Customer Insights
Jacob Duval
•
May 29, 2025
Intro
Understanding what customers want is at the heart of creating products people love. I'm going to walk you through the places you can find valuable customer insights and show you a simple way to transform this information into decisions that work.
Where to Find Customer Insights
Customer insights are everywhere if you know where to look. Here are the main places you'll find them:
Direct conversations
Talking directly with customers gives you the richest insights. These conversations help you understand not just what customers say they want, but why they want it. You can spot patterns in their needs that might not show up in data alone.
User interviews let you dig deep into specific questions. Customer support calls reveal real problems people face. Sales conversations show what matters most when people decide to buy.
Product usage data
What customers do often tells a different story than what they say. Usage data shows you how people actually use your product, where they get stuck, and which features they ignore.
Look at which features get used most, where users drop off, and how long tasks take to complete. This data helps you spot gaps between what you thought would happen and what actually happens when people use your product.
Surveys and feedback forms
Surveys help you collect feedback from many customers at once. They're great for testing if the patterns you notice in conversations hold true across your wider customer base.
Keep surveys short and focused on specific questions you want to answer. Mix rating questions with open-ended ones to get both measurable results and deeper insights into why customers feel a certain way.
Social media and reviews
People share honest opinions about products online. Review sites, social media, and community forums contain valuable insights about what customers love and hate about your product and your competitors.
This unfiltered feedback often reveals pain points you hadn't considered and shows you the exact words customers use to describe their problems.
Customer support tickets
Support tickets are a goldmine of information about what's not working. When customers reach out for help, they're telling you exactly where your product falls short of their expectations.
Look for common issues that come up repeatedly. These patterns point to areas where your product needs improvement or where instructions need to be clearer.
Sales win/loss analysis
Understanding why customers choose your product—or a competitor's—reveals what features and benefits matter most at the moment of decision.
Talk with your sales team about the reasons deals close or fall through. This information helps you see which product features drive purchases and which gaps are costing you customers.
Gathering and Organizing Insights
Finding insights is just the first step. The real challenge is making sense of all this information and organizing it in a way that helps you see patterns.
Capture everything in one place
Start by bringing all your customer insights into a single location. When feedback is scattered across email, chat logs, and documents, important patterns get missed.
Use a tool that lets your whole team add insights as they hear them. This creates a shared pool of customer knowledge that grows over time. Each new conversation or piece of feedback adds to this collection, making patterns clearer. Obviously, our recommendation is to use our own tool, Rough.
Focus on the problem, not the solution
When recording insights, capture what problem the customer is trying to solve, not just the feature they're asking for. Customers often suggest solutions based on their limited view of what's possible. Your job is to understand the underlying need.
For example, instead of noting "Customer wants a dashboard with 12 metrics," write "Customer struggles to quickly see if their campaign is on track." This keeps you focused on solving the right problem rather than just building requested features. This is why pitches on Rough always have a problem block by default.
Add context to each insight
An insight without context is easy to misinterpret. For each piece of feedback, note:
- Who shared it (their role, company size, how they use your product)
- When and where you heard it (support call, user interview, survey)
- How common this feedback is (one request or a pattern?)
This context helps you weigh the importance of each insight and avoid making changes based on what one loud customer wants rather than what most customers need.
Group related insights
As you collect insights, group them into themes. This helps you see the bigger picture beyond individual pieces of feedback.
You might group insights by:
- Product area (onboarding, reporting, billing)
- Customer journey stage (discovery, purchase, first use)
- Customer segment (new users, power users, enterprise)
- Problem type (usability issues, missing features, performance)
These groupings reveal which areas need the most attention and help you prioritize where to focus next.
Look for patterns across sources
The strongest insights appear in multiple places. When you hear the same feedback in customer interviews, see it in support tickets, and notice it in usage data, you've found something worth paying attention to.
These cross-validated insights are your most reliable guide to what customers truly need. They help you avoid the trap of building something based on a single passionate customer's request that doesn't solve problems for your wider user base.
Turning Insights into Decisions
Collecting insights is only valuable if you use them to make better decisions.
Identify the biggest pain points
Start by looking for the problems that come up most often or cause the most frustration. These pain points are usually where you can make the biggest impact.
Focus on issues that affect many customers or that block important customer goals. Fixing these high-impact problems first gives you the best return on your effort.
Connect insights to business goals
Link customer insights to your company's goals. This helps you prioritize which problems to solve first based on what matters most to your business.
For example, if your goal is to reduce customer churn, prioritize insights related to why customers leave. If you're focused on expanding to new markets, pay attention to feedback from potential customers in those areas.
This connection ensures that your product decisions support your broader business strategy while still addressing real customer needs.
Define the problem clearly
Before jumping to solutions, make sure you understand the problem completely. Write a clear problem statement that captures:
- What specific challenge customers face
- Why it matters to them
- How it affects their ability to achieve their goals
- Which customer segments experience this problem most acutely
A well-defined problem focuses your team on solving the right issue and prevents you from building features that miss the mark.
Brainstorm solutions
With a clear problem statement, bring together people from different teams to brainstorm possible solutions. Include designers, engineers, and customer-facing team members who bring different perspectives.
Encourage creative thinking and consider multiple approaches to solving the problem. The best solution might not be the first one you think of or the one customers directly asked for.
Conclusion
Building products people love starts with understanding what they need. By gathering insights from multiple sources, organizing them thoughtfully, and using them to guide your decisions, you create a product that truly solves customer problems.
Remember that customer insights work isn't a one-time project. It's an ongoing conversation with your customers that continuously shapes your product. The more you listen and adapt, the better your product becomes.
Start small by picking one or two sources of insights that are most accessible to you. Develop a simple process for collecting and organizing what you learn. Then use these insights to make one improvement to your product.
Over time, you'll build a deeper understanding of your customers that guides every product decision and helps you create features people actually want to use.
