How to listen: Customer interviews or A\/B testing?

Business owners and marketers are often reminded to “listen to your customers.” It makes sense, but how do you do it?

For many in the digital world, social media provides ways to listen to how people—customers or not—are talking about your business, but social media isn’t always the type of listening you want to do. Customer interviews and A/B testing are also common avenues to acquire valuable qualitative and quantitative information. These approaches allow you to focus on the particular areas of your business that you want to hear feedback on rather than listen to feedback on everything as customers provide it. Here’s how each can be helpful and when:

Customer interviews: Do you know what customers’ behavior is but struggle to understand why it is the way it is or how you’re contributing to it? Customer interviews can be a valuable tool for understanding how people perceive your interactions with them and why they respond the way they do. They can also help to surface customer needs or wants, questions, or ideas you have not thought of—and, therefore, wouldn’t ask or test—but should develop solutions or new approaches for so you can improve their experience or perception.

A/B testing: Do you want to know what customers prefer? A/B testing is a great way to do this. Provide different experiences to segments of your audience, and see which generate more of the actions you want people to take or more positive feedback.

Use statistical significance to evaluate the results and determine how much of a difference your approaches influence customer behavior. Using 1) “statistically significant” 2) “directionally significant,” and 3) “not significant” as markers of the tests’ performance can help you understand the weight of the results and how to move forward with more testing. For example, it can help you determine whether you should make bigger changes in the test and control experiences.