15 Customer Discovery Questions to Ask for Valuable Insights
Asking the right customer discovery questions can make all the difference between building a product that satisfies user needs and one that nobody uses.
In this article, you will discover 15 such questions.
You will also learn different methods for collecting customer data and how product managers can do it with Userpilot.
What are customer discovery questions?
Customer discovery questions are questions that product teams can ask to gain a deeper understanding of their target customers—their behaviors, pain points, needs, and wants.
As a part of the customer discovery process, they allow you to validate assumptions and gather insights before developing or launching a new product.
In this way, you can ensure that what you’re building is in line with customer needs, which increases the chances of product success in the market.
Methods for collecting customer discovery insights
Product teams can gather customer discovery data in a number of ways. The most popular ones include:
- Customer discovery interviews: Whether individual or in the form of focus groups, discovery interviews allow you to engage with potential customers directly to gain qualitative insights into their needs, challenges, and habits.
- Customer feedback surveys: Delivered either by email or in-app, they allow teams to collect both quantitative and qualitative insights at different stages of the product development lifecycle at scale.
- Product analytics: With tools like session recordings and funnel analysis, you can objectively analyze user behavior inside the product. This helps identify customer pain points and preferences.
- Internal discovery: Customer-facing colleagues, for example, from the sales, customer success, or support teams, are a great source of anecdotal data about customers’ problems and needs.
- Competitor analysis: Analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of rival products and monitoring social media mentions, and reviews allow the product manager to identify gaps in the market and find ways to differentiate the product.
- Industry events: Attending conferences and trade shows allows you to stay up to date with the trends in your niche, network with potential customers, and gather feedback on your product ideas.
Customer discovery questions for target market research
The key to successful customer discovery is asking the right questions. Here are 7 customer discovery questions that you might consider while carrying out your initial customer research.
1. What is your current role and your most important tasks?
Understanding the nature of your potential customers’ roles and everyday tasks is essential when developing new products.
Such insights allow product managers to prioritize features that help users complete their JTBDs. This makes the product more relevant and useful to the target customer and increases the chances that they will adopt it.
Try Userpilot to Build Your Welcome Survey using these Customer Discovery Questions
2. What are your current pain points?
By identifying the pain points that plague users in their everyday work, product managers can understand gaps in the market and the weaknesses of the existing products.
Developing an effective solution to a customer’s problem increases the odds of product success. This is particularly true in the current economic climate. Customers may not always have the budget for vitamins, but they will always need painkillers.
3. What are the biggest challenges you encounter when trying to [achieve a specific goal]?
This question can be used as a follow-up to the question about users’ JTBDs.
It gives you a chance to understand better customer workflows and the obstacles that they face when trying to achieve their goals.
By understanding the challenges, product teams can design products that are easier to use and better satisfy user needs. The insights can also help them develop onboarding flows that remove friction from the customer journey.
![Customer discovery questions: What are the biggest challenges you encounter when trying to [achieve a specific goal]?](https://images.storychief.com/account_6827/challenges-customer-discovery-questions_a393e11202844b2d275962c06ffc354e_800.png)
4. What tools do you currently use to [solve a specific problem]?
Asking about the tools that users currently use gives product managers insight into existing solutions and identifies their key competitors.
As such, the question could be a springboard for in-depth competitive analysis. It is the first step to building a superior product that outperforms competitors and effectively meets user needs.
5. What do you dislike about the solutions you’ve already tried?
This is a specific question exploring the shortcomings of available tools from the user’s perspective.
Analyzing the weaknesses of the existing solutions enables product managers to avoid the mistakes that other companies have made.
Consequently, they can come up with product ideas that not only solve the customer’s problems but also improve the overall user experience.
6. Which factor is the most important to you when making a purchase decision?
Understanding what factors users consider when making the decision to buy a product allows the team to prioritize their efforts.
For example, if they mention usability or functionality, these are the aspects that you should prioritize.
The answers to this question can also help you refine your product positioning, differentiation, and messaging.
Let’s imagine that the majority of customers say that price is the key factor. In this case, you need to adapt your pricing strategy to stand out from the competitors. You could do it by lowering prices or offering a freemium product.
7. What does success look like when using a product to meet your goals?
Understanding how your customers define success provides valuable insights into what they truly value in a product. This helps product teams focus on delivering outcomes that align with users’ expectations and needs.
The insights can also improve your customer acquisition efforts: Marketing teams can use them to craft compelling messaging that highlights specific goals potential customers can achieve using the product.
Customer discovery questions to ask for existing solutions
Discovery isn’t limited to new products. On the contrary, it should be an ongoing and iterative process so that you can keep up with the changes in customer needs and preferences and retain your product-market fit.
