Written by: the UserTesting team
Today’s decision-makers have access to an ever-expanding plethora of tools to help them facilitate customer research. So how do you pick the right one? The answer is, many don’t pick just one. Different tools have different strengths that deliver different pieces of information, but by using multiple tools and combining synergistic technologies, businesses can unlock deeper insights and more effectively facilitate customer-centric decision making.
In the case of Fuel Cycle and UserTesting, the synergies are clear. By combining UserTesting’s Human Insight Platform – that empowers you to see and hear from your customers and collect on-demand customer feedback – with Fuel Cycle’s robust online community and progressive profiling capabilities, you can quickly and efficiently gather the insights you need from the audiences you desire (no matter how specific or difficult to reach) to make customer-centric decisions every step of the way.
Here are three practical ways you can generate value with Fuel Cycle and UserTesting:
- Conduct generative research with your online community
- Explore, compare, and validate concepts with your online community
- Use your online community to create your own panel of test participants
But how do I accomplish this, you ask? Let’s dive into it.
Conduct generative research with your online community
In order to identify new and innovative solutions, you must define the problem you are trying to solve. This requires you to truly understand how people live, including their environments, behaviors, attitudes/opinions, and perceptions. This can be accomplished with generative research, helping you to better understand your customers to effectively identify opportunities.
Conducting generative research with your target audiences is simple with Fuel Cycle and UserTesting – once you’ve curated and segmented your community based on demographic, behavioral, and attitudinal data leveraging Fuel Cycle’s P2 Engine, you can interview specifically targeted members – exploring their thoughts and opinions – using UserTesting’s Live Conversation. Instead of a traditional interview setting, you could ask a community member to complete a certain activity (i.e. search for a new car, book a flight, etc.) while asking questions and gathering insights about the experience as they progress.
Explore, compare, and validate concepts with your online community
Businesses invest significant time and effort in curating online communities that are intricately tailored to their specific target audiences and customer segments. So when conducting customer research, these communities are the exact people that they want to target.
Take Shoe Company ABC for example – they’ve spent months curating a Fuel Cycle online community tailored to their specific customer segments, that provides robust profiling data on everything from shoe style preference, to buying frequency, to store location visits. They have developed concepts for two new shoe styles and want to conduct research to better understand which they should prioritize and bring to market first based on customer needs and desires.
To accomplish this, Shoe Company ABC creates a UserTesting test that provides imagery and associated details of each shoe concept and asks participants to provide initial impressions, among other questions to help them understand which elements of each shoe they like or dislike. Using UserTesting’s MyRecruit, Shoe Company generates a shareable link to the test, enabling them to share it with their Fuel Cycle community and collect feedback from the highly specific audience they desire to reach.
Use your online community to create your own panel of test participants
When collecting customer feedback from your online community, you may find there is a subset of members that are more eager and willing to act as test participants. There may also be circumstances where you desire to collect ongoing feedback from a certain segment or subset of your online community. In either of these scenarios, it may be useful to create custom participant panels from your community to enable researchers within your organization to more easily target and conduct testing with these groups.
Let’s look at the first scenario, where the goal is to create a participant panel of community members that have expressed interest in providing feedback on new ideas or concepts from your company. With UserTesting’s My Panel, you can securely recruit, manage, and target participants from your online community that have opted-in to participate in UserTesting tests. This allows you to seamlessly target and distribute tests to your community-based panel directly from the UserTesting platform, making it easier to conduct continuous research with your desired subset of community members.
The UserTesting Human Insights Platform empowers businesses to see, hear, and talk with consumers, customers, and a wide range of customizable panels to gather audio, video, and text responses that drive fast, informed decision-making. And when coupled with Fuel Cycle’s online communities, organizations can scale their customer feedback initiatives and leverage reporting and visualization capabilities for a comprehensive analysis of both quantitative and qualitative research results.
Interested in learning more about how you can use Fuel Cycle and UserTesting to optimize CX initiatives?
