What is Customer Experience Research?

If you really want to get people interested in a product, you have to know what kind of product people are looking for. You need to know who would be interested in your product, target audience, geographic location, and their whole customer journey. After all, you can’t know what people want to buy if you don’t know who they are. 

Not knowing these things is like trying to throw a basketball into a hoop with your eyes closed and doing it over and over again. Not the best marketing strategy. You may make a basket every once in a while, but it often yields no long-term results. This is why it is so important to do customer experience research to have all the questions asked and answered in real-time so you shoot hoops, and make it every single time.

When it comes to running a successful business, customer experience research (CER) is essential. It helps businesses understand their customers, identify their needs, and improve their products and services. Customer experience research (CER) is a type of market research that focuses on understanding the customer’s experience with a company’s product or service. It helps businesses better understand the customer’s needs, wants, and preferences. CER is used to identify customer pain points, uncover customer feedback, and develop strategies to improve customer experience.

Moreover, CER is a valuable tool for understanding customer behavior and developing strategies to increase customer loyalty and retention.  It helps companies identify areas of improvement, develop new products and services, and stay ahead of their competitors. 

But what is customer experience research, and why is it so important? In this blog post, we’ll explore the concept of customer experience research and discuss why it’s such an important part of any successful business. We’ll also take a look at what customer experience research encompasses, how to do it, and the tools you can use to make sure you get the best results.

What Is Customer Experience Research?

Customer experience research is a type of market research that focuses on understanding the customer’s experience with a company’s product or service. It helps businesses identify customer needs, wants, and preferences and use this data to improve their products and services.

To put this into perspective, think about what you know about customer experience already. The customer experience is how your customers perceive your company based on their previous interactions with you. Customers can have good experiences or bad experiences, and that’s going to affect how they perceive your company. Customer experience research focuses on deeply understanding the customer experience. 

Understanding customer experience (hopefully before a customer has a bad experience) can help you understand what your customers are looking for, their real needs, how they perceive your company, and what they expect from your company. Understanding your customer’s experience helps to improve your products or services you have—and helps you prepare new ones. Customer experience research describes the collection and analysis of any type of data relevant to the experience your customers have when interacting with your company.

Customer experience research can take many forms. It can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer feedback, and field research. It can also include data analysis and customer segmentation. The purpose of CER is to understand the customer’s experience and identify areas of improvement.

Why Is Customer Experience Research Important? 

Market research is always a good idea. Customer experience research is important for any business that wants to remain competitive and provide the best customer experience possible. CER helps businesses identify customer needs and wants, develop strategies to improve customer experience, and increase customer loyalty and retention. 

This need for CER is becoming only more and more important with the increase of social media. Social media provides an easy avenue for customers to express their experiences with your company. CER provides you with the opportunity to learn from the discussion happening online, find pain points, room for improvement, and discover what your customers are really interested in. 

Other key benefits of customer experience research include:

• Increased customer retention. CER helps businesses understand why customers are leaving and what can be done to improve customer retention. It’s generally more profitable to boost retention than to try and attract more customers. 
• Improved customer experience. CER helps businesses identify customer pain points and develop strategies to improve customer experience. Knowing what your customers are experiencing helps you create the experience they want. 
• More effective marketing. CER helps businesses understand customer behavior and develop effective marketing strategies. You know your customers and their experiences, and you know how to reach them. 
• Improved customer segmentation. CER helps businesses identify customer segments and develop strategies to target each segment effectively. Segmentation helps make your marketing and sales more strategic. 
• Increased sales. CER helps businesses identify customer needs and develop strategies to increase sales. You deeply understand what your customers are looking for, and you create an experience that gives them that. 

What Does Customer Experience Research Encompass?

Customer experience research can encompass a variety of different research methods. It can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, customer feedback, field research, and data analysis.

Surveys are a great way to collect customer feedback. They can be used to gather a variety of data, from customer satisfaction levels to purchase behavior. Surveys can be administered online, over the phone, or in person. It’s a familiar way to do research. Here are some surveys many companies might use for CER: 

• NPS surveys
• CES surveys
• CSAT surveys
• VoC

Many other companies use interviews. Interviews are another useful tool for customer experience research. They allow researchers to get a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences. Similar to interviews, some companies will utilize focus groups. Focus groups are a useful tool for collecting customer feedback. They are typically conducted in a group setting, with a moderator guiding the discussion. Focus groups allow researchers to get a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.

