10 Ways of Doing Customer Research

Business exists for customers and the way you deal and respond to your customer will determine how productive is your business as well as its ultimate impact on customer retention. Ace Research proposes that the information you acquire from your customers, help you grow your business. The research method you will opt will depend upon the type of your business and the kind of information you need to acquire. And it can be done internally by assigning a task to some individuals or you may hire a consultant to conduct perhaps more transparent research for your organization.

Although several Customer Research methods can be combined to achieve certain customer research objectives but following are the main Customer Research methods businesses usually incorporate to assess customer’s perception and expectations.

Advertisements and Promotion Evaluation

The impact and effectiveness of your advertisement and promotions can be gauged efficiently with the information collected regarding; the response of your customers to your adopted strategy, it can be done by means of focus group discussions. Also, the analysis of your promotions i.e. the past trend and future plans with respect to sales volume in that given time period. These sorts of research are also categorized as activation evaluation and pre-post campaign evaluations.

Customer Satisfaction Surveys

You can observe the degree of customer satisfaction by informal approaches like a questionnaire that will target old and new customers and also a conversation with staff and the evaluation of product and services scorecards.

Factors influencing Consumers Decision Making Process

A market research, survey, or by means of the questionnaire you can determine that what factors are motivating your customers and influence their decision criteria also, what is the decision-making process they adopt.

Concept testing 

You can ascertain that either your customers consider your product as useful or it carries rational benefits. Also, by means of personal interviews and focus group discussions, you can also determine how they respond to your marketing strategies.

Positioning research

How your customers view your product against your competitors can be observed via this approach and also the revenue earned from each of your market segments and the attitude of your customer in that respective market segment will open various avenues of improving customer relations.

Brand Testing

The feelings of your customer about your brand and product names can be assessed in brand testing. The emotional responses of consumers via focus group and surveys can be determined and also, the brand performance can be tracked by allowing the brand researcher to evaluate your brand using existing available brand research.

Price Testing

The price change testing helps in understanding that how sensitive is your customer to fluctuation in price. You can do it simply by multiplying the number of items sold at the price of each item. And this will show either your revenues increased or decreased. Also, this will determine that what affect your pricing had on your product demand.

Customer service audit

Assessment of either you are providing adequate customer service can be done through, feedbacks, customer surveys, conducting customer panel and phone surveys.

Mystery shopping

To check quality control of your stores, you can designate a mystery shopper to carry out the assessment as an anonymous customer in your store. The mystery shopper shall report, behavior and attitude of sales staff, customer service approaches and sales techniques and strategies adopted by the team.

Social media monitoring

Social media engagement and feedback is a great tool for monitoring your customer’s feedback about your services. Customers are now using social mediums like Facebook to share their experiences and complaints, therefore it is becoming a very important element of business marketing. And if you have managed it productively it can serve as one of the very effective and meaningful research tools for your business.