The quality of your product depends on the quality of your insights.
Good customer insights help you establish the right direction and ensure your products create actual value for your customers, in turn maximizing your chance of commercial success.
In this article, you’ll learn what customer insights are, how to gather them, and how to utilize them to make informed product decisions.
Customer insights are relevant pieces of information about your target customers, including their:
This deep understanding of your customers helps you prioritize problems, define solutions, and adjust communication to ensure that the product you build meets your customers’ expectations.
There are numerous ways to gather valuable customer insights. Some of the most common include interviews, surveys, behavioral data analysis, and collaborating with customer-facing departments:
There’s no better source of customer insights than an actual conversation with your customers. However, these are also the hardest and most expensive to execute.
The two most common types of customer interviews include:
User interviews work best when used regularly, ideally on a weekly basis.
Customer surveys are a great way to quickly gather insights at scale.
One way to use them is to implement quick, contextual on-site surveys after users complete a particular action. For example, a common CRO tactic is to ask, “is there anything that almost prevented you from buying?” right after a customer completes a transaction to get an insight into potential objections.
Another way is to send out a more robust (thus usually incentivized) research survey that asks deeper questions into customers’ attitudes.
Although interviews and surveys are great to gain insight into customers’ attitudes, they don’t reveal much about the actual behavior.
The truth is, what customers say and do is often different.
The best way to get insight into actual behavior is to rely on actual data. Tools like LogRocket can help you gather and analyze them.
An example of using behavioral data is feature-based segmentation. Say you are building a streaming platform by segmenting users into movie-watchers and TV-series watchers. You might discover that TV-series watchers retain better over time:
This is an invaluable insight for further product strategy.
Sometimes, you don’t need to look too far to find worthwhile customer insights.
Catch up with other customer-facing departments in your company regularly and you might be surprised by how much they actually know about the customer. After all, they work with them every single day.
For example, ask the customer support team about the most common doubts, problems, and requests customers are sending and what patterns they see in their daily interactions.
If you work in B2B, it’s worth participating in some sales calls as well. Listening firsthand to potential customers’ questions, doubts, and concerns is an excellent source of insights.
Customer insights are only valuable if they lead to actionable next steps. Gathering insights for the sake of collecting them is a waste of resources. The following are some of the ways you can successfully use them:
Product strategy aims to develop a solution that delivers value to both customers and shareholders. It’s a fundamental part of product development that you shouldn’t blindly develop.
Use collected customer insights to establish patterns and opportunities to chase.
Your customers will always have more problems than you’ll have the capacity to solve. Thus, you need a smart way to decide which problems to solve and which ones to ignore.
Customer insights give you valuable data points that’ll help you assess the severity and scale of the problems and help you choose the most impactful ones.
There’s usually more than one way to solve a problem.
The more you know about your customers, the higher the chance you’ll choose the best solution for a given problem.
When assessing a solution, look at how well it aligns with gathered insights and choose the one with the most proof.
By understanding your customer’s pains, doubts, and expectations, you can craft better messaging and run marketing campaigns that target these particular points.
The more relevant your copy, the higher your conversion rates, the better your outcomes.
Use your current knowledge of customers to define the biggest areas of opportunity, and then plan your subsequent research to dive deeper into them. This approach will yield better ROI than just randomly fishing for problems.
Insights are everything.
They help you define optimal product strategy, prioritize problems, and choose solutions. They’re also essential for planning messaging and marketing and serve as input for further customer research.
Without customer insights, you are just blindly throwing spaghetti at the wall, hoping that something will stick.
Investing time in gathering insights, that is, conducting interviews, running surveys, analyzing behavioral data, and talking with customer-facing departments, is one of the highest ROI activities you can do as a product manager.
With high-quality insights, everything else is a breeze.
Featured image source: IconScout
LogRocket identifies friction points in the user experience so you can make informed decisions about product and design changes that must happen to hit your goals.
With LogRocket, you can understand the scope of the issues affecting your product and prioritize the changes that need to be made. LogRocket simplifies workflows by allowing Engineering, Product, UX, and Design teams to work from the same data as you, eliminating any confusion about what needs to be done.
Get your teams on the same page — try LogRocket today.
Mike Korenugin, Director of Product at SE Ranking, shares the importance assuming a data-informed approach.
Priya Lakshminarayanan, Chief Product Officer at Recurly, talks about Recurly’s work to improve merchants’ subscriber experiences.
Phil Freo shares his experience scaling Close from its founding team to more than 100 people and transition to being a fully remote company.
Nick Fisk shares his experience leading transformations and transitioning companies to a product ownership model.
Learn more →
