CUSTOMER RESEARCH
Understand your customers
You make decisions every day. But are they based on what your customers truly experience, feel and expect? Customer research is not just about numbers: it relies on observation, listening and analysis. Training and consulting: everything you need to turn your customers’ real needs into concrete decisions.
Customer research in practice
You probably already have data: sales figures, satisfaction scores, website analytics. They tell you what your customers do. They don’t tell you why.
Customer research goes after that “why”. It relies on simple, rigorous methods: empathy interviews, field observation, personas and empathy maps, and testing with real users. This is also known as user research, or UX research.
Why it has become essential
In many organisations, product, marketing and service decisions rest on internal assumptions. We think we know what customers want because we have worked alongside them for years. And yet launches disappoint, pain points persist, and customer studies gather dust in a drawer.
Investing in customer research means replacing “I think” with “I observed”. Decisions become sharper, and your teams finally share the same voice of the customer.
My approach: listen, observe, analyse
I help you go and find information where it lives: with your customers. First, prepare the right questions. Then, run interviews and observations without influencing them. Finally, turn what you have heard into customer insights the whole team can own and use to make decisions.
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Frequently asked questions
What exactly is user research?
User research, or UX research, means observing, listening to and questioning your customers to understand what they actually experience, not what you assume they experience. Unlike market research, which measures behaviour at scale, user research looks for the “why” and the “how”. It relies on qualitative methods: in-depth interviews, field observation and user testing. The goal is not numbers but insights: a deep understanding that informs your decisions.
Do you need to interview a lot of customers to get reliable results?
No. This is one of the biggest misconceptions about user research. In qualitative interviews, 5 to 8 conversations are usually enough for meaningful patterns to emerge. Beyond that, new conversations repeat what you have already heard: this is known as insight saturation. What matters is the quality of listening and the rigour of the analysis, not the number of respondents.
What is the difference between a persona and an empathy map?
They are two complementary tools that are often confused. A persona is a composite profile representing a type of user: their characteristics, goals and frustrations. It answers the question: who is my customer? An empathy map explores what that customer thinks, feels, hears and sees in a given situation. It answers the question: what are they actually going through? The persona gives the portrait; the empathy map gives the depth.
How do you know you have enough insights to make a decision?
You have enough insights when three conditions are met: the same observations come up from one interview to the next, you can explain your customers’ behaviour without hesitation, and you can clearly state the problem to solve. If you finish a round of interviews thinking “I still don’t know what to do with this”, the issue is not volume, it is analysis. That is where expert support can make the difference.