Customer research is a crucial and often underrated process within businesses. It can become treated as more of a luxury project, when you have downtime or the resources to conduct the level of attention needed to collate the appropriate amount of data.
Other organisations may not be in a position to arrange an effective customer research process. Or even not understand the benefits from it. And that may be because they are long-term effects. But essentially, if you know your customers are happy, disappointed, content etc, it can give you the power to make important decisions which can scale your business and allow it to grow.
Without qualifying the underlying issues throughout your business, then you can not be certain that an investment into a certain area or campaign is secure or logical. You need the answer as to why. And this comes from through honest and detailed research projects.
It is not necessarily the most glamorous job in the world but as before-mentioned, possibly one of the most underrated, in terms of its direct impact on decision making, ensuring a repeat custom and scaling through generating new leads and progressing prospects through your daily cycle.
Here are some tips that will help you conduct an effective customer research.
What Is Customer Research?
Customer or market research is to get better knowledge and understanding of customers, products, competitors as well as customer behavior. This type of research aims at making a business better and improve its products and services.
Types of Customer Research
There are basically five types of customer research that are as follows:
- Brand Research that deals with where a business or brand stands in the market.
- Client Research that focuses on finding the right customers for a business.
- Market Research tries to uncover the competitors of a brand.
- Client Journey Research finds out the sources from where customers come to a business.
- Client Personal Research is all about who the customers are and what is their background.
How to Conduct Customer Research?
Primary Research
In primary research, relevant information about the business, customers, products, competitors and other factors is gathered through surveys, research work and questionnaires. The information gathered thus doesn’t exist before and aims to guide a business about customers and their trends.
When it comes to this type of research, the companies try to find information about their customers and products in general. The details can include more information like what customers think about the business, its products or services etc. Usually this research is conducted through predesigned questions. The questions are distributed to the relevant people.
New customers, old customers and other relevant people are approached for this search. The data thus collected is available in raw form without having any clear direction. When the data is analyzed and interpreted, this leads to findings and recommendations for the business.
Secondary Research
Then comes the secondary research. This deals with data collection and information fathering from the already available resources. It includes previous research studies, industry reports, trends, studies by your competitors, previous interviews and other relevant sources.
Before conducting any surveys and studies, the past research work is covered. Sometimes, the secondary data is very relevant and it provides a business new dimensions to cover in their work. You will also see similar studies but with different findings. The past studies are very helpful and yield valuable results for anyone.
Here are some areas that are covered in secondary research to better conduct next studies. It would be right to say that secondary research builds the base of further studies.
- The data regarding customers. This usually includes how customers decide when it comes to purchasing and what factors are involved in their decision making.
- The other relevant includes industry research work. As there are other brands and companies doing the same business so they do their own research and it helps new companies learn from the relevant industry data.
- There are some general research studies covering a certain sector. They are mostly independent studies or sometimes carried out different organizations. The purpose of these studies is to highlight issues, guide the relevant sector companies and recommend solutions for improvements.
Tools For Customer Research and Feedback
- Website Visitor Tracking Software
- Qualtrics
- KeySurvey
- Zinklar
- Canny
- UPS
