customer experience research definition

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Customer Experience Research: Steps, Methods, Best Practices

Have you ever wondered what sets successful businesses apart? The answer often lies in their commitment to understanding and enhancing the customer experience. How do industry leaders consistently deliver exceptional service? The key lies in strategic customer experience research.

Customer experience research is a systematic process of gathering and analyzing data to understand and evaluate the interactions between a customer and a company throughout the entire customer journey. 

It involves studying customer perceptions, expectations, and satisfaction levels to enhance and optimize the customer experience.

In this blog post, we will explore the essential steps, methods, and best practices for conducting effective customer experience research.

What is a Customer Experience Research?

Customer experience research is a systematic and strategic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting data related to customers’ interactions with a brand, product, or service. The objective of this research is to gain a comprehensive understanding of the overall customer journey, perceptions, preferences, and satisfaction levels. 

Through various research methods such as customer satisfaction surveys , interviews, focus groups, and observational studies, businesses seek to uncover insights that can inform improvements in products, services, and customer interactions. 

The ultimate goal is to enhance customer satisfaction, loyalty, and the overall quality of the customer experience, contributing to the business’s long-term success. 

Importance of Customer Experience (CX) Research

The significance of customer experience (CX) research cannot be overstated, as it plays a pivotal role in various aspects of a business’s success. Here is a more detailed exploration of the importance:

Customer Retention and Loyalty Building

Customer experience research dives into understanding the intricate nuances of customer needs and expectations. Businesses can tailor their products, services, and interactions to create meaningful and positive experiences by gaining insights into what truly matters to customers. 

This, in turn, increases customer loyalty, as they feel understood and valued and are more likely to continue their association with the brand. Retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones, making customer retention a key focus for sustainable business growth.

Competitive Advantage in a Crowded Market

In a fiercely competitive marketplace, where products and services may be similar, the quality of positive customer experience emerges as a powerful differentiator. 

Companies that invest in understanding their customers and consistently deliver exceptional experiences gain a distinct competitive advantage. Positive customer interactions become the brand’s trademark, setting it apart from competitors and attracting a loyal customer base.

Driving Revenue Growth through Customer Satisfaction

Satisfied customers are likely to make repeat purchases and become brand advocates. Customer experience research helps identify the touchpoints that leave a lasting positive impression, encouraging customers to choose the brand repeatedly. 

Satisfied customers are more inclined to recommend the brand to their networks, effectively becoming brand ambassadors. This word-of-mouth marketing can significantly contribute to organic growth and increased revenue streams.

Operational Efficiency and Cost Savings

CX Research provides valuable insights beyond enhancing customer satisfaction by pinpointing pain points in the customer journey. It can lead to operational improvements within the organization. 

Streamlining processes, eliminating bottlenecks, and resolving pain points can increase operational efficiency and cost savings. This dual benefit of enhancing customer experience while optimizing internal operations is a strategic advantage that can positively impact the bottom line.

Steps Customer Experience (CX) Research

Conducting practical customer experience (CX) research involves a series of well-defined steps to ensure that you gather meaningful insights that can drive improvements in your products, services, and overall customer interactions. 

Here are the key steps for conducting customer experience research:

1. Define Objectives

At the outset of any customer experience research initiative, it is imperative to outline and define the goals and objectives meticulously. These should serve as the guiding principles throughout the research process, helping to maintain focus and relevance in enhancing the overall customer experience.

2. Identify Touchpoints

To comprehensively understand the customer journey, mapping out each touchpoint where customers interact with the brand is essential. This involves a detailed exploration of various phases, from initial awareness to post-purchase engagement. 

Identifying these touchpoints provides a holistic view of the customer experience, highlighting crucial moments that significantly impact satisfaction and loyalty.

3. Select Metrics

Choosing the right metrics is important to measure customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall experience accurately. Metrics should align with the defined objectives and touchpoints, encompassing quantitative and qualitative aspects. 

Relevant metrics may include Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer satisfaction scores, and key performance indicators (KPIs) specific to each touchpoint.

4. Collect Data

Employing a multifaceted approach, customer data is collected through various methods, such as surveys, interviews, and analytics tools. Surveys offer structured insights, interviews provide in-depth qualitative information, and analytics tools offer quantitative data on customer behavior. 

This comprehensive data collection process ensures a well-rounded understanding of customer preferences and sentiments.

5. Analyze Data

Once the data is collected, a rigorous analysis is undertaken to discern patterns, identify trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement. Advanced analytical techniques may be applied to extract actionable insights. 

This phase transforms raw data into meaningful information that can guide decision-making and strategy formulation.

6. Implement Changes

With the insights from data analysis, strategic improvements are implemented in the customer experience. 

This phase involves making necessary adjustments to processes, communication channels, or any other touchpoints identified as potential areas for enhancement. The objective is to align the customer experience more closely with the defined goals and objectives.

7. Monitor and Iterate

The customer experience journey is an evolving process that necessitates continuous monitoring. Customer feedback, both solicited and unsolicited, is consistently reviewed. 

This iterative approach allows organizations to adapt swiftly to changing customer expectations, ensuring the customer experience strategy remains dynamic and responsive. Regular reviews and refinements based on ongoing feedback contribute to the sustained improvement of the overall customer experience.

Customer Experience Research Methods

Customer experience (CX) research employs various methods to gather insights into customers’ perceptions, expectations, and interactions with a brand. The choice of methods often depends on the research’s specific goals and the business’s nature. 

Here are some common customer experience research methods:

• Structured Questionnaires: Design surveys with clear and concise questions to collect quantitative data on specific aspects of the customer experience, such as satisfaction levels, ease of use, and overall impressions.
• Scale Utilization: Implement rating scales, Likert scales, or Net Promoter Score (NPS) scales to quantify responses and measure the degree of customer satisfaction or loyalty.
• In-Depth Exploration: Conduct one-on-one or group interviews to dive deeply into customer experiences, emotions, and perceptions, allowing for a nuanced understanding of their thoughts and motivations.
• Open-Ended Questions: Open-ended questions encourage customers to express themselves freely, providing rich qualitative data beyond predefined categories.

Observation

• Ethnographic Research: Immerse researchers in the customer’s environment, whether physical or digital, to observe natural behaviors and interactions, revealing insights that may not emerge through traditional surveys or interviews.
• Task Analysis: Break down customer interactions into specific tasks to identify pain points, bottlenecks, or areas where improvements can be made.

Social Media Monitoring

• Sentiment Analysis: Employ sentiment analysis tools to gauge the overall sentiment of customer conversations on social media platforms, helping identify positive and negative trends.
• Engagement Metrics: Track engagement metrics, such as likes, shares, and comments, to understand which aspects of the customer experience resonate most with the audience.

Usability Testing

• Task-Based Testing: Design usability tests with specific tasks for participants to complete, assessing how easily they can navigate products or services.
• Iterative Testing: Conduct iterative usability testing throughout development to identify and address usability issues early on.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

• Standardized Scoring System: Use the NPS scale to categorize customers as promoters, passives, or detractors based on their likelihood to recommend the product or service.
• Follow-up Qualitative Questions: Supplement NPS surveys with open-ended questions to gather additional insights into the reasons behind customers’ scores and their suggestions for improved customer satisfaction. 

Best Practices for Customer Experience (CX) Research

Practical customer experience (CX) research requires careful planning and adherence to best practices to ensure the insights gained are meaningful and actionable. Here are some best practices for CX Research:

Customer-Centric Approach

• Understanding Customer Personas: Develop detailed customer personas to comprehend different customer segments’ diverse needs, preferences, and behaviors.
• Journey Mapping: Create comprehensive customer journey maps that outline every touchpoint, from initial awareness to post-purchase support, ensuring a holistic understanding of the customer experience.
• Empathy Building: Encourage customer service teams to adopt an empathetic mindset to see the world from the customer’s perspective and better anticipate and meet their needs.

Multi-Channel Analysis

• Integrated Data Systems: Implement integrated data systems that consolidate information from various channels, including online and offline interactions, social media, and customer support, providing a unified and comprehensive view of the customer journey.
• Omni-Channel Strategy: Develop an omni-channel strategy that ensures a seamless and consistent experience across all customer touchpoints, regardless of their chosen channel.

Regular Feedback

• Real-Time Feedback Mechanisms: Implement real-time feedback mechanisms, such as post-purchase surveys, online reviews, and social media listening, to capture immediate customer sentiments and preferences.
• Periodic Surveys: Conduct routine surveys to dive deeper into specific aspects of the customer experience, allowing for more in-depth insights into identifying evolving trends.

Employee Involvement

• Training and Awareness Programs: Provide employees with comprehensive training on the importance of customer experience and equip them with the skills to understand and respond to customer needs effectively.
• Employee Feedback Loops: Establish feedback loops where employees can share insights from customer interactions, fostering a collaborative approach to improving the overall customer experience.
• Recognition and Rewards: Recognize and reward employees who contribute positively to the customer experience, reinforcing a customer-centric culture.

Data Security

• Compliance Measures: Implement robust data security measures to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, such as GDPR or HIPAA, and build customer trust in handling sensitive information.
• Transparent Data Practices: Communicate openly with customers about data collection and usage, providing clear information on how their data is stored, protected, and utilized.

Continuous Improvement

• Agile Implementation of Findings: Adopt an agile approach to implementing research findings, allowing quick adjustments to products, services, or processes based on customer feedback.
• Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Establish KPIs to measure the impact of changes implemented due to customer experience research, ensuring that improvements align with business goals.
• Benchmarking: Regularly benchmark against industry standards and competitors to identify areas for differentiation and innovation, fostering a commitment to continuous improvement beyond immediate customer feedback.

How QuestionPro CX Can Help in Customer Experience Research

QuestionPro is a survey and research platform that offers various tools for conducting customer experience (CX) research. It provides a range of features to help businesses gather feedback, analyze data, and make informed decisions based on customer insights.

Here’s a general overview of how QuestionPro CX can be used for customer experience research:

NPS & Churn Risk

• The NPS Survey Dashboard provides an advanced analytics platform for measuring Net Promoter Score (NPS) and predicting churn risk.
• Isolate, identify, and predict customer churn based on NPS data, allowing businesses to address issues and retain customers proactively.
• Leverage customer interactions to make informed decisions for improving products and services.

Sentiment Analysis

• Sentiment analysis helps classify text feedback as positive, negative, or neutral, offering more profound insights into the quality of interactions between customers and the organization.
• Move beyond numerical ratings to understand the emotional tone and sentiment behind customer feedback.
• Identify areas for improvement based on sentiment trends and patterns.

Advanced Dashboards

• Access customizable dashboards with various widget configurations, enabling you to tailor your dashboard to specific needs.
• Customize filters, chart types, labels, and month-tracking widgets to effectively visualize and analyze customer feedback.
• Gain a holistic view of customer experience data through visually appealing and insightful dashboards.

Workflow Setup

• CX Workflow allows you to assign and send surveys to customer segments within the same data file.
• Automate survey reminders to improve response rates and gather more comprehensive feedback.
• Streamline survey processes for efficient data collection and analysis.

Disposition Metrics

• Monitor emails sent continually to collect valuable data at every engagement point.
• Track changes in customer behavior over time and identify key touchpoints influencing customer satisfaction.
• Use disposition metrics to refine communication strategies and enhance customer engagement.

Closed Loop

• Capture the customer journey at various touchpoints in real time.
• Share feedback with different teams to foster collaboration and implement organizational improvements.
• Implement a closed-loop system to address customer issues promptly and enhance the overall customer experience.

Incorporating customer experience research into your business strategy is a proactive approach to building strong, lasting customer relationships. By following these steps, employing effective research methods, and embracing best practices, you can gain valuable insights that drive positive change and elevate the overall customer experience. 

Remember, a satisfied customer is not just a one-time buyer but a potential brand advocate who can contribute to the long-term success of your business.

QuestionPro CX empowers customer experience research through advanced NPS analytics, sentiment analysis, customizable dashboards, workflow automation, disposition metrics monitoring, and closed-loop feedback. 

This comprehensive toolset enables businesses to proactively identify issues, understand the sentiment, and continuously enhance customer interactions, ensuring a superior and informed customer experience.

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What is Customer Experience (CX) Research? Definition, Methods and Best Practices

What is Customer Experience (CX) Research? 

Customer experience (CX) research is a systematic process of collecting, analyzing, and interpreting customer experience data to understand and improve the quality and effectiveness of customer interactions with a brand, product, or service. It involves using a wide range of methodologies and techniques aimed at gaining insights into the customer experience journey , identifying pain points, and enhancing overall customer satisfaction. 

Here are the 3 key attributes of CX research:

• It requires gathering customer data through various channels of interaction and feedback throughout their journey with a brand/ product or service. For example, the touchpoints can be dedicated user feedback surveys, user testing , website usability testing , UI testing , customer service interactions, sales interactions, post-purchase experience etc. These sources provide a comprehensive view of customer/ user behavior, preferences, and sentiment. By collecting data from multiple CX touchpoints, organizations can create a holistic view of the customer journey, from initial awareness to product’s user experience .
• CX research is iterative and ongoing. Successful organizations recognize that customer expectations evolve, and continuous research is necessary to stay aligned with these changes. By regularly gathering feedback and adapting strategies, companies can remain responsive to customer needs and maintain a competitive edge.
• Customer experience (CX) research is a driver of organizational change and improvement, creating a customer-centric approach. The insights gained through customer experience research inform decision-making at all levels of an organization. Whether it involves refining product features, streamlining customer support processes, or enhancing website usability, CX research empowers organizations to make data-driven decisions that lead to improved customer acquisition and increased customer loyalty, and therefore more revenue.

Key Benefits of Conducting Customer Experience (UX) Research 

CX research is important because it enables organizations to understand, measure, and improve the experiences of their customers, which allows them to deliver better customer retention, acquire new customers more easily, and therefore grow business revenue.

