Key takeaways
- Customer experience research is how you understand what people actually feel and do before, during, and after they buy from you or use your service, not just what they say afterwards.
- Quantitative methods tell you what happens at each touchpoint. Qualitative methods tell you why, which is where empathy and better decisions come from.
- The practical steps: build a cross-functional team, define a clear objective, recruit the right participants, design open-ended tasks, and pilot before you launch.
- The biggest risk is participant burden. The more you ask of people, the less you tend to get back, so balance depth against response rate.
- With Indeemo you can recruit from a global panel, capture videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts in the moment, and analyse responses with AI.
What is customer experience research?
Customer experience research is a set of techniques and strategies for understanding what customers experience across their whole relationship with a brand, and using what you learn to improve it. It covers everything before, during, and after the point of sale or the completion of a service. CX is a human-centric idea: the voice of the customer, and their real experiences with a brand, sits front and centre.
Traditional approaches to market research and CX leaned on quantitative insights. Increasingly, organisations want deeper meaning and richness, so qualitative methods, often built on exploratory research design, are becoming the foundation for CX work. These insights matter most at an early, seminal stage of CX and UX design: customer discovery.
It is at the discovery phase that you gather the true meaning behind customer behaviour. A human-centric approach opens up insights that CX teams often miss with traditional techniques, and the most important part of it is building empathy. Empathy drives good CX. To build it, CX and market research teams need tools that uncover the meaning, and the why, behind the numbers.
Customer experience research in a sentence: A range of qualitative and quantitative methods for understanding how customers feel and behave at every touchpoint, so you can build empathy and improve the experience you offer.
What is the difference between qualitative and quantitative CX research?
Both have a place, and strong CX programmes usually combine them. The short version: quantitative research measures what is happening, and qualitative research explains why.
How do you conduct customer experience research?
Start by building a diverse, cross-functional team, then define a clear objective, recruit the right participants, design open-ended tasks, and pilot the study before you launch.
CX teams, UX teams, and market research teams often work in silos. They may have different goals, but there is only one customer. A team with different perspectives helps you build an inclusive research strategy, and a mix of personas will uncover more valuable insight into the customer journey. A few things to consider as you design your study.
Define your CX research objective
Every project should have an overall objective, shaped by the problem statements your team and stakeholders have identified. Those problem statements should draw on what you already know from past CX projects, which helps you spot gaps in your current understanding. That review of existing knowledge is your secondary research, and it points the way for the new study.
Choose your data gathering techniques
Quantitative methods like surveys have traditionally been used to understand customer attitudes towards a product or service. They can tell you what the touchpoints are, but they tend to miss the true nature of the experience. CX research informed by qualitative data fills that gap by uncovering the meaning behind the attitudes.
Recruit the right participants
Recruiting the right participants is key to a successful CX research strategy. People can be reluctant to give up their time for qualitative research. If your organisation doesn't have quick access to the right customer journey mapping participants, a recruitment partner can manage it for you. Incentives, monetary or otherwise, help motivate strong engagement.
Design tasks and run a pilot
You'll need tasks that prompt customers to record the actions they take, the touchpoints they interact with, and the emotions they feel along the way. Keep them open-ended. An exploratory approach should let participants feel comfortable bringing you into their world.
There is always a risk of participants dropping off, in any study. So run a pilot, for two reasons. First, to check the tools and the research flow work. Second, to see how much give there is from participants. Get your own team to pilot the design: have colleagues capture and document their own experiences with your brand in real time. You'll quickly find what needs improving, and you'll get an early sense of which personas might emerge.
What are the challenges of customer experience research?
The main challenge is participant burden. CX research isn't a mammoth task, and like anything it gets easier with practice, but a qualitative study can become overburdensome if it asks too much of people over too long a period.