Let’s look at a few questions that can help you get valuable insights about an existing product.
8. How easy is our product to use?
This question is designed to identify any usability issues the customer might be experiencing. Their responses can provide insights into how intuitive and user-friendly the product is.
Answers to this question can guide the design and development teams to make improvements necessary to enhance the user experience. You can use them to remove complexities in navigation, improve feature discovery, and remove friction that makes it difficult to perform tasks.
9. Are there any features you wish this product had?
This question uncovers the unmet needs or desires of the customers. By asking this, you can understand what additional functionalities or features customers are looking for.
This can also help you identify issues with user onboarding and customer education. If the users request a feature that you already have or your product addresses the need in a different way, you need to explore why users don’t know about it.
By accommodating user requests and improving feature discovery, you make the product more competitive and enable users to realize its full value.
10. If you could change one thing about our product, what would it be?
This question gives customers the chance to suggest product changes and improvements.
What makes this question valuable is that it asks users about just one thing they’d like to change. The one that would make the biggest difference to their product experience. This keeps the responses focused on the key pain points and needs.
Thanks to this, you can prioritize product initiatives that deliver the most perceived user value.
11. How likely will you recommend this product to a friend/colleague?
This question is a direct measure of customer satisfaction and loyalty and is often used to calculate the Net Promoter Score (NPS).
In short, if customers are willing to recommend the product, it indicates their satisfaction and trust in the product.
When paired with open-ended questions, it can highlight the areas that need immediate attention to improve the overall customer experience.
12. Did you try any alternative solutions before this product?
This question gives you insights into the customer journey and can help you understand what made your customers choose your product over competing offerings.
Such insights are invaluable for product and marketing teams.
As a product manager, you can use them to uncover gaps in the market that your product could fill.
For marketing managers, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of alternative products helps identify unique selling points and improve product positioning.
13. Are there any features that you rarely use or don’t find valuable?
This question helps to identify the less valuable features of the product.
By understanding the features that don’t bring value to customers, you can better prioritize your development efforts and focus on improving the most useful functionality. This can simplify the product and make it more user-friendly and easier to maintain.
However, before you decide to sunset the unpopular feature, use in-app analytics to verify user feedback. Investigate why the feature adoption is so low. This may reveal issues with onboarding that you can easily address by improving in-app messaging.
Leverage Userpilot to Gain Valuable Insights using these Customer Discovery Questions Examples
14. Is there anything that could make you stop using our product?
This question identifies potential risks that could lead to customer churn.
Understanding these risks allows you to address them proactively before customers leave.
These insights can also be used to improve your product and customer service, which will translate into improved overall customer satisfaction.
15. How has our product helped improve your business outcomes?
This question is crucial for understanding the real-world impact of your product on customers’ businesses.
Understanding which aspects of your product contribute most significantly to business goals can guide future development efforts and help you prioritize high-impact features and capabilities.
By gathering specific examples and metrics of how your product has positively affected business outcomes, you can build a compelling case for the product’s effectiveness: the data makes it easier to justify the product’s ROI to a potential customer.
How Userpilot can help with customer discovery?
Userpilot is a product growth platform that can enhance your customer discovery process.
It offers two main ways to collect customer data: in-app surveys and product analytics.
Creating in-app surveys takes a few minutes, thanks to the survey template library.
Just search for a relevant survey you want to conduct, like NPS, CES, CSAT, or any other industry-standard survey, pick the template, customize it in the visual editor, and set the triggering and audience options.
Userpilot offers in-depth survey analytics, so analyzing the insights takes little effort. This includes qualitative NPS responses, which you can tag to keep them organized.
Now, onto analytics. Userpilot automatically captures all user behavior data, so you don’t have to manually tag features or events to follow.
You can then analyze the data in one of the main reports (Trends, Funnels, Paths, and Retention). That’s how you can identify friction points in the user journey and understand what drives customer value.
Or what doesn’t add any value, so you don’t waste your resources, just like one of our customers, Zoezi did.
And what if you want to conduct customer discovery interviews?
Userpilot doesn’t offer interview capabilities but can help you recruit the right interviewees from your customer base.
For example, you could use analytics or the NPS survey results to find your power users and send an interview invite to the relevant customer segment via an in-app message.
Conclusion
Customer discovery questions are essential at the early stage of product development when you’re researching the competitive landscape and assessing customer needs.
They are also vital for incremental innovation after the launch. They allow you to identify ways to improve the product and make it more competitive.
If you want to see how Userpilot can help you with customer or product discovery, book the demo!
Leverage Userpilot to Gain Valuable Insights using these Customer Discovery Questions Examples
