Customer insights

Why is customer insight important

The answer is simple: understanding what your customers need and want is intrinsic to your business’ success. Customer insights allow your business teams to gain a deeper understanding of how your customers think and feel about your products and experiences. By knowing this, you’re able to build deep customer empathy beyond understanding what they need, but exactly why they need it.

How do you collect customer insights?

Customer insights are most actionable when they combine data from both qualitative and quantitative research. Traditional quantitative research methods, like surveys, and traditional qualitative research methods, like interviews and focus groups, can be effective, but they have one fundamental flaw: they all rely on your customers’ memory or predictions of their behavior. And the problem with relying on memory is that it deteriorates over time.

One effective form of qualitative research is ethnographic research, in which a researcher shadows an individual and records their behavior. The obvious challenge with this is that the presence of a researcher isn’t natural to any situation. This could lead to behavior changes such as aiming to please the researcher or “stage fright.”

The solution? Remote usability testing.

How to collect customer insights via remote usability testing

While remote usability testing is most commonly used for testing prototypes, websites, and apps, it can also be used to collect customer insights on a range of experiences. It’s an efficient way to capture real people completing real tasks. The major benefits of remote usability testing include: 

• Testing wherever your customers naturally interact with your product or experience
• Fast and cost-efficient
• On-demand and in real time, so it doesn’t rely on memory or predictions to get feedback

You can learn more about ways to collect customer insight remotely here.