Gathering User Insights

This detail explains why a balance is needed between customer research and automated data gathering.

Customer research

Strengths

Asking customers about their experience will give you valuable insights into the “why”. For example, your data indicates a feature isn’t being used. Through discussion, you find that they are using a far superior third-party product.

Weaknesses

Used on its own, this approach has weaknesses:

  • Hard to discuss with enough customers to gain a statistically significant sample.

  • Customers may overly focus on specific areas and ignore others.

  • A focus on reactive, short-term fixes, ignoring opportunities for wholesale process change.

  • Customers can become accustomed to a poorly designed process over time and not recognise it as an issue.

  • The interviewer may have a bias that skews the results.

  • Customers can become overwhelmed with feedback requests and stop responding.

Automation

Strengths

By automating data gathering, the tracking effort will be significantly reduced. Without this, your organisation may give up on tracking results and continue with failing strategies for too long. You can use clickstream and data analysis tools for customer behaviour. Getting early warning from trends is much better than waiting for complaints. Some customers will churn rather than complain, and at this point, it won’t be easy to get them back. For example, you run data analytics on your platform and discover that 20% of your users don’t complete the application form. If the customers you interview don’t raise this problem, you could miss this significant issue.

Weaknesses

Data gathering on its own has weaknesses:

  • Customers may succeed in a process but still be highly frustrated by it.

  • You can’t spot workarounds.

  • If they are outside of your systems, you will not be able to fully understand the journey they are going through.

  • Niche customers may be very frustrated, but the data averages them out. For example, an enterprise client struggles with setting up user security, whereas smaller clients find it easy.

  • A lot of data can be overwhelming and challenging to use.

  • If you don’t automate this gathering, it can be very time-consuming. This will either result in high costs, or the task will not be completed at all.

Using them together

Using data to provide indicators that gather insights, then follow up with customer research to determine the underlying reasons.

  • Having a structured cadence for contacting customers.

  • Centralise insight gathering to ensure customers are not overwhelmed by excessive requests.