Nothing beats sitting with a customer and actually listening to them. I can't reinforce enough the importance of this. As companies grow, its easy to lean on reports / reporting to tell you "what the customer thinks & feels". But there is so much nuance in how people communicate -- and as humans, we're all naturally atuned to these signals. So as a baseline, I encourage all my teams to participate in live listening sessions, focus groups, sales pitches, etc at least 1x every quarter to keep their ear to the ground and stay close to the customer.
Of course, the above doesn't scale and we all have lots of things we need to do with our time. So I'm very interested in a few types of data to inform qual & quant:
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Platforms like Suzy & Feedback Loop have been incredbily valuable tools for my team & product management teams that I've worked with recently. Suzy's Dynamic segmentation tool not only lets you complete a segmentation exercise, refresh it regularaly, and then gives you a mechanism to get feedback from those segments within 48 hours. It saves my team and my product teams tons of time, and ensures that our products & external communications are user-insight driven and optimized throughout the entire process of getting ready to go to market. I like to think of these platforms as Qualitative at Scale.
- For Quantitative, I've used a lot of survey platforms but I have to say my favorite quantitative mechanism is actual behavioral data. Product Analytics, Web Engagement, Media Engagement, Customer Support Inquiries, etc. Humans don't always do what they say / think, and I think actual behavioral data is the best to assess what customers are actually most intrguied by or interested in. I require my teams to be keeping their ears close to these sources to pick up important themes. When you're listening and watching across these different platforms, PMMs can usually start picking up on important themes to pass back either to product or creative teams to improve the end to end customer experience.
