actually help people to solve their pain point.

In a few in-depth qualitative interviews, you ask people about their exact brushing habits, how they currently use their tooth brush, what they do when they brush their teeth, and so on. In this process, you might find out that people share their electric tooth brush. Which makes sense. It’s an expensive product, it uses a lot of resources and is hard to recycle. Yet, it doesn’t last all too long, especially as technology improves. So, why have two of these things at home, when you and your partner can share one and just use different brush heads? So, that’s something you can keep in mind when devloping your app! Because having a coach is only really helpful, if it actually knows that YOU are brushing your teeth right now and not your partner or kid.

Now, all you need to do is continue this process. Create a very rough MVP and take some wireframes in front of a focus group. Then, back to the drawing board to integrate what you learned. Next, testing a prototype. And so on. You get the idea. You’ll be surprised at the amount of insights you get (and money you save) by iteratively involving customers along the product devlopment journey. This iterative and collaborative process will also set you up to move beyond branding and create truely meaningful brand experiences.

4. Work with experts in each dicipline.

Working with experts in each discipline increases the quality of your research results. Period. But even research that’s done semi-professionally by a dedicated team will produce valuable insights for your product, strategy, and business. There are quite a few simple, low to no-budget methods to involve your customers. However, if you do have the means, I highly recommend working with experts. Hire experienced recruiting agencies. Use the right tools, even if they do require some monetary investement. Have specialists design quantitaitve studies and involve experienced interviewers to conduct focus groups or 1-on-1 interviews. Just like in any other preofession, the more qualified the people are that you work with, the better the outcome will be.

5. Keep the same team throughout your research project.

I know this can be tough, especially as things sometimes change quickly in projects and organisations. But fact is: insights will get lost if the people on the team change throughout the research. That’s not the end of the world, and yes there are perfect handovers that cover absolutely everything out there, but they’re rare. Maybe not Unicorn rare, but probably Saola kind of rare. This is especially true, as reading an insight report is never as effective as actually doing the interviews yourself and hearing the insights & discussions first hand. In any case, handing over research results makes the process less efficient, thus slower and more costly. So, my clear recommendation is to define a small but consistent team for your research process.

6. Effective & coherent note taking will save you.

I know that implementing point 5 can be tough sometimes. So, if your team does change throughout the research process, the one thing that will save you is having documented the research process in as much detail as possible. That includes all steps taken along the process (who recruited participants, how many interviews have been conducted, how many people have received & completed the quant survey, who was actually at the focus group, etc.) as well as detailed notes during interviews. This is especially important in qual.

Even as most interviews are recorded nowadays, from my experience, the recordings only serve as a tool to double check if you got that quote right. It’s just too time consuming to rewatch the entire interview to gather insights. I also appreciate that there are many AI tools that can do this job for you now. However, as of now, I think their big issue is, that they don’t capture what’s said between the lines. Instead, I think taking notes during the interview is the way to go.

The best set-up, from my experience, is to have 2 people in each qualitative interview. One person actively conducting the interview, another taking notes. This has several advantages:

• Firstly, the interviewer can focus fully on the interviewee
• Second, notetaker & interviewer can do a 15 minute debrief right after the interview to already identify insights & themes and making sure to capture the “interviewer’s impression”. This includes anything that was “felt” in the interview (“I feel like they had a hard time explaining why feature A of the app was important to them”; “Their eyes really lit up when describing how they did X”).
• And thirdly, the notetaker can give immediate feedback to the interviewer what could be improved in the next interview.

To make note taking as efficient and coherent as possible, I create a note taking template for every project. It’s mostly based on the discussion guide and eliminated the need for any formatting or structuring during the actual interview. This is especially helpful, if different people take notes during the process. In this case, it’s also crucial to align on how you want to take notes. Are we noting down as much as possible? How do we highlight quotes? Do you just jot down bullet points of the key ideas or write down entire sentences of what’s being said? There’s no one right way, it’s just important to make sure you have a coherent understanding across the team.

Doing customer research will help you build better products and services.

That’s probably the key learning from my work in the broad field of customer & brand experience so far. It just helps to talk to the people who will eventually use your product or service, who will consume your content, or will interact with your brand. It doesn’t always have to be done with a huge budget. And even if you do invest some resources into a holistically designed customer research, it will pay off in the long run. If you’re still not convinced, just give it a try. I’m sure it will enable you to make more informed decisions, give you a deeper understanding of the people you’re designing for and will lead you to new inspiration.

Do you have any learnings to add from your experience? Please hit me up and share them with me, I’d love to hear them!