How to Do Customer Research: Steps, Tools, and Tips Included

Ever wonder what someone else is thinking? You’re not alone.

Companies obsess about it. They’re constantly trying to decipher what’s going through customers’ minds. Knowing how to do customer research keeps companies’ fingers on the user’s pulse. Research helps create products that improve consumers’ lives and stand the test of time.

Without further ado, here’s our all-encompassing guide to consumer research.

Want to dive right into our favorite customer research tool? Sign up for a free account on Marvin, and you can start uncovering your users’ deepest thoughts today!

What is Customer Research?

Customer research is the process of collecting and analyzing customer data. An essential component of product strategy, customer insights inform a business’s decision-making.

Through this process, teams decipher user needs and challenges. Using research results, they develop initiatives to elevate the user experience. This helps products and services meet market demands, keeping customers happy.

Companies conduct customer research to:

• Understand customers better: What do customers really want? What is their relationship with the brand? What are their behavioral and purchase patterns?
• Call attention to product issues: Customers share common pain points and problems with products (or lack thereof). Research also highlights problem areas in a product that need attention.
• Gain insight into the user experience: Customers tell you things you didn’t know.  Insights detail what they pay attention to while using a product. Gain new perspectives about your brand and offerings.
• Explain market trends: Helps diagnose the underlying reasons behind movements in sales figures (upward or downward). Customer research reveals areas of opportunity with existing products or potential new ones.

Customer research helps businesses become more user-centric. Informed decision-making shapes strategic and tactical initiatives, creating products that users love.

Difference Between Market Research and Customer Research

Both types of research help us understand aspects of a company’s environment. They seek to shed light on human behavior. Using similar methods, companies glean insights to develop product, sales, and marketing strategies.

That’s where the similarities stop.

Market research is an umbrella term for studies that examine wider market dynamics (past and present). It casts a wide net, delving into a company’s:

• Industry: Track macro industry and sector trends. Identify new business opportunities. Discover the latest technological innovations. Gauge the level of demand for products and services. Is the market expanding or contracting?
• Competitors: Identify competitive forces. How do the competition’s offerings stack up? Helps position your brand uniquely within the market.
• Customers: Collect demographic data at scale. Identify and develop your understanding of your target audience.

Teams use a combination of quantitative and qualitative studies to conduct market research. Collecting data with large sample sets helps improve generalizability. This means that results are applicable to a wider population. Market research helps businesses stay in tune with evolving trends. Learn how market research tools can drive business growth.

Customer research is a subset of market research. Studies focus on collecting data that reveals user needs and pain points.

Companies carry out studies that specifically focus on the customer experience. They use qualitative studies to understand:

• Behavioral data: What customers do, i.e., how they interact and navigate within products. Identify elements that capture their attention and any bugs or usability issues.
• Psychographic data: Customer feedback reveals the underlying user motivations and frustrations. What is the rationale behind their purchase and in-app behavior?

Companies use this data to understand and then cater to user needs. Customer research helps segment users into groups to develop into personas. This enables firms to tailor communication and product offerings towards their target audience.

Key Benefits of Customer Research

If you haven’t already, here are a few reasons why everyone needs to conduct customer research:

• Informs business strategy: Key stakeholders use research insights to make data-driven decisions. Research helps teams formulate product, marketing, and sales strategies.
• Establishes target audience: Hone in on people’s demographics and psychographics to establish user groups. Understand who your customers are, what they want, and how they consume content.
• Reveals users’ needs: Customer research deepens your understanding of user requirements, preferences, and attitudes. How do they interact with a product? Understand their online activity, communication preferences and more.
• Enhances the user experience: After mapping user needs, deliver what they’re looking for. Incorporate feedback to improve products and services and create personalized experiences. Research reveals updates and their importance, helping teams prioritize tasks.
• Targeted campaigns: Newfound customer knowledge helps marketing teams create relevant content. They create tailored campaigns that speak to users, addressing their needs. Create powerful marketing funnels, leading to better conversions and increased sales. Elevate your brand in the user’s consciousness.
• Increase customer satisfaction and loyalty: Catering to user needs equals happy customers. Satisfied customers become repeat ones, increasing their customer lifetime value (LTV). They become brand cheerleaders and recommend the product to their inner circles. Positive word of mouth.
• Strengthens competitive advantage: Companies who respond to user feedback, enjoy a stellar reputation. They separate themselves from competitors. Moreover, research helps teams discover new opportunities for underserved market needs. Find customers and capture new market segments that fly under the competition’s radar.