Customer feedback can be collected through various channels, including online reviews, social media, and customer service inquiries. It is important for businesses to stay up-to-date on customer feedback and use it to improve customer experience.

While surveys and similar tools are powerful, they can be limited when it comes to CER. Only relying on surveys or interviews won’t help you truly understand your customers’ experience and utilize CER. Surveys can be reactive or vague, which won’t help you find the data you need. So what else can you do to create a robust customer experience research plan? 

Data analytics and predictive models. Data analysis is an important part of customer experience research. Data analysis can be used to identify customer trends and insights, helping businesses make better decisions. Using research tools, you can really begin to explore and understand what the data you’ve gathered means and what it could mean for the future of improving customer experience at your business. 

How to Do Customer Experience Research

Customer experience research is an essential part of any successful business. But how do you go about conducting customer experience research? Here are some tips to help you get started and some general guidelines to doing CER. 

• Set clear objectives. Before you start conducting customer experience research, it’s important to set clear objectives. What do you hope to achieve? What information are you looking to uncover?
  • Establish the business context that you’re working in. You need to understand the market as a whole in order to really get a good idea of what your objectives should be and how you can help your customers
  • Establish KPIs. Metrics such as Likelihood to Recommend, Net Promoter Score (NPS), Overall Satisfaction, Response and Wait Times, and Overall Value Delivered are just some of the indicators used to measure company success. By assigning a number to represent elements of the customer experience, companies can more easily discern patterns of behavior.
  • Have a timeframe and scope. Setting a specific time frame and scope objective helps you keep your research focused. 
• Identify the right research methods. Once you have set your objectives, it’s time to decide on the research methods you will use. What type of survey, interview, or focus group will be most effective? How can you better incorporate data analysis and modeling into your research? Here are some research methods to consider:
  • Surveys: Surveys can be used to collect customer feedback and identify customer needs and preferences.
  • Interviews: Interviews can be used to get a better understanding of customer needs and preferences.
  • Focus groups: Focus groups can be used to collect customer feedback and identify customer needs and preferences.
  • Customer feedback: Customer feedback can be used to identify customer pain points and develop strategies to improve customer experience.
  • Field research: Field research can be used to gain an in-depth understanding of customer needs and preferences.
  • Online collection: Online collection includes gathering data from social media, websites, and other online behavior. 
  • Data analysis: Data analysis can be used to identify customer trends and insights, helping businesses make better decisions.
• Gather your data. Once you have decided on the research methods, it’s time to start gathering data. Make sure to include both qualitative and quantitative data from a variety of collection sources. Qualitative data will give you insight into the feelings, emotions, and thoughts of your customers while quantitative data will help you backup your findings and business decisions. 
• Analyze your data. Once you have gathered your data, it’s time to analyze it. Use data analysis tools to identify trends and insights.
• Develop strategies. Once you have analyzed your data, it’s time to develop strategies to improve customer experience. Use the insights you uncovered to develop strategies that will help you achieve your objectives. Essentially, it’s time to turn data into actionable items that will improve your customers’ experiences with your products and services and company. For example, if you learn that customers are struggling with understanding your returns policy, your strategy would involve making a clear and readily accessible policy and providing the right customer support from your team. 
• Monitor customer feedback. Make sure you monitor customer feedback to stay up-to-date on customer needs and preferences. 

These tips are just the beginning of unlocking your potential as a successful marketer.

The Bottom Line

Customer experience research is an essential part of any successful business. It helps businesses identify customer needs, wants, and preferences and develop strategies to improve customer experience. CER can encompass a variety of research methods, from surveys and interviews to data analysis and customer segmentation.

It may seem very overwhelming to conduct all this research, especially when it can require a lot of time, money, and effort. The good news is that InMoment incorporates all this research and more in their marketing research software, making this part easy so that you don’t miss the mark in your marketing and CX efforts. If you want to get the best results from your customer experience research, use the right tools. Try out InMoment’s market research software to get started.