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February, 2023

Customer Research Methods

Alex Thompson Digital Consulting February 27, 2023
customer research

Are you looking for ways to get insights from your customers? Customer research is a great way to learn about your customers’ needs, wants, and preferences. But what are the best methods for conducting customer research?

In this blog, we will discuss what customer research is, why it is essential, the types of customer research, how to create a customer research process, and the different methods used to conduct customer research. So, whether you’re just starting or you’ve been in the game for a while, there’s something here for you. Keep reading to learn more!

What is customer research?

“Whoever understands the customer best wins.” Customer research is a vital tool that helps businesses understand their customers’ needs and wants. It can be used to discover customer preferences, track customer satisfaction levels, fine-tune marketing strategies, and more. Customer research also helps organizations uncover new insights which can dramatically improve customer experience.

Companies that conduct customer research have access to valuable market information and are likely to see improved customer engagement, loyalty, and positive effect on brand awareness. Customer research is essential in helping companies connect with their customer base, make well-informed decisions, and ultimately create long-term customer relationships.

Why is customer research important?

Customer research is a critical component of any business, large or small. It allows companies to understand the preferences and values of their customers and use the insights from that research to adjust their business strategy and offerings accordingly. Learning about your customer helps to target promotions and products more effectively and gives an edge over the competition.

Understanding customer needs also allows companies to become more agile, adjust quickly as needed, and have an intimate understanding of their customers so that they can keep them loyal for as long as possible. In short, customer research is essential to having success in today’s market.

Types of customer research

Different types of customer research can provide invaluable insights for businesses. Here are the two main types of customer research to help understand your customers better:

customer research

Customer research process

customer research process

Customer research can be time-consuming and complex, but it’s ultimately worth it. Before beginning any research, you must first develop the objectives and define the goals for the process. Then it is essential to formulate a plan. You can choose any one of the multiple customer research methods. Now it is time to conduct the research.

The customer research process does not end with collecting information. The main job is analyzing your collected data, deriving actionable insights, and making changes to your product, service, and marketing tactics. Knowing what makes your customers tick helps create content and products they want. Although a deep dive into understanding customers can provide many benefits, good customer research isn’t overnight work and requires effort upfront before reaping any rewards.

Customer research methods

There are a variety of methods to conduct customer research. Here are some of the most popular and effective ones:

customer research methods

Customer Research Application

Now that your research is done, it’s time to analyze and act. Customer research data can be used by different departments in a company to improve their business processes in the following ways:

Marketing

Customer research data can help the marketing department understand customer preferences, behaviors, and opinions about their brand, product, or service. This information can be used to develop more targeted marketing campaigns and improve customer engagement.

Sales

Customer research data can help the sales department identify customer needs, pain points, and buying behaviors. This information can be used to develop more effective sales strategies, improve customer relationships and close more deals.

Product Development

Customer research data can provide valuable insights into customer opinions about the company’s products. This information can inform product development and improve the overall customer experience.

Customer Service

Customer research data can help the customer service department understand customer needs and identify areas where the customer experience can be improved. This information can be used to develop more effective customer support strategies and improve customer satisfaction.

Operations

Customer research data can help the operations department understand customer needs and preferences and identify areas where business processes can be optimized to better meet customer requirements. This information can streamline operations, improve efficiency, and reduce costs.

Different departments can work together to improve the overall customer experience and drive business growth by utilizing customer research data.

Conclusion

When it comes to customer research, there are a lot of different approaches you can take. But to maximize your chances for success, follow these five essential steps: define your goals, identify your target market, choose the suitable research method, collect and analyze your data, and use your findings to improve your business. By following these simple tips, you can set yourself up for success and ensure your customer research is as effective as possible.

Human Experience – Tapping into user psychology & behaviors

Alex Thompson Digital Consulting February 21, 2023
Human Experience Design

The human experience is a complex and multi-faceted concept that can be influenced by various cultural, social, psychological, and biological factors. How people experience things positively and negatively can significantly impact their behavior and decision-making. In this blog, we will explore how tapping into user psychology and behaviors can help to create better user experiences.

The field of psychology has long been interested in studying human experience and behavior. One of the main areas of focus is understanding how people perceive, process, and respond to information. By gaining insight into these processes, designers and product teams can create better user experiences that are more aligned with the needs and motivations of their users.

Attention

One way to tap into user psychology is by understanding the concept of attention. Attention is a limited resource, and people constantly decide what to pay attention to in their environment. For example, when reading a book, we must focus on the words on the page rather than the sounds around us. Similarly, when using a digital product, we must choose what to focus on and ignore.