Customer research helps you target the right audience with the right product using the right channels. Generate more sales and keep customers happy.

Types of Customer Research

To begin, customer research relies on either primary or secondary sources.

Researchers conduct primary research by collecting their own data firsthand. They conduct either direct conversations or indirect ones (surveys, etc).

Designing their own studies, they target existing or potential customers. Primary research’s purpose aligns with business goals. However, it’s resource-intensive and can be expensive and time-consuming.

Secondary research is when companies gather insights from third-party resources compiled. These include published reports, surveys, and any other existing research documents.

Secondary sources offer information that isn’t customized to a company’s needs. They don’t focus on research goals, instead providing general information. Usually carried out by small teams without the resources to conduct their own studies.

Researchers either use a quantitative, qualitative, or mixed approach to gather and analyze user data. 

Quantitative data is numerical and measurable. It is objective and conclusive and analyzed using statistical methods. Researchers use quantitative studies to understand the ‘what’ that underlies customer behavior.

What actions did users take? How many leads converted into sales?

Conversely, qualitative research seeks non-numerical data from respondents. Asking open-ended questions leads to subjective answers that reveal human thoughts and attitudes. This non-numerical data helps you decipher the ‘why’ behind consumer behavior.

Why did users click on a button? What prevented them from completing their transaction?

Product teams generally prefer primary research as it helps answer pressing research questions. Further, insights help them create and update offerings to achieve product-market fit.

Here are a few different types of customer research that product teams undertake:

• Customer satisfaction (CSAT): How satisfied are customers with a product? 
• Customer needs and preferences: Use surveys and open-ended questions to uncover what users value and their buying motivations. 
• Customer experience (CX) market research: Teams seek to understand user behavior and interactions. Highlights usability issues, providing opportunities to improve a product. 
• Brand perception: Investigates how people perceive a brand by measuring awareness and loyalty.

How to Do Customer Research

Follow this systematic approach to conduct effective consumer research:

1. Define goals: What do you want to learn about your customers? Are you looking for usability issues in an existing product or validating ideas for a new one? Establish clear objectives for your research. Craft a compelling statement defining the purpose behind your research.
2. Identify target users: Analyze your existing user base and competitor customers. Create detailed user personas for targeted users. Ensure a variety of user groups are represented to gather data on diverse demographics and perspectives.
3. Choose a research method: Which method serves the research purpose best? Will you conduct primary or secondary research? Keep resource constraints in mind when planning studies. Use quantitative and qualitative methods to get a well-rounded picture of the user experience.
4. Prepare your studies: Meet with stakeholders to understand their customer research needs. Prepare questions for interviews and focus groups beforehand. Brainstorm questions that tell you something about the customer. Make research questions specific and clear. Learn how to craft UX research questions.
5. Collect data: Gather feedback from multiple channels. Surveys, interviews, customer reviews, support tickets, and social media provide a range of insights. Ensure accuracy and reliability when collecting data.
6. Analyze & share findings: Look for patterns and trends in your data. Tag qualitative data to categorize it into recurring themes. Learn how to turn data into actionable insights. Share insights across the organization for maximum impact. Use purpose-built customer research software to collect, analyz,e and share data. Marvin, perhaps? 
7. Iterate: Perfecting customer research is an ongoing pursuit. Collect feedback from stakeholders to understand the shortcomings of existing research. This helps enhance future projects and tailors their insights to key decision-makers.

Customer Research Methodologies that Deliver Insights

The research method you choose depends on goals and user preferences. What’s the best method to extract data from people? Combine quantitative and qualitative methods to understand user behavior and the reasons behind it.

Here are some effective consumer research methods to consider:

Surveys and Questionnaires

Structured means of gathering quantitative and qualitative data en masse. Popular tools like Typeform help you distribute customer research surveys online at scale. Alternatively, you can conduct them in person or via social media.

Surveys and questionnaires help businesses gain insight into prevailing market trends. Companies understand how their products cater to (or not) the target market. 

Alternatively, polls help you decipher customer preferences without removing them from a product. They add a quantitative component to your research. Quickly gauge user sentiment at different touch points. 

In-depth Interviews

Interviews offer deep insight into customer attitudes and preferences. Typically, one-on-one conversations are conducted with users on a much smaller scale. However, their specificity means findings are far from generalizable.

