How can market research professionals leverage the hot topic of “customer experience” to boost our career opportunities? Trust us, if you have been in market research and customer insights for more than 5 years, you likely have “CX” in your background—you just didn’t call it that at the time. Here are 7 classic “market research” project scopes that are, as of 2017, often referred to as “CX research”.
1: Customer Feedback
In short, any kind of customer feedback can fall under the CX umbrella. The many types of customer feedback include feedback about a product, website, or customer service experience…among others. For example, monitoring and analyzing customer experiences with returns or billing disputes is now often defined as “CX.”
2-5: Customer Journey
In CX you will often hear a focus on understanding the ‘customer journey.” Well, if you dig a little deeper, you’ll see there’s a lot of this “CX” research are market research classics:
- Evaluation Process
- This process defines the steps a customer takes in order to consider purchasing a particular product. How does one go about researching and evaluating what their options are? Understanding a customer’s thought process and activity steps before purchasing their product is valuable information for any business.
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And a classic market research study.
- This process defines the steps a customer takes in order to consider purchasing a particular product. How does one go about researching and evaluating what their options are? Understanding a customer’s thought process and activity steps before purchasing their product is valuable information for any business.
- Purchase Process
- Another key step in the customer journey, it concerns not only how a customer decides on what product to buy but also how (and where) they make the purchase itself. As a market researcher, does this sound new to you? Nope.
- Deployment Process
- This process has to do with a customer’s experience in getting a product up-and-running. For example, a computer company may find it worthwhile to evaluate how their customers feel about laptop set-up procedures to identify opportunities to improve the process. Again, not a new type of study—just a new name.
- Retirement Process
- This relates to the experience of a customer transitioning away from a particular product or service, and is often more relevant for B2B than B2C companies. For example, if you are doing research with IT managers who run large network centers, you may want to ask how they retire their networking gear when it’s at the end of its useful life. Understanding this process can help brands find ways to keep current customers loyal at this risky juncture. Again, not a new research topic.
6: Employee Behavior
Another topic often considered as part of CX is employee behavior. That’s right, customer experience now includes employee research. This research area has arisen as recent studies have shown a strong, positive relationship between employee engagement and customer satisfaction. If you haven’t seen the research on this, search some out on Google Scholar, where you’ll find some really cool articles.
7: Product Usage
Lastly, we come to a common aspect of considered part of contemporary CX work: product usage. How does the customer interact with and use a product?
Ultimately, a company hopes that through a deeper understanding of the customer’s use experience, they’ll be able to further optimize the product, and maximize loyalty.
Is Your Resume Ready for a CX Makeover?
So, if you’re an experienced market researcher, do you notice anything about all of these “customer experience” projects? They are all classic market research studies.
There’s nothing new here. The differences lie only in semantics—useful semantics in some cases, but still just language. Project scopes, methods and applications are largely the same.
And CX is hot. Hiring managers are often looking for “CX experience.” Many cool job openings these days have “CX” in the title. As a market researcher, you can with absolute integrity refresh your resume with today’s semantics—especially if you have done any of the 7 project types described above. You may not have known it, but you have been a customer experience expert for years. And now is the time to start bragging about it.
Thanks for reading! If you’d like to go deeper on this subject, be sure to check out the related video on Research Rockstar’s YouTube channel!
