Blog Series: Achieving Customer Understanding and Empathy

Our customer understanding and empathy blog series walks you through the strategies and tools you need to successfully reach your customers and exceed their expectations.

Empathy derives from understanding, which naturally flows from conversation. Qualitative research strategies provide a structure that transforms conversations with customers into two invaluable resources for your business: customer understanding and empathy.

These resources will support your investment in a customer experience management program that’s proactive, not reactive.

Three qualitative research strategies — in-depth interviews, journey mapping and observational interviews — clarify customer likes and dislikes, so you can determine the potential success of new strategies or if the customer wants a new experience at all.

These conversational strategies foster a rapport with your customers and remind you of your business’s goals and mission, so you not only meet customers’ expectations but also anticipate and even outperform their needs.

Read the Series

Qualitative Research Like In-Depth Interviews Helps With Customer Understanding and Empathy — Focused questions and a sixty-minute conversation with customers illuminate where and how they experience friction.

Don’t Forget About Journey Mapping to Gain Customer Understanding and Empathy — Take a walk in your customer’s shoes to recognize roadblocks in their experience, repair broken moments, reconstruct solutions and reinvent experiences — removing the risk of friction altogether.

Observational Interviews Aid in Gaining Customer Understanding and Empathy — Observing customers as they interact with your services reveals the 5 Ws of customer understanding: what they are doing, when and why they are doing it, why they are doing it that way, and whether they are interacting with your services in the way you intended.

Customer Experience Management Starts with Customer Understanding and Empathy — These three strategies — in-depth interviews, journey mapping and observational interviews — exist within a larger framework: customer experience management. This comprehensive approach prioritizes the customer, so you can develop strategies to grow your business to its full potential.

Use Customer Understanding Techniques to Design Optimal Processes — In-depth interviews and observational research can do more than identify customers’ needs and expectations. Their methodology can also be used to improve processes, especially front-office processes that are closest to your customer and your revenue.

Customer Understanding and Digital Analytics Integration — Digital analytics are no longer restricted to public-facing experiences, like your website. Leading companies now use them to enrich both customer profiles and aggregated behavioral analysis, so they have a more robust understanding of what people are doing, why, when and how.