How to Conduct Customer Experience Research for eCom

Customer Experience (CX) research is essential for any ecommerce store. It helps you understand your customers’ experiences and needs, so that you can make your business better. But it’s not always easy to know how to conduct CX research. What questions should you ask? How can you get reliable answers? In this article, we’ll discuss the different types of CX research and provide tips for getting the most out of each one.

• Types of Customer Experience Research
• Tips for Conducting Customer Experience Research
• Conclusion on customer experience research

Types of Customer Experience Research

There are a few main types of CX research: surveys, interviews, usability testing and analytics. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses, so let’s take a look at what they can do for your business.

Surveys

Surveys are great for quickly gathering feedback from a large number of people. They’re also relatively inexpensive and easy to set up. However, they don’t always give you deep insights or capture qualitative data like interviews do.

Interviews

Interviews allow you to dive deeper into customer problems and gain valuable insights into their experiences with your store or product. You can conduct these interviews in person or over the phone or video chat—whichever method works best for you and your budget. The downside is that interviews require a lot of time and effort to set up, so it may be best to reserve them for specific problems that need further exploration.

Usability Testing

Usability testing helps identify website design issues by having users perform tasks on your site while being observed (either in person or remotely). This type of testing allows you to uncover user frustrations quickly without having to invest too much time or money into the process. The downside is that it only reveals surface-level issues—it doesn’t provide deep insights into user motivations or experiences like surveys or interviews do.

Analytics

Analytics give you data-driven insights into how customers are using your site—and where they might be struggling along the way. Analytics tools like Google Analytics can provide useful information about page views, bounce rates, visits per page and more—allowing you to make informed decisions about how to improve customer experiences on your site. As with usability testing though, analytics don’t offer deep insights into why users are doing what they’re doing; they just tell you what they did (or didn’t do).

Tips for Conducting Customer Experience Research

Now that we know what kinds of CX research are available, here are some tips for making sure yours is successful:

1. Start With Your Goals

Before conducting any kind of CX research, think about what results would be most helpful for improving customer experience on your site/store/product. Knowing this ahead of time will help guide you in the right direction when it comes time to select the right type(s) of research methods to use.

2. Prioritize Quality Over Quantity

Quality data is much more valuable than quantity when it comes to researching customer experiences; focus on getting insights from targeted groups instead of trying to survey as many people as possible in a short amount of time (which usually yields unreliable results).

3. Test Constantly

Don’t just conduct customer experience research once; constantly measure how users interact with your business so that you can continually improve their experiences over time! Use multiple methods throughout the year if necessary—surveys during slower periods; usability tests after launching new features; analytics all year round; etc.—to get an accurate picture of how customers perceive your business at any given moment.

4. Follow Up After Research

Once the research has been conducted, follow up with customers who provided feedback (if allowed); thank them for taking part in the study and let them know what changes have been made as a result! This encourages repeat participation from those same customers in future studies too (not to mention goodwill between them & your company!).

Conclusion on customer experience research

Customer experience research plays an important role in helping businesses understand their customers better—but there's no “one size fits all approach". Different types of CX research serve different purposes; some uncover surface-level issues while others reveal deeper motivations behind customer behaviors & decisions online & offline alike! By following our tips above & focusing on quality rather than quantity when conducting such studies though - ecommerce owners should be able gather all sorts meaningful insights needed to create better shopping experiences & increase sales over time!