The Importance of Research & Insight in Customer Experience Design

Research and insight forms an integral part of your customer experience design. It is essential that you first understand your customers and the user experience before you build your website – which is why Profound Digital prioritises user experience research and insight above all else.

You have about 0.5 seconds to convince your customers to stay on your site. That’s less time than it takes for you to blink. Your digital functions have to do more and do it faster.

You might be feeling disheartened or frustrated that your current technology isn’t fit for what you need it to do. No doubt you want to invest and start evolving but lack the confidence to do so. You can’t justify the spend without guaranteed results.

You need 10 times more from digital, but you feel helpless.

Understanding the entire Customer Experience makes your choices obvious. You can use evidence to inform the best way to design across your website, mobile, in-store, social and B2B channels. It takes away the niggling feelings of self-doubt.

Unfortunately, it’s not as easy as choosing your technology based on your gut-feeling. And you can’t rely on ageing survey-based systems for customer research either.

In fact, relying on historical customer data is pretty dangerous with how fast things change. Your year-on-year and even month-on-month data is now completely pointless. You can thank the lockdowns for that.

You’re left with one option; contextual research and insight.

Real-time feedback through split testing and in-context surveys are a much more useful way to start achieving it. And choosing an expert external partner to guide you through research and planning without bias is a no-brainer.

Customer data should include a variety of metrics in order to get a full picture of what a customer wants and needs. Your data should include things such as real-time traffic data, customer feedback and behaviour analytics but also wider trends such as social changes, cultural shifts and wider dynamics.

Some data sources that can be utilised to inform your customer experience strategy can include customer satisfaction scores, behavioural data that shows how customers interact at different touchpoints, transactional data to understand purchase habits and even demographic and psychographic data that covers more subjective factors.

Data that can be collected includes:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
• Customer Effort Score (CES)
• Voice of the Customer (VOC)
• Behavioural data
• Transactional data
• Demographic data
• Psychographic data

This data can then be used in practice to improve website personalisation, streamline touchpoints and ensure that user experience is being prioritised at every single stage.

You can design experiences that influence your customers for predictably successful results, faster. Any tech you choose will only follow solution design, so all your focus is on the project’s aim. This means your teams combine their skills to deliver better outcomes.

And because everyone in your business will understand your audience, the customer sits comfortably at the heart of each decision. When you’re challenged daily to develop customer relationships and maintain loyalty, keeping your customer squarely in the crosshairs makes actioning your plans easier and more effective.

You can also answer important questions more confidently, like what caught their eye at that moment? How do they want to feel after buying your product? Then, you can design intelligently to unlock creative new ways to explore your business.

You’ll risk far less and get far more out of every pound you spend because customer behaviours point you to where you need to go. Some of your difficult decisions will become easier, because you’ll have the customer evidence and intent to back them up.

Owning your customer relationship is vital. Brands now realise that how they predict and influence their business’s future depends entirely on how much they know about their customers. How well they listen and react to their wants and needs.

Customer experience isn’t just digital, but digital is your most important channel. How you approach your attitude towards and relationship with your customers will fundamentally shape the experience you offer. Square pegs in round holes will be a thing of the past.

At Profound Digital we put the customer first and the only way to do that is through data & insight. We have the right tools needed to perform in depth customer experience research to really get under the skin of the customer and implement a user experience strategy that is based on real data.

For more information on how a customer experience agency could help your business, get in touch.