Deep dive into people’s experiences, beliefs, values, motivations, and frustrations. 

Prepare discussion guides for interviews beforehand. This helps researchers guide the flow of the interviews. 

Be sure to note down any action points or takeaways for afterward.

Focus Groups

A guided discussion where a small group shares their thoughts on a brand or product. Conducted either in-person or online, focus groups help establish collective attitudes and behaviors.

Conducting focus groups before launching a product is a great acid test to see how it would perform in the market. It helps you gauge interest and understand pricing, marketing, and other decisions.

Although the format is an open-ended discussion, it requires preparation. Develop a list of questions beforehand. Here are some must-ask product feedback questions for deeper customer insights.

Record focus group sessions so you can focus wholly on moderating the discussion. Use Marvin.

Observation-Based Strategies & Ethnographic Methods

Observe participants as they interact with a product or service. Researchers examine the context behind decision-making in a real-world setting. They immerse themselves in a user’s daily life. This helps researchers understand people’s routines and values. 

These approaches deliver rich qualitative data. Data that informs product decision-making based on user preferences.

Analytics and Behavioral Data Analysis

Conduct customer research analysis by leveraging data from various platforms. These include website analytics, CRM software, and user testing tools. 

Analyze how users interact and navigate through a product to understand usability issues. Purchase history helps you identify the frequency and average spending of different users.

Use historical data to predict possible future user behavior. Here’s our take on customer insights analysis. 

Review Mining

Once you sort through the BS, the internet is a treasure trove of information. Companies view customer reviews on forums and websites to discern whether they meet people’s expectations. If they’re falling short, and why?

Scrape reviews from social media, e-commerce websites, and feedback forms. Examine direct communication channels with customers and leads. These include sales calls and customer support tickets.

Competitive Analysis

It is explanatory, this one. Teams closely study everything about competition, including a competitor’s online presence, pricing, sales channels, advertising, and social media. This helps them benchmark the product experience against competitors.

Conduct a SWOT analysis to reveal strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Capture changes to improve your product and differentiate yourself from the pack.

How to Create a Customer Research Report

The true test of a researcher’s skills is the ability to crystallize findings into a digestible format. Reports are the final deliverables that showcase research results to stakeholders. This includes insights on the business landscape and customer groups.

To create a comprehensive research report, make sure you include each of the following sections:

• Navigation: Include a title page and table of contents. This helps readers jump to sections that they’re interested in.
• Executive summary: Addresses the purpose behind the research. Briefly describe the methods and main research findings so people can quickly understand them.
• Lit review: List the research that already exists in this domain.
• Methodology: Outline the method(s) used to collect data. How did you analyze said data?
• Analysis: Visualize data clearly using charts, graphs, and infographics. This highlights key trends, and summarizing insights helps readers quickly understand complex information.
• Discussion: Tell a story with your data. Contextualize research results by adding visualizations to support your narrative. Dive into the significance of data and what it means for generalizability. What implications does it have for the business?
• Conclusion: What are the key takeaways from the research? How do research results support or contradict your arguments? Finally, provide recommendations for future research.

PRO TIPS:

• Use professional tools: Purpose-built assets such as SurveyMonkey or Marvin help expedite research tasks.
• Review and edit: Proofread your report for accuracy, clarity, and coherence. Remove industry-specific jargon and make it easy to understand.
• Share: The entire purpose behind creating a report –  different teams benefit from the findings.

6 Best Customer Research Tools

Here are our picks of the best tools for customer research.

Since research is a diverse and multifaceted process, we’ve included different types of tools to help. For further explanation, head over to our guide to different types of research tools. 

Survey and Feedback Collection Tools

Create surveys and questionnaires with purpose-built tools. Use their templates to begin crafting your studies.

Distribution is a breeze with these tools. Branching logic helps you direct users through the feedback process. Analyze responses in-house with their visualization.

Top survey tools: SurveyMonkey, Typeform

For more, here’s our comprehensive guide to UX survey tools.

Visual Feedback and User Testing Tools

User testing tools help you optimize the user experience. Watch as people interact and navigate through a product. Heatmaps help identify elements that capture a user’s attention.

Test prototypes with A/B testing and improve a website’sinformation architecture. Discover roadblocks or bugs before they spiral out of hand.

Top user testing and visual feedback tools: UserTesting, Hotjar

Here’s our guide to the best user testing tools.