Here are the key benefits in detail, that make customer experience (CX) research important for businesses:

• Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: CX research helps organizations identify and address pain points in the customer journey. By resolving issues and improving the overall experience, organizations can increase customer satisfaction, leading to higher customer retention and loyalty.
• Competitive Advantage: Understanding customer preferences, expectations, and behaviors gives organizations a competitive edge. By meeting or exceeding customer expectations, companies can differentiate themselves in the market and attract more customers.
• Improved Customer Loyalty: Satisfied customers are more likely to become loyal customers who repeatedly choose your brand. Loyal customers not only generate repeat business but also serve as advocates who recommend your products or services to others. It is often more cost-effective to retain existing customers and increase the acquisition of new customers, driven by great experiences. 
• Reduced Churn and Increased CLV: CX research helps identify factors that contribute to reduced customer churn/attrition and increased customer lifetime value (CLV). By addressing CX issues and offering solutions, organizations can reduce customer turnover and reduce the associated costs of acquiring new customers.
• Data-Driven Decision-Making: CX research provides valuable quantitative and qualitative data and insights that inform strategic decisions. Organizations can use this data to prioritize initiatives, allocate resources effectively, and make informed choices that align with customer needs and expectations.
• Better Roadmaps: Customer/ user inputs gathered through CX research serve as a valuable source of input for product and service development roadmaps. Organizations can tailor their offerings to better meet customer requirements and preferences.
• Cost Savings: By pinpointing inefficiencies and areas of frustration in the customer journey, CX research can help streamline processes and reduce operational costs. Improving the customer experience can also lead to fewer support requests and complaints.
• Higher Revenue: CX research leads to better and easier customer acquisition and once converted to customers, these satisfied customers are further likely to repeat/ upgrade their purchases. It allows organizations to identify opportunities for better user acquisition, upselling, cross-selling, and creating more appealing customer-centric offers, which drive revenue growth.
• Brand Reputation: A positive customer experience contributes to a strong brand reputation, as well as better brand recall. Happy customers are more likely to share their positive experiences with others, recommend your products/ services, and therefore drives organic growth.
• Customer-Centric Culture: CX research encourages organizations to adopt a customer-centric mindset. When employees understand the importance of the customer experience and how it basically pays their salaries in the bigger picture, they are more likely to align their efforts with delivering exceptional service.
• Faster Adaptation Change: CX research helps organizations stay responsive to changing market conditions and customer preferences. It provides early warning signs of shifts in customer behavior/ preference and allows for proactive adjustments, while the rest of the market catches up.

Learn more: What is Customer Experience (CX) Design?

Customer Experience (CX) Research Methods 

Conducting customer experience (CX) research relies on various methods and techniques to gather insights into customer interactions and perceptions. Here are some common CX research methods:

• Customer/ User Tests and Surveys:

User testing and CX surveys are structured data collection tools that involve asking customers a series of predefined questions to customer/ users. They can be administered online, via email, or in person. These tests and surveys are useful for gathering quantitative and qualitative data on customer interaction and preferences and align product/ service experience to match/ exceed these expectations.

• Usability Testing:

Usability testing involves observing users as they interact with a product or website while performing specific tasks. Researchers assess ease of use, navigation, and user satisfaction. Usability testing is a critical research asset to identify user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) issues and provides insights into how customers navigate and interact with apps, websites, e-commerce portals, and SaaS products.

• In-Depth Interviews:

In-depth interviews involve one-on-one conversations with customers and product users to gather qualitative data. These interviews can be structured with specific questions or unstructured to allow for open-ended discussions. Interviews provide qualitative insights into customer experiences, allowing for a deeper understanding of motivations, pain points, and emotions.

• Focus Groups:

Focus groups involve small groups of customers/ users discussing their experiences with a moderator. It’s a qualitative method that encourages participants to share experiences across several user journey touchpoints and build on each other’s perspectives. Focus groups are helpful for exploring a range of opinions, uncovering shared sentiments, and generating ideas for customer experience improvements. Focus groups can also be used among employees to understand common CX issues across customer facing departments such as marketing, sales, account management and customer service.

• Heatmaps and Clickmaps:

Heatmaps and clickmaps are solutions to visualize user interactions with a website or app, highlighting areas of high and low activity, clicks, and scrolling behavior. These visual tools help organizations understand user engagement, identify popular content, and optimize layout and user experience design .

Learn more: What is Customer Experience (CX) Optimization?

Customer Experience (CX) Research Best Practices for 2023

Customer Experience (CX) research is crucial for understanding and improving the interactions between your customers and your organization.

Here are the best practices for conducting effective CX research:

• Clearly Define Objectives and Goals: Start with a clear understanding of what you want to achieve with your CX research. Define specific objectives and goals that align with your organization’s strategic priorities.
• Segment Your Customer Base: Recognize that different customer segments may have varying needs and expectations. Segment your customer base based on demographics, behavior, or other relevant factors to tailor your research approach.
• Choose the Right Research Methods: Select research methods that align with your objectives and the nature of your customer interactions. Common methods include surveys, interviews, focus groups, usability testing, and journey mapping.
• Collect Quantitative and Qualitative Data: Quantitative data (e.g., surveys and analytics) provide statistical insights, while qualitative data (e.g., interviews and open-ended questions) offer in-depth understanding. Combining both types of data can provide a comprehensive user feedback on customer experience design .
• Align Real-Time and Periodic Feedback: Incorporate real-time feedback mechanisms, such as post-interaction surveys or chatbots, to capture immediate insights. Additionally, conduct periodic, more in-depth research to gain a holistic perspective.
• Implement Customer Journey Mapping: Create customer journey maps to visualize the end user customer experience. This helps identify pain points, opportunities for improvement, and touchpoints that matter most to customers.
• Leverage Customer Feedback Platforms: Utilize customer feedback platforms and tools to collect, analyze, and manage customer feedback efficiently. These tools often provide sentiment analysis and reporting features.
• Measure Key CX Metrics: Key CX metrics include Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES). Monitor these metrics to track changes in customer sentiment over time.
• Incorporate Employee Feedback: Employees play a critical role in delivering a positive customer experience. Collect feedback from front-line staff and others who interact with customers to identify operational challenges and training needs.
• Maintain a Customer-Centric Culture: Ensure that everyone in your organization, from leadership to front-line employees, is aligned with a customer-centric mindset. CX research findings should inform decision-making at all levels.
• Continuously Iterate and Improve: CX research is an ongoing process. Continuously gather feedback, measure performance, and refine your CX strategy based on changing customer needs and market conditions.
• Ensure Data Privacy and Security: Protect customer data and comply with privacy regulations, such as GDPR or CCPA. Use secure methods for data collection and storage.
• Benchmark Against Competitors: Compare your CX performance against industry benchmarks and competitors. 
• Share CX Insights Across the Organization: Disseminate CX research findings and insights throughout the organization to create a shared understanding of customer needs and foster collaboration in improving the customer experience.

Learn more: What is CX Management?

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Understanding Customer Experience

• Andre Schwager
• Chris Meyer

Anyone who has signed up for cell phone service, attempted to claim a rebate, or navigated a call center has probably suffered from a company’s apparent indifference to what should be its first concern: the customer experiences that culminate in either satisfaction or disappointment and defection.

Customer experience is the subjective response customers have to direct or indirect contact with a company. It encompasses every aspect of an offering: customer care, advertising, packaging, features, ease of use, reliability. Customer experience is shaped by customers’ expectations, which largely reflect previous experiences. Few CEOs would argue against the significance of customer experience or against measuring and analyzing it. But many don’t appreciate how those activities differ from CRM or just how illuminating the data can be. For instance, the majority of the companies in a recent survey believed they have been providing “superior” experiences to customers, but most customers disagreed.

The authors describe a customer experience management (CEM) process that involves three kinds of monitoring: past patterns (evaluating completed transactions), present patterns (tracking current relationships), and potential patterns (conducting inquiries in the hope of unveiling future opportunities). Data are collected at or about touch points through such methods as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and online forums. Companies need to involve every function in the effort, not just a single customer-facing group.

The authors go on to illustrate how a cross-functional CEM system is created. With such a system, companies can discover which customers are prospects for growth and which require immediate intervention.

Companies that systematically monitor customer experience can take important steps to improve it—and their bottom line.

Anyone who has signed up recently for cell phone service has faced a stern test in trying to figure out the cost of carry-forward minutes versus free calls within a network and how it compares with the cost of such services as push-to-talk, roaming, and messaging. Many, too, have fallen for a rebate offer only to discover that the form they must fill out rivals a home mortgage application in its detail. And then there are automated telephone systems, in which harried consumers navigate a mazelike menu in search of a real-life human being. So little confidence do consumers have in these electronic surrogates that a few weeks after the website www.gethuman.com showed how to reach a live person quickly at 10 major consumer sites, instructions for more than 400 additional companies had poured in.

• AS Andre Schwager is a former president of Seagate Enterprise Management Software and a founder of Satmetrix Systems, a customer experience software company based in Foster City, California. (Contact him at [email protected] .)
• CM Chris Meyer is the chairman of the Strategic Alignment Group, Inc., a member of the Band of Angels deal committee, and adviser/board member for several early-stage companies.

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A complete guide to customer satisfaction research

Last updated

10 August 2024

Reviewed by

Miroslav Damyanov

If you’re not in business to create happy customers, you won’t be in business for very long.

Customer satisfaction research is the best way to determine how happy your customers are with your product or service. It also enables you to ensure their happiness becomes long-term satisfaction. When you understand customer feedback, you can improve your products and services, increase customer loyalty, and drive long-term success.

In this article, we’ll take a detailed look at what this type of research is and how you can conduct it.

• What is customer satisfaction research?

Happy customers are repeat customers. They are likely to tell their friends and colleagues about the products and services they enjoy, potentially sending new customers your way.

Unsatisfied customers are the opposite. They won’t return, and they will possibly warn their friends, family members, and colleagues to stay away too. It stands to reason that building a successful brand means creating far more happy customers than unhappy ones.

Customer satisfaction research is the process of collecting and analyzing feedback from customers to understand how well you are meeting their expectations and needs. This vital research can help your business improve its products and services, ensuring happier and more loyal customers.

Through customer satisfaction research, you can learn which steps your company should take to create more happy customers.

• Why do customer satisfaction research?

Getting more happy customers and fewer unhappy customers is important as a general aim, but it’s quite broad. Customer satisfaction research has several concrete goals that it provides insights into. Some companies begin their journey into customer satisfaction research specifically because they have one or more of these goals in mind:

Improving product/service quality

Enhancing customer loyalty and retention

Gaining a competitive advantage

Identifying areas for improvement

Measuring the impact of business initiatives

• What are the objectives of customer satisfaction research?

To provide you with actionable insights, customer satisfaction research needs to be comprehensive. It isn’t enough to know whether a customer is happy with your brand or not; you need to understand the specifics of what makes them happy or unhappy.

Here are some objectives:

Measure overall customer satisfaction levels

Understand the drivers of satisfaction

Identify strengths and weaknesses

Track changes in satisfaction over time

Benchmark against industry standards

Gather feedback for product/service development

Understanding how your company measures up in these areas will enable you to determine whether you have a problem with customer satisfaction. It will also provide an important guide for how to address those issues and improve how customers view your brand. 

When you know the true reasons your satisfied customers keep coming back, you can incorporate that into your value proposition. This will make your marketing efforts more effective, helping you retain customers who might not have considered that positive aspect of your offering before.

This information also tells you which of your features are worth developing further, which need work to live up to your expectations of them, and which you can abandon entirely.

• Examples of customer satisfaction research topics

All the questions above can be applied to a number of customer satisfaction questions. Trying to answer them all at once will result in unfocused and possibly unhelpful research. Instead, it’s best to focus your research on one or two areas. Some common areas for customer satisfaction research are listed below:

Product/service quality

Customer support and service

Pricing and value perception

Ease of doing business

Brand reputation and loyalty

Post-purchase experience

Comparison to competitor offerings

You might not know which of these you should start with. By gathering some initial customer feedback, you can narrow down which of these topics are strengths and which are weaknesses, allowing you to drill down deeper in your next round of research.

• Levels of customer satisfaction research

We can also take a different view of granularity when doing customer satisfaction research. Customers interact with your brand on several levels. Their opinions of the brand at each of these levels may vary.

Transactional (single interaction)

This level of customer satisfaction deals with a single interaction. While a customer could generally be very happy with your brand, an individual transaction could annoy them in some way. Eliminating these sources of annoyance could be the tipping point that pushes less satisfied customers toward brand loyalty and away from dissatisfaction.

Here are some examples of transactional customer satisfaction research:

Post-purchase surveys

Service desk satisfaction surveys

Website/app feedback surveys

Point-of-sale customer satisfaction ratings

Event feedback forms

Relational (ongoing relationship)

This deals with the customer’s overall perception of your brand independent of any single interaction.

Just as it’s possible for a generally happy customer to have a negative single experience, customers can develop a negative view of your brand even if they have one or two great transactions.

By looking at customer satisfaction from a broader perspective and focusing on the customer’s view of your brand itself, you can unlock deeper insights into what makes customers leave or stay.

Examples of relational customer satisfaction research include the following:

Customer satisfaction and loyalty survey programs

Churn/retention analysis

Net promoter score (NPS) surveys

Long-term, in-depth customer interviews

Quarterly customer surveys

Brand perception studies

Holistic (overall experience)

This level of customer satisfaction research involves combining the previous two. Instead of focusing solely on single interactions or the brand’s overall perception, holistic customer satisfaction research examines the entire picture.

So, why is this helpful? In customer satisfaction, the whole is often more than the sum of its parts. By looking at how everything fits together, you can get a broader sense of which areas need adjustment.

Examples of holistic customer satisfaction research include the following:

Customer journey mapping

Customer lifecycle analysis

Omnichannel experience surveys

Ethnographic studies and observational research

Comprehensive customer feedback programs

• How to carry out customer satisfaction research

Although the specifics will depend on your business and the type of customer research you’re interested in, the seven steps below provide a solid roadmap for successfully carrying out customer satisfaction research.

Step 1: define research objectives

The first step is defining your objectives. Before you can research something, you need to know what you’re researching.

Your research objectives might include, for example, retaining customers, improving marketing and sales efforts, elevating long-term product use, and more.

Next, identify the key performance indicators (KPIs) you’ll be measuring. These can include retention rate, monthly active users, repeat purchase rate, net promoter score, customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores , churn rate, and various customer support metrics, among other things. Include these or any others that are specific to your goals. 

As you’re deciding what your objectives are and which KPIs to use, ensure that your choices align with your business objectives.

Step 2: select a research methodology

The next step is to determine which research methodology you’ll use to gather your data. Quantitative methods, such as surveys and rating scales, can provide concrete numbers that are easy to track over time. Qualitative methods, such as interviews and focus groups, can provide more in-depth information about what customers do and don’t like about your product or service.

In practice, you’ll likely want to use a mixture of these two methods. A hybrid approach will provide you with data you can use to compare your results with industry standards or past results from your own research. It will also give you more actionable insights to drive those numbers in the direction you want.

Step 3: develop customer satisfaction surveys

If surveys will be a part of your methodology, you need to decide what those surveys will entail.

Remember, focus is key. There are many questions you can ask customers, but you should limit yourself to those that directly address the current research topic. This will make the data easier to sort through and help you use your resources more effectively. 

When crafting your surveys, consider your customers. If you want to get a sufficient number of well-thought-out responses, you’ll need to make sure the surveys are easy and convenient to complete. Overly lengthy surveys or those that use challenging technologies can limit the number and quality of responses you get.

