Intro
CX research is the key to a good design, user-friendly interfaces, and great customer experience overall. It helps to understand why a person needs our product and how he wants to use it.
Qualitative CX research responds to why users make a purchase or take any other action. During research you can get insights, data about needs, motives and problems of customers. It is critical to understand the needs and expectations of customers while developing a new product, adding new functionality, or improving existing ones.
In-depth interviews can help with this. With its help, you may learn more about the customer (gender, age, etc.), about his experience, hidden motives, about his attitude towards your product and competitors. The main goal of the interview is to determine the true causes and motives of the customer's behavior, because most of the time the individual does not explain why he makes this or that decision.
Understanding customer behavior is critical for businesses to deliver seamless user and customer experiences. In-depth interviews are a valuable tool for businesses to delve into the brains of customers, allowing them to identify behavioral categories and improve UX for online retailers while bridging the gap with offline stores.
Scope of application
An in-depth interview is the crucial instrument for practically any business and different kinds of research.
- Collecting information about the target audience. When a company offers a solution to a large number of people, it is important to segment the audience. Then you need to create a portrait of each group, identifying their needs, barriers, behaviors, and customer experience elements, as well as understanding how they differ from each other. All of this is relevant when developing a new product, looking for your niche or a new target audience.
- Collecting recommendations. Over time, any product needs to be refined and improved. The best way to understand what to fix or add is to talk with customers. The interview will allow you to understand how people use the product, what they don’t like, what makes it difficult to complete tasks, and what are their expectations.
- Analysis of competitors. Analysis allows you to understand the situation on the market, what trends and problems are relevant. In-depth interviews allow you to discover more about the customer perception of other companies: what problems they have using the product, the benefits and disadvantages of competitors, and what advantages your product has.
- Making a customer journey map (CJM). In-depth interviews can help you identify the client's touchpoints and the difficulties he faces at each stage. Also, you can find out what feelings each stage of interaction with the product evokes, points of growth and development of the product.
- New features (the testing and evaluation of a new solution). Before making a decision to change a feature, it must be thoroughly reviewed and evaluated. You can put a new solution to the test with the help of an interview, in which you will obtain feedback from customers. This is most commonly used in the development of new products and the evaluation of prototypes.
Behavioral segmentation
Behavioral segmentation is the process of categorizing customers based on their actions, attitudes, and preferences. In-depth interviews play a vital role in unraveling these behavioral segments because they provide a unique opportunity to interact directly with customers and gather useful insights by understanding customers' decision-making processes. These segments can be based on factors such as purchase frequency, spending habits, product preferences, brand loyalty, and interaction patterns. Companies that have this information can change their strategy and offerings to better serve the needs of each segment.
In-depth interviews may be used in 2 different situations:
- When we already know our customers, their behavior, characteristics and use interviews to confirm the available data about the segment, or to compare the segments with each other.
- Another situation is when we don’t know our target audience yet, and use interviews to collect information, build hypotheses (followed by a quantitative method), create personas and build CJM.
Improving customer experience
In-depth interviews are especially useful for online businesses, where companies face challenges in providing an intuitive and satisfying user experience. We can get insights about the problems that customers face during their purchase trip, such as navigation issues, checkout friction, or information overload by conducting interviews. Another important feature is the checkout process. By asking customers about their frustrations during the checkout process, businesses can identify areas where customers often abandon their carts. This information can be used to improve the checkout flow, remove unnecessary steps, and simplify the entire experience.
In-depth interviews can also reveal customers' preferences for personalized experiences. By understanding their expectations for personalized recommendations, businesses can implement features that deliver relevant product suggestions, based on previous purchases or browsing history. This personalization improves the CX by offering customers a customized shopping experience.
These insights can be used to guide UX improvements such as intuitive website navigation, effective search filters and personalized recommendations, as well as simpler checkout processes and improved product information.
But benefits of in-depth interviews extend beyond the digital realm. Companies that have both an offline and online presence can use these interviews to improve overall customer experience by bridging the gap between two channels. These interviews provide insights into customers' expectations, preferences, and pain points in each channel, enabling businesses to align their offline and online experiences seamlessly.
For example, in-depth interviews may reveal that customers desire a consistent brand experience across all channels. This understanding can lead to the implementation of cohesive branding elements, such as consistent visual design, messaging, and tone of voice, which create a unified and recognizable brand identity.
For example, in-depth interviews may reveal that customers desire a consistent brand experience across all channels. This understanding can lead to the implementation of cohesive branding elements, such as consistent visual design, messaging, and tone of voice, which create a unified and recognizable brand identity.
Example
We did the research for the educational platform which offers online and offline courses for the B2B segment. The company wanted to make a user-friendly interface by redesigning their website. The research combined in-depth interviews with UX-test.
The purpose of the research was to identify main customer needs and optimize user paths. The target audience was a combination of different target groups: business owners, HR managers and CEO assistants.
As a result, we discovered that each target group makes different decisions about purchasing courses and has unique goals when visiting the company's website.
For example, HR managers and CEO assistants look for detailed information about the training program, coaches, duration of the course. It’s important to be able to download the training program as a PDF file to show and offer it to the person for whom the training program is being selected. They pay attention to the history and reputation of the company, and feedback from students.
Business owners make decisions based on personal suggestions from educational companies and feedback from their colleagues. For them, the status and prestige of the training program is more important than the skills they can acquire. Usually, they don’t check the company website at all to get more information about the training program. They prefer a personal meeting with the sales manager or PDF presentation.
During the UX-test of the website we found out that user paths of our target groups were completely different as well as their customer journeys in general. In-depth interviews allowed us to correctly identify the needs of each target group and draw up a list of recommendations for website redesign based on the data received.
Conclusion
In-depth interviews are a powerful tool for improving customer experience and allowing businesses to tailor their strategies and offerings to match customers' diverse needs. By leveraging these insights, businesses can create seamless customer experiences across offline and online channels. It may help to improve their UX design, optimize navigation and checkout procedures, and bridge the gap between offline and online experiences with the knowledge gathered from in-depth interviews, ultimately fostering customer satisfaction and loyalty.
