Most businesses know it’s important to do some research about their customer base. Understanding how a potential customer thinks and acts during the brand determination and shopping experience is critical information for product development and marketing teams.

However, many businesses are making a common mistake when it comes to getting the complete picture. To save money and time many companies are using only narrow research tools and approaches – instead of a more comprehensive research approach.

To be clear, the popular research options like shopper intercepts, checkout surveys and online pop-ups surveys are popular for a reason: they provide information quickly, are focused, and they are easy to implement. However, taken individually they do not give you the entire picture. Think of it like dental x-rays versus an MRI. There’s nothing wrong with getting a dental x-ray. It’s good for the health of your mouth. But, if you want to know what the entire body is doing, an MRI offers a more comprehensive picture. The individual research tools you like to use are great, but you need more.

There are three primary reasons we tell our clients that they need a customer journey perspective of shopper insights:

1. Customer Journey integrates multiple Research Approaches to provide a complete view

The best objective of shopper insight is to provide a comprehensive view of how your product is performing and/or how a customer reacts to your product from the beginning of the process (when they first realize they need what you sell) to the end, when they consider how your product worked in their life. Single tools only look at certain points on the Path to Purchase. Shopper Insights look at the entire picture.

The risk with using only your favorite research tools is that you could get results that are incomplete and sometimes even contradicting. An integrated approach to research & analysis sees shopping behavior from multiple perspectives.

2. Touch-Point Specific Approaches are efficient, but less effective

Good shopper insight does more than look at specific sections of the path to purchase process by expanding the scope of research to allow for a more complete analysis. While touchpoint specific research (like advertising or packaging feedback, checkout surveys or online intercepts) can provide valuable insight, they are narrow in scope. Customer Journey mapping allows you to look at the entire process from the shopping trigger to repurchase and study the entire shopping experience from the moment a customer recognizes they have a problem to their experience with the product they chose to solve that problem afterward.

3. Moments of Truth and Pain Points easier to Identify with Customer Journey Mapping

Shoppers experience a range of emotions during the entire purchase process, and not all of them are positive. For example: One person may experience anxiety before they go shopping for clothes because they are afraid they won’t find anything that fits. Others feel overwhelmed with their choices in the aisle, making it hard to choose a product (and making them more inclined to shop online), while some don’t know a solution to their problem until they are in a store and see the full set of options available to them. Further, some customers experience a moment of truth after purchasing the product and realizing that it either works as well or better than they thought, or it doesn’t work (or they don’t know how to make it work).

The only way to truly understand what is driving customer satisfaction is to look along the entire journey and identify possible pain points and moments of truth along the entire path to purchase. Focusing on single instances or perspectives are not as helpful for the long term because they provide limited detail.

Do you want to know more about a better way to understand your customers?

Gold Research Inc. has extensive experience in journey mapping, path-to-purchase research, deploying customer intercepts, in-store interviews, and mobile surveys for concept testing, marketing testing, satisfaction research, shopper insights, and mystery shopping. We can also act as an extension of your research team in helping with data processing, analysis, report development, and survey programming. Contact us at 1-800-549-7170 or send us an email for a free 30-minute consultation on this topic.