Our Process
Customer Needs Research
The aim of the Customer Needs Research is to understand the specifics of an area or a problem in order to be able to create a solution for a better customer journey.
When your company needs to use Customer Needs Research?
- Each time you sense that understanding customer is too shallow and the knowledge about the user is insufficient
- When starting a new project and it is necessary to check the existence and the scale of customer needs to be satisfied by the product
- When developing a concept and strategy for a new digital product or service
- When testing MVP
- When redesigning and changing the product strategy
It is worth to reapply Customer Needs Research during a long-term project research, when the company team members find it difficult to go beyond the scheme as regards the understanding of customer needs, and to overcome their habits in order to ensure customer satisfaction.
Long-term projects create situations where the company team members fall into routine, and instead of conducting a customer research for identifying customer needs they follow the ‘we’ve created developed software for years, we know our users’ line.
Customer research tools are common methods allowing you to reduce the probability of making wrong strategic and conceptual decisions.
It reduces the costs of design and development of solutions that will not be helping customers and which will not enable you to achieve your business objectives.
What customer feedback can we get from Customer Needs Research?
Product customer
We will identify the ideal customer for our digital product or service.
We will specify the socio-demographic characteristics of the users, get to know their skills in using digital devices and applications.
It is not the aim of the analysis itself, but getting to know your customer base is every company’s basis for product creation and development, sales and marketing.
Product use situations
By asking the right questions, we will gain insight into the context in which our product helps the customer, whether they use it on the way to work, or immediately after waking up, or during a meal. The context is extremely important.
The location, time, device type, product features, who is present during use, who can distract during interaction. The analysis enables us to understand these factors and define their significance.
Behavior patterns and niche markets
The Customer Needs Research enables us to determine and describe the user behavior patterns.
Deep insights into the routine, habits and culture of the users enable us to create lasting solutions and services with new features which will organically support customers and will form part of the established processes.
Being able to understand customer behavior models enables us to identify unmet target customers needs and to discover undeveloped niches in an industry.
Previous user experience
What evokes negative emotions in users, discourages, 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, how they can react to a business idea.
The needs research enables us to relate to the competitors: ask the right questions and gain insight into the competitors’ mistakes.
Learning about the previous user experience enables us to introduce appropriate modifications into the product concept, obtain valuable information necessary for UX design, save valuable time and money by learning from other people’s mistakes instead of making our 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, the manner of providing information to the customer differs depending on the target audience of a digital product - specific industry specialists. The customers tend to label, categorize, use shortcuts to thinking.
Our use of the right terms determines not only the interface usefulness for the user, but also whether we will be able to build the customers' trust in our product or service.
Inspirations and VALUABLE insights
As regards customer feedback, a casual comment, question, unexpected interlocutor’s response, 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 affecting the project concept, and sometimes can be used as business concept for potential solutions meeting customer needs.