Designers can use this understanding of attention to guide users through a product or website in a way that makes sense. This can be achieved through clear hierarchy and visual cues that help to direct users’ focus. For example, by using a bold font or bright color for the most essential information, designers can draw users’ attention to the most critical parts of a page. Additionally, by reducing clutter and distractions, designers can help users to focus on the task at hand, making the customer experience more enjoyable and efficient.

Motivation

Another area of psychology that can be applied to user experience is motivation. People are driven by various factors, such as the desire for achievement, recognition, social connection, and self-expression. By understanding what motivates users, designers can create experiences that tap into those needs and provide a more fulfilling experience.

For example, gamification is a popular technique for tapping into users’ motivations. By adding game-like elements to a product or website, such as points, badges, and leaderboards, designers can encourage users to engage with the product in a more fun and rewarding way. Gamification can also help users reach their goals and improve their skills. By setting up challenges and providing rewards for success, designers can encourage users to continue using the product and progress toward their goals.

Social Psychology

Social psychology is another area of psychology that can be applied to user experience. Humans are social creatures, and how people interact with others can significantly impact their experience. By understanding the dynamics of social interaction, designers can create products and websites that facilitate positive social interactions and build a sense of community.

For example, social media platforms are designed to facilitate social interaction by allowing users to connect with others, share content, and engage in conversations. The ability to like, comment, and share content on these platforms can also create a sense of community by providing users with a sense of connection and recognition. Additionally, social media platforms can also be used to build communities around specific interests or causes, providing users with a sense of belonging and a shared sense of purpose.

What we do at TVS Next to understand users

Human Experience Design

Conclusion

In conclusion, tapping into user psychology and behaviors can help designers to create better user experiences. By understanding how people perceive, process, and respond to information, designers can create products and websites that are more aligned with the needs and motivations of their users. By incorporating elements of attention, motivation, and social psychology, designers can create experiences that are enjoyable, efficient, and fulfilling. By doing so, they can help to create a more positive and meaningful human experience.

How DevOps Accelerates Business Growth

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering February 13, 2023

Introduction

It is a prevalent fact now that DevOps is the key to any accelerated development or transformation initiative. It quickly grabbed the attention of the IT industry for all the right reasons. Due to its fast-paced working environment, shorter turnaround time, high-quality output, and lesser post-production errors, DevOps was quickly adopted by many development teams. In this article, we will look into how DevOps accelerates business growth.

Why DevOps?

DevOps is a combination of development and operations principles and philosophies. It is a methodology comprising many concepts, techniques, tools, and practices. These components help fully automate the process between development and operations, enabling development and deployments at incredible speeds in short and controllable iterations. DevOps is not just about development and operations teams working together and leveraging the right tools. It is a cultural shift and mindset to adopt new ways of working.

Here are some reasons why businesses are adopting DevOps:

Key metrics of DevOps

The following are the five-key metrics for DevOps performance.

Key principles of DevOps

Automation

In a DevOps environment, all tasks which can be automated should be automated. Instead of manually checking code for errors and bugs, we can automate this by leveraging tools that do the tasks in a single command. Automating SDLC processes allows developers to focus on writing code and developing new features. Infrastructure provisioning should also be automated to meet the market demands with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools and continuous delivery pipelines.

Continuous integration

This encourages developers to commit their code multiple times a day, thus integrating smaller chunks of code regularly, which avoids the likelihood of bad code moving ahead in the pipeline. Another important aspect of continuous integration is automated testing, where the developed code will be tested for bugs and compatibility with the master branch before merging. Continuous integration relies heavily on having a version control system in place.

Continuous Delivery

Continuous delivery is a practice where code changes are automatically prepared for releasing to production. Continuous delivery expands upon continuous integration by moving code to test and/or production environments. Then it is adequately tested using automated tests, including UI tests, load tests, integration tests, etc. This way, production-ready build artifacts will always be available at any time. Continuous delivery needs manual approval before releasing the artifacts to production.

Continuous Deployment

Continuous deployment releases the artifacts automatically without explicit manual approval. It automates the entire software release process from development, build, and test to production deployment. The developer decides the final trigger to deploy artifacts to production in continuous deployment.

Continuous Monitoring

This involves automatically collecting information about the code that has been deployed and running in production and the infrastructure underlying it. This enables operations to finetune and optimize the infra resources. It also reveals hidden bugs in the system, which can then be added to the backlog.

Benefits of establishing a DevOps-first practice

Some of the benefits of implementing a DevOps-first practice include the following:

Above mentioned benefits can be achieved by choosing the right DevOps tools and embracing the DevOps culture.

