Do you want to know what your customers think of your product? Do you want to understand whether it is possible to optimize your typical user’s experience across all phases of online and in-store buying? Do you want to know whether a new packaging, a service or a new strategy will manage to satisfy, convince and engage a new target?
Entrepreneurs, managers and communication teams ask themselves questions like these every day. The answer? It comes from research in the field of CX, or more fully Customer Experience. Customer Experience Research is a discipline rooted in listening to the consumer, which evolves by applying the behavioral sciences and is enriched by a multitude of targeted methods and approaches.
So which methodology should you choose, based on your specific goals? Let’s find out in this overview, which aims to be a first handbook for greater awareness of the techniques available and their main advantages and disadvantages in Customer Experience.
The premise
A necessary premise: consumer research, analyses and surveys, when effectively designed, always have a certain component of customization that, while respecting methodological effectiveness, has to be applied case by case, depending on the specific goals set, the type of target involved, the historical or social context, the product category under examination and any variables that may emerge and that a trained researcher, especially in the behavioral field, knows how to identify, oversee and manage.
This is how you end up applying a mix of methodologies to Customer Experience, or breaking some established rule to make a survey more usable and able to collect real data, less affected by biases or merely declarative.
The typical questions answered by Customer Experience (CX) Research
Let’s first look at some of the typical questions to which Customer Experience Research can provide solutions and answers. Analyzing the target, digging into thoughts and opinions, but above all expectations in terms of perceptions and behaviors, can be enormously useful:
- when launching a new product, packaging or service;
- when you want to optimize your communication strategy or better manage content creation and understand whether you are working around the most effective communication concepts because they are aligned with the consumer’s needs and expectations;
- when you want to optimize your sales strategy and understand whether the active channels and the methods currently in place have any pain points or can be strengthened;
- when you want to analyze an entire sales funnel: for example, from online purchase, to home delivery, to the actual use of a product;
- when you want to analyze the offline consumer experience, in store or inside an accommodation facility or in any real-life context, to understand whether what has been designed works or whether some services can be removed, improved or evolved;
- when you want to test online communication tools, such as websites, e-commerce, apps or even more complex systems such as management software, banking tools or terminals of various kinds.
The main Customer Experience methodologies compared
Each of these Customer Experience topics can be approached with different methodologies, evaluated case by case. What are the main methodologies? What are the main benefits of each and the limits to keep in mind? How do you choose the most appropriate methodology for the purpose?
There are basically three different approaches with different gains and pains.
Qualitative approach
It is generally applied when a preliminary exploration or a targeted deep dive is useful. This Customer Experience approach in fact involves little breadth in terms of sample (e.g. 6-10 participants), but great depth in the data collected, both by observing the person’s behavior while they browse an e-commerce site or make a purchase in a store, or while they go through any experience designed for them; and by going in-depth afterwards with individual interviews to explore mental processes, observed behaviors, the subject’s perceptions, the emotions felt (remember that different emotions induce different behaviors), any unmet expectations or unsatisfied needs that could be the starting point for a future evolution of the designed experience.
Qualitative Customer Experience research can therefore be a starting point for outlining the main characteristics of a context (then explored in detail by quantitative research, as we see in the next section) or a specific, targeted deep dive into themes and behaviors of which a general picture is already known.
Quantitative approach
This Customer Experience approach is generally recommended when you already have a good knowledge of the context and want to give greater solidity to the qualitative data collected, to identify statistically trends in preferences and established habits and thus obtain a reliable overview of the paths to take and the evolutions of the business or communication.
The advantage over qualitative research is certainly the breadth of the sample (hundreds to thousands of participants are involved), which ensures statistical significance and therefore solid data that can be used objectively.
The disadvantage, however, is the impossibility of digging into any points of interest in terms of motivation behind the declared behaviors and the opinions given. Imagine a trend emerges in the use of a service that was not expected to work: now we know the service should be developed, but we may not know what could motivate people to choose it, what they expect from the service, how they would like to use it and therefore how to develop it.
More elaborate forms of qualitative research can include so-called diary studies, which we could describe as a long survey over an extended period of time: I once followed a company in the entertainment sector and analyzed, over the first 15 days of use, how the typical consumer interacted with hardware (a television) and a portal for watching TV channels and programs. In this case a diary-manual was designed that allowed the participant to complete some missions within the set time frame, describing the experience they lived and assigning scores and ratings on certain KPIs and key elements, important for the company and for effective navigation and use of the tool.
Quali-quantitative approach
Personally my favorite and the one I specialize in: it is a research methodology that allows you to mix open and closed questions on large samples, but not as large as those needed in quantitative surveys, that is from a hundred respondents to a few hundred, depending on need.
It is an approach with a series of advantages: more solid data than that of qualitative research and at the same time the possibility of in-depth qualitative feedback on specific points or themes, thanks to open answers that make it possible, for example, to learn the reasons behind a low score on a CSAT (Customer Satisfaction) scale, or behind preferring one packaging option over another.
There are situations in which people can be contradictory in their answers, because they do not have a clear opinion or because they are not fully aware of why they behave in a certain way (remember that human beings are often not entirely rational in their choice behaviors) or perhaps because they do not want to commit: in these cases the quali-quantitative approach makes it possible to “unmask” irrationality and declared data, also thanks to control questions, and to obtain as far as possible a real, behavioral and objective view of what can be expected from the consumer.
In reality no methodology is better than the others. You always have to weigh carefully the objective, the moment in the company’s life in which the research takes place, and all the variables listed at the start.
UX Research
UX Research or User Experience Research also falls within qualitative research (for an extended treatment you can buy my book User Experience Research).
It is the discipline that applies the principles of qualitative research to the investigation of online user experience, while using any digital product or tool.
Generally, so-called usability tests are split into two phases:
Phase 1 – Use Case: a first phase in which the participant is given a manual containing several missions (called Tasks) to complete on the portal under investigation. The user tries to complete the Tasks without the researcher’s help, while the researcher records, observes and notes everything the user does and says aloud (the thinking aloud technique).
Phase 2 – Survey/Interview: a final targeted deep-dive phase that can take place through a written qualitative survey and/or a short interview based on the behaviors observed.
The data collected is reliable to the extent that we do not merely ask people what they would do on a certain portal, but watch them at work. If the sample is carefully selected to be representative of the target and recurrences and trends in behavior are observed, we can be confident that what was collected and observed during the test will also happen to other users in the real context.
The challenge
The art of research is constantly evolving, but it rests on solid foundations consolidated by years of practice and by behavioral theories and tests that have, in a sense, certified the effectiveness of certain approaches. The Researcher’s daily challenge is always to take the pieces of their knowledge and bring them down to earth, weighing all the contingencies of the moment: every project has its own soul, its own momentum (as the Romans would say) and needs to be looked at with attentive eyes able to apply theory through customization.
If you want to learn more about the services Then offers in Customer Experience, visit our dedicated CX page.
