The customer insight glossary
Clear, practical definitions of the terms behind customer understanding, from personas and jobs-to-be-done to voice of customer and continuous discovery. Each entry explains what it means and how teams put it to work.
Personas and segmentation
- Customer journey mapA customer journey map is a visual timeline of the steps a customer goes through to get something done with your product, from first need to ongoing use, showing what they do, think and feel at each stage.
- Customer personaA customer persona is a research-based profile of a target customer that captures their goals, behaviours, pain points and context, so teams can make decisions with a specific person in mind.
- Customer segmentationCustomer segmentation is the practice of dividing a customer base into groups that share meaningful attributes, needs or behaviours, so each group can be served and prioritised differently.
- Ideal customer profileAn ideal customer profile (ICP) describes the type of company that gets the most value from your product and is most valuable to you in return, defined by attributes like size, industry, situation and the problem it needs solved.
- Proto-personaA proto-persona is a provisional customer profile built from a team's existing assumptions and knowledge, used as a starting point before primary research is done.
Research and discovery
- Affinity mappingAffinity mapping is a way of making sense of qualitative research by writing each observation or quote on its own note and grouping the notes by similarity until clear themes emerge.
- Continuous discoveryContinuous discovery is the practice of maintaining a regular, ongoing habit of talking to customers and testing ideas throughout product development, rather than doing research only in occasional big projects.
- Customer interviewA customer interview is a one-to-one conversation with a current or potential customer, used to understand their goals, problems and behaviour in their own words, usually by asking about specific things they have done.
- Discussion guideA discussion guide is the plan for a research interview: the goal, the topics to cover in order, and the questions and follow-ups to ask, written so every interview in a study covers the same ground.
- Product discoveryProduct discovery is the work of deciding what to build and why, by validating that a proposed solution is valuable, usable, feasible and viable before committing significant engineering effort to it.
- Qualitative researchQualitative research is the study of customer attitudes, motivations and behaviours through non-numerical methods such as interviews, observation and open-ended feedback, aimed at understanding why people act as they do.
- Research repositoryA research repository is a centralised, searchable store of customer research and evidence, from interviews and tickets to survey results and the insights drawn from them, that a whole organisation can draw on.
- Research synthesisResearch synthesis is the step after collecting research where you combine everything you heard into a small number of findings, each backed by evidence, that the team can act on.
- Thematic analysisThematic analysis is a qualitative research method for identifying, grouping and interpreting recurring patterns, or themes, across a body of unstructured feedback such as interviews, tickets or open-text survey responses.
Feedback and insight
- Churn analysisChurn analysis is the work of finding out which customers leave, when, and why, so you can fix the reasons that are in your control and spot the warning signs earlier.
- Closing the feedback loopClosing the feedback loop means going back to customers who gave feedback to tell them what you did with it, whether you fixed the problem, built the feature, or decided not to and why.
- Customer feedback analysisCustomer feedback analysis is the process of collecting qualitative and quantitative feedback, organising it into themes, and quantifying those themes so teams can prioritise what to act on.
- Customer insightA customer insight is a non-obvious, evidence-backed understanding of customer behaviour or motivation that can change a decision, distinct from a raw data point or a single piece of feedback.
- Net Promoter ScoreNet Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric based on a single question, how likely someone is to recommend a company on a 0 to 10 scale, reported as the percentage of promoters minus the percentage of detractors.
- Voice of customerVoice of customer (VoC) is the practice of systematically capturing what customers say about their needs, expectations and experiences, and feeding it back into product, marketing and service decisions.
Strategy and growth
- Feature prioritisationFeature prioritisation is deciding which product changes to build first, by weighing how many customers a problem affects and how badly against what it would cost to solve.
- Jobs to be doneJobs to be done (JTBD) is a framework that describes products in terms of the progress a customer is trying to make in a given situation, rather than the customer's attributes or the product's features.
- Product-market fitProduct-market fit is the point at which a product satisfies a strong market demand so well that customers adopt, stay and recommend it, and demand begins to pull the business forward.
- RICE scoringRICE scoring is a prioritisation framework that ranks ideas by Reach, Impact, Confidence and Effort, calculated as reach times impact times confidence, divided by effort.
- Win-loss analysisWin-loss analysis is the practice of systematically studying why deals are won or lost, using evidence from sales conversations and buyer feedback to improve product, positioning and sales execution.
See what your customers keep telling you
Connect a source or upload a few files. Your first opportunities show up in minutes.