Convincing leadership to invest in customer insights: A how-to guide

If you’re a product design decision maker, you probably know just how important it is to listen to the wants and needs of your customer. At Think Company, we’ve heard from clients and prospects that it can be a challenge to convince executive leadership to invest time and money in primary user research—a key component to having a complete picture of your customers’ wants and needs.

To help leadership see the importance of primary user research, a good place to start is ensuring that they recognize that it’s impossible to fully understand the voice of the customer without considering user research.

Give the voice of the customer a seat at the table

The voice of the customer is a term used to represent bringing the customers’ perspectives, inputs, and needs into consideration when designing products. From CEOs to product owners, many leaders have an intimate knowledge of their products and industry. However, they tend to use this knowledge to represent the voice of the customer, often with little to no investment in actual customer research—making assumptions about their customers’ experiences and needs instead of gathering feedback directly from the source.

Listening to the voice of the customer is a continuous process 

It’s likely that you’ve done some user testing in the past, but did you know that conducting customer research once isn’t enough? It’s important to set up a system for collecting continuous feedback from customers and a plan for responding to this feedback. With this customer feedback loop strategy, companies can stay in tune with their customers’ evolving needs. 

Because of the ways that customers use a tool, product, or service change over time, so do their expectations of that experience. If you stop short of incorporating the voice of the customer into regular feedback loops, you’ll start basing decisions on assumptions and opinions rather than data.And products built based on assumptions or gut feelings are usually darts shot in the dark. These products can be clunky and calcify quickly, instead of being dynamic and deeply relevant. 

3 tactics for helping leadership see value in listening to the voice of the customer 

So how can you convince your leadership team about the need for ongoing customer insights? And how can you start utilizing that information to drive meaningful results? 

There’s a saying that “research breaks ties.” Using customer research data to inform a product strategy makes for efficient decision-making and drives long-term, sustainable growth. What leadership team doesn’t want that? Here are three tactics we’ve seen succeed when convincing company leadership to invest in customer insights. If you’re making a case for more customer research, these ideas can be a great place to start.

1. Ask “Do we know what we don’t know?”

You may have already come up against this roadblock, but many leaders and product owners already believe they know their customers. This is often based on a single customer interaction from the past or information that is no longer relevant. These beliefs can be in opposition on the same product team, leading to difficulties in decision-making and prioritization.

By illustrating how much data is out there—and how much your company is missing—you can start to highlight the possibilities your business can take advantage of. But you have to highlight the lack of information first, showcasing that there are things they don’t know and that gaining that knowledge can positively impact business decisions.

When we work with clients on this, we break down the information into three categories:

1. Known knowns: Things we’re confident we know
2. Known unknowns: Things we know and have questions about
3. Unknown unknowns: Information gaps we think we might have and want to be on the lookout for

You may want to use this structure—or one like it—to illustrate your team’s lack of actionable customer data and how much could be done with that information.

2. Reveal the benefits of building a dynamic product  

Start small: listening to customer feedback and applying those learnings are the building blocks to creating flexible, dynamic products that evolve with your customer and industry. You don’t have to tackle a whole redesign to implement customer insights into your current products. Building or improving on products with an agile approach will give them a greater possibility of succeeding in their niche. Effectively utilizing customer insights can help you get ahead of evolving trends in your industry.

This is about more than just avoiding a plateau. Listening to your customers and utilizing the information they provide can create opportunities to expand your business in ways your leadership team may never have considered. Many leaders are concerned about how to future-proof their businesses, and this can help address that.

3. Set yourself up to measure your success

Measuring success requires a baseline understanding of your product or service’s current state—another great point to bring up when advocating for customer research. Along with measurements such as conversion, sales, and adoption, user research also helps track usability, accessibility, and satisfaction. Including repetitive research in a voice of the customer program can offer a way to measure success over time. 

Scale your research efforts 

Your leadership may be concerned that launching a comprehensive customer research effort will take time and resources to execute. 

Don’t be discouraged—listening to the voice of the customer can be a scalable process. There are several ways to strategically leverage the data you already have, including diving into past feedback and analytics. 

A great voice of customer example can be seen in the decision a client made to shift their project priorities to align with the customer data they were already collecting. Through data analysis, the client noticed that their website usage had dramatically shifted from desktop to mobile. Over time, their customers became more nimble—wanting mobile-first access to the website. This client shifted their product backlog to prioritize maximizing the usability of their mobile navigation over other site improvements. They didn’t need a robust voice of the customer program—they used the data they were already collecting daily to make a user-centric product decision that was deeply relevant.

Ready to drive growth with customer insights?

Investing in user research gives you the opportunity to understand the voice of the customer and how it’s critical to business success. Listening to your customers can help your organization grow in several key areas: 

• Flexibility: Research helps alleviate ambiguity by lending you answers to puzzling questions and providing an insider view of your customers’ desires. This allows for dynamic products that evolve with user interests and needs. 

• Prioritization: Research shows you what your customers care about. You can use this information to guide your decisions on what changes to make to your product, and in what order. 
• Confidence: Strategic choices become easier to make when they are informed by research. 

We know that convincing your company’s leadership about the importance of collecting and analyzing customer insights can be challenging to articulate. Using the tactics and strategies listed above, you can help your company leadership see the value in research and the ways that it can ignite growth. 

 Are you starting a design and development project? Make sure you’ve got relevant research that supports your customers’ needs—chat with our experts today!