Customer insights can boost product development, improve customer service, and spark product innovation — but it’s not always that simple. You and your product team might struggle with finding a method to gather customer insights. Or maybe you’re having trouble interpreting customer feedback and applying it to your product.
How do you use customer insights to drive product innovation for your business? Learn more about tools and strategies for gathering and analyzing customer insights below.
Understanding Customer Insights
Customer insights are trends that reflect your users’ feedback and give you actionable paths forward for addressing your target audience’s needs. It’s different from feedback, which is simply what your users say. Insights are the analysis of this data to uncover patterns and suggest the next steps for your product team. With this knowledge in hand, you can tailor your products or services to meet your users’ needs.
That’s just the start of what customer insights can do. Customer insights help you meet your users’ needs, create exceptional customer experiences, and identify opportunities for product development and improvement.
For example, eSports training platform ProGuides used Sprig’s in-product surveys to capture valuable feedback in real-time from its users. This saved time and freed up ProGuides’ support team for other matters. Based on the customer insights they gained, ProGuides added features that subscribers wanted, directly addressing user needs and adding value to their membership offer.
Common Methods of Gathering Customer Insights
To efficiently gather meaningful customer insights, you need methods that are user-friendly and quick for both your customers and your product team. With any method that’s too time-consuming or difficult, you risk gaining little to no customer insights at all.
Common methods for gathering customer insights include:
- Surveys. Your customers can tell you exactly what they like, dislike, and want to improve with your products or services. Sprig’s In-Product Surveys make it easy to gather insights. Your survey questions can be open-ended, multiple-choice, or rating-scale, and you can target them to reach any user at any point in your product experience.
- Social media. Look at comments, mentions, direct messages, and tagged content to find valuable customer insights. You can get a sense of customer satisfaction and attitude toward your products or services on social media too.
- Customer reviews. Save positive reviews for your marketing materials, but use neutral and negative reviews as a foundation for improvement. Take note of any recurring problems or issues that pop up frequently in reviews so that you can address them.
Whether you start with one method or leverage all three, put the feedback you gain to use. Product development isn’t a one-and-done cycle — there are five key stages of user research throughout the product lifecycle. It’s a constantly evolving process that requires evaluating customer insights, implementing feedback, measuring the improvements and response, and asking for customer insights again.
The Role of Customer Insights in Product Innovation
Many product teams are too close to their work to notice bugs, pain points, and other issues that their customers experience. That’s why customer insights are essential for product innovation. You absolutely need tools for gathering and analyzing customer insights that bring these issues to light so that you can make data-based improvements.
Sprig Replays provide short clips of user sessions so that you can see exactly how customers interact with your product, including those hard-to-find pain points. Instead of sifting through long sessions and overlooking data, Replays make it easy to watch clips of certain steps in the customer journey map. You can hone in on onboarding or how your customers use a certain feature.
Product teams can leverage Sprig Replays and in-product surveys for even more detailed insights. Paired with direct user feedback and footage of a user’s activity, you can understand customer pain points, troubleshoot issues, and make plans for improvement.
Tools and Technologies for Capturing Customer Insights
Surveys, social media, and customer reviews are treasure troves of customer insights. But how can you actually capture those insights without using more resources than what’s available?
For starters, an efficient analytics tool such as Sprig AI Analysis gathers customer insights for you and organizes the data. Sprig AI points out themes or patterns and outlines key takeaways for your team. It does all of this automatically and rapidly to free up your time.
Platforms such as Google Alerts are another option. These tools monitor what people are saying about your brand online by tracking mentions, keywords, and hashtags. They compile all the data gathered across social platforms and organize them in one location. These are helpful for tracking what people are saying in real-time about your brand and your competitors too.
For more direct feedback, however, in-product surveys are the most valuable tool possible for capturing consumer insights. They’re how Sprig helped online education platform Codecademy improve its messaging and drive more conversions. By learning about user goals and expectations, Codecademy tweaked its marketing and attracted more of its ideal users.
Analyzing and Interpreting Customer Insights
Once customer feedback is collected, how can you interpret that data and turn it into action points for your business?
Consider which user experience metrics you’re tracking in the first place — choose metrics that fall in line with your customer insights goals. Ask yourself: What questions are you hoping to answer with your chosen metrics? What will the data you gather tell you? For example, CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) is a helpful benchmark for ongoing assessment because it’s easy to interpret.
You should organize your insights into categories and subcategories for easier interpretation. Some categories you can create include price, quality, customer service, satisfaction, and so on. From there, you can tackle any problems that need to be addressed first or questions that need to be answered immediately.
Then, look for trends in your analysis. Is your feedback overwhelmingly positive or negative? Are there particular complaints or questions that frequently occur? Do your customers request certain features, information, or improvements?
Depending on the volume of data you gather, interpreting customer insights can be difficult and time-consuming. Sprig AI Analysis automates analysis for you with AI-generated summaries of your data. Sprig AI also suggests questions you can ask of your data, plus answer any questions you have by analyzing and searching for the answer. With Sprig AI, you can understand what your customers are saying and make key decisions based on data more quickly.
Challenges and Solutions in Leveraging Customer Insights
With so much data at your fingertips, leveraging customer insights for product innovation can be an uphill battle. You may find yourself stuck or unsure how to implement customer data into your products or services. One way to avoid this challenge is to have a clear product strategy from the start.
A comprehensive product strategy includes a vision, identified target market, competitive analysis, product roadmap, pricing strategy, and marketing strategy. While user insights inform and help shape product strategy, they should support, not derail, your approach. Ensure that customer insights come from the target market and align with your goals so that they’re relevant to your product or service.
Another way to overcome common challenges is to make a list of top-priority questions you want answered. Keep your business’s goals and values in mind as you do so. For example, if you want to use customer insights to decide what new features and products to build, use a decision matrix. This makes it easy to organize your feedback and weigh your options.
Identify features that your customers have asked for in surveys, social media, testing, or reviews. Think about the value that the new feature would add to your product or service. Then, consider how long it would take to implement the feature and how it would impact your business. By narrowing your focus on customer insights, you can answer specific questions or solve certain challenges without getting inundated with data.
Capture High-Quality Customer Insights with Sprig
With customer insights, you can create more successful products by solving pain points and addressing issues quickly. You’ll find it easy to optimize and improve your products or services after learning how your customers use and experience them. At the same time, you’ll need to interpret large amounts of data to make better decisions and measure your product’s performance.
Sprig achieves all this and more with In-Product Surveys, Replays, and AI analysis. With Sprig’s products, you automatically gather high-quality customer insights and more efficiently leverage this data for meaningful product changes. Ready to get started? Create your account today.