5 Ways to collect game-changing customer insights

Customer insight collection and analysis is how you make better business decisions—whether that’s in marketing, customer service, or product. Understanding customers and their needs is a gateway to building a customer-centric organization that effectively retains existing customers and attracts new ones.

Customer insights are pieces of quantitative and qualitative data that provide a deeper understanding of your customers and what makes them tick. Customer insights are essential for business growth and success, as they enable businesses to make user-informed decisions across everything from product development to marketing activities, sales, and customer support.

When you understand what attracted customers to your product and what made them stick around, your business can replicate these tactics and formulas for proven success.

Customer insights are often conflated with consumer insights and user insights—but there’s some slight differences.

Customer insights can also sound similar to market research. To clear up any doubts, we called in Haley Stracher, CEO & Design Director at Iris Design Collaborative, for clarification. Haley said, “Customer insights and market research work hand-in-hand, but they’re very different from one another. Customer insights is all about getting into the minds of your customers. Market research helps understand the market as a whole for business strategy and launch”.

In summary, customer insights focus on understanding your customers’ motivations and pain points, while market research aims to understand the wider market—and competitors—as a whole, so you can hone in on a target market.

There’s no limit to how you use customer insights in your organization, including:

We’ve discussed the what and the why—now it’s time for the how. Here are some of the ways you can get actionable insights from your customers.

For most organizations, conducting remote customer insight collection is the most feasible option to hear from customers.

With customers all over the globe, it can be difficult to run in-person customer research studies that accurately reflect a mix of your customer base. Remote user research—provided you have the right research tool in place—makes it easy and efficient to collect customer insights from a distributed user base (not to mention, it’s a lot less costly, too).

While you can collect insights from all customers, it’s logical to prioritize gathering feedback from users who make up your ICP, to ensure the data you’re working with reflects your ideal customer type.

Focusing on insights gathered from your ICP means you can trust that these align with your most valuable customers’ feelings, experience, and priorities. In turn, any product decisions informed by customer data will best serve your most valuable existing customers, and attract your target audience.

Here’s our top five user research methods to collect customer insights:

Remote usability testing is a great way to get insights into how customers use your product. Usability testing involves presenting users with what you’re looking to test—maybe it’s an updated version of your website or a new feature prototype—and giving them a list of tasks to complete.

Usability testing gives insights into how easily customers can use your product—looking at things like navigability, accessibility, information architecture, and more. If customers can quickly and easily complete tasks, you’re on the right track. If they struggle, the insights you collect can be analyzed to help improve your product.

Haley, a strong advocate for running remote usability tests, suggests taking your research to the next level by asking demographic questions before conducting your usability tests:

“In my experience, all of the best remote usability testing happens when you ask preliminary questions to users, like their level of education, technical proficiency, and more. This really helps dig deeper into why certain demographics are using the platform in particular ways, and the data becomes very analytical."

"So in other words, it’s less about 'this is the right way' and 'this is the wrong way', and more like 'Why is everyone aged 20-30 clicking the bottom right button while the others are going to the top navigation?'"

In short? It’s about finding out why. Getting demographic customer data helps you focus on insights from your ICP to continually meet their needs.

Next up are customer feedback surveys. Customer feedback surveys involve asking customers about their experience with your product to identify what’s working and what isn’t.

These user surveys are a great way to assess customer sentiment or review product ideas. They come in many shapes and sizes and can be distributed to customers via various channels, e.g. email or in-product widgets.

Some of the types of surveys you can send out to get feedback from customers are:

One thing that all these surveys have in common is that they’re optional. Consider offering an incentive for survey completion—a gift voucher or an exclusive look at new features. Whatever you can offer, an incentive will undoubtedly get you more feedback.

Customer user interviews are another great way to collect real-time customer feedback on everything from new messaging to a UI redesign. They consist of chatting—typically one-on-one—with users to better understand their wants, needs, motivations, pain points, and more.

That being said, conducting customer interviews only gets you feedback. It’s your customer interview analysis that gets you actionable insights.

Once you’ve conducted customer interviews, analyze them for key feedback and themes. You need to look through the data you’ve generated from customer interviews, identify and compare insights from different interviews, and summarize your findings into a research report.

It might sound like a time-consuming process—but it doesn’t have to be. There are plenty of tools out there to help speed up the analysis and get insights faster.

With the help of AI, Maze’s interview studies feature supports your interview process by summarizing interviews and creating notes, extracting key insights and learnings, and automating report generation using natural language processing (NLP). If you’re a small team, stuck for time, or worried about cognitive biases creeping into your analysis—opting for an AI-enabled analysis tool is a great solution.

Gathering insights from product analytics involves looking at how your customers engage with your product to get customer behavior and engagement data. This customer insights collection method is slightly more passive than the others on this list, but that doesn’t mean it’s less effective.

Product analytics get you a ton of product research insights that can be used across the business to inform key decisions, such as:

Monitoring your product engagement and behavioral data helps you identify and solve product problems proactively. If you notice issues in product feedback and engagement data, you can begin working to resolve them—likely by connecting with customers to gather more insights.

Product analytics is an excellent way to pre-empt any problems, and continually monitor customer insights and usability metrics.

Your customer service and success agents spend most of their time talking with customers. They discuss the good, the bad, and the mundane. This means they’re the ideal funnel for your customer insights mission.

Customer service and success conversations and communications are a gold mine for customer feedback. Nobody in your organization stays in such close contact with such a large number of customers.

There are a variety of ways you can go about uncovering insights from these conversations:

Customer insights come from all over an organization. Whether it’s the support team flagging frequent bugs, your marketing team highlighting feedback on LinkedIn, or the UX research team identifying friction points. Make the most of these pre-existing customer connections, and start considering how you track all this data.

Even though customer insights play a key part in business success—collecting, analyzing, and using them to inform decision-making is where most businesses fall short.

Our Continuous Research Trends report showed that a vast majority of product teams wish they had access to more regular feedback and user insights—speaking to your customers is the number one way to do this, but don’t make it a one-off.

“You should be collecting customer insights always and often,” says Haley from Iris Design Collaborative. And it doesn’t have to be a labor-intensive, laborious (or expensive) task. Tap into your existing feedback initiatives, and consider what new channels and research methods can help you create new customer touchpoints and collect insights on a regular basis.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is now. Plant the seeds for your customer insight collection and analysis process now and begin your journey to attracting your ICP.