If you fancy yourself as a curious, customer-centric business owner who wants to create, make, and ship products people love, then performing great customer research (AKA UX research) should absolutely be part of your business plan.
Aside from testimonials, customer research gleaned straight from your customer base gives you a clearer picture of the people you’re serving, helps you build more relevant products, improve brand experiences, and ultimately, helps you have more empathy for your customer.
That’s a pretty important element in running a successful eCommerce business if we do say so at Sendle! While customer research can be time intensive and complex, it bears fruit and can greatly benefit your business long-term.
Be there for your audience every step of the customer journey through customer research.
Customer research is simply the process of collecting data from the people using (or potentially using) your products or services to gain feedback and improve their customer experience.
By collecting this data—the customer’s ‘voice’—you’ll be better placed to make more customer-centric business decisions.
There are many different ways you can capture the voice of your customer through research. Read on to know which types of customer research you think would better suit your business.
Here are the methods we’re going to jump into a little later:
As you can see, some customer research methods might be more accessible than others, depending on your business’ stage of maturity, budget, and time resources.
The method you decide to use will also depend on the type of data you want to collect. Would you like answers to the ‘what’ of a problem or dive a bit deeper into the ‘why’?
An example of how quantitative and qualitative data from customer research can improve a business process: Say you look at some returns data collected by your eCommerce store’s customer service team based in North Dakota.
The numbers (quantitative data) show you that people ordering your products from California have been returning your product more often than any other state.
You ponder, ‘why is this?’ so you decide to peel back some layers by undertaking phone interviews with customers in that area to learn more about their preferences and behaviors (qualitative data).
Lo and behold, the product doesn’t work well in the warmer climate, which is why they are returning your products frequently.
End result: You can begin the process of adapting your product or messaging around its uses.
Conducting regular customer research streamlines the often fluffy process of putting your customer at the center of everything you do within your business. And we think it should be part of any eCommerce store’s user experience.
By integrating a regular customer research practice in your work, you’ll:
There are loads of ways you can gather the data you need to put customers front and center of your business.
As mentioned earlier though, the kind of research method you choose will depend on a few things like time, resources, and budgets.
To make it easier for you (we’re cool like that), we’ve broken down a few of the simplest and cheapest customer research methods as well as ones that require a bigger investment in time and resources. So you can adapt and apply the perfect research method to your business, no matter what stage it’s at.
Do you have an email list? You got the makings of a survey, my friend! This simple, effective, and cheap quantitative method can be used by any type of business to enhance customer experience.
A great example of a survey is the Sendle Small Business Survey, where we ask our partners relevant questions to give us a better insight on their eCommerce experience and how Sendle can improve it.
And while you’re at it, why not join the Sendle mail list? Get exclusive access to our latest small business tips and newsletters for all things eCommerce and sustainability!
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We recommend using an easy online platform like Typeform or Google Forms to create the survey because you probably have access to these tools already.
You’ll likely get responses from customers who are already fans of your brand, but you could offer incentives to get a bigger range of customers answering (like a discount code or free product upon submitting survey answers).
The trick to successful surveys is doing them regularly (at least once a year or at different stages of a customer journey), so you can keep track of changes across your business and measure your progress and customer satisfaction. We’ll cover how to take action on your results a little later.
Having a conversation with your customers is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to gather qualitative data about how they perceive your business and interact with your product (not to mention, a good way to build rapport and relationships)!
It can be free, though you may need to incentivize your customers to participate.
Simply book in a 30-45 minute call with a sample size of your customers and let the conversation flow! Okay… maybe there’s a little more preparation than that.
This qualitative method is quick, low-cost, and a great way to nab insights from everyday human beings/potential customers.
While it might be a little more difficult to do now (guerilla research is done in-person, and we, ah, are in the middle of a pandemic)... some of the best research can come from asking randoms at your local coffee shop to give you feedback on concept products.
Pro tip: Buy them a coffee to say thanks!
Guerilla research can also be referred to as ‘intercept interviews’—where you literally intercept the types of people you want to hear from.
For example, if you’re keen to learn about people’s fitness behaviors, you can intercept them as they’re hopping off the treadmill at the gym.
Another pro tip: Maybe don’t intercept them while they’re benching 200 lbs.
Focus groups are not only a fun way to gain insights, but also a chance to build better customer relationships
Focus groups are great for capturing big ideas while getting to know your customers. However, they often require a bit more planning and resources, since it’s all about gathering a group of people together at the same time.
The value of the focus group is that there is an element of brainstorming and bouncing ideas off one another, which leads to fruitful conversations and swapping of perspectives that wouldn’t otherwise happen.
If you’re a little more tech-savvy, have a decent-size research budget, and want to nail the user experience from first site visit through to ordering and beyond, (might we remind you of this post on eCommerce user experience?) you may be interested in running user testing on your site to gather both quantitative and qualitative data.
It’s a great way to identify any gaps in user behavior or feature requests that you would have otherwise missed, or finding problems in your order flow, and it’s also helpful for future marketing and targeting initiatives.
Step 1: Define your goals
Step 2: Make a plan
Step 3: Conduct the research
Step 4: Action the findings
So you’ve got all the good bits of data to know your customers better and now you’re ready to rumble. Where to next?
The official term is to ‘synthesize’ it into a summary of findings, which will include action items for what should be changed in your product and business offerings (like customer experience, brand, platform uses, etc).
It’s a big job, so make sure you give yourself plenty of time to weed through the results and organize the information into patterns that make sense to you.
Our favorite way to do this at Sendle is called Affinity Mapping. This is where you are encouraged to use sticky notes (a UXer’s dream) with ideas and data insights, then look for connections (cluster ideas that are related to one another).
Then, create themes and groups, as well as a statement about what you learned from each group.
From there you can build diagrams, write out insight statements, or anything that helps you to further make sense of the findings.
Once you’ve done that, take some more time to think about the implications for each element of your business.
If you don’t have sticky notes and a big whiteboard, you can also do this virtually using a tool like Miro, or a spreadsheet, or even your Notes app.
Successful research is done on a regular and ongoing basis—which is why the metric you’re measuring is so important to define!
For example, if you’re looking to increase customer satisfaction, the metric might be reviews or ratings. If you’re looking at increasing sales, your metric might be order volumes. If you realize your target market is younger and tech-savvy, you could try marketing on Tiktok.
When the time comes to make updates to your business process based on your customer research findings, you should monitor performance to see if anything changes.
Keep an eye out for any patterns in your business, like customer types, or sales stats, or purchasing behaviors.
You don’t need a lot of resources to conduct good customer research: all you need is a customer-first mindset, a curiosity about people and their behaviors, and being open to new and exciting ways to improve your business and products. With how fast consumer trends change, it’s important to keep innovating with research-backed data.
That being said, one of the best innovations you can make for your business is going green! Not only is it a deciding factor for consumers now, it’s also a great way to be both sustainable and profitable.
And Sendle makes it so easy! With every package you ship via Sendle, we offset its carbon emission through environmental projects around the world. As a 100% carbon neutral shipping company made especially for small businesses, your parcels—and the planet!—is safe with us.