Customer research

Your team keeps pouring budget into clever campaigns yet the next board deck still asks why conversions feel random. Dashboards trumpet micro lifts, then slide back. I have seen the pattern too often: we tune adverts before speaking to the people they target.

During an e-commerce platform migration I managed, our data suddenly suggested loyal coffee-pad buyers had switched to whole beans. Panic spread, everyone blamed the migration. I stepped outside the brainstorm and rang the first shopper on the list. He was brewing beans at home for flavour but used capsules on his sailing trips because grinders and waves do not mix. He loved the brand yet struggled to find the matching pods. We launched a bundle discount for the capsules and watched revenue climb. One phone call solved what a week of spreadsheet autopsies could not.

My first job was in a call centre, dialling strangers ten hours a day. That training stripped away the fear of picking up the phone and taught me that the fastest route to insight is a direct question. Years later, running conversion projects for http://nu.nl/ with eye-tracking gear, I saw the same truth: metrics tell you where eyes go, but only the person behind the dots can explain why.

Conversation beats correlation. A single structured chat often reveals more than gambling €5 000 on blind clicks. Yet those discoveries only matter when they rewrite copy, reshape targeting, or spark a new experiment.

This guide shows you how to turn five focused 30-minute calls into copy that converts, adverts that resonate, and tests that win, without burning money on guess-and-check media spend. Read on and replace hope-fuelled marketing with evidence-backed growth before the next invoice from your ad platform lands.