Article

Customer insights that drive growth: Solving the problems people actually pay for

In this article, we’ll explore how to use customer interviews to refocus your organisation on the problems customers are actually paying you to solve.

Ann Padley (Denver)

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…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

Why successful organisations often lose touch with the core problems they solve for customers.

How to quickly reconnect with customer value through simple, focused interviews.

Practical steps to uncover functional, emotional, and aspirational needs that drive spending and loyalty.

How to turn customer insights into a springboard for innovation and future growth.

Article

Customer insights that drive growth: Solving the problems people actually pay for

In this article, we’ll explore how to use customer interviews to refocus your organisation on the problems customers are actually paying you to solve.

Ann Padley (Denver)

·

…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

Why successful organisations often lose touch with the core problems they solve for customers.

How to quickly reconnect with customer value through simple, focused interviews.

Practical steps to uncover functional, emotional, and aspirational needs that drive spending and loyalty.

How to turn customer insights into a springboard for innovation and future growth.

Article

Customer insights that drive growth: Solving the problems people actually pay for

In this article, we’ll explore how to use customer interviews to refocus your organisation on the problems customers are actually paying you to solve.

Ann Padley (Denver)

·

…

·

Dec 4, 2025

In this article, you’ll learn:

Why successful organisations often lose touch with the core problems they solve for customers.

How to quickly reconnect with customer value through simple, focused interviews.

Practical steps to uncover functional, emotional, and aspirational needs that drive spending and loyalty.

How to turn customer insights into a springboard for innovation and future growth.

Why you need to refocus on the problems customers are paying you to solve

Why you need to refocus on the problems customers are paying you to solve

Why you need to refocus on the problems customers are paying you to solve

As organisations grow, they tend to invest more time and energy developing products and services they think will sell and less time understanding the problems customers are paying them to solve in the first place. The risk is that you get stuck tinkering with what you do today, rather than imagining what you could build with customers tomorrow.

Case in point—UX design tool InVision recently announced it would be shutting down operations by the end of the year. According to Fast Company, some customers and former employees have argued that “instead of growing its products, the company allowed those products to get stagnant and failed to react to the market around it (Price, 2024).”

It’s easier for this to happen than you might think. There is a sense of achievement when sales numbers are going up or we have successfully increased market share. The signals are more subtle that we are losing touch with the essence of why we exist in the customer's mind.

Interviewing customers: The secret number

There's a fantastic piece of research that came out of the Nielsen Group. Researchers found that after conducting five one-hour, high-quality, face-to-face or remote interviews, they were able to surface, on average, 80% of the customer challenges they would have uncovered if they had conducted 100 or 200 interviews.

Whilst five interviews might not seem like a lot, it is a very quick and inexpensive way for your team to reconnect with what matters most to customers.

Has it been embarrassingly long since you spoke with a real-life customer?

Here’s what to do:

  • Be bold and arrange 5 video calls with customers for each person in your team

  • Consider a cross-section of different customer types or markets, ensuring you are talking to at least 5 in each segment

  • During the interviews, collect stories about the problems they were paying to solve when they ‘hired’ you

  • Explore patterns together and get the team excited about new ‘problems worth solving’

Accelerate your strategic plan with customer insights

Customer research isn’t just a “nice-to-have", it’s a catalyst for sharper strategy and bolder decision-making. By grounding your strategic plan in what customers truly value, you avoid incremental tinkering and instead uncover the breakthroughs that fuel growth.

At Sprint Valley, we see customer insight as the front door to innovation. It helps leadership teams:

  • Facilitate bold choices by aligning stakeholders around the problems worth solving.

  • Create strategic ownership by giving teams clarity on what matters most to customers.

  • Experiment with confidence by testing new ways to solve functional, emotional, and aspirational needs.

Reconnect with the problems customers are paying you to solve. Be bold. Get out there. Schedule five calls for each member of your team. Then, come together to reflect on what you’ve learned collectively.

Start with questions like:

  • What are we doing well?

  • What is it that customers truly value about the way we deliver our product or service?

  • What are the things that really matter to customers?

  • What problem(s) were they trying to solve by becoming a customer?

  • Were we successful in delivering an effective solution?

Debriefing as a team turns raw insight into shared clarity. That clarity is what allows you to move from incremental progress to a bold vision—moving from “what we sell” to “the problems customers pay us to solve.”

From insight to impact

Tired of research that gathers dust? We turn real-world insight into results you can measure.

Get the research kit

Talk to an expert

From insight to impact

Tired of research that gathers dust? We turn real-world insight into results you can measure.

Get the research kit

Talk to an expert

From insight to impact

Tired of research that gathers dust? We turn real-world insight into results you can measure.

Get the research kit

Talk to an expert

Build a habit of customer insight generation

Markets move quickly, and customer expectations evolve even faster. The organisations that thrive aren’t just the ones that capture insights once—they’re the ones that build a rhythm for listening.

By weaving customer insight into quarterly or annual planning cycles, you keep strategy grounded in today’s reality. This cadence ensures you spot emerging needs early, adjust priorities before risks become crises, and invest in opportunities while competitors are still catching up. This continuous focus on the problems customers are paying you to solve becomes the foundation for budgeting, prioritising, and making informed strategic bets.

When leadership teams anchor strategy in customer insight, they avoid the trap of incremental improvement and instead identify the bold moves that matter.

Get customer insight support you can trust

If it’s been a while since you have talked to customers, keep it simple by following the steps above. If you are ready to take customer insight to the next level, check out our Ultimate Research Kit.


The Ultimate Research Kit is designed by the Sprint Valley team to help:

  • Establish a clear research plan - Define what success looks like and create a framework to achieve your vision.

  • Turn research into a team sport - Use structured planning tools to bring diverse perspectives into the room.

  • Gather actionable insights - A well-structured plan will give you what you need to lead to meaningful change.

Our research team can also help you stay ahead of what people really want (and wish you offered) with insights that supercharge spending and loyalty.