Market Research:
For any business, it is imperative to have customer / market research data upfront. In fact, the analysis from the data help us to decide on the feasibility of the businesses. Not only at the initial stage of the business, but also to have a constant sense of what actually customer wants on the product or service we are providing, the research is needed.
Market Research is an all-purpose term referring to the practice of collecting and analyzing data to answer discrete business questions, while consumer research is the practice of studying consumer behavior for effective business decision-making.
In this post, we're only going to look what is customer research? Why it is needed? How this analysis helps the product companies? And finally, we'll take an example product and do the research.
Are you up for it?
Yay! Let's begin!
What is Customer Research?
Customer research is the process of gathering information about our product's purpose, development direction, and which solutions or improvements you should offer to create customer delight.
Why?
Customer research is conducted so as to identify customer segments, needs, and behaviors. It can be carried out as part of market research, user research, or design research. Even so, it always focuses on researching current or potential customers of a specific brand or product in order to identify unmet customer needs and/or opportunities for business growth.
Simple demographics of a current or future client group can be the focus of customer research (such as age, gender, and income level). These factors are crucial in determining who a product's target market is. However, such research frequently aims to comprehend numerous behaviors and motivators—factors that enhance the study of a product's use and potential.
In a nutshell:
- to understand the users' needs and pain points
- to impact the prioritization
- gain a competitive edge by improving the product
When?
- Before Launch - to understand which initiatives you should include and prioritize based on customer needs, and to develop a product-market fit
- During experimentation - to understand how the customer perceives the new features on the iteration and learn what they like and don't like
- Soft launch - to analyze how effective and useful your Minimum Viable Product is among a segment of customers, and identify changes to make before releasing the full product to market.
- Post launch - to understand customers' behavior, reactions and analyze their satisfaction, and identify potential bugs or improvement areas
How?
There are many reliable data collection methods like Surveys, Customer interviews, App store / Play store review, Online research from different websites, or third party vendors who would do the research and share us the data / reports to us.
1. Surveys:
A method of collecting information from the target customers to understand their demographics, expectations, feedback, needs and etc. Online survey or internet survey, is one of the most popular data-collection sources, where a set of survey questions is sent out to a target sample and the members of this sample can respond to the questions over the web. Respondents receive online surveys via various mediums such as email, embedded over website, social media or other modes.
The online surveys are efficient, cost-efficient and really quick way of getting the data.
There are certain hacks for sending out Online survey questions, which in return yield us better user data. Some of them are: Always know the purpose on why should we do this survey, Ask clearly, Be sensitive, Never ask leading questions, If the result of any question is a magnitude always provide options, To get the user's feedback use smileys [Bad :( to Good :))]
Read this guidance document by SurveyMonkey on the web-based surveys to get better clarity: http://s3.amazonaws.com/SurveyMonkeyFiles/SmartSurvey.pdf
2. Customer Interviews:
PM / the product person, is the voice of customer for internal team. To become a successful VOC, customer interview is a much needed method to familiarize with the customer needs. It is usually conducted as a one-on-one conversation or discussion with the small group of relevant people.
The purpose of the discussion is to identify the customer pain points, needs, the priorities of those needs, strength & weakness of the current product.
It is obvious to identify the customer to interview, before even starting the same. There is no sense of talking with irrelevant customers and getting the data. Hence, based on market segment characteristics, work with Marketing and Sales to identify potential customers. Consider current customers, the competitor’s customers, and potential customers.
The trivial workflow of the customer interview would be:
Customer identification >> Plan for the interview >> Prepare questions >> Do the ground work >> Schedule & conduct the interview >> Record the discussion >> Analyze and get direction.
3. Online research:
It is no brainer that, if we're going to research about the app the first place to go would be an App store or Play store.
The simplest way to analyze the feedback from the online (App store / other website) is:
Capture the information in a spreadsheet > Score them each from -5 to 5 (negative value specifies negative feedback) > Put them each in a specific general tag buckets (e.g. Good app, Late delivery, etc.) > Make a graphical representation. This could be done to compare the product with our competitors' products.
For example, if the feedback / reviews fall under those buckets as below:
The graphical representation would look like this:
This chart helps us to compare with the other product's performance instantly.
There are many other ways to get the data in order to improve the product or add any new feature into it. The above are most common methodologies being used in the tech industry.
That's it for now! Will catch up in the next one! ✌
References:
2 Comments
After a long ,
ReplyDeleteagain one good post
Informative 🤗
Thanks! Your comments motivating me!
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