What do high-performing research and insights teams know that sets them apart?
To answer this question, we showcased industry experts and award-winning customers earlier this month in Alida’s annual Innovation Day. Presenters shared how they’ve partnered with their customers to navigate changes in their business, introduce new products, redesign brands, and drive revenue.
To help you build your research and insights strategy for 2025 and beyond, we’ve pulled together the top learnings from Innovation Day. Focusing on these best practices will help you build a high-performing research program that’s ready to meet the challenges of tomorrow.
- Real users are the best source of insights
Top UX, market research, and insights pros believe it’s their responsibility to share the customers’ story as the source of truth their stakeholders are craving. They find creative ways to bring the customer narrative to life and provide evidence that supports decision-making.
According to Forrester Research, 70% to 80% of product design and development use cases are best served by sourcing feedback from existing customers, while only 20% to 30% are a fit for third-party samples. In fact, generic surveys not focused on real users have high failure rate, in which unreliable input leads to uninformed investment decisions that put revenue and reputation at risk.
If you’re thinking: “That sounds great, but how will I determine who is a user and who isn’t?” you’re not alone. Finding and engaging real users is a common challenge for researchers. Innovation Day highlighted strategies for effective segmentation and targeting.
For example, A&E Networks uses custom survey data in conjunction with other data sets around viewing preferences, habits, and ad receptivity. Based on these factors, they can tailor research activities to each viewer. This is particularly useful to create forced exposure experiences that authentically represent how ad campaigns would unfold.
In a B2B example, Google Geo runs studies for niche segments based on customers’ previous responses and highest priority use cases. They tailor their messaging for different segment to drive greater engagement.
- Customer communities are built on relationships, not transactions
In market research, words like “participant,” or “panelist” reflect a short-term, transactional relationship between a brand and people who are part of a study. In contrast, when we use terms such as “customer” or “user” to refer to community members, it indicates a special kind of relationship that’s built on trust and mutual benefit.
With a community-based research model, all parties are deeply invested. Researchers and the brands they work for want to know what’s going through customers’ heads. They engage in ongoing conversations (sometimes over years!) to deeply understand motivations, preferences, and sentiment.
Many Alida customers have realized the benefit of forging a direct connection between customers and product teams. While business teams responsible for roadmaps love to hear direct feedback regarding proposed experiences and prototypes, customers also love being able to ask questions and get previews of new innovations.
As UX Researcher Roger Sambrook from Google Geo shared on Innovation Day, “People want something out of this for themselves. They want to engage with human beings on other side of company wall.”
Beauty brand Orveon Global, for example, engages with “superfans,” customers most excited to test new products, rate and review them, and generate their own content as part of marketing campaigns.
- Speed to insight is essential for success
Numerous speakers at Innovation Day shared the pressure they face for fast turnaround. In a common scenario, the deadline for a product launch is looming and stakeholders have only a small window to test hypotheses and make changes. For research teams responsible for sales support, requests for research provide little notice and tight timeframes.
Top performers are continually finding ways to compress timeframe for each part of the research process:
- Customer communities simplify audience management, including segmenting, recruiting, and scheduling.
- Integration across multiple tools and platforms streamline mixed-method research across the entire design lifecycle.
- Rapid analysis and shared dashboards help to democratize insights, such that stakeholders can see answers roll in in real time and serve them up to local teams to incorporate in their operations.
When operations run more efficiently, researchers have more time in their day to spend in in-depth interviews with customers and strategy discussions with stakeholders.
Hungry for more lessons?
For more best practices and fantastic examples of the impact research and insights can have on an organization make sure you watch the on-demand sessions from Innovation Day as well as the stories of Alida’s Delta Award winners.
The steps you take today may just take you to the award stage in 2025.
