Customer Research Consulting and Workshops for Growing and Changing Organizations and Brands.
When you're on the cusp of growth and change, the decisions you make need to be strategic, creative and customer centered.
Customer research and human insight gives you the structure and fuel you need for proof of concept, customer engagement, strategic decision-making and product and service prioritization.
I'm glad you're here - come on in!
Big corporations and their teams explore their customers' experiences so often and complete so much customer research.
It makes their marketing and brand decisions creative, clear, focused and optimized for customers' emotions and experiences. You can get that creativity, clarity, focus and optimization too.
It starts with customers and questions.
TOOLS &
TEMPLATES
Faster research design and organized analysis with our shortcuts aka
FAST & EASY
TIPS
Focus on your customers' perspective and get ideas for your customer research
RESEARCH
WORKSHOPS
Act on your
customer curiosity, untangle their behaviours and optimize for your customers.
Why Customer Research?
A creative, collaborative and customer-centric process is vital to getting to the root of your customer problems and getting to those smarter, faster and stronger decisions.
Our process is powered by twenty years of research experience, industry best practices and digital first strategies.
Start with what you know - and think you know.
There are messy and beautiful human stories and data everywhere. Your business and brand is no exception. Your customers are telling you at least part of what you need to know. And it's hidden in plain sight among customer service calls, analytics data, social media comments and event experiences. What's also hidden are the assumptions and generalizations that aren't serving your marketing strategy.
Build strategy and create space for customer answers.
Once you're super clear on what you can say for certain about your customers, you start pulling on the threads. We decide the correct path forward, and we design and plan. I'll provide you with an outline of the best customer questions, analytics tools or workshop. We're asking and talking and looking, and all the mess and chaos starts to become order. The numbers and words start to become patterns.
Have you built a brand and business for your customers?
When you progress through the data chaos, the trends and patterns in your customers' behaviours, emotions and purchases show you where your products and services align with your customer's expectations. And where they don't.
What are you going to build for your customers?
With customer questions answered, customer problems aren't so tangled and mysterious. You can optimize your current marketing strategy based on your customer's reality. Your products and services evolve and grow in a way that aligns with what your customers want and need.
MY OWN HAPPY CUSTOMERS
Smarter, Faster, Stronger Customers
Caroline is a true research strategist as she always works beyond the data and analysis of a traditional market researcher. I worked with Vireo on many research projects, and Caroline is adept at listening to and exploring client's business challenges and questions they have about their consumers, and turning those conversations into creative and well designed research projects. Her reports and presentations are detailed, engaging and well thought out, and include strong insights and recommendations that make decision making easy.
Ryan Crawford
Vice-President, SAGO
The Smarter, Faster, Stronger Customer Personas Workshop gave me the clarity and direction I needed! Before I wasn't sure what my next marketing move was, I knew I needed more leads, and a lead magnet would support my ideal client in finding me and assessing our fit, but beyond that I was stuck. Now I have questions baked into my process that will allow for data to build over time, better identifying the problems my ideal clients are facing. It was so good to spend deep time reflecting on my customers' experiences and needs, strategizing and then brainstorming solutions.
Lauren Malach
Career Strategist & Coach
We have been working with Caroline and Vireo for over five years now. We started with a one-off youth research and engagement project that grew into an annual survey that goes out to our youth and their families, and our program partners. The data and insights we gather are the cornerstone of our strategic planning and decision making. The data also allows us to continually demonstrate and prove the impact of our programs for our donors and funders. I can't recommend Caroline and the work she does enough.
Jeanette Heywood
Executive Director, YouthReach
Frequently Asked Questions
Everyone does their own research from time to time, so the word gets used a lot! At Vireo, we focus on designing and running primary research to understand your current or prospective customers. A well designed and statistically sound research study includes problem definition and objective setting, following design best practices and accurate analysis. Vireo is guided by and follows both the best practices set out by the market research industry's global and Canadian professional associations.
When we're working directly with customers, sometimes our customer's database or social channels are large enough for us to tap into. Sometimes we use our own database and social channels, or online groups that we're active in to build a shortlist of participants. Other times, we use sample and recruitment partners from the market research industry! On occasion, we'll do all three! Most importantly, when we work together, we make the best choice based on the research needs.
If you're just starting to explore and optimise based on your customers' experiences, why not start here, with our Free Customer Research Tools. You'll find example questions, tips for planning and executing your own research as well as templates to organize the data you have now. If you've already got a few research projects under your belt, then you could reach out directly and book a meeting with me. Let's see what's next for you and your customers!
Yes! Corporations do so much customer research it makes your head spin. They have every customer metric and data point on their brand you can imagine (and yours, btw.) I know that because I've designed and run those studies for most of my career. Start-ups, small and medium sized businesses, growing brands can access and unlock what their customers think, act and do too! I'm here to make it happen.
Customer data has many different forms and functions, from your web analytics and structured databases to unstructured images and online conversations. We're adept and experienced at managing, interpreting and untangling what's actually going on with your customer based on the quantitative or qualitative data you're working with now, and the data you'll need in the future.
We're methodology agnostic here! Customer challenges can be messy to untangle and the right methodology and techniques are key to be able to ask the questions that matter. So if qualitative, quantitative or analytics are where the answer lies, that's where we'll go!
Probably more than you're doing now, but not that much more. The best customer research will align with customer and business cycles and the decisions you have to make around those cycles, consider when you plan your social media strategy, or how you'll work to add a new product or service.
The three most common ways I work with Vireo's customers are our Done in a Day programs, workshops or a custom research project we design based on your business' or brands' specific data and decision needs.
I am privileged to live and learn on this land. I acknowledge that my home and work place sits on the current and ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabe and Haudenosaunee people. They are the original caretakers of the land, water, plants and animals that are important aspects of our community. Under the Dish With One Spoon Treaty, myself and my family agree to share, taking only what we need so that something is left for those who follow.
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