客户理解：协调研究的深度和广度（对定性和定量研究的深入解析）

The Gist 要旨

• Customer insight key. Deep customer understanding drives market share.
  客户洞察力的关键。深入的客户理解推动市场份额。
• Behavior analysis essential. Analyzing customer behaviors enhances engagement.
  行为分析必不可少。分析客户行为可以提高参与度。
• Mixed methods advantage. Integrating research methods reveals comprehensive insights.
  混合方法的优势。整合研究方法揭示了全面的见解。

Understanding the intricacies of your customer base is paramount in today’s competitive marketplace. In order to gain and defend market share, things like pricing strategies, cost control and product features are critical, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. To be successful in a sustainable way, companies must provide differentiated offerings based on an uncompromising alignment with the stated and unstated needs of their customers, embodying the essence of customer understanding.
在当今竞争激烈的市场中，了解客户群的复杂性至关重要。为了获得并捍卫市场份额，定价策略、成本控制和产品功能等因素至关重要，但它们只是冰山一角。为了以可持续的方式取得成功，公司必须在坚定地满足客户明确和未明确的需求的基础上提供差异化​​的产品，体现对客户理解的本质。

Lifetime customer value starts way before selling a product or service. As businesses pivot more and more toward highly segmented and targeted marketing and messaging, a deep-seated customer understanding of customer characteristics becomes indispensable. By analyzing behavioral patterns, preferences and feedback across marketing channels, companies can effectively pinpoint communications and engagement strategies — thus fostering meaningful connections with customers that lead to long-term relationships, brand loyalty and recurring revenue.
终身客户价值早在销售产品或服务之前就开始了。随着企业越来越转向高度细分和有针对性的营销和信息传递，对客户特征的深入了解变得必不可少。通过分析跨营销渠道的行为模式、偏好和反馈，公司可以有效地确定沟通和参与策略，从而与客户建立有意义的联系，从而建立长期关系、品牌忠诚度和经常性收入。

Another critical area for market success is continuous improvement. The orchestration of the various touchpoints between customers and your company (such as your marketing, sales, product development and customer service) must be continuously evaluated for its value that is perceived by the customers. This too necessitates the deployment of sound research methodologies that enable you to identify pain points, tactical areas of improvement and strategic opportunities for innovation, underlining the importance of customer understanding.
市场成功的另一个关键领域是持续改进。必须不断评估客户与公司之间各种接触点（例如营销、销售、产品开发和客户服务）的编排，以了解客户感知到的价值。这也需要部署完善的研究方法，使您能够识别痛点、改进的战术领域和创新的战略机会，强调了解客户的重要性。

In short, customer understanding and user research are extremely important for your business success. There is a wide range of methodologies available, including usability testing, interviews, surveys and analytics. They can be categorized into three buckets that I will cover in the following.
简而言之，客户理解和用户研究对于您的业务成功极其重要。有多种可用的方法，包括可用性测试、访谈、调查和分析。它们可以分为三个部分，我将在下面介绍。

Quantitative Research: The Numerical Perspective
定量研究：数值视角

Quantitative research leverages numerical data to derive trends, patterns and insights. It helps answering questions like “How much?”, “How many?”, and “How long?” The data itself is in a structured format, allowing processing and transforming it algorithmically. The volume of research subjects like users or customers is normally high so that the results can be generalized. For example, the results from a Net Promoter Score (NPS) survey that was answered by 2,000 customers can be assumed to be valid for your entire existing customer population, reflecting a broad customer understanding.
定量研究利用数字数据来得出趋势、模式和见解。它有助于回答“多少钱？”、“多少？”和“多长时间？”等问题。数据本身采用结构化格式，允许通过算法对其进行处理和转换。用户或客户等研究对象的数量通常很大，因此结果可以概括。例如，由 2,000 名客户回答的净推荐值 (NPS) 调查结果可以假定对整个现有客户群体有效，反映了广泛的客户理解。

