Our Process
Customer Needs Research
Customer needs research aims to understand the specifics of an area or problem so that a solution can be created for a better customer journey. Its primary goal is to get to know customers and users better through user and market research.
When does your company need to use customer needs research?
- You sense that your understanding of the customer is too shallow and that your knowledge about the user is insufficient each time.
- When starting a new project, it is necessary to check the existence and scale of the customer's needs to be satisfied by the product.
- When developing a concept and strategy for a new digital product or service.
- When your team is testing MVP.
- When you're redesigning and changing the product strategy.
It's worth repeating customer needs research during a long-term project when the company team members find it challenging to go beyond the scheme to understand customer needs and overcome their habits to ensure customer satisfaction.
Long-term projects create situations where company team members fall into a routine. Instead of conducting customer research to identify customer needs, they say, "We've created and developed software for years; we know our users."
Customer research tools are standard methods that allow you to reduce the probability of making wrong strategic and conceptual decisions.
It reduces the costs of designing and developing solutions that won't help customers or enable you to achieve your business objectives.
Customer Segmentation
Customer needs analysis
Customer needs analysis/research focuses on examining customer data from various sources, such as market research, market trends, product usage trends, user interviews, or focus groups.
This data allows you to gain insights into user needs and customer expectations, which are crucial for developing a digital product or service that will satisfy customers.
The effort to uncover the desires of your user base and unmet customer needs can be transformed into a tangible competitive advantage.
Moreover, user needs analysis can help your customer service teams create a more customer-focused experience.
The benefits of customer needs analysis also include the following:
- Revenue growth
- Customer loyalty
- Improved conversion rate
- Satisfied users and customers
- Business growth
Types of customer needs
Customers and users have various needs that can be organized into types.
Product needs
The most fundamental customer need is related to a product's price. Various customer and user bases will have different budgets. It's important to try to strike the right balance between satisfying customers and your business goals.
You also need to consider your product's functionality. Product features are crucial from the users' perspective since they allow them to achieve their objectives. The same goes for usability, which determines the overall user experience of your products and services. It can be a crucial differentiator against the competition.
Product performance and efficiency are also equally important factors that will determine your products' competitiveness. It's only natural that customers will prefer error-free products that enable them to complete tasks as fast as possible.
Customer service needs
Customer service needs focus on making your product reliable. This image can be ruined by users encountering bugs, cognitive frictions, and other UX aspects causing frustration. It may prompt users to choose a more suitable solution.
Customers also greatly appreciate transparency. A transparent business doesn't hide information from its users. This involves understandable pricing plans and thorough explanations of changes.
Accessibility and helpful information also significantly increase user satisfaction. By providing accessibility features, you allow a broader audience to use your products comfortably. It's also crucial to ensure that your applications can be accessed both on desktop and mobile devices.
Furthermore, offering helpful instructions and information enables customers to understand better how the product works and how to achieve their goals.
Last but not least, you should provide quick and reliable customer support. Some users will encounter issues or bugs that they can't fix with provided instructions, and in such a case, your customer service team should be ready to offer help.
Emotional customer needs
Customers' emotions play a significant part in building a relationship with your business. One aspect that can appeal to them is time. Time is about the speed with which users can receive help when they need it, whether it's from customer service or finding answers within the content of your website. The quicker they can get their answers, the happier they are.
Another factor is how friendly and approachable your business is. This is heavily influenced by the tone of voice you're using and how your brand is perceived. The emotions that your brand evokes will allow customers to form positive and negative associations. Additionally, they will also influence your brand recognizability and customer loyalty.
The feeling of control is also important from the users' perspective. Customers need to feel like they're in charge and can freely move around and interact with an application. This means they can unobstructedly cancel subscriptions or add products to wishlists.
It's also important to ensure your customer service is empathetic towards users. This will impact the image of your products and brand. Moreover, it will increase the probability of making repeat purchases or recommending your services to their family and friends.
What customer feedback can we get from customer needs research?
