As all the aspects of your own world – your worklife, your family, your leisure time – are radically changing, so are those of your customers. Social distancing and stay-at-home requirements are driving significant behavior shifts to online experiences, and the same time, the needs and motivations of your customers are being steered by their situations. Now is not the time to distance yourself from your customers by cutting back on your customer insights activities!
The good news?
It’s easier than you might think to shift your in-person research plans to a remote approach! The tools may differ (think, more technology), but for an experienced researcher, the approaches remain remarkably similar.
Remote research can still span the spectrum of goals, from ethnographic studies to understand customer context, to more in-depth participatory approaches that enable learning through co-creation, to evaluative testing on prototypes. Tools like Zoom, MURAL, and dscout can enable you to connect with customers virtually, but still meaningfully, and help you generate insights to lead your through and beyond our current situation.
And here’s more good news! With remote research, you aren’t tied to a specific geography, and the reduction in facility expenses (if you usually need to rent space to conduct your research in neutral, unbranded, locations) could even allow you to increase your sample size.
The changes we are all adapting to may not be permanent, but they are very real for the time being, and postponing customer research until things get back to “normal” will delay your ability to adapt to customers’ changing needs, and to address their needs in the near term.
If you’d like to talk through how you might adapt your prior customer insights plans to a remote approach, drop me a note and we can set up some time to chat.
-elizabeth