User Insights: How To Prepare Them Better and More Efficiently
User insights offer real, informed feedback from the people who actually use your product.
Despite this, a surprising number of product managers have little to no understanding of how to use these insights to set roadmap priorities.
Finding valuable and quantifiable insights can be incredibly time-consuming and makes gathering reliable feedback from stakeholders difficult.
Utilizing user insights helps teams understand their customers. As the understanding grows, it can unearth deep user insights that allow the team to build exactly what their customers need.
What are deep user insights?
As the name might suggest, deep user insights are insights that allow teams to understand their customers at a deeper level. Deep user insights should identify your customer’s behavior, psychology, and needs.
You should aim to answer the following questions:
What drives your customers?
What do they desire from your product?
Are they satisfied with your product already?
How can you solve any problems they are having?
The answers to these questions will help guide your product development as you can make informed decisions and prioritize tasks to bring value to your customer.
How can you gather deep user insights?
In this modern age, gathering insights is easier than ever.
You can gather insights from various sources, including customer feedback surveys, social media, and customer reviews.
Most businesses will have mountains of this data that can help you gain deep user insight, but few know how to actually turn the data into value.
To gather deep user insights from this data, you need to balance the qualitative data with the quantitative data.
You’ll only start fully understanding your customer when the two are combined. Sure, you can use customer behavior data to influence your decisions, but you need to know the motivations and emotional reasoning for their choices.
With all that in mind, let’s look at some methods you can use to gather deep user insights.
Analyze your existing data
Even small businesses can access a huge range of valuable user data.
You can often find valuable user insights hiding in plain sight by going through:
Interactions between support staff and users
Conversations between sales staff and potential users
Exit surveys and feedback forms
Feature or product requests
Social media posts
Simply by looking through the data you already have, you can unearth heaps of information to help you figure out what works for your users and what their current needs are.
Hold meetings with customer-facing teams
Your sales and customer support staff spend every day speaking to your customers.
They will already know the main customer pain points and most sought-after features before the development team have even thought about it.
By holding regular meetings with your frontline teams, you can unlock valuable insights straight from your customers. Those teams already have a deep understanding of your product or service, and they can present these insights in a relevant context.
Speak to your users
There’s no better way to gain insights from your customers than by actually talking to them. Chatbots and feedback surveys will only get you so far. Nothing beats a real conversation with a real person.
Honest and open conversations help build a relationship with your customer, making them more likely to raise any concerns they may have. Your user has so much value they can bring to the table. You just have to listen to them.
Use a feedback management tool
Using a feedback management tool, such as airfocus Insights, allows you to centralize feedback from multiple channels and uncover valuable insights that can guide product development.
Teams can also use feedback management tools to guide prioritization. They can organize the data to see what customers need the most and plan development around those needs. A few weeks ago we have also launched Forms app which will allow you to gather submissions from any existing workspaces or shared links.
User insights are the gateway to excellent products
Once your team starts gathering and managing deep user insights, you’ll find it’s easy to truly understand what your customers want and what your customers need.
Sometimes a customer will request a new feature, but they don’t realize why they want that feature. A customer could bring an idea they have had to solve a problem they have run into without telling you what the problem was. Deep user insights can help teams identify the underlying issue and build a product that solves a customer’s problem before they even have it.
This deep knowledge allows you to create great products that serve customers’ needs while also speaking to their emotions and motivations.
airfocus helps manage your insights
Gathering and managing these various strains of user feedback and insights might seem daunting, but airfocus is here to help.
Download our 5-minute guide, Why insights are essential and how to source them to learn more and get started!
Tomas Prochazka
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