How do you make sure your customer experience research is accurate?

Customer research lies at the heart of understanding and exceeding expectations. Customer research and understanding customer expectations is multifaceted and extends beyond functional necessities. It gets into emotional nuances and psychological triggers. For instance, an experience at a hospital transcends mere functionality—it encompasses emotions tied to life’s vulnerable moments.

Good research starts with a clear research intent, carefully crafted questions and testing to make sure that the responses to those questions provide meaningful and actionable data consistent with the research intent.

It’s also important to identify the right problem first before starting the research process. This is to avoid wasting time and resources. One thing I find useful is to gather all stakeholders and identify what’s the right problem to solve. The objective of this is to arrive at a problem statement that everyone agrees with. Ideally, the problem statement should be written clearly using simple language so everyone understands it and there’s no ambiguity to it. Once this is done, ask the stakeholders for hypotheses and assumptions they might have, pertaining to the problem that has been identified. These will then lead to the research questions and goals to address in the research process.

The depth and breadth of information required to satisfy your research intent will help you decide which research methods are most appropriate for achieving your research intent. Some research methods like surveys are better suited for breadth while other methods like interviews are good for achieving depth. Choose wisely.

Testing is a key component of customer research. In much the same way we have a research hypothesis we are trying to test, we also have a question hypothesis that sometimes we ignore - an assumption about how people are going to answer a certain question - and if wrong, we will get data that doesn't help answer our research hypothesis. So test, test, test!

Be careful what you measure! It’s important to be sure that you are capturing real behaviour within your research and not just what your customer wants you to hear. Design your business around real experiences and actual behaviour not constructed focus groups.