The customer satisfaction score (CSAT) is the simplest and most straightforward method for measuring customer satisfaction. It typically involves asking customers to rate their satisfaction with a specific interaction or transaction on a scale, such as 1–5.

Step 4: choose a sampling strategy

Next, decide who you’ll be conducting research on. Do you have a specific customer segment that you’d like to better understand? If your company makes heavy use of customer personas, it can be helpful to survey each of them independently to better understand how to appeal to them.

Here are some sampling methods you can consider:

Random sampling: randomly pick participants from your full customer base to ensure each customer has an equal chance of being included.

Stratified sampling: divide your customer base into distinct subgroups and sample equally from each to ensure complete representation across key segments.

Systematic sampling: choose every nth customer from a list to ensure an even spread of participants.

Convenience sampling: select participants who are easiest to reach or most readily available, which is quicker but may not be as representative.

Step 5: data collection and analysis

Now we come to the meat and potatoes of customer satisfaction research—the collection and analysis of the data. If you’re conducting surveys, this could mean online forms, phone calls, or in-person questioning. Whatever your method, collect all the data and store it in a convenient place.

Tools like Dovetail make it easy to do the following:

Collect disparate data types and create a single source of truth around customer insights

Sort through the data and glean actionable insights from what you have collected

Analyze both quantitative and qualitative results, identify trends and patterns, and determine what the next steps should be

Step 6: implement changes

Once you have analyzed the data, it’s time to put what you have learned into action.

First, identify all the areas that need improvement and prioritize them. The insights provided by customers can provide a great metric for prioritization, but be sure to also factor in the resources available to you and your business goals.

Once you have decided which areas to work on, develop an action plan to make the necessary changes. To stay organized, assign responsibility for overseeing these changes to someone who is capable and reliable. You might have several people handle larger changes, each with their own specific area of the plan.

Step 7: implement a feedback loop

Customer satisfaction research isn’t a one-and-done thing. You’ll want to revisit the research regularly to ensure that changing customer preferences and market dynamics haven’t altered how your customers view you. Quantitative measurements that can be tracked over time can be a big help.

If you’re making improvements but the rate of improvement is leveling off compared to previous results, it could indicate that a change is underway, shifting customer desires. It could also mean that you’re nearing peak customer satisfaction. The best way to know for sure is to set up more customer satisfaction research to understand your numbers.

The important thing is that you don’t let your customer satisfaction efforts become stagnant. Customer needs and preferences change all the time, and if you’re not making an effort to meet those evolving needs, a competitor will happily step in and do it for you.

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Customer Experience: What It Is and Why It's Important [+Data-Backed Tips]

Learn about customer experience and why it's so important to the success of your business.

CUSTOMER JOURNEY MAP TEMPLATE

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free customer journey map templates.

Updated: 06/11/24

Published: 05/27/21

There aren’t many genuinely unique products in today’s market. No matter what you’re looking to buy, likely multiple companies are offering the same thing at similar prices.

In a world with many options, customer experience is often the deciding factor. Personally, I’d rather give my business to a company that offers a top-notch customer experience, and I’d probably be willing to pay a little extra for it, too.

Excellent customer experience leads to loyal customers , who are likely to sing your praises via word-of-mouth marketing , which 92% of people trust more than advertising . So, what makes a great customer experience?

Read on to learn everything you need to know about customer experience and some tips and tricks you can implement today.

What Is Customer Experience?

Importance of Customer Experience

How to measure customer experience.

What Is Customer Experience Management?

How to Make a Great Customer Experience

Online customer experience management.

Customer Experience Management Tool

What is customer experience?

Customer experience (CX) is the impression your customers have of your entire brand throughout all aspects of the buyer’s journey. It results in their view of your brand and impacts factors related to your bottom line, including revenue.

There are two main factors to consider when it comes to crafting customer experience: products and people.

Does the product solve problems, meet needs, and generally blow you away? If so, you have a good product that bodes well for customer experience.

The other aspect is people. You could have the best product in the world, but if the people surrounding that product (think customer support, account managers, etc.) don’t inspire customer delight, then you’ve got an issue.

If you’ve got a great product supported by great people, you have the makings of a great customer experience.

Free Customer Journey Template

Outline your company's customer journey and experience with these 7 free templates.

• Buyer's Journey Template
• Future State Template
• Day-in-the-Life Template

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Are customer service and customer experience the same?

Customer service and customer experience are not the same thing. However, they are related. Customer service is a narrower term for helping customers solve problems and better use your products. Meanwhile, customer experience is an umbrella term that encapsulates every interaction a customer has with your brand throughout their customer journey .

In a HubSpot survey, we asked over 1,500 companies about their top challenges when crafting the customer experience. Top responses included:

• Understanding customer needs (22%)
• Adapting to increasingly demanding customer expectations (21%)
• Scaling my customer experience operations as my business grows (21%)

What do these data show? These responses make it clear that aligning with customer needs is the main challenge and key to customer success.

A remarkable customer experience is critical to the sustained growth of any business. A positive customer experience promotes loyalty, helps retain customers, and encourages brand advocacy.

Today, customers have the power. Thanks to the internet, customers have the necessary resources to educate themselves when choosing from various product options.

This is why providing a remarkable experience is important.

With so many options, I only want to do business with companies that provide a top-tier customer experience. So, how can you measure your customer experience to determine what you’re doing well and where there’s room for improvement?

• Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.
• Identify the rate of and reasons for customer churn.
• Ask customers for product or feature requests.
• Analyze customer support ticket trends.

1. Analyze customer satisfaction survey results.

Using customer satisfaction surveys (which you can easily create in HubSpot or one of the integrated tools like Survicate ) regularly — and after meaningful moments throughout the customer journey — provides insight into your customer’s experiences with your brand, product, or service.

In our 2024 State of Service Survey , the majority of respondents from companies across the world indicated their intention to increase their investment in collecting and analyzing customer feedback.

Analyzing customer feedback remains one of the most straightforward ways to understand customer needs and craft a great CX. So, it is no surprise that most companies plan to continue investing in the process.

A great way to measure customer experience is by using the Net Promoter Score (NPS ). This measures how likely your customers are to promote you to their friends, family, and colleagues based on their experiences with your company.

When measuring NPS , consider data in aggregate across teams. Since multiple teams impact your overall customer experience, you’ll need a clear picture of performance — and that comes from numerous data points.

For example, what is the NPS for in-product usage? For customer service teams across communication channels (phone, email, chat, etc.)? For sales? For attending a marketing webinar? And so on.

Analyzing NPS from multiple touchpoints across the customer journey will tell you what you need to improve and where you’re already providing an excellent experience while showing customers you listen and care about what they have to say.

With your NPS score, dive into your team-by-team performance to ensure you perform well across the board. Also, you may follow up on customer feedback — whether positive or negative — to connect with customers, deepen your relationship with them, and improve your retention and loyalty.

2. Identify the rate of and reasons for customer churn.

20% of companies in our State of Service 2024 survey identified preventing churn and boosting retention as a challenge when creating a great customer experience.

Churn happens — it’s part of doing business. But you must learn from churn to prevent it from happening again.

Ensure you’re doing regular analysis of your churned customers so you can determine whether your churn rate is increasing or decreasing, the reasons for churn , and actions your team may take in the future to prevent a similar situation .

3. Ask customers for product or feature requests.

Creating a great customer experience is all about giving customers what they need. One of the best ways to figure out what their needs are is to ask them!

Create a forum for your customers to request new products or features to make your offerings more valuable and helpful for the problems they’re trying to solve. Whether that forum is shared via email, social media, or a community page, allow customers to offer suggestions proactively.

While you might not implement all the suggestions you receive, it’s worth looking into recurring trends or requests that pop up.

4. Analyze customer support ticket trends.

You should also analyze the customer support tickets your support reps are working to resolve every day. If there are recurring issues among tickets, review possible reasons for those hiccups and how you can provide solutions across the board.

Doing so allows you to decrease the total number of tickets reps receive while providing customers with a streamlined and enjoyable experience.

We asked over 1,500 companies what they felt was their most effective customer service channel, and results pointed to AI chatbots (15%) followed by online chat with a human rep (14%), which I think is telling. Not only is chat-based support quick and easy for customers, but the analysis of the data is much simpler on the company end.

The data show that people overwhelmingly use their smartphones to search, so a mobile-optimized website should be a top priority.

If you’re online, you’re accessible via a smart device, which means customers can find your company anywhere there’s cellular or Wi-fi service. The experience these customers have should be nearly identical to those using standard desktop devices.

This means your website should have a comprehensive, well-working app. If it doesn’t, your site should be responsive and user-friendly cross-device. There’s nothing more disappointing than a company with a fantastic desktop website, but it’s cut off and unresponsive on mobile.

Additionally, your app or mobile site should be as effective as your desktop version. You should be able to accomplish the same amount of tasks using either a mobile or a traditional device.

Don’t sacrifice features for your team’s convenience. Instead, put in the extra effort and resources — customers will genuinely value an omnichannel experience .

It doesn’t matter how effective your product or service is if your customers can’t navigate their way around it. Websites and apps should be intuitive, making it clear to the user which steps to take to achieve their goals.

Your team can create a user-friendly design by running usability tests on your website or app. Usability testing evaluates how easy it is to operate your product or service. By running these tests before production, you can create a website design that’s easy to use and ensures every customer can achieve their goals.

User Onboarding

For some companies, customers need to be taught how to use their website or app. Not everyone is tech-savvy, and many SaaS businesses provide onboarding to users who aren’t familiar with their products or services.

Onboarding is the process of teaching new customers how to use your product or service. A representative from the company’s customer success team works with the user to ensure they understand the value and purpose of their purchase. This way, customers don’t have to go through a time-consuming learning curve and can get value from your business immediately.

Whether or not you’re a SaaS company, it can be difficult to improve upon your customer experience. That’s because you must make changes across multiple departments and ensure every employee is on the same page. This is where software can simplify the process for your team.

There are plenty of tools available that can monitor and analyze customer experience. Let’s review a few options.

Tips for Making a Great Customer Experience

I used my HubSpot portal to host my blog and as a CRM when booking shows for my band. Using the product myself gave me a unique insight into the customer perspective that I don’t think is possible to understand otherwise. In doing so, I could foster great customer experiences through a shared understanding of customer needs and goals.

You want to make it as seamless as possible for customers to access their accounts and locate relevant information. When you execute your website correctly, no one will notice. But that’s what you want. When the UX is optimized, everything will be where the customer expects it, which makes for an effortless customer experience.

In my experience, monitoring and engaging with customers via social media is crucial to understanding their needs, which is the cornerstone of customer experience.

When creating content for social media, it's essential to ensure that it is both high quality and authentic. Customers know when they are being sold something, and they can tell if your brand truly cares about solving their problems and meeting their needs. Check out the chart below to see how different age groups prioritize quality versus authenticity in content.

As a customer service representative, I found that customers appreciated it when I identified their needs/challenges and suggested new features to optimize their workflow. So, if you notice a way to help customers as they grow and their needs change, let them know.

What do these groups of people have in common? They just want everything to work.

The key is understanding your customers and communicating clearly on a level they expect and understand. Clear communication doesn’t just mean simplifying your explanation as much as possible (although sometimes it does). Instead, you must have a comprehensive enough grasp of your products and services to level with anyone.

No one wants to feel like they are being given the runaround. Let’s say your product is experiencing a service disruption, or maybe a shipment got lost in the mail. These things happen. Be upfront instead of burying your head in the sand and ignoring customer complaints.

Let your customers know exactly what has gone wrong and the steps you are taking to address it. Sure, issues like these are frustrating for everyone. Still, customers will feel valued and respected if you can level with them honestly, which is necessary for long-term customer success.

However, if you’ve worked in customer support like me, you know you can’t solve every issue at the drop of a hat. That doesn’t mean you can’t respond quickly, though.

My strategy was to respond to customer email tickets as quickly as possible, and even if I needed extra time to solve an issue, I would send out an email along the lines of:

“Hi [Customer Name],

I wanted to let you know that I’ve received your support request, and I’m looking into it. I see you are encountering an issue with [describe customer issue].

I will dive into this on my end, which will require a little time. However, you can rest assured I’m actively working on this and will update you within [describe anticipated time frame].”

See what I did there? I could have just placed this customer inquiry on the back burner and waited to respond until I had approached a resolution. However, I’ve found that giving a timely initial response and setting expectations go a long way in creating a positive customer experience.

71% said they would increase their investment in AI chatbots for customer service, 70% said they would increase their investment in generative AI for crafting customer communications, and 72% planned to increase investment in AI/automation throughout the customer experience.

So, I think the data are rather clear. AI tools allow for streamlining multiple business processes, and the customer experience benefits significantly from the increased efficiency.

As shown above, most Gen Z consumers prefer self-service, and if you ask me, that number will only grow over time. Consider investing in a thorough knowledge base and other self-service tools to empower your customers to help themselves.

We also asked over 1500 firms whether they would prioritize offering service reps better tools to solve issues for customers or offering customers better tools to solve issues independently. The response? 68% indicated they would be prioritizing self-service tools.

Instead, focus on creating something that genuinely benefits people's lives and is worth their hard-earned money. Especially today, as the cost of goods rises and purse strings tighten. Check out the data from our research below.

Every age group feels the effects of today’s economy. Now more than ever, offering value to your customers will be a top factor in determining customer satisfaction and success.

Customer Experience Management Tools

1. hubspot service software.

HubSpot’s Service Software is a customer service platform that includes various features used for customer experience management. For example, the tool offers ticketing and help desk automation to help record customer inquiries, track recurring support cases, and more.

It also has customer feedback capabilities to determine NPS® for customer interactions. These features make it easy for your team to identify common customer roadblocks and roll out changes that help users overcome them.

Price: Free plans are available. Starter plans cost $45 monthly. Professional plans cost $450 monthly. Enterprise plans cost $1,200 monthly.

What I Like : I like that HubSpot is continually integrating and iterating on AI features in the product to help you streamline and scale your service efforts.

Nice Feeback Management provides you with a summary of your overall customer experience. It does this by comparing direct feedback, indirect feedback, and KPIs — all in one report. This gives you a complete picture of the customer experience from the customer’s perspective and how it relates to business impact.

Price : Pricing is available upon request.

What I Like : Nice allows you to create automated triggers based on customer feedback to get ahead of potential churn.

WalkMe is a customer experience management solution for businesses primarily interacting with customers online.

It has self-service features that empower users to find their solutions, saving your support team time. It also has an extensive onboarding program, so your team can quickly get up to speed on the software.

With WalkMe, you get to build a satisfying relationship with customers from when they first become aware of your brand till they become brand advocates.