Conclusion

DevOps implementation will accelerate your business’s growth in different areas and aspects. With unified communication and a collaborative environment, DevOps can improve business efficiency, collaboration, employee experience, and customer experience. DevOps allows businesses to solve problems quickly, limit operational costs, and reduce business losses. Another primary reason to adopt DevOps is that it leaves much more room for brainstorming, promoting innovation within the project and the overall business.

How to transition from manual to automated testing and why you should do it now

Alex Thompson Digital Engineering February 6, 2023

Testing is an essential part of software development, and it can significantly impact the success of a project. While manual testing is still widely used, it has become increasingly important to automate the testing process to ensure quality and efficiency. In this blog post, we will explore the reasons for transitioning from manual to automated testing and provide tips on how to do it effectively.

Before embarking on our journey from manual to automated tests, it is essential to remember that “100% automation is impossible to achieve”.

Why you should transition to automated testing

Tips for successful automated testing

ROI and roadmap

A detailed ROI and roadmap need to be prepared on what percentage of cost/effort savings, quality improvements, and risk mitigation can be achieved once automated tests are implemented.

When we say automation, we refer to front-end and back-end testing like performance testing, sophisticated scenarios, and API test automation. 

Once the stakeholders are convinced of the benefits of automated tests, a detailed roadmap should be drawn out, involving effort estimates and prioritization.

Choosing suitable candidates for automation

The tests that tick most of the characteristics like

can be considered suitable candidates for our automated test bed.

Choosing the right approach (TDD vs. BDD)

While Test Driven Development (TDD) has some benefits, such as reduced rework time and faster feedback, Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) – implemented using tools such as Cucumber, provides better visibility of the tests to non-technical business stakeholders. The reason is that Cucumber’s feature files are written in plain English using keywords such as Given, When, and Then.

At TVS Next, we encourage our clients to go for the BDD approach, as we can clearly map the scenarios in terms of features to ensure better test coverage.

Choosing the proper tool/framework

Choosing the proper framework is mainly driven by the platform under test (Mobile/Web/API).

For web testing, we can choose from an array of frameworks such as Selenium, Cypress, Playwright, WebdriverIO, and TestCafe.

Some of the available options for mobile testing are Appium, Espresso, and XCUI Test.

For API automation, we can choose from various tools such as REST-Assured, K6, and Locust. These, in turn, can also serve as our load/performance tools.

At TVS Next, we encourage our Clients to go for futuristic frameworks such as Cypress and Playwright, which are much more stable and involve much less framework setup time than Selenium.

Build customized test suites

It is always better to have customized test suites such as:

Code quality and best practices

Similar to the best practices in development, it is essential to set up the environment to perform collaborative coding and ensure best practices in testing, such as

are implemented to avoid spending large efforts on code maintenance.

Implement DevOps – CI/CD Pipeline

Implementing CI/CD pipeline for our automated tests have advantages such as:

  • Faster smoke testing times – to provide feedback to Developers in case of critical failures/environment downtimes
  • Improved fault detection
  • Better communication with stakeholders via automated emails
  • Faster Mean Time To Resolution (MTTR)

Conclusion

By following the above-mentioned step-wise approach, we can move from manual to automated testing and achieve benefits such as:

In conclusion, transitioning from manual to automated testing can be challenging. But with careful planning and the right tools, it can be a successful transition that leads to improved software quality.

Leverage data analytics to maximize marketing ROI

Alex Thompson Data and AI February 1, 2023

Why is data analytics needed in marketing?

Data analytics is an essential component of marketing. Insights derived from marketing data help organizations understand what drives their customers to behave a certain way and refine their marketing strategy to get maximum return on investment (ROI). Marketing analytics also plays a significant role in understanding the performance of a product or service.

For instance, a specific product might do well only in certain regions and among particular demography. This can be understood and dealt with only if we have the performance reports we can get from analyzing the product’s data. This data can be collected via surveys, feedback, and polls filled in by the product users.

Data connected through various channels can then be put together using analytics to help the product team understand where the product’s benefits and drawbacks lie. Identifying such information helps to know the tastes and requirement of specific audiences and use it to create better products or services in the future.

Benefits of data analytics in marketing

Various marketing channels like email marketing, web marketing, and content marketing can be better understood and refined with the responses received for that method of marketing, which in turn improves the strategy or ideas to maximize the return on investment at each stage.

Here is a guide for marketing teams to leverage analytics:

Leverage data analytics to improve marketing ROI

Overall, data analytics is a powerful tool to help businesses better understand their target audience, identify and capitalize on trends, test and optimize marketing campaigns and track ROI effectively. It also helps identify any bottlenecks in the current marketing strategy.

Using data analytics in marketing wisely and effectively can increase brand awareness among consumers, bring in more revenue and effectively increase marketing ROI.

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