Great customer experience looks like what your customers want it to look like. We can only get that insight by listening to customers and probing them for a deeper understanding of what they want or need as they navigate their way through their customer journeys.

Every day, customers embark on multiple journeys. How customers experience and navigate their journey often impacts whether or not they ultimately decide to engage your brand.​​​​​​​ Improving the touchpoints that make up customer journeys can only mean one thing — improving the customer experience.

It can be intimidating to gather and analyze customer comments. From surveys, to emails, and social media posts, a lot of data exists, and – thanks to modern text analytics tools – we can effectively unlock the powerful trends hidden within that data.

Virtual focus groups are a vehicle for gaining qualitative insights into target audiences as respondents participate through the comfort and ease of their own devices. While such sessions are often more convenient for participants, there are several differences to address when compared to traditional, in-person, focus groups.

As researchers, we know some aspects of studies are out of our control. We never know how respondents will answer, and sometimes their insights don’t give us straightforward solutions or suggest changes to products or services that don’t seem feasible. While you may not get the answers you originally set out to find, when you think creatively, all insights are valuable.

Our goal as market researchers is to uncover the consumer motivations or truths that can then be turned into business outcomes through strategic decision-making by business professionals. However, we know that consumers’ perceptions, emotions, and behaviors don’t always align.

Solution quality is tied directly to how a research team works with stakeholders at every touchpoint — from project inception to deliverables.

It’s an age-old question: What is the consumer thinking? Market research online communities and online research panels are methods of uncovering consumers’ preferences, motivations, and opinions. Market researchers often use the terms interchangeably, but there are differences in their size, structure, and use.

Some modern researchers have argued in favor of abandoning consumer research and instead relying solely on intuition in the quest for innovation, claiming that consumers don’t know what they want. Do focus groups make sense for today’s (or tomorrow’s) research?