Using Grain for Customer Research

Many people who conduct customer research—particularly when interviewing customers—use Grain to capture the actual "voice of the customer." This includes UX researchers, product managers and marketers, product designers, startup founders, and more.

Before Grain, researchers interviewed customers via video calls, yet lacked an easy way to share customer feedback with other departments (engineers, designers, leadership) who need research to make product decisions. 30-minute video recordings would sit unwatched—or, worse, they didn't easily integrate with the communication tools companies use daily (e.g., Slack, Notion, etc.).

Grain allows customer researchers to share just the best parts of customer interviews with their colleagues. No more asking colleagues to watch a 30-minute recording. And no struggling with complicated video-editing software just to make the videos more digestible.

Create brief video highlight snippets from Zoom calls that you can share with others.

Because Grain integrates with Zoom, all of your customer-interview recordings automatically appear in your Grain Workspace (accessed in your browser). Now you can create and share brief video highlights using the call's transcript. Highlight the portion of the recording you want to share, click "Share Highlight," copy the link, and you're ready to go. Alternatively, click “Copy Highlights” to share a timestamped list of your Highlights, where each Highlight is a link to easy, on-demand viewing.

Share brief video highlights with your colleagues in the communication tools they use most.

Tip: Create a Slack channel with only customer feedback highlights. That way, your coworkers can see a steady stream of what your customers think. The highlights directly embed into Slack (something only Grain can do through our special integration).

Tip: Leverage multiple customers asking for the same thing—for example, a popular feature request—and embed several, similar customer quotes in one Notion article. Then, share the document as a "voice of the customer" proposal with your product-design-engineering team.

Tip: Rather than just share the 30-minute recordings of each interview, use Grain to edit the customers' responses to each interview question—for example, "how do you make purchasing decisions at your company?"—into easily digestible video highlights. Create a spreadsheet organizing all of the brief answers for your team to quickly reference and share with other decision-makers.

It's a best practice to take copious notes of what customers say during interviews—sometimes via pen and paper or a digital doc. However, these conventional writing tools don't integrate with the actual interview recording, making it difficult to find key moments after the interview.

The Grain desktop notepad allows you to take notes during a customer interview that are both time-stamped and integrated with your call recording. Every time you take a note, the note is converted into a smart video clip along with the original text of the note you took as well as the transcript of what was said in the clip.

You can

a) Write notes about the interview. Each note will link to that moment in the video-call recording for future reference.

b) Simply click an emoji in the desktop notepad to mark a key moment—instead of writing long notes.

Tip: Emojis allow you to remain focused on your interview subject—instead of appearing distracted while writing verbose notes. Read about how productivity guru Guillaume Cabane created a system of emojis for his team that represents key moments they're interested in.

Grain is better together. Invite your customer-research colleagues to your Grain workspace so that you can share customer-interview recordings, highlights, and notes. As a team in Grain, you can take advantage of each other's past work and perhaps save the customer from conducting another interview about similar topics.

Recordings can be tagged based on the subject matter for better organization. And search allows you to find recordings based on those tags—as well as notes, call titles, and words in the transcript.

Many customer researchers conduct interviews with teammates using Grain. If you invite a colleague—say, another UX researcher—to the desktop notepad, you can take notes together! Divide up tasks: one of you leads the customer interview, while the other takes notes.

From taking better notes during customer interviews to sharing the best parts of calls, customer research teams can extract more value from the qualitative research process with Grain. And colleagues in other departments are now more likely to embrace the research because it's the actual voice of the customer and it's easy to consume.