Customer experience looked very different when Confero began conducting research in 1986.
There were no smartphones in customers’ hands. No mobile apps. No online reviews or social media conversations unfolding in real time. Businesses had fewer digital channels to manage and far fewer sources of customer data.
Forty years later, nearly everything surrounding the customer experience has changed.
But the fundamental business question has not.
What are our customers actually experiencing, and what do we need to know to make that experience better?
After 40 years in customer experience research, one lesson stands out: the best research programs never stand still.
Start With the Business Question
Customer experience research should not begin with a standard package of services.
It should begin with what the business needs to understand.
A company may need to know whether employees consistently follow an important service process.
Another may need to understand why customers abandon a transaction.
A growing organization may struggle to maintain consistency across locations.
Another business may see disappointing customer feedback without understanding what is causing it.
Those are different business questions.
They should not automatically lead to the same research program.
Mystery shopping, customer surveys, compliance audits, social media monitoring, in-app research and other methods provide different kinds of information.
The research method should follow the question—not the other way around.
Research Questions Need to Change, Too
Even a well-designed research program can lose value if it remains unchanged for too long.
Businesses evolve.
Customer expectations change.
New products and services launch.
Technology changes how customers interact with organizations.
Operational priorities shift.
The questions being asked through customer experience research should evolve along with them.
If a questionnaire repeatedly confirms something the organization already knows, continuing to ask the same question may add little value.
A better question may uncover an emerging problem, test a new priority or help leadership understand why performance is changing.
Research should continue producing useful information—not simply continue measuring what has always been measured.
Different Methods Can Reveal Different Parts of the Same Problem
Some business challenges cannot be understood through one source of information.
Imagine a company seeing an increase in negative customer comments.
Knowing that negative feedback increased is useful.
Knowing why is much more useful.
Social media monitoring might help categorize recurring comments around issues such as staff attentiveness, checkout time, product availability or incorrect orders.
Customer surveys could provide direct feedback about expectations and satisfaction.
Mystery shopping could observe what occurs during the customer interaction.
Each method answers a different question.
Together, when appropriate, they can provide a clearer picture of the business problem.
The goal is not to collect more data.
It is to gather the information needed to understand what is happening.
Technology Should Expand What Businesses Can Learn
Technology has transformed customer experience research during Confero’s 40 years.
That does not mean technology should become the point of the research.
Its value lies in what it makes possible.
Consider a business with an established customer app and loyalty program.
Customers already shopping in a location could potentially receive a simple research opportunity through the app: observe something in the store, answer a question or upload a photo, then receive loyalty points or another incentive for participating.
The technology creates another way to gather timely customer insight.
But the important question remains the same:
What does the business need to learn?
Technology is useful when it helps answer that question more effectively.
The Right Insight Needs to Reach the Right Person
How research findings are delivered has changed dramatically, too.
Modern dashboards can give organizations access to enormous amounts of information.
That does not mean every person in the organization needs to see everything.
Consider a recurring finding that shopping carts are being left throughout one store’s parking lot.
For an executive overseeing hundreds of locations, that individual finding may have limited significance unless it becomes part of a broader pattern.
For the manager of that particular store, it may be immediately useful.
The manager can investigate the problem, correct the process and determine whether employees need additional coaching.
The information did not change.
Its usefulness changed depending on who received it.
Customer experience reporting can be customized not only around what information an organization needs, but also around which people and roles need access to it.
The objective is not to give everyone more information.
It is to give people information they can use.
Research Should Grow With the Business
Some organizations Confero has worked with over the years have grown from regional businesses into much larger operations.
Growth changes the questions leaders need answered.
New locations create new operational challenges.
New markets introduce different customer expectations.
Technology creates new customer touchpoints.
Leadership structures change.
Research that supported the business at one stage may need to evolve to support the next.
That is why customer experience research works best as an ongoing partnership rather than a static program.
The research should continue changing as the business changes.
What 40 Years Has Taught Us
Customer experience research today bears little resemblance to the tools available in 1986.
The methods have expanded.
Technology has accelerated the work.
Reporting has become more sophisticated.
Customer interactions now occur across channels that did not exist when Confero began.
But the purpose remains remarkably consistent.
Businesses still need reliable ways to understand what customers experience.
They still need to identify problems they cannot see from internal reporting alone.
And they still need useful information that helps the right people make better decisions.
Forty years in business does not mean doing the same thing for 40 years.
It means knowing what remains important while continually adapting how you help clients understand it.
Continue Reading
The evolution of customer experience research is reflected in Confero’s own published history.
In 2000, Confero President and CEO Elaine Buxton wrote for Quirk’s about the different insights businesses can gain from mystery shopping and customer satisfaction research.
Twenty years later, she returned to Quirk’s to explore how mystery shopping itself could evolve to identify CX/UX pain points across increasingly connected customer journeys.
Together, the two articles reinforce a principle that still guides effective research today: different business questions require different research approaches, and the best programs continue to evolve.
From 2000:
A Comparison of Mystery Shopping Studies and Customer Satisfaction Studies