Research Repository Software

All your customer research needs a place to live. Consolidate all your quantitative and qualitative data into one database. Assemble insights using emails, support tickets, surveys, and interviews.

A dedicated user research repository, Marvin connects with apps researchers love. Interrogate your research data — or ask questions about your repository. Or search by keywords. Marvin accepts files of varying formats. Keep user data protected with HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC2 compliance.

Here’s our list of the best research repository tools. We also recently published a report about the 2025 state of research repositories.

Customer Feedback Analysis Tools

To analyze mountains of user data, you need some seriously powerful analytics.

Marvin’s  AI creates time-stamped insights and summaries from interview recordings. Summarize lengthy transcripts and derive key insights without lifting a finger. Ask AI allows you to dive deeper into your data. Explore trends and patterns across projects.

Create stunning reports and visualize data with charts and graphs. Stitch video and audio together to create highlights that illustrate key ideas. Share them via a simple access link. Make your company user-centric with Marvin.

Give it a spin. Sign up for a free account today.

Notable Mentions: Qualtrics XM

Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them

Avoid these pitfalls when planning your customer experience research strategies:

1. Data Siloes: Researchers can miss insights if data is spread across multiple platforms. Centralize data with a research repository tool like Marvin. Book a free demo today!
2. Bias: Researchers may introduce their own biases unintentionally in data collection and analysis. You can’t fully eradicate bias from a study. Acknowledge its omnipresence in your research report. 
3. (Lack of) personalization: Treating every user group differently is key to conducting effective research. A one-size-fits-all approach can alienate user groups and result in poor data capture. Create user groups based on demographic and psychographic profiles.
4. Poor quality data: Incomplete and poor data can skew results. Low response rates or participants not answering truthfully can paint a picture that’s not reflective of reality. Acting on poor data equals poor decision-making.
5. Resource constraints: A limitation unique to every business. Consider the resources available for each study you conduct. This includes the budget, staffing, and duration of the project. Do you require expertise or skilled professionals to conduct research?
6. Stakeholder resistance: Stakeholders often have preconceived notions about the relevance of research. They might even impose their understanding of customers on research results.
7. (Lack of) direction: Without a clear and articulate research goal, you waste time and other resources. Resulting in collecting poor-quality data that doesn’t inform any strategy.

For more, here are the do’s and don’ts of user research.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

Below, we clarify some recurring doubts about customer research:

Can AI Be Used in Customer Research?

You bet!

AI automates manual tasks, freeing up a researcher’s time to focus on extracting insights. It handles large amounts of data in a fraction of the time. Save the big three resources – time, money, and effort. Real-time data processing allows teams to adjust their approach as new information comes to light.

Finally, AI helps create personalized user experiences. Depending on user type, it dynamically adjusts communication or aspects of the UI. Predictive analytics help anticipate user needs before they’re needed.

How Long Should Customer Research Take?

Studies range from a couple of weeks to months. Project duration depends on several factors, including the methodology used and research objectives. Qualitative data is complex to unravel, meaning analysis takes longer than quantitative research.

Online tools make it easy to create and distribute surveys and polls. Roll these out in under 2 weeks. Conducting in-person interviews and focus groups takes longer. These studies include participant recruitment and scheduling and can take up to 8 weeks.

While planning studies, provide adequate time for preparation, data collection, and analysis.

How Often Should You Update Your Customer Research?

The frequency of research depends on your industry, research type, and business goals. Here are a few general guidelines:

• As a rule of thumb, solicit customer feedback:
  • For new product launches or updates (CES, surveys or polls)
  • To investigate big swings in sales, customer usage or retention
  • During business expansion or evolution
  • Periodically for longitudinal studies. 
• Conduct market research, CSAT & NPS surveys every 6 months. Track changes in customer satisfaction and loyalty, and general shifts in market trends. 
• Roll out onboarding or implementation surveys on an ongoing basis. Engaging in continuous discovery teams agile. 

Monitor changes in customer behavior preferences and tastes and pivot accordingly.

Conclusion

The most important input for a winning product isn’t from developers and marketers. It comes from customers. 

Companies that put customers at the heart of their research create products that users love. 

Interactions with customers reveal their diverse user perspectives and needs. Customer research sheds light on changing customer tastes and macro industry trends. Product teams incorporate insights into product updates or create new products to cater to user needs.

Continuous research helps companies improve their offerings, keeping their customers happy.Choose the right customer research software to make insights accessible and actionable. Elevate the user voice with Marvin. Sign up for a free account now!