A CX professional has an important mission: to understand customer behavior at every touch point and provide insights that the organization can leverage to create more engaging digital experiences–and ultimately impact the bottom line.
According to DriveResearch, “CX implies an experience, not a single transaction, single relationship, or single survey.” CX research needs to be ongoing, with a regular feedback loop of customer insight that drives more positive engagement.
The Challenge of CX Research
As consumers conduct more and more transactions online and digital marketing becomes increasingly competitive as companies vy for their attention, the pressure is growing for CX professionals to deliver these insights quickly. CX is “crucial for brands to survive, for them to avoid disintermediation, irrelevancy, blandness, and/or cluelessness about customer sentiment,” says Forrester.
Customer insights can inform and influence the entire business, but it begins with a seemingly simple question. Why? This is the central question that a CX professional seeks to answer about customer behavior. Why did a mobile landing page drive more conversions than the desktop version? Why did a web experience resonate well with women but not with men? Once researchers understand why the customer took an action, or perhaps more importantly, did not take it, what steps can be taken to improve the experience?
Traditional research methods — poring over user reviews, conducting surveys, or commissioning focus groups — is time-consuming and expensive. When in-person testing with a focus group becomes possible again, the average cost ranges from $4,000 to $12,000, according to Drive Research. Also, focus groups are based on discussion and emotion, so they tend to return qualitative data.
While surveys can be less costly and provide more quantitative data, sifting through the raw responses to analyze then and derive actionable insights can take weeks. Both methods can leave researchers with an incomplete understanding of the actual customer experience – and what to do next.
Become a CX Superhero
Wouldn’t it be great to bypass the tedium of collecting and making sense of unstructured data to the insights that make CX research so valuable to the organization? CX professionals can do just that by adding a customer insight solution that combines the speed and accuracy of AI processing with human analysis to their arsenal of research tools.
WEVO is a customer experience platform that acts as the research assistant. WEVO does the heavy lifting of testing pre-live digital experiences (from a single page to a multi-platform journey) with a statistically significant panel of users and delivering key findings with actionable recommendations in just days.
At the outset of a project, researchers can use WEVO to run preliminary tests that will help define and focus their efforts, to ensure they are spending their time and resources in the right place. Instead of spending weeks testing each element of a new campaign through focus groups, they can upload the entire experience to WEVO, pre-live (or live), and learn in short order exactly what’s performing well and where more work (and further testing) is needed. This shortens the cycle of testing and iterating significantly.
WEVO can underscore the recommendations that the CX pro makes by providing a complete, synthesized findings report based on a combination of qualitative and quantitative data. Researchers can also point to verbatim feedback from testers, as well as industry benchmarks that show how the digital experience compares to others in the same industry – invaluable in today’s crowded online marketplace. Plus, researchers can literally see what works and doesn’t work on a page..and why.
WEVO accurately pinpoints where and why users aren’t engaging so CX professionals can confidently explain and socialize their findings across the organization and work towards the best possible customer experience. Here are some customer experience examples to get started. For insight on customer experience metrics, this post would be a great starting point.
Don’t go it alone when it comes to CX research. Stop guessing and understand why with WEVO.
