The Best Experience Insights Don’t Come from Surveys

Innovating experiences starts with understanding how people actually use what you’ve built.

Experience innovation gets discussed a lot. Usually in broad strokes: “delight,” “magic moments,” or “customer love.” But in practical terms, it’s not always clear what teams mean when they say they want to improve or redesign an experience.

At CoinJar Insights, we define experience innovation in fairly simple terms: It’s the process of understanding how your product or service is being used in the real world, and then improving that experience in ways that make it more intuitive, more complete, and better suited to the goals your customers are actually trying to achieve.

That’s not something you can fully grasp from usage metrics or satisfaction scores alone. It takes sharper listening, closer observation, and input from customers who are already pushing the boundaries of what your product can do.

What Experience Innovation Actually Involves

Experience isn’t just interface. And it’s not just customer service. It’s the cumulative effect of:

• The expectations customers bring in

  
  

• The touchpoints they move through

  
  

• The obstacles they encounter

  
  

• The adaptations they make along the way

  
  

Across categories—whether you’re building a SaaS platform, a consumer device, or a subscription service—what stands out in the long run isn’t always the core functionality. It’s whether the experience surrounding that functionality supports real use in context: is it simple, is it coherent, and does it feel complete?

Teams that want to innovate at the experience level often have to look beyond what’s broken. They have to study what’s being bent—where customers are creating their own workarounds or layering on tools to fill in gaps.

Where Typical Feedback Falls Short

Most organizations have some mechanism for capturing the Voice of the Customer: surveys, call transcripts, open text feedback, social media monitoring. That feedback is useful, especially for flagging service issues or validating known pain points. But it tends to be surface-level, and often reactive.

Customers who submit feedback are usually responding to a recent interaction. They’re rating a specific event, not reflecting on the broader experience. And unless the feedback is routed through a team with the right context, it may not lead to meaningful change.

More importantly, many customers simply adapt. They don’t complain. They work around difficulties quietly. That’s why traditional VoC programs often miss the bigger opportunities for improvement.

The Role of Catalytic Customers

This is where Catalytic Customers come in. These are customers who:

• Are experienced in the category as whole, not just with your product

  
  

• Use your product in real, sustained, often creative ways

  
  

• Offer feedback that’s not just descriptive, but diagnostic

  
  

• Are motivated to make the product better—not out of frustration, but out of engagement

  
  

They might be power users. Or they might be early signs of where your category is headed. Either way, their behavior can surface gaps between what your product was designed to do and how it’s actually being used.

In our work, we’ve found that Catalytic Customers can help teams:

• Identify edge use cases that are becoming more common

• Reveal assumptions baked into workflows or interfaces

  
  

• Test and refine experience changes before broad rollout

  
  

• Flag needs that haven’t yet become mainstream—but likely will

  
  

They don’t have all the answers. But they often ask better questions than most internal teams do.

What Experience-Led Teams Can Do with This

Product and CX leaders who take experience innovation seriously don’t rely on anecdote or wait for complaints to pile up. They actively seek out high-value users with critical input. They build in space for qualitative depth alongside quantitative tracking. And they make experience improvement a shared responsibility across product, design, operations, and support.

At CoinJar Insights, we work with teams to:

• Identify and recruit Catalytic Customers in their category

  
  

• Interview, observe, and analyze their usage patterns and decision-making

  
  

• Translate that input into practical experience enhancements

  
  

• Validate changes before broader implementation

  
  

No hype. Just sharper visibility into how your product is being used—and a more confident path to making that experience better.