The most effective ways to gather customer insights

Top 5 Article Takeaways

1. Customers change and their preferences shift, their pain points evolve, and what worked six months ago might fall flat today.
2. The most effective customer insights and analytics strategies use multiple methods that complement each other. 
3. Social media may be the most efficient and honest way to gather feedback. 
4. Consider timing carefully for gathering customer insights.
5. As you gather customer insights, take privacy and data ethics seriously.

Marketers and everyone else make a lot of assumptions about their audience on any given day. Despite having limitless data at our fingertips, we generally use assumptions based on past results or previous interactions with customers to start new campaigns. We test those assumptions, make adjustments based on performance, and then continue forward. The problem is, we often keep assuming we know how our customers have evolved or what they continue to like, without actually checking in. It’s not always intentional; it’s just habit after going through many iterations of campaigns, content, and ads. 

Here’s the thing: customers change. Their preferences shift, their pain points evolve, and what worked six months ago might fall flat today. Luckily, there is an incredibly valuable resource at our disposal to make sure we stop making assumptions and use the most useful data around: customers themselves. 

There are many ways to collect customer insights, some more effective than others, depending on your goals and audience. We’ll outline some of the most effective below and give tips for making them work. 

Start with the Basics

It makes sense to approach customer insights how you would any other campaign, which means outlining the project, setting goals, sketching out a timeline, applying a budget, and assigning tasks. This gives you a clear framework for the why, what, how, when, and where of customer insights, along with a clear baseline to measure against.

The most effective customer insights and analytics strategies use multiple methods that complement each other. Quantitative methods like surveys and analytics tell you what and how much, while qualitative methods like focus groups and interviews tell you why. Behavioral data shows what customers actually do, while surveys and conversations reveal what they think and feel.

Best methods for gathering customer insights

Social media monitoring

Social media may be the most efficient and honest way to gather feedback. More people than ever before are using social media for brand research and as the first stop for information about a variety of topics. Most people interact with some form of social media daily, making it a hotbed of activity and a goldmine of information for brands.

Social media monitoring involves monitoring your brand’s mentions, reposts, comments, and likes to get a feel for how people respond to it. It may also include observing the things your audience engages with to get a better idea of their needs, challenges, demographics, interests, etc. Pay attention to the conversations happening in comments, the questions people ask, and the complaints or praise they share. This real-time feedback often surfaces issues or opportunities before they show up in traditional research.

If your brand does not have an expansive or strong digital presence, this will not deliver many insights about your brand. Some audiences may still use social media, but due to the sensitive nature of the services they received, may not want to post about their experience in depth. If that is the case, social media monitoring is still an incredibly valuable source of general insights into customer behavior rather than a commentary on your brand. 

Customer surveys

Ask and you shall receive. Customer surveys are great ways to solicit anonymous and useful information and are perfect customer insights examples. They can be long or short (but most people will not spend a long time answering questions), tied to particular purchases or services, or combined with a promotion to increase incentives for responding. 

Regular customer surveys in certain industries, such as healthcare and hospitality, are crucial to delivering top-tier customer experiences. If you are sending out customer surveys, make the ask very clear, give upfront instructions, and start with an engaged audience.

Consider timing carefully. Post-purchase surveys capture immediate key buying insights, while surveys sent weeks later can assess longer-term satisfaction. Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys measure loyalty and likelihood to recommend, while Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys assess specific interactions.

Sales and customer service interactions

Customer service channels provide valuable insights into the challenges facing customers, and sales channels deliver insights into the products or services most important to your customers. 

If you hope to use this information for customer insights, you can collect both quantitative and qualitative data in a repository that can be referenced and catalogued or consider buying customer analytics software. Track common questions, frequent complaints, feature requests, and reasons for purchase decisions. Customer service tickets, chat transcripts, and sales call recordings contain rich information about what’s working and what’s not.

Mystery shopping

Yes, it still exists, and yes, it’s still useful. Mystery shopping is the process of hiring someone to shop anonymously on your site or in-person, who then relays their experience with your brand. The anonymous part is key as nothing should change to accommodate a “special customer,” delivering an account of an unfiltered or unbiased process. 

The actionable customer insights gathered can be used to make adjustments to the client experience founded in more objective data. Unlike surveys, where customers self-report, mystery shopping provides a controlled evaluation using consistent criteria across locations or time periods. It also catches issues that customers might tolerate without complaining about, but that still degrade their experience.

Online reviews

While online reviews are vital to the success of a company, with decreases in rankings causing direct ramifications for businesses, it might not be the best source of customer experience insight. Reviews tend to represent extremes. Customers who are very satisfied or very dissatisfied are most likely to leave reviews, while the majority in the middle stay silent. This selection bias means reviews may not represent your typical customer experience. Additionally, review fraud and competitor sabotage are ongoing challenges that can skew perceptions.

That said, reviews contain valuable insights when analyzed properly. Look beyond star ratings to read what customers actually say. Common themes in reviews reveal your true strengths and weaknesses. Tools using sentiment analysis and text mining can identify patterns across hundreds or thousands of reviews that would be impossible to spot manually

Take data privacy seriously

As you gather customer insights, take privacy and data ethics seriously. Regulations like GDPR in Europe and CCPA in California set standards for how you can collect, store, and use customer data. Beyond legal compliance, ethical data practices build trust with customers who are increasingly aware and concerned about how companies use their information. Be transparent about what data you collect and how you use it. Provide clear opt-outs and respect customer preferences.