Customer Research

About this skill

Helps uncover what customers actually think, feel, say, and struggle with — so that everything from positioning to product to copy is grounded in reality rather than assumption.

Use this skill when

• You need to apply Customer Research to a real project.
• You want to review or improve an existing Customer Research workflow.

What it can do

• Extract: pains, triggers, desired outcomes, language used, objections, alternatives considered
• Look for: the moment they decided to look for a solution, what they tried before, what success looks like to them
• Segment responses by customer tier, use case, or tenure before drawing conclusions
• Flag: what open-ended answers say vs. what multiple-choice answers say (they often conflict)
• Identify: the 20% of responses that contain the most useful signal
• Mine for: recurring complaints, confusion points, feature requests, and "I wish it could…" language
• Categorize tickets before analyzing — don't treat all tickets as equal signal
• Separate bugs from confusion from missing features from expectation mismatches

Typical workflows

• Cluster by theme — group similar pains, outcomes, and triggers across assets
• Frequency + intensity scoring — how often does a theme appear, and how strongly is it felt?
• Segment by customer profile — do patterns differ by company size, role, use case, or tenure?
• Identify the "money quotes" — 5-10 verbatim quotes that best represent each theme
• Flag contradictions — where do customers say one thing but do another?

Outputs

• Research synthesis report — themes, quotes, patterns, and implications
• VOC quote bank — organized verbatim quotes by theme, for use in copy
• Persona document — 1-3 personas built from the research
• Jobs-to-be-done map — functional, emotional, and social jobs by segment
• Competitive intelligence summary — what customers say about competitors vs. you
• Research gap analysis — what you still don't know and how to find it

Safety and limitations

• Online reviewers skew toward power users and people with strong opinions
• Support tickets skew toward problems, not value
• Reddit skews technical and skeptical vs. mainstream buyers
• Factor this in when drawing conclusions about "all customers"