Price : Pricing is available on request.

What I Like: I like WalkMe’s DeepUI feature, an AI-powered element recognition feature that ensures it can continually adapt to UI changes in other apps it integrates with.

Birdeye is a reputation management software, which means it specializes in managing online reviews across many channels. Online reviews are often the first place potential customers look in the consideration stage, and Birdeye helps you get more positive reviews quickly.

It features tools that automatically trigger customer review requests, auto-reply to customers, and share reviews on your website.

What I Like : I like that Birdeye solves a specific customer need. Not every business is based on customer reviews, but for those who are, Birdeye is super valuable.

Create a Remarkable Customer Experience

Identifying key touch points along your customer journey, collecting customer feedback to improve or keep iterating on those experiences, and analyzing trends will help you improve customer sentiment about your company — and keep them telling their friends and family about your organization.

Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in May 2021 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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Service Hub provides everything you need to delight and retain customers while supporting the success of your whole front office

The basics of customer experience research

Improving customer experience needs a deep understanding of the entire customer journey and makes structured research the key to success. Customer experience is influenced by multiple online and offline channels, and often happens along a long time frame. These facts make it necessary to carefully evaluate what methods and tools are useful for each specific research and innovation goal.

This article will cover the following questions:

What is customer experience research?

• Why is customer experience research so important?

How to conduct customer experience research?

• Different methods for customer experience research

Customer experience (CX) is your customers entire individual perception of their experience with your brand, product or service. It is influenced by each interaction happening between your company, product or service and its customer. This includes for example ordering a product in your online shop, receiving the product via the counter or receiving a newsletter.

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. The goal of customer experience research is to increase a company’s competitive advantage by better understanding customers needs and pain points and using these insights to improve the overall customer experience.  

Why is customer experience research important?

Customer experience research is essential for understanding and meeting customer expectations, driving business growth, and building long-term customer relationships. It allows businesses to continuously improve and adapt their strategies to deliver exceptional experiences that delight customers.

More specifically, CX Research helps you with:

• Increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty
• Achieving competitive advantage
• Generating business growth
• Higher customer retention and reduced churn
• Improved product and service development
• Saving cost

Especially in times of social media, customer experience is becoming a crucial competitive advantage for organizations. Through the quick distribution of information on social platforms, a negative experience can cause enormous harm within a short period of time. At the same time, a positive experience can lead to loyalty and recommendation.

Researching customer experience can provide valuable insights for enterprises and help understanding customer needs, desires or pain points. With this information at hand companies can increase customer satisfaction and develop a customer-centric business model.

It all starts with defining who you want to research and what information you want to gain.

The why: develop a research question and scope

What is your aim with the research? Why are you pursuing this question? The starting point of successful research is a clear research question and a defined aim. You could ask questions like:

• Why do my customers rate the restaurant’s service negatively?
• How do my customers experience the booking process?
• What is the experience like for my employees during the weekend shifts?

Research can also have different scopes. For example: you’ll have a different scope if you look at a service which takes 15 days (e.g., the period from the booking until the flight), than if you look at a specific part of the service that takes 15 minutes (e.g., a customer gets in contact with your customer service in order to solve a problem with their flight booking).

State if you want to research a specific point or if you want to zoom out and look at your offering from a higher level.

Assumption vs. research-based work

Assumption-based work.

This is where the researcher sketches out what they think the customer journey looks like. Assumption-based customer journey maps can be useful as a first draft because they can help you plan your research. It also might help to highlight the assumptions that might have been made concerning a problem. When it comes to making decisions – base them on research.

Research-based work

To create research-based journey maps or personas, draw on the data you have. For example, with a customer based project – chances are you have knowledge about your customer through analytics, order history, CRM databases and so forth. Co-creative workshops with your customer or folks who have profound knowledge or lived experience of the subject matter can also be a way to create research-based personas or journey maps.

Of course, research-based personas or journey maps need more time and resources. Ultimately tools based on valuable research are better to reference when making important decisions and are much closer to reality.

Tip: It’s helpful to write the research question down or post it up in your work space so you can always look back to it and align your research with your aim.

The who: sample

Who are the relevant people for your research? Who will you talk to? Is it users? Customers? Employees? Other stakeholders? Do you want to get information about the interactions between these groups? This decision will make sure that you only get relevant data out of your time and financial resources.

A few aspects to consider when defining a research sample:

• The number of participants: what’s the right size for my purpose?
• The characteristics of participants: do I only want to focus on certain customers?
• Am I mainly interested in people who have used a specific service, during a specific time period?
• The type of technology participants use: are they okay with using a smartphone?
• The amount of time participants have.
• The way you invite participants: sometimes people participate together, e.g. one parent fills in reports representing the family. Also, do you want a random sample or would you prefer picking participants manually? The method with which you invite people will affect that.

Once your research question has been defined and the participants have been identified, you can focus on what research methods suit your subject best..

Triangulation

Triangulation is used in qualitative research to maximize the quality and validity of the research. The idea of triangulation is that every research you do has its advantages and disadvantages. Triangulating methods, data etc. helps you reduce bias and balance the types of learnings you generate. E.g., if one research method leaves some black spots behind, another research methods can help put some light on it. So even if you don’t manage to triangulate everything, make sure to at least have a second source of data that helps verify your findings from a different perspective.

You can triangulate these research methods:

• Methods (e.g., interview, survey, and observation)
• Data types (e.g., text, pictures, and video)
• Participants (e.g., customers, employees, and management)
• Researchers (e.g., customer service, marketing and developers)
• Environmental (e.g., different time/day/season)

Scroll down for a more detailed description of the potential methods.

Deciding a time frame is necessary in order to get valuable data. The time frame of your research will depend on your research question, the scope of your project, and the resources that you can allocate to the project.

Make sure your time frame is long enough to really tackle the research question holistically, but keep it as short as possible so you can start working with the generated data as soon as possible and have a few iterations instead of over-engineering things.

Tip: Qualitative research processes evolve. You might need to dig deeper into a certain area or shift focus once you find a specific user need or problem.

Customer experience research methods

In order to research your customers’ experience you can use qualitative and quantitative research methods.

Whilst qualitative research helps you to get actionable insights and provides your with in-depth knowledge, the quantitative counterparts can help you verify these learnings, check for generalizability and monitor KPIs over time.

The main difference between qualitative and quantitative customer experience research methods lies in the nature of the data collected and the approach used to gather insights. Here are the key distinctions:

Qualitative Research Methods

Qualitative research methods provide rich, detailed insights into customer experiences and perspectives, using open-ended questions and smaller sample sizes.

• Data Type : Qualitative research methods gather subjective and non-numerical data. They aim to uncover rich, descriptive insights, opinions, and experiences from customers.
• Sample Size : Qualitative research typically involves smaller sample sizes, often consisting of a few individuals or small groups. The emphasis is on depth rather than breadth of understanding.
• Data Collection Approach : Qualitative methods use open-ended questions, interviews, focus groups, observations, or ethnographic techniques to explore customers' thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. These methods allow for detailed, narrative responses.
• Analysis : Qualitative data is analyzed through techniques such as thematic analysis, content analysis, or narrative analysis. Researchers identify patterns, themes, and recurring ideas to derive insights and develop an understanding of customer experiences.

Quantitative Research Methods

Quantitative research methods focus on collecting numerical data from a larger sample size, enabling statistical analysis and generalization of findings. Both methods have their strengths and can be used together to provide a comprehensive understanding of customer experience.

• Data Type : Quantitative research methods collect objective, numerical data that can be analyzed statistically. These methods aim to provide measurable and generalizable insights about customer experiences.
• Sample Size : Quantitative research typically involves larger sample sizes to ensure statistical validity and representativeness. The focus is on collecting data from a broader customer base to generalize findings.
• Data Collection Approach : Quantitative methods use structured surveys, questionnaires, or scales to gather data. Questions are often close-ended, allowing customers to select from predefined response options.
• Analysis : Quantitative data is analyzed using statistical techniques such as descriptive statistics, correlations, regression analysis, or inferential statistics. This analysis enables researchers to identify patterns, relationships, and trends within the data.

In general we suggest picking at least one qualitative as well as one quantitative research method. Qualitative methods, like interviews or focus groups, will provide you with in-depth knowledge about individuals, like their expectations or needs. Also they help to bring up topics you did not consider upfront. Quantitative methods will help you verify these learnings to see if the points also apply to other people.

An overview on the most common customer experience reseearch methods

There is a variety of research methods that can be used to collect customer experience data. All of them have their pros and cons, such as a certain bias that each method inherits or the specific types of data that it yields.

To level out potential biases – triangulate. Choose two or three methods that you think are most promising in collecting useful and actionable data.

Data collection

Participants are provided with a questionnaire

paper-based or digital

makes data and respondents comparable

Disadvantages

• static • respondents can only answer the questions that are asked

Researcher’s challenge

• asking the right questions • asking the questions right • participant recruitment

Participants are asked to talk about specific issues or experiences

• structured, semistructured, or unstructured • contextual or non-contextual Advantages depending on the grade of structure, respondents can express what is important to them

• time and cost intensive • interviewer effect: the interviewer influences the situation and consequently could impact the answers

• being aware of when they are guiding or leading the interviewee • remaining objective

Observation

‍ Data collection

Researchers watch and take notice of the behaviors of participants in a certain situation

• participatory, non- participatory, or somewhat in between • covert vs. overtAdvantagesmore objective view on behavior

• time and cost intensive • observer effect: people might behave in a way they think it is expected

• perceiving important information • being aware of the influence one has on the situation

Auto-ethnography

Participants observe themselves and reflect on their behavior, thoughts and so forth

diary studies, photos, videos, audio, artifacts, …

insights into the person’s inner thoughts

• bias caused by researcher’s prior knowledge and experiences • data might be highly subjective or contextual and need direct explanation by the participant

• researcher: briefing the participant correctly • participant: conscious reflection and report of situations

Cultural probes

Participants collect diverse material in the situation of interest

• abstract descriptions become more comprehensible • recall of information is supported

collection might take a lot of effort

collection/report of cultural probes

Mobile ethnography

Participants use their mobile to report experiences in real-time

open vs. structured approach

• mobile device • recall bias minimized through reports in real-time • minimal researcher bias

high effort for participants

You collected so much data, now is the time to structure it! This piece of content will help you to structure your customer experience data.

And now, what's next?

Now it's about implementing what you've just learned: start researching customer experience and create a repository of useful CX insights.

With the customer journey tool Smaply you can create a hub of CX research and take your innovation further from there.

Sign up now, it's free!

Antonia Cramer

Antonia keeps her eyes open for questions people interested in service design are looking to answer, and helps us provide resources to support their learning ambitions. With her background in digital communication she has great knowledge on how to create content that is easy to access and understand.

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The CEO guide to customer experience

What do my customers want? The savviest executives are asking this question more frequently than ever, and rightly so. Leading companies understand that they are in the customer-experience business, and they understand that how an organization delivers for customers is beginning to be as important as what it delivers.

This CEO guide taps the expertise of McKinsey and other experts to explore the fundamentals of customer interaction, as well as the steps necessary to redesign the business in a more customer-centric fashion and to organize it for optimal business outcomes. For a quick look at how to improve the customer experience, see the summary infographic.

Armed with advanced analytics, customer-experience leaders gain rapid insights to build customer loyalty, make employees happier, achieve revenue gains of 5 to 10 percent, and reduce costs by 15 to 25 percent within two or three years. But it takes patience and guts to train an organization to see the world through the customer’s eyes and to redesign functions to create value in a customer-centric way. The management task begins with considering the customer—not the organization—at the center of the exercise.

Customer experience

More insight into creating competitive advantage by putting customers first and managing their journeys.

Observe: Understand the interaction through the customer’s eyes

Technology has handed customers unprecedented power to dictate the rules in purchasing goods and services. Three-quarters of them, research finds, expect “now” service within five minutes of making contact online. A similar share want a simple experience, use comparison apps when they shop, and put as much trust in online reviews as in personal recommendations. Increasingly, customers expect from all players the same kind of immediacy, personalization, and convenience that they receive from leading practitioners such as Google and Amazon.

Central to connecting better with customers is putting in place several building blocks of a comprehensive improvement in customer experience.

Identify and understand the customer’s journey.

It means paying attention to the complete, end-to-end experience customers have with a company from their perspective. Too many companies focus on individual interaction touchpoints devoted to billing, onboarding, service calls, and the like. In contrast, a customer journey spans a progression of touchpoints and has a clearly defined beginning and end.

The advantage of focusing on journeys is twofold.

First, even if employees execute well on individual touchpoint interactions, the overall experience can still disappoint (Exhibit 1). More important, McKinsey research finds that customer journeys are significantly more strongly correlated with business outcomes than are touchpoints. A recent McKinsey survey, 1 1. McKinsey US cross-industry customer-experience survey, June–October 2015 data. for example, indicates customer satisfaction with health insurance is 73 percent more likely when journeys work well than when only touchpoints do. Similarly, customers of hotels that get the journey right may be 61 percent more willing to recommend than customers of hotels that merely focus on touchpoints.

Quantify what matters to your customers.

Customers hold companies to high standards for product quality, service performance, and price. How can companies determine which of these factors are the most critical to the customer segments they serve? Which generate the highest economic value? In most companies, there are a handful of critical customer journeys. Understanding them, customer segment by customer segment, helps a business to maintain focus, have a positive impact on customer satisfaction, and begin the process of redesigning functions around customer needs. Analytical tools and big data sources from operations and finance can help organizations parse the factors driving what customers say satisfies them and also the actual customer behavior that creates economic value. Sometimes initial assumptions are overturned. In one airport case study, customer satisfaction had more to do with the behavior of security personnel than with time spent in line (Exhibit 2). For a full view of the airport’s insightful customer-satisfaction exercise, see “ Developing a customer-experience vision .”

Define a clear customer-experience aspiration and common purpose.

In large, distributed organizations, a distinctive customer experience depends on a collective sense of conviction and purpose to serve the customer’s true needs. This purpose must be made clear to every employee through a simple, crisp statement of intent: a shared vision and aspiration that’s authentic and consistent with a company’s brand-value proposition. The most recognizable example of such a shared vision might be the Common Purpose 2 2. The Common Purpose is the intellectual property of The Walt Disney Company. See Talking Points , “Be our guest. . .again,” blog post by Jeff James, December 22, 2011, on disneyinstitute.com/blog. of the Walt Disney Company: “We create happiness by providing the finest in entertainment for people of all ages, everywhere.” The statement of purpose should then be translated into a set of simple principles or standards to guide behavior all the way down to the front line.

