The customer insight glossary
Clear, practical definitions of the terms behind modern 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.
Customer persona
A 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 segmentation
Customer 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.
Proto-persona
A 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.
Continuous discovery
Continuous 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.
Product discovery
Product 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 research
Qualitative 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 repository
A 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.
Thematic analysis
Thematic 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.
Customer feedback analysis
Customer 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 insight
A 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 Score
Net 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 customer
Voice 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.
Jobs to be done
Jobs 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 fit
Product-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.
Win-loss analysis
Win-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.