Two Research Methods 两种研究方法

Two very prominent quantitative customer research methods are closed-question online surveys and analytics. Both are empirical and directly relay findings about customers. And both can be easily scaled as there is no marginal cost to include more customers in the research.
两种非常突出的定量客户研究方法是封闭式在线调查和分析。两者都是经验性的，直接传递有关客户的发现。而且两者都可以轻松扩展，因为将更多客户纳入研究中没有边际成本。

Gaining Insights 获得见解

You can gain insights specific to various customer segments, markets and product categories. By aggregating data from numerous customers, you can identify emerging trends, validate hypotheses and measure performance metrics with precision. Quantitative research also allows benchmarking against industry standards, the competitive landscape and historical data.
您可以获得特定于不同客户群、市场和产品类别的见解。通过汇总来自众多客户的数据，您可以识别新兴趋势、验证假设并精确衡量绩效指标。定量研究还可以根据行业标准、竞争格局和历史数据进行基准测试。

Getting to the Deeper Roots
深入根源

“Let the numbers speak!” is a way to say that quantitative user and customer research facilitates well-grounded and data-driven decision-making based on descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, trend and pattern recognition and predictive modeling. The advent of big data, advanced analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence amplifies the efficacy of quantitative research.
“让数字说话！”是一种说法，定量用户和客户研究有助于基于描述性统计、推论统计、趋势和模式识别以及预测建模的基础良好和数据驱动的决策。大数据、高级分析、机器学习和人工智能的出现增强了定量研究的效率。

These technological advancements streamline data collection and automate the analysis and synthesis of results, making research more insightful, faster and cheaper. This benefit, however, should not distract from the fact that the numerical nature of this approach is very limited in explaining deeper-rooted phenomena that stem from people’s motivations, sentiments and experiences.
这些技术进步简化了数据收集并自动分析和合成结果，使研究更具洞察力、更快、更便宜。然而，这种好处不应忽视这样一个事实：这种方法的数字性质在解释源于人们的动机、情感和经验的更深层次的现象方面非常有限。

Qualitative Research: Delving Deeper Into Customer Understanding and Sentiments
定性研究：深入研究客户理解和情绪

Qualitative research goes beneath the surface, trying to unravel customer motivations, challenges and aspirations. Unlike its quantitative counterpart, qualitative research focuses on individual narratives, and lived experiences, capturing the essence of human interactions, motivations and aspirations. Through methodologies such as in-depth interviews, focus groups, and ethnographic studies, qualitative research immerses researchers in the customers’ worlds. This fosters empathy, deep understanding and connection, which can allow you to unveil nuanced insights, subtle cues and contextual factors that explain the “Why” behind phenomena.
定性研究深入表面，试图揭示客户的动机、挑战和愿望。与定量研究不同，定性研究侧重于个人叙述和生活经历，捕捉人类互动、动机和愿望的本质。通过深度访谈、焦点小组和人种学研究等方法，定性研究使研究人员沉浸在客户的世界中。这可以培养同理心、深刻的理解和联系，让你能够揭示细致入微的见解、微妙的线索和背景因素，解释现象背后的“原因”。

Justifying he Effort 证明他的努力是正当的

Because the source data that is acquired from qualitative research is unstructured, consisting of words, pictures, stories and experiences, there is a relatively high effort associated with gathering the data (for example, carrying out 10 one-hour, in-depth face-to-face interviews) and analyzing the results (for example, carrying out grounded theory analysis).
由于从定性研究中获得的源数据是非结构化的，由文字、图片、故事和经验组成，因此收集数据需要付出相对较高的努力（例如，进行 10 个一小时的深入面对面调查）。面对面访谈）并分析结果（例如，进行扎根理论分析）。

For the latter, the technological advancements in artificial intelligence and natural language processing effectively help in data interpretation and insights extraction. But even without the help from AI, the richness, depth and granularity of insights derived from qualitative research justify the effort. The results allow you to define empathy-driven and customer-centered strategies, innovations, and initiatives.
对于后者来说，人工智能和自然语言处理的技术进步有效地帮助数据解释和见解提取。但即使没有人工智能的帮助，来自定性研究的丰富性、深度和粒度的见解也证明了这一努力的合理性。结果使您能够定义同理心驱动和以客户为中心的战略、创新和举措。