What Customer Research Is Actually For

A lot of customer research gets conducted after the real decisions have already been made — a product has been scoped, a feature has been designed, and the interviews that follow are really just a search for validation. That’s not research. It’s confirmation-seeking wearing research’s clothes, and it tends to produce exactly the reassuring answers everyone was hoping for.

Research is for reducing a specific uncertainty

Good customer research starts from a genuine, specific uncertainty — not “do people like this?” but something closer to “will a small business owner actually change how they invoice customers to use this, or is the current way of doing it not actually painful enough to switch?” The narrower and more honest the question, the more useful the answer.

This matters because a vague question invites a vague, agreeable answer. Almost everyone will say they’d find a useful tool useful. Far fewer will say, specifically, what they currently do, why it’s frustrating, and what would have to be true for them to change it — and that second kind of answer is the one actually worth having.

What research can’t do

Customer research is very good at surfacing real problems, real language, and real behavior. It is much less reliable at predicting what people will do with something that doesn’t exist yet. People are honest about their past behavior and unreliable about their hypothetical future behavior — which is exactly why the strongest research questions ask about what someone already does, not what they’d theoretically do.

• Reliable: “Walk me through the last time you dealt with this problem.”
• Less reliable: “Would you use a feature that did X?”
• Reliable: “What have you tried already, and why didn’t it stick?”
• Less reliable: “How likely are you to buy this on a scale of one to ten?”

Using research to say no

The most valuable outcome of a round of customer research is often a confident no — evidence that a planned feature solves a problem few people actually have, before months are spent building it. That’s a much less satisfying result to present than a green light, which is exactly why it gets skipped so often. It’s also, frequently, the more useful finding.

Treated this way, customer research stops being a formality that happens before the real decision, and becomes part of how the decision gets made in the first place.