One of the profound weirdnesses about how businesses attempt to improve their customer experience is how little they invest in qualitative research.

Every company I’ve worked with has some kind of quantitative capability — analytics, dashboards, etc. — yet practically none have a dedicated qual researcher on their CX staff running interviews, conducting field studies, or just observing people interacting with employees in a store.

As Steven Walden says, we’ve ended up doing customer experience without including the customer, which is pretty bloody odd, especially when you consider that experiences are fundamentally qualitative in nature.

The truth is you are far more likely to spot opportunities to innovate or improve your CX from qualitative research than quantitative, not least of all because small nuances in people’s behavior can matter a great deal.

The more specialized the domain — like designing something for wheelchair users as we did on a project a few years ago — the more important this becomes.

My advice — redress the balance. Get out of the building and spend time with real people. Observe them in action. If you can afford a mega analytics platform, you can afford a dedicated qualitative research capability. The ROI from the latter will probably be far higher.

See this post on LinkedIn