Customer journeys are the framework that allows a company to organize itself and mobilize employees to deliver value to customers consistently, in line with its purpose. The journey construct can help align employees around customer needs, despite functional boundaries. As McKinsey’s Ron Ritter elaborated in a recent video, rallying around customers can bring the organization together.

Shape: Redesign the business from the customer back

Customer-experience leaders start with a differentiating purpose and focus on improving the most important customer journey first—whether it be opening a bank account, returning a pair of shoes, installing cable television, or even updating address and account information. Then they improve the steps that make up that journey. To manage expectations, they design supporting processes with customer psychology in mind. They transform their digital profile to remove pain points in interactions, and to set in motion the culture of continuous innovation needed to make more fundamental organizational transformations.

Apply behavioral psychology to interactions.

Deftly shaping customer perceptions can generate significant additional value. One tool leading customer-experience players deploy is behavioral psychology, used as a layer of the design process. Leading researchers have identified the major factors in customer-journey experiences that drive customer perceptions and satisfaction levels. 3 3. Richard Chase and Sriram Dasu, The Customer Service Solution: Managing Emotions, Trust, and Control to Win Your Customer’s Business , Columbus, OH: McGraw-Hill Education, 2013. For example, savvy companies can design the sequence of interactions with customers to end on a positive note. They can merge different stages of interactions to diminish their perceived duration and engender a feeling of progress. And they can provide simple options that give customers a feeling of control and choice. One pilot study at a consumer-services firm found that improvements in customer-satisfaction scores accrued from “soft” behavioral-psychology initiatives as well as from “hard” improvements in operations (Exhibit 3).

Reinvent customer journeys using digital technologies.

Customers accustomed to the personalization and ease of dealing with digital natives such as Google and Amazon now expect the same kind of service from established players. Research shows that 25 percent of customers will defect after just one bad experience.

Customer-experience leaders can become even better by digitizing the processes behind the most important customer journeys. In these quick efforts, multidisciplinary teams jointly design, test, and iterate high-impact processes and journeys in the field, continually refining and rereleasing them after input from customers. Such methods help high-performing incumbents to release and scale major, customer-vetted process improvements in less than 20 weeks. Agile digital companies significantly outperform their competitors, according to some studies. 4 4. See The 2015 Customer Experience ROI Study , Watermark Consulting, watermarkconsult.net. To achieve those results, established businesses must embrace new ways of working.

Perform: Align the organization to deliver against tangible outcomes

As the customer experience becomes a bigger focus of corporate strategy, more and more executives will face the decision to commit their organizations to a broad customer-experience transformation. The immediate challenge will be how to structure the organization and rollout, as well as figuring out where and how to get started. Applying sophisticated measurement to what your customers are saying, empowering frontline employees to deliver against your customer vision, and a customer-centric governance structure form the foundation. Securing early economic wins will deliver value and momentum for continuous innovation.

Use customer journeys to empower the front line.

Every leading customer-experience company has motivated employees who embody the customer and brand promise in their interactions with consumers, and are empowered to do the right thing. Executives at customer-centered companies engage these employees at every level of the organization, working directly with them in retail settings, taking calls, and getting out into the field. In the early years, for example, Amazon famously staged “all hands on deck” sessions during the year-end holidays, a tradition that lives on in the employee-onboarding experience. 5 5. Brad Stone, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon , New York, NY: Little, Brown, 2013. Some organizations create boards or panels of customers to provide a formal feedback mechanism .

Establish metrics that capture customer feedback.

The key to satisfying customers is not just to measure what happens but also to use the data to drive action throughout the organization. The type of metric used is less important than the way it is applied . The ideal customer-experience measurement system puts journeys at the center and connects them to other critical elements such as business outcomes and operational improvements. Leading practitioners start at the top, with a metric to measure the customer experience, and then cascade downward into key customer journeys and performance indicators, taking advantage of employee feedback to identify improvement opportunities (Exhibit 4).

Put cross-functional governance in place.

Even for companies that collaborate smoothly, shifting to a customer-centric model that cuts across functions is not an easy task. To move from knowledge to action, companies need proper governance and leadership . Best-in-class organizations have governance structures that include a sponsor—a chief customer officer—and an executive champion for each of their primary cross-functional customer journeys. They also have full-time teams carrying out their day-to-day work in the existing organization. To succeed, the transformation must take place within normal operations. To foster understanding and conviction, leaders at all levels must role-model the behavior they expect from these teams, constantly communicating the changes needed. Formal reinforcement mechanisms and skill-building activities at multiple levels of the organization support the transformation, as well. In a recent video, McKinsey’s Ewan Duncan describes how rewiring a company in this way is typically a two- to four-year journey.

Log early wins to demonstrate value creation.

Too many customer-experience transformations stall because leaders can’t show how these efforts create value. Executives, citing the benefits of improved customer relations, launch bold initiatives to delight customers that end up having clear costs and unclear near-term results. The better way is to build an explicit link to value creation by defining the outcomes that really matter, analyzing historical performance of satisfied and dissatisfied customers, and focusing on customer satisfaction issues with the highest payouts. This requires discipline and patience, but the result will be early wins that will build confidence within the organization and momentum to innovate further.

Delighting customers by mastering the concept and execution of an exceptionally good customer experience is a challenge. But it is an essential requirement for leading in an environment where customers wield growing power.

Related Articles

Designing and starting up a customer-experience transformation

From touchpoints to journeys: Seeing the world as customers do

Why the customer experience matters

Customer experience: a systematic literature review and consumer culture theory-based conceptualisation

• Published: 15 February 2020
• Volume 71 , pages 135–176, ( 2021 )

Cite this article

• Muhammad Waqas 1 ,
• Zalfa Laili Binti Hamzah 1 &
• Noor Akma Mohd Salleh 2  

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The study aims to summarise and classify the existing research and to better understand the past, present, and the future state of the theory of customer experience. The main objectives of this study are to categorise and summarise the customer experience research, identify the extant theoretical perspectives that are used to conceptualise the customer experience, present a new conceptualisation and conceptual model of customer experience based on consumer culture theory and to highlight the emerging trends and gaps in the literature of customer experience. To achieve the stated objectives, an extensive literature review of existing customer experience research was carried out covering 49 journals. A total of 99 empirical and conceptual articles on customer experience from the year 1998 to 2019 was analysed based on different criteria. The findings of this study contribute to the knowledge by highlighting the role of customer attribution of meanings in defining their experiences and how such experiences can predict consumer behaviour.

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Customer experience: fundamental premises and implications for research

Components of Customer Experience and their Impact on Co-created Value: An Abstract

Customer experience management: toward implementing an evolving marketing concept, explore related subjects.

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Waqas, M., Hamzah, Z.L.B. & Salleh, N.A.M. Customer experience: a systematic literature review and consumer culture theory-based conceptualisation. Manag Rev Q 71 , 135–176 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11301-020-00182-w

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Customer experience, or CX, is a holistic account of customers’ perceptions that result from all their interactions with a business or brand, whether online or in store.

Customer experience involves customer experience management (CXM). CXM refers to strategies, technologies, and practices for improving business results by creating an ideal experience for anyone interacting with a company.

Customer experience creates an emotional bond that helps companies build a competitive advantage by capturing more customers, deepening customer loyalty and increasing customer lifetime value.

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Customer experience differentiates a company and its value proposition from competitors based on human factors—such as how well the company’s customers feel they are understood, served, and treated. The goal of this differentiation is to form an emotional bond with the customer that maximizes the lifetime value of the customer—the ultimate profit the company realizes from each customer acquired. Strengthening their relationship with customers strengthens their bottom line. Customer experience can generate on average three times in returns to shareholders, according to McKinsey  (link resides outside of ibm.com) 1

Good or great customer  (link resides outside of ibm.com) experience can maximize a customer lifetime value (CLV) by deepening customer loyalty, improving customer retention and generating more and larger sales to customers. It can also drive brand reputation and bottom-line growth. These results from existing customers’ word-of-mouth and online advocacy for the brand can lead to the acquisition of new customers.

Today, the overall customer experience’s influence is difficult to overestimate. According to industry analyst Gartner  (link resides outside of ibm.com) 2 , two-thirds of companies compete based on customer experience. Standard & Poor’s research among IT executives (2021) found that improving customer experience was voiced as the single most important driver of digital transformation  (link resides outside of ibm.com) 3 . Nearly 65% of CX leaders anticipate larger budgets in 2024 for CX initiatives, according to Forrester  (link resides outside of ibm.com). 4

Customer centricity

The essential first step for a business shifting to a customer experience focus is to place the customer’s perceptions and feelings in the driver’s seat of the relationship. This includes basing the business’ brand promise on an understanding of its customers’ needs and emotions. Getting there means acquiring as deep an understanding as possible of what each prospective and existing customer is seeking at each stage—or even each interaction—of the relationship.

For many companies, this is a significant transition. It typically requires support from the boardroom and executives down to the employees. It can be a difficult adjustment for executives and managers whose careers have not been customer-centric or who historically found success by focusing first on transactional metrics or financial KPIs. And, as noted before, it involves a substantial investment in new technologies, from mobile apps to payment processing to advanced analytics and artificial intelligence (AI).

A bad customer experience —a late delivery, a misunderstanding with the customer support or a contact center, or any other pain point—can make customers feel, however unreasonably, like they’ve been intentionally singled out for poor treatment.

In contrast, a positive customer experience can leave customers feeling like a company exists just for them and, more importantly, it can leave them feeling generous. According to PwC, 65% of consumers feel a positive experience with a brand is more important than good advertising. The same survey revealed that customers would pay up to 16% for a great experience  (link resides outside of ibm.com). 5

Customer journey mapping

Buyer personas are the starting point of a customer experience management program. The next step in customer journey mapping involves defining and then optimizing the interactions throughout the entire customer journey. Companies need to observe the touchpoints that each persona has throughout the customer lifecycle. This starts with the customer learning of the company, moves through the process of making an initial purchase decision, goes into their ongoing use of the product or service and includes the decision to either make more purchases and or abandon the company.

The assumptions behind customer journey mapping are that prospects or customers are being purposeful at each touchpoint—trying to solve a problem, answer a question, compare options, or cross something off a to-do list. This means that the company can keep these people on their journeys to becoming loyal customers by helping them achieve those purposes as quickly, simply and satisfying as possible. Companies often create customer success teams to guide their most important customers through this process.

The goal of customer journey mapping is to deliver actionable insights for developing a customer experience strategy. Rather than completing an end-to-end map of every customer touchpoint for every persona, the initial goal might be to focus on the touchpoints where a company is most clearly underperforming or on the personas that offer the greatest upside.

Customer personas

A customer persona also called a buyer persona, is a fictional or semi-fictional character who represents a significant segment of a company’s customers or potential customers. For example, a company that manufactures skiing and snowboarding equipment might create personas representing a novice skier, an intermediate snowboarder or an expert skier or the parent of a child getting into skiing or snowboarding.

Personas are created based on data from various sources. Factors such as purchasing behaviors, web analytics, surveys, ratings and reviews, social media posts and interactions with customer service and support teams can all influence personas. The goal of creating personas is to help the company visualize the wants and needs of people in each customer segment at the various stages of the customer lifecycle.

Customer relationship management

It is the practice of collecting, tracking, analyzing, and acting on data resulting from customer interactions throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Customer relationship management (CRM) also refers to a category of software systems that are used to simplify and automate this practice.

The first CRM systems, which existed before the advent of the internet, might be considered the first customer experience management systems—they were used by sales and customer service teams to optimize and personalize direct customer interactions (face-to-face or via telephone, email, or direct mail). Today CRM systems serve as an essential data source for all elements of an organization’s customer experience strategy. Many CRM systems also include advanced technology for creating and delivering experiences based on customer data.

The “heavy lifting” of customer experience management involves reorienting all aspects of the enterprise to a tight focus on anticipating and meeting not just a customer’s needs, but their emotional wants , to deliver a truly great customer experience. Winning the customer’s heart is what creates brand loyalty, reduces customer churn and maximizes lifetime value.

What follows are several key elements of a good CX strategy and the technologies that drive them.

Cross-functional collaboration

Successful customer experience management initiatives break down organizational silos, share information in new ways and most importantly, share responsibility for customer experience and customer satisfaction. Companies committed to customer experience often unify customer data across  (link resides outside of ibm.com) disciplines— sales, marketing, and  (link resides outside of ibm.com) customer support—to create a single source of truth about customers. And most appoint a C-level executive, typically a customer experience officer (CXO), with the authority to make departments work together on cross-functional issues that impact customer experience.

Customer self-service

Providing a  (link resides outside of ibm.com) phone number or offering a form that customers can complete to connect with a representative—these can no longer be the only way to help customers get answers. Customers want to help themselves to find the information, answers, and support they need.

Frequently asked questions (FAQs), knowledge bases and customer forums are just a start. Increasingly customer expectations include

• Ability to engage customer service and support teams via online chat or SMS text messaging
• Ability to schedule appointments using online tools (and without making a phone call)
• Information in context—for example, product pages populated with brochures,  product manuals, detailed specs, how-to videos and other pertinent information  (link resides outside of ibm.com) 
• Optimized search that enables customer to quickly find answers to their questions
• Customer self-service is one area where not all automation is good automation

Customer experience teams must be careful to prioritize the needs and wants of the customer over shiny new technical toys.

Employee experience

Most organizations find that improving customer experience ultimately requires a parallel program that enhances your employees’ experience—enhancing the user experience and performance of the tools employees use to interact with and serve customers. 85% of respondents to a recent IDC survey agreed that improved employee experience results in “a better customer  (link resides outside of ibm.com) experience, higher customer satisfaction and higher revenues for their organization.” 6  In the same survey, 58% indicated that customer satisfaction is a key metric for evaluating employee productivity—so it seems only fair that employees should have the best possible tools and experience for meeting customer expectations.

Omnichannel approach

Customer experience strategy should encompass all channels of customer engagement and communication, including

• Traditional media messaging, such as print, video and audio advertising and PR
• Social media messaging—not only the company’s social media channels, but also customer comments and reviews on third-party blogs or web sites
• Digital experiences such as the corporate web site, mobile apps, chatbots , ecomme rce experience and more
• Direct contact including face-to-face contact in a retail setting and phone contact involving customer support and customer service teams

The messaging and experience should be as consistent as possible across channels so that prospects and customers move seamlessly from one channel to another as if it were all part of the same experience. To the greatest extent possible, customers should be able to accomplish as much and as many of their goals in the channel of their choice—e.g., if they choose to get customer support through social media versus the phone or purchase via the app versus ecommerce site, they should be able to do those things. The customer experience should meet them wherever they are.

