Customer experience research is critical to understanding the needs, desires and pain points of your online customers. This research will equip you with insights to improve not only your online customer experience, but how customers experience your brand across different channels, resulting in a unified brand experience.

Also known as user research, customer experience research can be performed using several different methods, including:

• Moderated or unmoderated sessions
• Customer interviews
• Usability testing
• Card-sorting
• Five-second testing
• Customer surveys

It’s important to choose the right research method in order to gather the customer experience data you need to achieve your goals. The ultimate goal for most e-commerce retailers, of course, is boosting conversion rate optimization. However, you should identify any other goals you want to achieve before embarking on a user research project.

Here are a few examples of how we have performed customer experience research to help clients achieve their objectives.

Improving the customer navigation experience

A global household appliance retailer featured two websites with different menu structures  - one site was focused on cleaning and the other was focused on cooking. We tested the user experience of the menu structures by giving in-market participants the menu options randomised, without the category titles. We asked participants to create the categories they would expect the options to appear in, and then title and order the options within those categories. The goal was to improve the customer’s navigation experience so they could reach the product listing they were searching for faster via the journey they expected to take.

Participants completed this card sorting exercise for both the cleaning and cooking websites  - half started with one site and half started with the other site. We moderated the research activity to ask further questions about why participants made certain choices and to explore topics of interest to increase the chance of the research being successful. We were able to show the client where their current structure was meeting customer experience expectations and where new categories or changes in menu options might improve the experience.

Creating new filter options to refine searches

A global variety retailer offered customers a lot of different filter options. We re-evaluated these options by using card-sorting to determine how users would group them together and what names they would give the filters. In-market participants were given a list of all filter options and were asked to group them into categories and then title their groupings. The test was unmoderated because the task was straightforward, and we wanted to collect a large amount of data due to the large number of filter options.

From this data, we looked for overlap between options where we could narrow down the filter options and potentially create new filter categories from common groups created by the participants. The goal was to improve the customer’s navigation experience by creating filter options that allowed them to refine their searches faster using the options they expected to see.

Improving the multi-channel customer experience

A British frozen food retailer uses additional channels beyond their website to communicate with customers, including email, paper brochures and a customer support phone line. We conducted moderated user research to examine the multi-channel customer experience and determine how customers used the different channels to complete and track their food orders. During the task we addressed, if customers were using more than one channel to place an order. And if one channel (such as email) prompted them to visit the website to review and track their order.

The goal was to learn about all the potential brand touch points that could occur as part of the customer experience and identify opportunities where these channels could be further unified. Through the research, we determined that older customers tended to be less comfortable solely ordering online and more comfortable using multiple brand touchpoints to place their orders. As a result, the client emphasized a multi-channel approach when marketing to older demographics.

Creating the right user experience

It’s critical to understand your customers, their expectations and motivations in order to create the right user experience for them. Customer experience research is the best way to accomplish this. An optimisation agency can help you determine and conduct the right user research method based on your goals and objectives.

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