Qualitative Research or a Survey? How to Understand Customer Opinions

By Andrew Edwards, Founder and CEO of CITE Research

Imagine a customer gives your onboarding process a six out of ten. What would you fix?

Maybe they waited a week for someone to set up their account. Maybe the setup went smoothly and they still had no idea what to do next. Those two customers gave you the same score, and they're asking you to solve different problems.

If I were helping you decide what to fix, I'd ask what you already know. If the reasons are still fuzzy, I'd start with interviews. If you know the likely problems and need to decide which deserves attention first, I'd start with a survey.

Start with interviews when you're still figuring out what happened

In an interview, I'd ask a customer to walk me through their first week, starting from the day they signed up. What did they expect to happen? When did they first get stuck? What did they do next?

Say a customer says setup was confusing. A good follow up is, "Can you show me where you got stuck?" They might pull up a welcome email and point to three links that looked like different ways to start. That gives your team something specific to investigate.

For a topic like onboarding or cancellation, I'd usually choose individual interviews. If I wanted to see how customers react to a new welcome message and what they pick up from one another's reactions, I might use focus groups. Both approaches can surface language and experiences you hadn't thought to ask about.

Use a survey when you need to know how widespread it is

Suppose you already hear about confusing emails, delayed account setup, and trouble getting help. A survey can ask customers who joined recently which issues they ran into and which one held them up most. With enough responses in each group, you can compare customers who set up on their own with those who had someone guide them.

I'd also look at who answered. If most responses came from customers who finished onboarding, you may have heard very little from the people who gave up along the way. That matters if the decision is where to spend money reducing early drop off.

Use both when the decision needs both kinds of answers

You can start with interviews, then borrow customers' own words to build better survey questions. "I couldn't tell which link to click first" is easier for someone to answer than "The onboarding communications lacked clarity."

You can also go in the other direction. If an existing survey shows that customers setting up on their own are less satisfied, interviews can help you find out where their experience diverges from customers who had help. Ask for permission to contact respondents again if you plan to recruit from the survey.

You don't have to do both every time. If you're rewriting one welcome email, a few interviews where customers show you how they read it might be enough to get started. If you're deciding whether to redesign onboarding for the whole customer base, you'll probably want to know how common each problem is before choosing where to invest.

At CITE Research, we use qualitative interviews and customer surveys to help teams make decisions like these. If you need data that travels — findings you can share with press, customers, or partners — a PR survey can do both: measure how widespread a problem is and give you something worth publishing. If you’re weighing the two, tell us what you’re trying to decide. We can start there.