Personalized experiences

Personalized experiences are interactions, services, or products that are tailored to meet a customer’s specific wants, requirements, purposes, likes, or even personality. Examples of personalized experiences include (but are by no means limited to)

• A website, app, or chatbot that greets the customer by given name
• A customer support hand-off that doesn’t ask the customer to repeat data already provided
• Recommendations based on previous product purchases (or videos viewed)
• A follow-up email or text message after a purchase to ask how the product is performing or provide how-tos or other useful product information

Many personalized customer interactions involve powerful technologies such as advanced analytics, automation, and generative AI. In fact, the IBM Institute for Business Value found that 85% of execs believe that generative AI will be used to interact with customers directly in the next two years.

But others require simpler technology—for example, a web ‘splash page’ that simply asks a customer what they want to do. And still others require no technology at all—like Coca-Cola's bottles that are labeled with people’s given names, enabling a customer to give a friend a personalized drink.

Regardless of how it is implemented, personalization is increasingly seen as table stakes for a good customer experience. A recent study by McKinsey found that 71 percent of customers expect personalization and 76% of customers get frustrated when they don’t find it  (link resides outside of ibm.com). 7

Customer experience requires collecting and processing feedback and measurement as part of the everyday business process instead of periodically or as a special project. Companies typically deploy technologies for capturing customer feedback and measuring satisfaction in real time. Common metrics include:

Customer satisfaction (CSAT) score

CSAT is the percentage of respondents who claim to be satisfied (4) or very satisfied (5) in surveys that are offered after a touchpoint experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Developed by the consultancy Bain and Company, NPS asks users who have experienced a touchpoint how likely they are to recommend the company to others. The number of low scores (6 or less) is subtracted from number of “promoters” (9’s and 10’s) and the net is converted into a percentage. This percentage can range from -100 (all 6’s or less) to +100 (all 9’s and 10’s). Earning a positive score is typically the first goal, while the best performers attain NPS scores of 80.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

After a touch, the customer is asked how easy or difficult it was to accomplish their goal, rating the difficulty from 1 (easy) to 5 or 7 (difficult). Increasingly CES is viewed as a better predictor of genuine customer loyalty than surveys that score satisfaction levels.

Envision, design and deliver smarter customer experiences that earn loyalty and trust.

Build an integrated and cohesive SAP customer experiences.

Deliver exceptional employee experiences with data, AI and automation.

A design-led, data-driven approach to experience transformation.

Give your customers instant, accurate custom care anytime, anywhere, with conversational AI.

Empower your workforce with AI-powered chatbots and automation.

Harness the power of data and AI to enhance strategic decision-making.

Three things every leader needs to know about generative AI

A blueprint for creating exceptional customer experiences

Building reliable customer experiences with watsonx Assistant -

Transforming marketing to deliver personalized client experiences

Providing fans with AI-generated insights and world-class digital experiences.

Envision, design and deliver smarter experiences across the entire customer journey. IBM customer experience consulting provides deep expertise in customer journey mapping and design, platform implementation, and data and AI consulting so you can harness best-in-class technologies to drive transformation and growth.

1   What is CX?  (link resides outside of ibm.com), McKinsey, August 17, 2022  2 and 3   Customer Experience Focus Can Improve Equity And Credit Performance  (link resides outside of ibm.com), S&P Global, September 16, 2021 4   Planning Guide 2024: Customer Experience  (link resides outside of ibm.com), Forrester 5 Ingredients for Great Experiences  (link resides outside of ibm.com), PWC 6 Employee Experience and Customer Experience  (link resides outside of ibm.com), IDC, September 17, 2021 7 What is personalization  (link resides outside of ibm.com)? McKinsey, May 30, 2023

Customer experience management

Positive customer experiences can boost both a company’s reputation and bottom line, but negative ones can have the opposite effect. Crafting and implementing a customer experience management strategy is essential. This guide explores techniques and tools that can help organizations construct and implement an effective customer experience management plan.

Customer experience (cx).

• Nick Barney, Technology Writer
• Erica Mixon
• Christina Torode

What is customer experience (CX)?

Customer experience (CX) is the sum total of customers' perceptions and feelings resulting from interactions with a brand 's products and services. CX spans the lifetime of customers' relationships with a brand, starting before a purchase is made, continuing through active use and to renewal or repeat purchase.

Any brand that has customers provides customer experience whether the brand realizes it or not. As the term implies, CX is based on the perceptions and opinions of customers. A brand may claim to sell a superior product or provide outstanding customer service, but customers are the ultimate arbiter.

Customer experience can be hard for brands to control because customers act, respond and react in unpredictable ways. The best approach for brands is to assess and optimize each customer touchpoint to maximize the likelihood of customer satisfaction.

How customer experience works

Customer experience encompasses all the touchpoints customers have with a brand. Examples of touchpoints include researching product offerings, buying the product online or in person, opening a product's packaging, reading the instruction manual, speaking to a customer service agent, having the product repaired and exchanging the product for a different model.

This article is part of

What is customer experience management (CXM)? Ultimate guide

• Which also includes:
• 7 must-have skills for customer experience professionals
• How do companies protect customer data?
• 10 top customer experience certification programs

Customers experience feelings and emotions at each touchpoint, which causes them to form judgments. Feelings can range from joy to apathy, disappointment and even anger. Judgments can range from positive, such as viewing the company as helpful when a customer is efficiently assisted, to negative, such as seeing the company as incompetent when dealing with slow and frustrating customer service. The emotions and judgments can vary wildly from one touchpoint to the next.

Positive customer experience can lead to customer retention. Gartner research in 2020 found an 82% average probability that a customer would stay with an organization when given the opportunity to switch after a value-enhancing service interaction compared with 61% probability after a regular interaction.

Importance of customer experience

Great customer experience is one of the most important factors for business success. Brands that provide a poor customer experience take a hit financially and, in some cases, don't survive.

Providing excellent CX results in satisfied customers who become loyal customers who do repeat business. This is a more effective way to grow a business than relying solely on generating new customers. Many brands use customer experience as a competitive advantage, taking market share by providing a superior customer experience compared to competitors.

Happy customers also can become brand ambassadors . These are advocates who recommend a business's products and services to friends, associates and colleagues via word of mouth and social media.

How to improve customer experience

Creating great customer experience requires a customer-centric approach, as well as a deep understanding of customer needs and expectations. Key initiatives to improving CX include the following.

Develop a customer experience strategy

A well-defined CX strategy serves as a roadmap for delivering exceptional customer interactions. It involves understanding the target audience, defining a brand promise and aligning business goals with customer expectations. A CX strategy should guide all customer-facing interactions and initiatives.

Embrace digital transformation

Digital transformation enables businesses to deliver personalized, real-time digital experiences that cater to customers' preferences and needs. This includes providing seamless omnichannel experiences, optimizing websites and mobile apps for user experience , and using new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), to enhance self-service options.

Empower employees

Employees can provide the best and most personalized support when they're equipped with the necessary tools, training and authority to resolve customer issues. Empowered employees feel valued and motivated, leading to positive interactions with customers and, ultimately, enhancing customer experience.

Understand the customer journey

Customer journey mapping helps businesses understand end-to-end CX and identify pain points and areas for improvement. By mapping each touchpoint and customer interaction, businesses gain insight into critical customer interactions and make informed decisions to enhance the experience. Additionally, customer journey mapping details a customer's goals and motivations at each one of those touchpoints.

Personalize customer interactions

Personalization is key to driving customer engagement and creating great customer experience. Using customer data and insights, businesses can tailor their interactions to meet individual preferences and needs. Personalization can range from addressing customers by their names to offering personalized recommendations based on their past purchases or preferences.

Foster a customer-centric culture

Creating a customer-centric culture starts from the top and permeates throughout the organization. It involves ensuring that every employee understands the importance of customer experience and is committed to delivering exceptional customer service. A culture of customer centricity encourages collaboration, innovation and accountability in interacting with customers.

Monitor and adapt

Customer expectations and preferences evolve over time, so organizations must continuously monitor and adapt their CX initiatives. They should regularly review customer feedback on websites and social media, analyze customer behavior and stay updated on industry trends to identify areas for improvement and innovation. Customer feedback is essential to business , and companies should be willing to make changes to align with customer needs.

Use technology and automation

The latest technologies and automation can streamline processes, reduce customer effort and enhance overall CX. Implementing self-service options, chatbots and AI-powered tools can provide quick and efficient answers to customer queries and improve response times. However, it's essential to strike a balance between automation and human touch to maintain a personalized experience.

Foster customer advocacy

The most successful customer experiences can turn customers into brand ambassadors and advocates. Organizations should encourage and incentivize customers to share their positive experiences through testimonials, online reviews and word-of-mouth recommendations. Customer advocacy can significantly impact brand reputation and attract new customers.

Customer experience vs. customer service

Customer experience and customer service are similar, related terms, but they aren't interchangeable. Customer service is a facet of customer experience that requires specific skills , while customer experience refers to a broader spectrum of the customer journey.

Customer experience describes the emotions, judgments and reactions that a customer has throughout the process of interacting with the business. These steps include researching the product, making the purchase, getting help when there's a problem, reviewing the product and service, and potentially recommending it to others.

Customer service, on the other hand, is limited to interactions a customer has with a business's employees -- often customer support representatives -- before, during and after a purchase. These interactions can occur through communication channels, such as live chat, social media, phone calls, chatbots and email. Customer service can focus on helping a customer choose the right product and troubleshoot problems.

Companies can use processes to track, oversee and organize customer touchpoints through customer experience management ( CXM/CEM ). With CXM, the organization can evaluate and improve every interaction between a customer and the company throughout the customer lifecycle .

In a small business, such as a bakery, produce market or dry cleaner, only a few individuals provide customer experience. In larger companies that sell complex products and services, numerous groups and departments contribute to CX, some directly and others indirectly. Sales and customer support interact directly with customers, while engineering, marketing, finance and legal create products, services and processes that affect and influence customers but might not interact directly with them.

For more complex products and businesses, excellent customer service requires close coordination across groups among other best practices . For example, sales and customer support can provide customer feedback to product engineers so they can consider creating a new feature to address a product deficiency. Engineering then coordinates with marketing, which takes the lead in developing messaging about the new feature and communicating it to the market. Without such coordination, the product's shortcoming would go unaddressed and perpetuate poor customer experience.

Examples of good customer experience

Positive customer experience often revolves around listening to customer feedback and turning that into actionable insights. The following are some examples of CX strategies:

• Netflix's personalization strategies. Personalization provides customers with content and other marketing materials based on their individual preferences and past behaviors. Personalization can improve CX, boost sales, and enhance brand and customer loyalty by offering customers goods and services that they are more likely to be interested in. Netflix's personalization strategy is an example of this approach. Netflix's personalization engine recommends media content that it predicts a customer will enjoy based on past consumption and any rating feedback the customer provides; these predictions increase in accuracy as a customer consumes more content and provides more ratings.
• Microsoft's customer feedback collection. When companies listen to their customers' thoughts and feelings about a product or service, they are able to respond to that feedback positively. Companies can collect customer feedback through deploying post-interaction surveys, listening to recorded phone calls, using analytics tools and looking at social media. Microsoft uses customer feedback forums to get suggestions from customers and let them vote on their favorite feature ideas.
• Chewy's emotional connections. Customers are more likely to engage with brands that they have emotional connections to. To spark this connection, companies identify their customers' emotional motivators, such as the desire to feel successful or unique or a sense of belonging. For example, the e-commerce pet supply company Chewy is known for sending flowers and handwritten cards when a customer's pet dies, which fosters trust and loyalty.

Causes of bad customer experience

The quality of a customer's experience can make or break a company. Take the example of a company that sells an innovative, award-winning product. However, when customers ask for assistance, their calls aren't returned, and their issues go unresolved. In this example, the poor quality of customer service defines customer experience, undercutting the value of the company's innovative product.

CX strategies fail because of a variety of factors , such as the following:

• Lack of alignment across the organization. Achieving good CX requires an organization to be aligned across a variety of departments. All team members should understand and be working toward the same CX goals. A customer support team, for example, can be fully invested in a customer experience project, but if the sales team isn't, then poor CX is likely to occur.
• Unclear customer journey. Mapping out the customer journey lets CX teams identify pain points and the factors that influence a customer to make a purchase. Without an understanding of the customer journey, it's difficult for an organization to connect with its customers at the right time using the appropriate communication channels.
• Lack of technology. CX technologies can enable an organization to collect the right data, measure customer satisfaction and organize customer information. Without these tools, brands can struggle to effectively deliver a positive experience.

Measuring CX

There are a variety of metrics to measure customer experience . The most effective include the following:

• Net promoter score (NPS). This is one of the most common customer experience metrics. NPS measures brand loyalty through one question: How likely is it that you would recommend [company/service/product] to a friend? Customers typically give a 0-10 rating, which corresponds to not at all likely and extremely likely, respectively. To calculate an overall NPS score, eliminate the neutral responses, and subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.
• Customer satisfaction (CSAT). A CSAT score is another common metric that's gauged through the question: How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [service/product] you received? Customers can respond with a 1-5 rating; 1 represents very unsatisfied, and 5 represents very satisfied.
• Customer churn rate. This metric measures the rate of repeat customers. There are a variety of ways to calculate customer churn rate , such as using the number of lost subscribers or monthly recurring revenue. A good churn rate depends on many factors, such as the company's industry and location.
• Customer effort score (CES). This measures the ease of customer experience and the effort required to resolve any issues. CES is usually calculated using responses to customer feedback surveys.
• Voice of the customer (VOC). Collecting this feedback directly from customers through surveys, interviews and online reviews provides valuable insights into their experiences and expectations. Analyzing VOC feedback helps businesses understand customer sentiment and make data-driven improvements.
• Customer lifetime value (CLV). This metric measures the total revenue a customer generates over their entire relationship with the company. By understanding CLV, businesses can focus on retaining high-value customers and enhancing their experience.

Customer experience management vendors and tools

It can be helpful for brands to assess the overall customer experience they provide through CEM. Companies can use several techniques and technologies, including:

• Customer relationship management ( CRM) platforms organize and consolidate customer information into a single database. Most CRM platforms include functions such as marketing automation, lead management and workflow automation. Major CRM vendors include HubSpot, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP.
• Customer data analytics platforms enable organizations to analyze user data and implement customer segmentation. Customer analytics tools are often a feature of a CRM system, but they can also serve as standalone platforms. Customer analytics tools include Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics 360 and IBM Watson Customer Experience Analytics.
• Contact center software helps organizations monitor customer calls and other interactions and also lets them analyze customer conversations and sentiment. Vendors include Five9, RingCentral and Twilio.

Customer experience plays a part in retaining customers and driving revenue and profit. Master the top 10 customer success key performance indicators and metrics you should be tracking.

