Customer experience research is a vital step in customer journey mapping to ultimately inform your customer experience strategy. It puts you in your customer’s place, looking at your brand from their perspective, so that you get vital insights for designing every step of the journey and every brand touchpoint.
What is customer experience research?
Your customers experience your brand on a path of steps and interactions. It starts when they first become aware of its existence, moves on to learning more and engaging, and finally purchasing and beyond. A touchpoint is where a customer perceives and possibly interacts with your brand. It could be a website, a social post, a promotional display in a store, a package, and more. Customer journey mapping and identifying touchpoints along the way is a key part of designing a customer an effective strategy. That takes customer experience research that helps you understand each step, interaction, and reaction along that journey.
Customer experience research is a systematic way to collect data about customer interactions and perceptions from awareness to purchase and use, repurchasing, and potentially advocating for your brand. Researching the CX, short for customer experience, can involve multiple methodologies, all designed to give you an in-depth understanding of what your customer sees, feels, thinks, and reacts.
Customer experience research methods
CX research methodologies are different approaches for understanding customer expectations and how they behave in categories, interact with brands, evaluate their options, make decisions, and ultimately how they define satisfaction to drive loyalty. You can uncover friction points, gaps, weaknesses, and where competitors are stronger. Here are some of the most common ways of measuring customer experiences:
Ethnographic research
This qualitative approach observes customers in their everyday environment to understand what they actually do, rather than what they say they do. You might watch how they shop, use a product, or navigate a website. Observation can uncover behaviors customers don’t notice or think to mention. For example, a consumer may say they buy only healthy cereal, but when shopping with their children, the consumer lets the children choose a sugrary brand.
Customer intercepts
An interviewer approaches customers before, during or after an experience to ask about what they are doing, noticing, and thinking. The interviewer might ask shoppers why they came to this store, what they noticed, what they bought, and why. Because the experience is recent, intercepts capture immediate reactions with less reliance on memory.
Shop-alongs
A researcher accompanies a customer through an experience, observing behavior and asking questions along the way. In a store, for example, you can ask customers to compare products, explain their choices or indicate which packaging appeals to them. Online, you can observe how they navigate a website and where they encounter difficulties.
Exit interviews
An exit interview is an intercept conducted after an experience is complete, such as leaving a store, completing a digital purchase, exiting a theater, or returning from a trip. You can ask what customers enjoyed, what frustrated them, whether the experience met expectations and what they would change. Unlike an intercept during the journey, an exit interview captures the customer’s overall reaction.
Customer experience research examples around the globe
People are different around the world. Your methods for measuring customer experiences will vary as well. The right methodology gives you the insights you need to adjust your customer experience strategy to fit different places, values and cultures.
North America: Online interviews with in-store observations
Online interviews and other remote research methods are often used in North America, making it an efficient way to reach customers across a large geographic area.
Dairy Farmers of Wisconsin combined online interviews with in-store observation to understand where shoppers were dropping out of the path to purchase for Wisconsin cheese products. Researchers used online interviews to explore decision-making, followed by in-aisle shop-alongs, to observe shoppers in specialty cheese sections. Various research projects into the CX revealed opportunities to improve wayfinding, product organization, sampling and cross-merchandising, showing how digital and physical research can work together to reveal the complete shopping experience.
Europe: In-person ethnography
In-person research can be particularly valuable when you need to understand how culture and environment shape consumer behavior.
TikTok Shop researchers used ethnographic techniques to examine how people in the UK actually shopped on the platform, including product discovery, purchasing, unboxing and returns. The research looked beyond the TikTok experience to understand how shoppers moved between social media, product research, reviews and other websites. This highlighted an important difference between China and the UK: Chinese shoppers engage in live e-commerce that integrates entertainment, social interaction, discovery and purchasing. UK shoppers, for example, were found to be more likely to move between different platforms during the journey.
Asia: Face-to-face interviews and shop-alongs
Asia is not a single market, so research needs to account for differences between countries and regions. Face-to-face interviews and shop-alongs can be particularly useful for observing behavior in context.
One shopping mall chain used more than 60 shop-alongs to understand how customers navigated its malls, interacted with stores, and made purchase decisions. Follow-up interviews helped researchers understand the reasons behind observed behavior. Combining observation with interviews gave the mall owners a clearer picture of the customer journey and where the experience could be improved.
Middle East: Ethnography reveals cultural context
In some Middle Eastern markets, in-person research requires sensitivity to how and where consumers are comfortable participating. Home-based ethnography and in-depth interviews can provide a more appropriate setting for exploring behavior and attitudes.
Kitchenware brand OXO conducted research in the UAE, Saudi Arabia and Jordan to understand cooking, food preparation and household organization. Researchers observed customers in their homes and interviewed them about their behaviors and routines. The research gave OXO a deeper understanding of how local consumers use products in their everyday lives and how those behaviors differ across markets.
Latin America: One region with many cultures
Internet access is widespread and participants are more willing to take part in online CX research, particularly among young urban people. In others, in-person research is more effective. Recruiting can be easy in some regions and very difficult in others.
Nubank, a popular digital bank, realized its understanding of the customer was incomplete. The customer base was actually quite diverse in demographics and pain points. They were also operating in a marketplace that was changing quickly. Nubank needed a way to stay in better touch with their customers. The solution was a panel of users willing to interact with the company long-term, having direct interviews with product managers, engineers, and designers. While that was a good start, Nubank added in-person bank-alongs with customers to see how they interacted with the bank at home, on the street, at work, and in stores.
How AI will change customer experience research
AI is changing how you design, conduct, and analyze CX research. Use it for designing the study, recruiting and interviewing customers, and identifying patterns across large volumes of feedback and behavior.
AI works best as an extension of human research capabilities, not a replacement for them. One thing most off-the-shelf AI platforms can’t do is detect and interpret nuances of behavior. If a customer hesitates before purchasing, looks confused by signage, or subtle changes in facial expressions, AI is not yet good at reading what is happening or why. That is why the strongest use of AI is in combination with human insights and abilities. It is a tool that expands your capabilities.
Informing a better customer experience strategy
The effectiveness of your customer experience strategy depends on the quality and completeness of your insights for customer journey mapping and optimizing brand touchpoints. Combining methodologies, adopting new technologies, and making the extra effort to look through the customer’s eyes will help you create better customer experiences.
Frequently asked questions
What is customer experience research?
Customer experience research helps you understand how customers perceive, navigate, and interact with your brand throughout their journey. It can combine qualitative methods such as interviews, ethnography and shop-alongs with quantitative research and customer feedback data.
What are the reasons to conduct customer experience research?
Customer experience research helps you understand what customers expect, where they encounter friction, what influences their decisions, and how they perceive your brand at different touchpoints. These insights can help you improve the customer journey, strengthen loyalty, identify opportunities, address weaknesses, and make better-informed customer experience decisions.
What are the most common customer experience research methods?
Common methods include customer interviews, surveys, ethnographic research, customer intercepts, shop-alongs and exit interviews. The right approach depends on what you need to understand, whether that is what customers say, what they do, or how they react to an experience.
How is AI changing customer experience research?
AI can expand CX research by helping you recruit participants, conduct interviews, analyze large volumes of customer feedback and identify patterns in behavior. It can increase the speed and scale of research, while human researchers provide the context, judgment and interpretation needed to turn those findings into meaningful customer experience improvements.
What are the reasons to conduct customer experience research?
Customer experience research helps you understand what customers expect, where they encounter friction, what influences their decisions and how they perceive your brand at different touchpoints. These insights can help you improve the customer journey, strengthen loyalty, identify opportunities, address weaknesses and make better-informed customer experience decisions.
