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The success or failure of a business or service depends on many factors. Some of them you will have no control over and some will be things that you can mitigate with your preparation and actions. Thorough customer research is one of those things that can help you to reduce your chances of being unsuccessful. For the purpose of this article, a customer is defined as a person who is the one who pays or not. Not all users will be the payer of the products or services that you sell but understanding them is vital. It doesn’t matter if you are involved with public services or a private company; doing customer research will help to avoid service and product failures. This will help you to avoid most of the early pitfalls in development and design phases because it allows you to understand what customers and users are expecting before you have even built anything. If you have already built something and it isn’t getting the traction that it should, there are many issues that could be at fault and without doing the research, you can only guess which one (or combination of them) it is. This takes time and money and will give you a much shorter runway to fix the problem. What is Customer Research? Customer research, when done thoroughly and intentionally, is a combination of asking, listening, and learning. Direct and indirect customer research can consist of: interviews surveys observations shadowing internet searches reading articles blogs academic journals, etc. There are a lot of ways to do this research and it is important to include different methods to get a good overview of the market and the customers themselves. One very good resource for understanding different methods for customer research is the website This Is Service Design Doing. There are both qualitative and quantitative methods of customer research listed on this website. Both are needed to create an in-depth context to gain actionable insights for your service or product. What is Thick Customer Research? When doing research of any kind, you have the choice of doing quantitative or qualitative data. Both of these have their pros and cons. Quantitative research allows you to reach far more people than you would be able to get with qualitative; this research can tell you whatis happening. While the depth of insights and understanding of human experiences that you can get from qualitative research will tell you why it is happening when compared to quantitative research. There is no context to the what. In combination, these two create what is called “thick data”. Tricia Wang gives a greatly informative TEDxTalk on the value of thick data. Looking at the photo of this article, using quantitative data, we can ascertain that there is 1 Santa Clause under the pier, there are two people talking to the Santa character, they are potentially half way along the pier and stood in between the pillars. What we cannot know is the why of any of this situation. Without doing some quantitative research, we cannot find out: Why Santa is there? What the people are talking about? How often Santa is present under the pier? If Santa will return tomorrow. What does Santa hope to achieve by being there? Is Santa achieving what he set out to do? Like mentioned above, even if we gather the answers to the quantitative research, we still have no context or actionable insights into what is really happening. Why Do Customer Research? There are a few main uses for customer research Knowing who you need to focus on Understanding how to communicate with your customer Follow different shifts and trends in your customer base Understanding what is important to your users You need to identify who your customers are or are going to be, you need to interview some of them and find out how they are currently fixing the issue(s) that your service or product will fix (or should fix). When you research why companies fail, as mentioned above, there will be a mix of reasons. An article promoted on a US Chamber of Commerce website lists three main causes of small business failure: Cash flow problems No demand for product of service Poor management From these three, the easiest one to help with customer research is the no demand for the product or service. If you are doing good research, you will find out early in the process whether your idea is useful or sellable. Long before you invest in full development, you should be out there asking questions and testing your idea before you have built it with a simple prototype. Doing this should also help with problem number one because it will let you put off bigger financial investments and reduce the amount of time it takes to get a sellable product. It can cost a lot of money and time to get your first fully functioning product or service. These steps should not be taken until you have a proven prototype that has shown that people are interested and willing to pay for it. Outside of validating a prototype, customer research is valuable to learn how to communicate and sell to your customer, figure out how they would use your product or service (it may not be how you think), and see if there are any specific elements or competitors that you are missing. It is also important to figure out how people are currently solving the problem right now without your product on the market. Understanding this will help you understand what may be a competitive edge in the future. Which Services and Businesses Need to Do Research? Understanding your customers/users is vital whether you deliver a specific service in a larger organisation or if you are a business that serves B2B or B2C customers. Customer research is so important for most people to learn because most people will need to use it in their work. It does not matter where you are in an organisation, most people have some kind of customer that they are creating services for. But many may not use that perspective in their work. For example, people working in HR functions or the finance office of an organisation can have both internal and external customers depending on their specific role. Many will likely have both. Human Resources will have responsibility for professional development opportunities but also recruitment. Professional development roles are creating services that will be used by internal customers [how staff or their managers can access or request certain training] and external customers [how training providers can submit proposals to collaborations, etc.]. In recruitment, hiring managers need use the processes that are in place to open a role to the public, but also the recruiter needs to field questions from outside the organisation and the external stakeholder needs to be able to easily navigate the application process. Not A ‘One and Done’ The purposeful design of services and products is what will make sure that you have the best chance of becoming essential to your customers and users. Purposeful design begins with research. Deep, methodical research that can be refined, replicated and impactful. Research is also not something that you can do once or become complacent about. It is important to make sure that you are always gathering some feedback in order to refine and respond to new trends and needs. This valuable edge will give you the understanding of what it will take to continually be solving your customer’s problems. And solving a real problem is the reason you will be successful. Author Pamela Spokes works as a Service Designer in Metropolia’s RDI team. Originally from Canada, Pamela has years of experience in university admin focusing on international recruitment, marketing, and the international student/staff experience. With a Bachelor’s from Canada, a Master’s degree from Sweden, an MBA in Service Innovation & Design from Laurea, and her AmO from Haaga-Helia, she is interested in purposefully designed experiences that are centred around the user. Don’t be surprised if she knocks on your door to talk about learning co-creation methods through intensive learning experiences.