Be mindful of duration and what you ask of participants. Response rates are relative to the burden you place on them. A longitudinal design gives you more scope for contextual insight, but you risk responses tailing off over time. Aim to reduce the burden and make people feel their time is worthwhile, and they'll engage. It's another reason to test your protocol with your own team first. The more you ask of participants, the less you tend to get back.
Letting customers document their experiences as they happen is valuable. They bring you into their world, so you see their environment and their relationships. Qualitative techniques like videos, photos, and mobile screen recordings capture each touchpoint across omnichannel journeys and buying journeys.
What are the benefits of customer experience research?
It builds customer empathy
Empathy sits at the centre of good customer experience. Qualitative CX research captures the richness that feeds it, and empathising with your customers is essential to innovation and to delivering a better experience.
It surfaces pain points and opportunities
A holistic view of the experience uncovers key issues. When you can see pain points across multiple channels, new opportunities appear, the kind that let you and your team improve the service and provide a better experience.
It creates a shared understanding of your customers
Customer experience isn't static. Each touchpoint and interaction shapes how customers feel. CX research deepens everyone's understanding of the journey, and that understanding is shared across UX teams, service designers, and market researchers. Each team can focus on the point of interaction or the area of service that matters most to them.
It saves money
The insight from CX research helps reduce costs across an organisation. The richness of what you gather supports better decisions, so products and services adapt around the voice of the customer. Designing with the customer in mind tends to pay off, with increased referrals and sales through word of mouth.
What tools can you use for customer experience research?
CX research keeps evolving, and researchers reach for new methods and technology as user needs change. The tools that help most are the ones that capture experience in real life and bring it together in one place.
Customer journey mapping tools are now part of research design. Technology that captures the user experience in real time can feed straight into visual journey maps. Mobile screen recordings are central to CX research, helping you follow and understand the path to purchase. Diary studies capture the qualitative side of customer experience, and with videos, photos, and screen recordings you see human behaviour as it happens, with the visual detail that goes on to shape design.
The Indeemo customer experience research tool brings these capabilities together to get you closer to your customers. Recruit from a global panel, capture videos, photos, screen recordings, and texts in the moment, then analyse it all with AI, including transcription and translation, before sharing subtitled highlight reels with stakeholders. Everything in one place, from recruitment through to insight. If you've imported interviews or focus groups from Zoom, Teams, or your computer, you can analyse those with generative AI too.
Do you need to be a research expert to run CX research?
No. Whether you're an experienced researcher or a brand team running customer experience research for the first time, Indeemo can support you.
Use the platform independently if you have the expertise in-house, or partner with our Catalyst team for study design, recruitment, moderation, and analysis. If you have research ambitions but not the capacity to run the project yourself, we can lend a helping hand. We've supported thousands of research projects, from mapping the path to purchase for aquarium filters, to mortgage buyer journeys, to the patient journey of kidney transplant patients.
Frequently asked questions
What is customer experience research?
It's how you understand what customers experience across their whole relationship with a brand, before, during, and after a purchase or service, and use that understanding to improve it. It combines quantitative methods that measure what happens with qualitative methods that explain why.
How is CX research different from UX research?
UX research focuses on how people interact with a specific product or interface. CX research takes the wider view, covering every touchpoint and channel a customer encounters. The two overlap and complement each other, which is why CX, UX, and market research teams benefit from working together.
What qualitative methods work best for CX research?
In-the-moment methods tend to work well: video diaries, photos, and mobile screen recordings that capture real behaviour as it happens, rather than relying on recall. These reveal the emotion and context behind the numbers.
How many participants do you need for a CX study?
It depends on the objective, but qualitative CX studies often work well with a focused group rather than a large sample, because each participant produces rich data over time. The priority is recruiting the right people and keeping the task burden manageable.
How do you stop participants dropping out of a study?
Reduce the burden. Keep tasks short and open-ended, be realistic about duration, and make people feel their time is worthwhile. Piloting the study with your own team first helps you find and fix friction before launch.