Continue Reading About customer experience (CX)

• How to create a customer satisfaction survey
• 5 tips for creating customer journey maps from buyer personas
• A strong CX technology spending plan can bring big returns
• How to collect customer feedback

Related Terms

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Customer Research 101: Definition, Types, and Methods

Pragadeesh Natarajan

Last Updated: 30 May 2024

12 min read

Table Of Contents

What is Customer Research?

Why is customer research important, types of customer research.

• 6 Customer Research Methods
• How SurveySparrow Can Help

Do you want to improve your marketing or product? Then, customer research can help.

Your customer is at the heart of all your business decisions. In fact, everything revolves around a customer. A business is about having a paying customer, and it wouldn’t exist without one.

The effectiveness of your product or marketing depends on how well you know your customers. When you know your customers better, you can make better product or marketing decisions.

In this article, we break down:

• What customer research is
• Why it’s valuable for your business
• Different types of customer research
• Six customer research methods you can use to refine and grow your business

Customer research (or consumer research ) is a set of techniques used to identify the needs, preferences, behaviors, and motivations of your current or potential customers.

Simply put, the consumer research process is a way for businesses to collect information and learn from their customers so they can serve them better.

Businesses typically conduct customer research to uncover new insights on their customers. They then use these newly uncovered insights to improve their product, craft an effective marketing strategy, and more.

Here are 2 key questions customer research helps you answer:

• Who are my ideal customers? Who is the best fit (or worst fit) for our product?
• What channels can I use to find and communicate with my ideal customers?

Online survey tools like SurveySparrow can help you answer these questions. With omnichannel survey distribution, snazzy data visualization, and 1,500+ integrations with your favorite tools, SurveySparrow simplifies customer research for your GTM and product teams.

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A. How well do you know your customers? Not knowing enough about your customers can cost you time and money.

For example, a recent survey revealed that 46% of customers broke up with a brand because they received irrelevant content pushes.

Successful marketers realize that research is necessary to understand and cater to the ever-changing needs of today’s customers. According to a study by Coschedule:

• Successful marketers are 242% more likely to conduct audience research at least once every quarter.
• 56% of the study’s most elite marketers research at least once a month.

B. You shouldn’t make assumptions about your customers’ preferences or needs. You have to go out there and get opinions from real customers.

C. You need to go beyond your general idea about your customers. The more you understand your customers, the better you’ll be able to serve them with your product or service.

D. If you want to make your product the best in the market, you need to identify any unmet needs and learn how well your product serves the needs of your current customers.

E. Customer research helps you learn more about your customers, both the potential and existing ones. Serving your customers better than the alternatives starts with understanding them better and more deeply.

F. Here are other key reasons why you should research customers:

• Know the Why : Your analytics dashboard merely tells you what your customers do. Only research can help you understand why they do that.
• Validate Assumptions and Best Practices : In most cases, guesswork leads to terrible decisions. Your customers might not need what you think they need. And what works for most businesses might not work for you. The only real way to know is to talk to your customers.

Customer research can be done in two distinct ways: primary and secondary.

Primary research

Primary research is research you conduct yourself. In other words, in primary research, you collect the data yourself. Some examples of primary research are face-to-face interviews, surveys, and social media interactions.

Secondary research

Secondary research (or desk research ) is done by someone else. In secondary research, you make use of data that’s been collected by other people. A few examples of secondary research are forums or communities, industry reports, and online databases.

Primary and secondary research can be further broken down into two kinds of data: qualitative and quantitative.

Qualitative data

Qualitative data is descriptive and conceptual. And the nature of the data makes it subjective and interpretive. Examples of qualitative data include descriptions of certain attributes, such as blue eyes or chocolate-flavored ice cream .

Quantitative data

Quantitative data can be expressed using numbers, which means it can be counted or measured. As opposed to qualitative data, it’s objective and conclusive. Examples of quantitative data include numerical values such as measurements , length , cost , or weight .

Customer Research Methods that Work in 2024 (and Beyond)

Now that you know what customer research is and why it’s important, read on to learn the different consumer research methods you can use to make the most of it.

In a survey, you ask a series of questions to your customers regarding a subject or concept.

You can conduct a survey in person, over the phone, through emails, or online forms.

Here are some advantages of conducting customer research through surveys:

• Quickly collect a ton of insightful data without the high costs.
• The data you collect using surveys is simple to analyze.
• You can ask various questions since you get a wide range of question formats.

When it comes to surveys, it’s all about how you ask. Clear and concise questions can help you get reliable information.

An online survey tool is your best bet for quickly gathering customer information. All you need to do is create a survey with a ready-to-use template and send your customers a link to take it.

If you’re in need of a cost-free and easy-to-use solution for conducting customer research surveys and beyond, consider exploring SurveySparrow . This tool aids in gathering essential data by enabling you to conduct thorough data analysis via its user-friendly and conversational survey format.

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In an interview, you speak directly to your customers and ask them open-ended questions.

• Interviews allow you to have deep, one-on-one conversations with your customers and explore a topic in-depth.
• You can go into the details, obtain data beyond surface-level information, and gather deeper insights.

While interviews allow you to probe deeper into a subject, success depends on the expertise and skills of the researcher (or interviewer) conducting the interviews.

Conducting interviews isn’t easy. It’s time-consuming and costly. However, the information you collect can be invaluable for your company’s growth.

You can meet your customers in person to conduct your interviews. Or you can use video conferencing tools such as Google Meet or Zoom to converse with your customers online.

Your analytics dashboard lets you in on your customers’ actions within your product.

Just a glance at it and you’ll know what your customers do and how they engage with your product.

The irony is that customers don’t know what they want or why. They might think they need something but that might not be the case.

What they say they need doesn’t equate to what they do.

The point is that customer-reported behavior is different from actual behavior. That’s why it pays to track and observe your customers’ behavior.

You can use heatmaps, click tracking, scroll mapping, and user-recorded sessions to gain insights into your users’ actions and behavior.

Focus Groups

In this method, you combine a small group based on certain criteria such as demographic, firmographic, or behavioral attributes.

And you ask this group about whatever topic or concept. It could be about your product, marketing message, or something else that’s related to your customers or business.

The idea is to get them to talk to each other and have meaningful conversations.

A moderator helps facilitate the conversations between the individuals in this group. The moderator will try to draw meaningful insights from these conversations and discussions.

You mainly use this technique to understand a certain topic or subject better.

Competitive Analysis

Studying your competitors’ strategies and tactics is a great way to learn more about the target market and the existing solutions.

You can analyze both your direct and indirect competitors depending on the needs you address and the customers you cater to.

You can conduct a competitive analysis from a marketing or product perspective.

If you conduct your analysis from a marketing perspective, you study your competition’s SEO strategy , landing page copy, blog content, PR coverage, social media presence, etc.

You can also conduct your competitive analysis from a product perspective and analyze your competitors’ user experience, features, pricing structure, etc.

Review Mining

The reviews of you and your competitors are another great way to get inside your customer’s head. This method can be especially valuable if you are a SAAS company.

It helps you better understand your competitor’s strengths and weaknesses as well as your own. This understanding helps you improve your own products and better address the needs of your ideal customers.

This kind of data is easy to acquire as it’s publicly available, and you can get them on:

• Review sites such as G2Crowd and Capterra.
• Forums and niche communities such as ProductHunt, Reddit, Quora, etc.

Why SurveySparrow is the Best Customer Research Tool

SurveySparrow facilitates comprehensive customer research by enabling businesses to efficiently collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback, leading to better informed and customer-centric decisions.

• Collect Feedback Easily : Create simple surveys to find out what customers think about your products or services.
• Understand Satisfaction : Use surveys to figure out how happy customers are with what you offer.
• Learn Buying Habits : Find out why customers buy certain products, which helps in planning what to sell.
• Get Product Opinions : Ask customers what they like or don’t like about your products to make improvements.
• See How People View Your Brand : Understand how customers see your brand, which is important for your marketing.
• Keep Up with Trends : Regular surveys help you stay updated on what your customers want or need.
• Group Customers : Identify different types of customers to target them more effectively with your marketing.
• Improve Customer Experience : Learn where you can make the buying process better for your customers.
• Test New Ideas : Before launching new products, check if your customers would be interested.
• Check Customer Loyalty : Find out if customers would keep using your products or recommend them to others.

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Final thoughts.

Businesses that deeply understand their customers have a huge advantage over the ones that don’t. Period.

Whatever you’re looking to learn or achieve, it becomes a lot clearer with a little research.

When done right, customer research can be your competitive advantage.

Be sure to pick a method that’s right for your situation. What are you looking to learn and achieve? Think through each research method carefully and pick the one that works best for you.

Have you conducted customer research? What did you learn? And how did it go? Tell us about that in the comment section below.

And if you’re looking to conduct customer research through surveys, feel free to check out SurveySparrow .

I'm a developer turned marketer, working as a Product Marketer at SurveySparrow — A survey tool that lets anyone create beautiful, conversational surveys people love to answer.

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User experience (ux) research: definition and methodology.

17 min read To build outstanding products and services for your customers, you need a thorough understanding of who they are, what they need and where their pain points and priorities lie. UX research helps you fully step into your customers’ shoes.

What do we mean by user experience?

User experience (UX) is a customer’s-eye view of your business as it relates to completing tasks and using interactive platforms and services.

It’s closely tied to the idea of customer experience (CX) , but rather than being a holistic view of your brand, it’s more focused on utility and usability testing – the hands-on side of things. You can think of UX as a sub-discipline of CX .

For example, CX research might consider how customers perceive a company’s customer service levels and how confident they feel in having their issues resolved. Meanwhile, UX research would focus on how successfully those customers navigate a self-service website, whether the language on that site is clear and how easy it is to use.

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What is user experience (UX) research?

User experience (UX) research is about diving deep into how customers interact with your brand on a practical, functional level, and observing how easily they can complete their tasks and meet their goals.

User research is the process of discovering the behaviors , motivations, and needs of your customers through observation, task analysis, and other types of user feedback . It can involve working directly with members of your target audience through UX testing sessions, remote session observation using digital tools, surveys to collect user feedback, and many more UX research methods and techniques.

Why is UX research important?

So what exactly is the value of user experience research? After all, you understand your business and its workings better than anyone. How can uninformed external users help you learn more?

The fresh perspective of your end-users is exactly why UX research is so valuable. Because they’re not already immersed in your language, processes, and systems, user testing participants are in the best position to help you see where things might be confusing to a newcomer who isn’t involved with your business.

Better yet, they can show you where confusion or frustration might lead a new or potential customer to miss out on product benefits, fail to convert, or even give up and look toward your competitors instead.

In areas like new product design and development , user research allows you to head off potential issues with products and services before they even hit the shelves. You can design the product correctly the first time, instead of having to fix it later when customers are unhappy.

Simply put, UX research is critical because it keeps you from wasting time, money, and effort designing the wrong product or solution. It’s valuable for all areas of your business and yields clear benefits for your product, your users, and your bottom line.

• Product benefits By asking your customers for direct feedback about a potential product, you can discover how and when customers prefer to use a product, what pain points your product will solve, and how to improve your product design .
• User benefits UX research is unbiased feedback, straight from the most valuable source: your customers. Because this type of research is not biased by investors, company leaders, or outside influences, it is the best resource for getting actionable product feedback.
• Business benefits Knowing what your users value helps you spend less time and money fixing flawed designs, speeds up the product development process , and increases customer satisfaction.

UX research helps brands and organizations to:

• Understand how users experience products, websites, mobile apps, and prototypes
• Evaluate and optimize prototypes and ideas based on UX research discoveries – and nail the design and experience early in a product’s life cycle
• Unearth new customer needs and business opportunities
• Find and fix hidden problems with products and services that arise in real-world use cases
• Make informed decisions through the product development process by testing various aspects of product designs
• Provide user experiences that outperform other businesses in your sector ( UX competitor research )
• Understand each user interaction across complete customer journeys
• Build a richer, more useful picture of your target audiences for better marketing and advertising

What’s the ROI of performing UX research?

The ROI of UX research is tricky to pin down because there often isn’t a direct, easy-to-spot correlation between time spent on it and resulting revenue. UX research can and does drive revenue, but it more directly influences metrics that show customer satisfaction, customer retention, and behavioral goals like user signups.

A simple way to draw a straight (if basic) line between UX research and its associated ROI is to calculate your conversion rate, where ‘conversion’ simply means completing the action you had in mind:

Number of people who took your desired action

—————————————————————       x 100

Total visitors/users

That percentage can be calculated and revisited over time to see how UX changes resulting from your research are having an effect.

Generally, when we talk about ROI, we’re talking about the highest possible rates of return you can attribute to an investment. But – while PWC research suggests that ROI on UX research can rise to as high as 301% – it’s better not to get caught up in absolutes with operational data like revenue.

Instead, it’s worth thinking more about the benefits that come out of tracking human behavior associated with improving your UX in general.

For example, IBM research states that 3 out of 5 users think that a positive user experience is more influential than strong advertising, while Forrester Research estimates that as many as 50% of potential sales fall through because users can’t find the information they need.

Thorough UX research can also cut a project’s development time by up to 50% .

Ultimately, when trying to track the ROI of your time spent doing quantitative and qualitative research on UX, you want to look at behavior and sentiment. If your main goal is website use, you should notice a decline in bounce rate as a sign of positive ROI. If you sell services, run regular CSAT surveys to determine how satisfied customers are with everything.

You might also find that data in unusual places. For example, if you spot a decline in chatbot requests around how to do or perform certain actions, or for information, then you know your new UX implementations are working as desired.

Those kinds of behavioral data points will shine a light on how worthwhile your UX research has been more readily than changes in revenue.

User experience research methods

The type of UX research techniques you choose will depend on the type of research question you’re tackling, your deadline, the size of your UX research team, and your environment.

There are three research dimensions to consider as you decide which methods are best for your project:

Attitudinal and behavioral

“Attitudinal” refers to what people say, while “ behavioral ” refers to what people actually do – and these are often very different. Attitudinal research is often used in marketing because it measures people’s stated beliefs and needs. However, in product design and user experience research, what people do tends to be more relevant.

For example, A/B testing shows visitors different versions of a site at random to track the effect of site design on conversion and behavior.

Another behavioral method is eye tracking, which helps researchers understand how users interact and visually engage with the design of an interface by following their gaze.

Qualitative and quantitative methods

Quantitative UX research studies collect and analyze results, then generalize findings from a sample to a population. They typically require large numbers of representative cases to work with and are structured in their approach.

Quantitative research uses measurement tools like surveys or analytics to gather data about how subjects use a product and are generally more mathematical in nature. This type of inquiry aims to answer questions like ‘what,’ ‘where’ and ‘when’.