Who is a product customer?
You will identify the ideal customer for your digital product or service.
You will specify the socio-demographic characteristics of the users and learn their skills in using digital devices and applications.
It's not the aim of the analysis itself, but getting to know your customer base is every company's foundation for product creation and development, sales, and marketing.
Product use cases
By asking the right questions, you will gain insight into the context in which your product helps the customer, whether they use it on the way to work, immediately after waking up, or during a meal. The context is critical.
The analysis enables us to understand these factors and define their significance, including the location, time, device type, product features, who is present during use, and who can distract during interaction.
Customer behavior patterns and niche markets
The customer needs research enables you to determine and describe user behavior patterns.
Deep insights into users' routines, habits, and culture enable you to create lasting, innovative solutions and services with new features that will organically support customers and form part of the established processes.
Understanding customer behavior models enables you to identify unmet target customer needs and discover undeveloped niches in an industry.
Previous user experience
What evokes negative emotions in users, discourages them, irritates them, or renders a product or service ineffective (pain points)?
What makes the users react with positive emotions, what makes them happy, builds their trust, evokes admiration, and how can they respond to a business idea?
Needs research allows you to relate to competitors, ask the right questions, and gain insight into their mistakes.
Learning about the previous user experience allows you to introduce appropriate modifications to the product concept, obtain valuable information necessary for UX design, and save valuable time and money by learning from other people's mistakes instead of making your own.
Industry language and terminology
Inappropriate language can be a critical factor impacting the product or service success.
The terminology used in product or service descriptions and the manner of providing information to the customer differs depending on the target audience of a digital product—specific industry specialists. Customers tend to label, categorize, and use shortcuts to think.
Using the right terms determines the interface's usefulness for the user and whether you can build customers' trust in your product or service.
Inspirations and valuable insights
As regards customer feedback, a casual comment, question, an unexpected interlocutor's response, or an expression of emotional needs can be an inspiration, an eye-opener, discovering an actual customer need or a customer's problem.
Customer interviews can be a treasure trove of valuable customer feedback that affects the project concept. Sometimes, they can be used as a business concept for potential solutions to meet customer needs.
Customer needs analysis process
As mentioned, customer needs analysis allows you to obtain valuable data regarding users. When done correctly, it will enable you to make informed decisions and gain actionable insights.
So, here are the steps that you will need to take.
Create a customer journey map
Take some time to take apart the customer journey and analyze its steps. This analysis will enable you to discover different needs that emerge at different stages and identify new pain points. It's an excellent start for an initial user and customer experience analysis.
Conduct user segmentation to collect data
User segmentation is valuable for dividing your customer base into manageable segments. It's usually conducted using quantitative and qualitative research methods. With customer segments, you can clearly see the usage patterns and behaviors that characterize each group.
Gather customer feedback
Collecting user and customer feedback inside the application is a precious resource of insights. Gathering it through the app allows you to continuously obtain new and up-to-date data. You can easily determine what issues users have and at which stage, leading you to create a better experience.
You can do that by using in-app surveys, reviews, or dedicated software to collect user data.
Create data visualizations
Create data visualizations to understand customer behavior and patterns better and share the analysis results more easily.
Thanks to using suitable tools, you and your development team can easily analyze emerging trends. You should select a tool that will enable you to monitor the usage of individual features to get a precise performance overview.
Moreover, it will enable you to track user engagement more closely.
Analyze your findings
Once you have visualizations ready, it's time to analyze your findings.
At this point, you should already have data regarding user problems and details regarding their behavior. Based on this, you can start developing a plan to improve user experience and customer satisfaction. Naturally, this also allows you to see what works in your business, and you can keep it that way or improve it even more.
Ensure your business processes are in line with customer needs
With all this insight and data in hand, you start making actionable changes. Ensure that your objectives align with customer needs and expectations. Start with small changes and work your way out. The improvement doesn't have to be a giant leap. It can be a series of small steps that users will recognize with time.