Customer research is a concept all insight experts are familiar with, have to be familiar with to be good researchers in our industry. We understand that customer research is vital to informing successful decisions and strategies in business, but the challenges we have encountered in our mission to communicate this fact have hindered our efforts to create cultures of Customer Salience in client organisations.
As we understand the power of customer research, it begs the question: how can we use customer research to challenge the norms of how insight teams create and distribute insights in businesses to create a culture of Customer Salience? There are, in fact, a few ways this could happen, but here are two to start us off.
As experts in our field, with a marketplace full of different tools to communicate with research participants, there’s no wonder that we are able to produce a variety of impactful projects, tasks and experiences that generate truly actionable insights. And this continues to work for many in our profession. However, these methods are often focussed on in-house or client business objectives, using budgets to serve existing or bring about new strategies that steer businesses towards success. There is another use for out research tools that will benefit future research practices: seeking out exactly what customers and target segments think about market research.
A great example of this has already been conducted by FlexMR’s Head of Development & Research, Gareth Bowden. He ran an experiment with SurveyMR on FlexMR’s InsightHub platform with three set objectives surrounding participant experiences with market research, and detailed his findings in the FlexMR Insight Blog.
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| Customer research methods have more uses than simple business-focussed insight generation. When used well, we can revolutionise our own practices for better Customer Salience. |
What Gareth found was that “70% of respondents had a good or very good understanding of what market research is”, and “75% [believed that market research was primarily for selling] products more effectively and to make more money.” Now, both of these responses on their own are well-thought-out and hold a relative degree of truth to them; but together, they start to form a picture that is at odds with what market research could be - a way to connect stakeholders to customers, and a way for customers to have a say in their own customer journeys, brand experiences and to bring about relevant, meaningful change.
Using market research methods to investigate customers’ beliefs, behaviours and preferences in their market research experiences will help insight experts in two ways:
This almost meta way of using market research will require some time to do properly, but will generate better results. For how can business stakeholders hope to better connect to customers if the research team is also disconnected?
The same approach can also be applied to understand how stakeholders perceive market research, how much value they place on insights, and how they might be convinced to think more about customers on a regular basis. Insight experts, arguably should be the most knowledgeable people in the whole organisation, with knowledge of not only the business customers, but also the strategies in place, strategies currently being formulated, the objectives, decisions being made and stakeholder preferences and behaviours that will influence exactly how we distribute insights for maximum impact.
Using market research methods and tools, we can gather quick insights into stakeholder views and preferences, and use that to create new insight activation strategies that start to create a culture of Customer Salience in a way that the business will readily accept. Using surveys, polls, synchronous and asynchronous focus groups and any other research methods your stakeholders will engage with, insight teams can find out:
The information we gather from this exercise will provide us with the perfect data to form a Customer Salience Strategy. Using a mixture of incremental changes and radical changes to existing processes and the operational infrastructure, insight teams stand a chance at being included in progressive conversations and exert more influence over decisions being made in the moment than ever before.
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| This particular audit-based research will need to be re-run on a regular basis to continue it's lasting impact, but the more this is run, the easier it will become. |
This isn’t a one-and-done process, because the processes you need to put in place will change depending on the target audience. In the case of the research participants, there will be customer segments that demand different communication processes, difference levels of involvement in research tasks, and different levels of researcher contact. In terms of the stakeholders, they too will demand different insight delivery channels, require different levels of involvement in the insight generation process, and need educating to different degrees depending on their previous experience with market research.
Thus, making this auditing process a regular touchpoint for both stakeholders and participants will ensure that insight experts keep delivering relevant, impactful and effective research experiences for all involved. The more relevant the research experience, the more value will be gained from the customer insights and research.