Qualitative research methods, on the other hand, gather information about users by observing them directly, as in focus groups or field studies.

Qualitative research aims to understand the human side of data by gaining a sense of the underlying reasons and motivations surrounding consumer behavior. It tends to use small numbers of diverse (rather than representative) cases, and the data collection approach is less structured. Qualitative methods are best suited to address the ‘how’ or ‘why’ of consumer behavior.

Qualitative UX research methods

Several UX research methodologies can help UX researchers answer those big ‘how’ and ‘why’ questions, and influence the design process of any product or service you’ve got cooking. Here are just a few …

1. Participatory design

In participatory design, people are asked to draw or design their own best-case version of the tool, product, or service in question. This gives UX researchers the ability to ask qualitative questions about why specific choices have been made. If multiple participants make similar choices, it’s easy to spot patterns that should be adopted.

You might ask participants how they would redesign your website. While their responses will naturally vary, you might spot that several of them have moved your site’s navigation to a more prominent spot, or have moved the checkout from the left of the screen to the right.

2. Card sorting

Card sorting involves giving participants a range of cards that represent business-specific topics and asking them how they would sort them into groups. UX researchers are then able to probe into why their audience might group certain things, and make changes to existing offerings as a result.

If you have a wide range of products and solutions, card sorting would be a useful way to gauge how your target audience would naturally bucket them on your website. A furniture seller, for example, might use this technique to find that people are naturally inclined to group items by room, rather than by furniture type.

3. Diary studies

If you’d like to know how the UX of your product or service varies over time or throughout the length of its use, a diary study can help. Here, participants are given a way to record their thoughts as they set about using the product or service in question, noting things that occur to them as they go. This is useful as it provides real-world insight over a longer period than a one-off focus group.

Giving people access to an early build of an app and asking them to keep usability testing notes can highlight pain points in the user interface. In a one-off focus group, having to tap three times to get to an oft-used screen might seem fine – whereas participants are more likely to find it annoying in the day-to-day. This kind of longer-term usability test can provide really valuable insights.

Both quantitative and qualitative UX research methodologies can be useful when planning the design and development of your brand presence, as well as for usability testing when it comes to product and service design.

Context-of-use

By collecting and analyzing information about users, the intended use of the application, the tasks they perform with the application, and the technical constraints presented by the application, context-of-use analysis allow UX researchers to better understand the overall experience.

Typically, context-of-use analysis data is collected through research surveys, focus groups, interviews, site visits, and observational studies.

Context-of use-analysis is one method for identifying the most important elements of an application or product in the context of using that application or product. This type of UX research is typically done early in the product lifecycle and continued as data identifies which components of the product and UX are most critical.

Types of user research tools

There are many types of user research methods for discovering data useful for product design and development. Below are some common examples of tools user experience researchers may use to gather information and draw insights into mental models, or users’ thought processes.

UX research surveys or questionnaires can discover data at scale through in-person or remote polling, with specific questions designed to collate useful information about user experience.

User groups or focus groups are a form of a structured interview that consults members of a target audience on their experience, views, and attitudes towards the product or solution. They usually involve neutral parties, such as a moderator and note-taker, and are led by a researcher who asks open-ended questions focused on specific aspects of an investigation.

User interviews are one-on-one structured interviews with a target audience member, led by a UX researcher to understand more about personal experiences with the product. These user interviews can be directed to compare and contrast answers between users, or non-directed, where users lead the conversation.

Ethnographic interviews take place within the target users’ typical environment to get a better context-of-use view. Field studies and site visits are similarly observational in nature, and take place in situ where the product or service is used, but may involve larger groups.

This is not a comprehensive list of research techniques but represents some of the main ways UX researchers might perform usability testing or trial UX design.

When to conduct user experience research

Before launching a new product or service, understanding user preferences that could impact your design or development is key to success. The earlier user experience research is performed, the more effective the end product or service will be, as it should encompass the insights learned about your target audience.

As a product and service’s use and value evolve over its lifecycle, the user experience will change over time. User research should be undertaken on an ongoing basis to determine how to adapt to users’ new needs and preferences.

Five basic steps to conducting UX research

If you’re new to UX research, here’s a step-by-step list of what to consider before you begin your UX testing program:

• Objectives What do you need to find out about your users and their needs?
• Hypothesis What do you think you already know about your users?
• Methods Based on your deadline, project type, and the size of your research team, what UX research methods should you use?
• Process Using your selected UX research method(s), begin collecting data about your users, their preferences, and their needs.
• Synthesis Analyze the data you collected to fill in your knowledge gaps, address your hypothesis and create a plan to improve your product based on user feedback.

Qualtrics makes UX research simple and easy

User experience research and user testing are multifaceted and can involve a lot of both quantitative and qualitative data. To ease the process and make sure it is efficient and scalable, it’s best conducted using a highly responsive platform that allows you to collect data, analyze trends and draw conclusions all in one place.

Whether you need attitudinal or behavioral insights, Qualtrics is your go-to solution for collecting all kinds of UX data and making use of it in the context of your wider CX program .

Conduct in-person studies or send beautifully designed surveys easily and quickly, and view your results via custom dashboards and reports using the most sophisticated research platform on the planet.

Related resources

User experience 20 min read, user experience surveys 9 min read, ux research tools 8 min read, user analytics 11 min read, rage clicks 11 min read, user experience analytics 10 min read, website user experience 14 min read, request demo.

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Customer Experience Guide for CMOs to Drive Loyalty

Boost growth by enhancing customer experience to retain, grow, and attract customers

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Over 70% of customer experience leaders struggle to design projects that boost loyalty and deliver results.

Changing customer needs and behaviors have motivated CMOs to become more customer-focused. Strong, sustainable customer relationships start with understanding the value of customer experience   from the customer's perspective.

Download the customer experience guide to build a clear, customer-centric approach and:

• Deliver maximum value to customers
• Establish a “true north” to guide every customer experience decision
• Align stakeholders on specific customer experience goals

Three key elements for a customer experience strategy that delivers on customer needs and business goals

CMOs have high aspirations for customer experience (CX). Progressive marketing organizations invest in a systematic plan and fundamental CX competencies that drive sustainable, long-term value for customers, the business and employees.

• Deep Customer Knowledge
• Customer-Centric Culture
• CX-First Channel Selection
• Powerful CX Journeys

Collect, analyze and share insights that drive consistent, compelling CX

Deep customer understanding lays a critical foundation for a compelling CX — yet CMOs rank customer understanding among the top 3 capabilities gaps in their organizations.

Effective customer listening (e.g., voice of the customer [VoC]) is as much about how you use, analyze and disseminate insight across the organization, as it is what you listen to and how you listen. 

Successful CMOs build a strategy for how to collect, analyze and share customer insights for action, enabling the organization to deliver consistent and compelling experiences to customers and provide value to internal stakeholders. 

Deep customer insights lay a foundation for solid technology investment decisions.  By understanding the customer first, you can set the stage for higher adoption and greater scale when the company does invest in new technology. To drive positive impact in the form of customer loyalty and financial returns, progressive CX leaders ask the questions: “What customer objectives do we need to support? How can we use technology to support those objectives? And what types of skills are needed outside of technology?”

Deep customer insights also fuel ongoing persona development.  Most companies understand that having accurate, well-crafted personas is a critical driver of growth, but many companies miss out on the potential value by taking a “fix it and forget it” approach. Successful CX leaders treat personas as a continuously evolving tool, applying changing customer data to create experiences that resonate from the customer’s point of view. People change constantly — and personas should reflect those changes. Stay in close touch with teams that handle customer feedback, and keep personas fresh.

CX starts with outside-in understanding but must be executed from the inside-out

CMOs who successfully lead organizationwide CX start with an outside-in understanding of the customers' needs and perceptions. Then they execute inside-out by considering how CX will be defined, measured, implemented and prioritized across the organization. This requires active participation from cross-functional leadership with a long-term goal of continuously improving CX. 

To help differentiate on the basis of CX, progressive companies:

Map the customer journey end to end. Most companies start with the intention of serving customer needs. But over time, the focus drifts to short-term outcomes — clicks, purchases and email opens — often at the expense of improving customer loyalty and advocacy, which is critical to creating sustainable growth. Our 2021 Customer Experience Management Survey revealed that CX programs that exceed management expectations are 2.3 times more likely to focus primarily on postacquisition marketing efforts versus on the path to purchase. 

Build a robust measurement strategy. Progressive companies build a portfolio of marketing metrics that reflects the end-to-end CX aligned with performance objectives. A doctor can’t measure a patient’s overall health based only on their pulse. Similarly, a single marketing metric, such as a Net Promoter Score, doesn’t represent the whole picture and can’t drive real improvement. 

Nurture internal partnerships. Create a committee of CX leaders who study and identify the most strategically important customers and what’s important to them. Then set a unified vision for behaviors and activities across the organization that will enable the company to deliver a solid, consistent experience to those customers.

Prioritize the employee journey. To truly put the customer journey at center stage, give equal consideration to the “backstage” of CX. Be intentional about creating the best possible environment for the people and teams who deliver CX. Ask questions like: 

Where might there be friction between departments?

Where are individuals most and least empowered?

Are policies or operating procedures getting in the way of delivery?

How do all these factors impede or enable a smooth customer experience? 

To grow support for CX improvement efforts, it’s critical to demonstrate ROI

Everyone agrees that improving customer experience and satisfaction is a good idea, but many don’t know what this improvement is worth to the company. 

By combining customer-sourced feedback with operational data, you can paint a value picture that supports further investment in CX. Companies that connect customer satisfaction and business results are 29% more likely to report CX budget increases and a third less likely to report decreases in their CX budget.

Apply a holistic approach to CX design with a customer-centric channel strategy

An effective customer experience clarifies customers’ next steps and helps them feel confident in their decisions. Successful brands reframe their CX design strategy with less upfront emphasis on what channel to use and more emphasis on understanding how to address customers’ needs.

Customers are 3.5 times more likely to advocate for companies when they deliver high-value experiences — and customers do not assign value based on channels. Although the COVID-19 pandemic forced consumers to become more acclimated to digital channels, 57% of consumers in 2021 did not agree that online or virtual experiences are an adequate replacement for all experiences. Rather, customers want to feel like they are in control across their end-to-end journey and engaged in a hybrid world. 

Looking across the entire customer journey will provide your team with context and insight for how your brand can support customers’ needs for confidence and control in the most impactful way. This holistic approach to CX design prevents your team from focusing on a single channel, while ignoring other channels that might be relevant to customers. It also permits more flexibility to adapt CX design based on how your brand can provide confidence and clarity, regardless of channel.

Think of channels as vehicles for experience delivery — a means, not an end — when assessing CX design. The following factors can supplement your existing channel selection criteria to help determine which channels your company is best positioned to deliver:

Feasibility: Is your organization equipped to deliver on the experience as promised?

Repurposing:  Is there an opportunity to leverage an existing capability or channel?

Measurability: How easy is it to assign metrics that track value for the customer and the company?

Employee effort: Will this channel require a completely new workflow or skill?

Time: Can your organization deliver when customers expect the experience to occur?

CX ROI: What are the potential gains and costs involved?

Innovative experiences that exceed customer expectations do not have to be a grand investment built on the latest technology; they can be simple gestures of help and hospitality.

Build loyalty by striking a balance between CX improvement and innovation

In the interest of improving CX, many companies fix broken touchpoints but miss opportunities to differentiate their customer experience.

Other companies innovate CX to delight customers but fail to resolve core customer complaints or understand what types of innovation will drive the most customer satisfaction.

Progressive CX leaders strike a balance between remediating “dissatisfiers” and innovating “satisfiers.” The results are powerful, differentiated experiences that build strong loyalty and brand advocacy. 

To help your team prioritize and address drivers of dissatisfaction, be sure to:

Address the most frequent complaints thoroughly. Focusing on the most common sources of customer frustration is the easiest way to prioritize CX efforts and can reduce call volumes, improve social media buzz and online ratings, and result in less customer churn. Identify and resolve the root causes so your solution won’t just quiet the noise but will improve CX and provide long-term ROI.

Focus on high-value segments and personas first. A common CX mistake is to evaluate dissatisfiers across the entire customer base versus focusing on key customer groups. If a portion of your base drives significant revenue — or if certain customer types have greater influence — you’ll benefit from analyzing customer feedback by segment, role or persona.

View customer feedback and research in the context of operational data. The most frequent complaints don’t always drive the most customer churn. Combine VoC data and research with operational data, such as customer revenue, retention or digital data. Look at changes in customer engagement or purchase trends connected to expressed dissatisfaction to see if some have an outsized impact on customer growth and retention.

Analyze VoC data to identify core customer issues. Transactional surveys don’t always reflect the experiences that make the deepest impression on customers. Probe VoC data, particularly text submitted in response to open-ended questions, for signs of memorable experiences that influence customers’ future loyalty.

Creating new satisfiers gives the CX team a way to collaborate with peers, be seen as a source of innovation and win praise for making positive contributions. It also reduces risks, delivers value for customers and differentiates your brand. To help your team effectively lift customer satisfaction, be sure to:

Probe for unmet needs before investing in additional features, products or services. Any experience that is not valued or adopted by your customers cannot deliver the promised benefits. Before evolving technology, get a firm grasp on what customers want and need through VoC surveys, ethnographic studies, interviews, focus groups and “outside-in” customer journey maps.

Avoid strategies that improve relationships with one persona at the expense of another. Finding something that will delight all customers can be difficult. Consider potential impacts across your entire customer base and how to better target your efforts. If a new strategy may strengthen some relationships but hurt others, carefully consider whether and how to execute those new experiences.

Enhance existing products and services that align to your core experience. New experiences can become dissatisfiers, if discontinued. Focus on honing the satisfiers your company already offers — and align innovative experiences to your core customer journey. Also, measure customer awareness and perception of each new feature you launch so that you don’t inadvertently remove a feature customers valued without being aware of the impact of doing so.

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Customer Experience FAQs

How do you define customer experience.

Gartner defines customer experience as the customer’s perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier’s employees, systems, channels or products.

Why is customer experience important?

Many organizations lack the deep customer insights that drive loyalty and higher returns on customer experience (CX) investments. Focusing too heavily on short-term outcomes, such as likes and clicks, rather than long-term growth strategies, can hinder sustainable success. Additionally, struggling to demonstrate ROI makes it challenging to justify CX improvement efforts. Prioritizing customer experience is crucial for building strong, lasting relationships and achieving long-term business growth.

How can businesses improve their customer experience?

To deliver an improved, differentiated customer experience, CMOs should balance efforts to fix “broken” touchpoints that cause customer dissatisfaction with efforts to improve and elevate CX.

Drive stronger performance on your mission-critical priorities.