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Editor’s note: John Hunoval is an associate director in customer marketplace insights at Verizon, New Jersey. 

Understanding our customers is paramount for driving growth and sustaining engagement. This article explores various strategies employed by researchers within Verizon's insights organization, with a particular focus on the experiences of a hybrid team dedicated to product research. This team's design emphasizes the integration of market and user research to foster product and experience innovation.

While this article centers on the synergy between market and user research, the outlined strategies hold broad applicability for other insights organizations and the varied types of teams, and researchers that exist within and alongside them. By combining market research data, which tends to focus broadly on customer attitudes and behaviors, with user research insights into experiences and needs, a more holistic view of the customer journey emerges. This integrated perspective reveals significant opportunities for organizations to optimize product development, evolve customer experiences, refine marketing strategies, ultimately enhance overall customer engagement and for researchers to drive additional impact with their business partners. 

Bridging the gap: Building a team focused on MR and UXR integration 

Providing a comprehensive understanding of our customers can take various forms. Within Verizon’s insights organization, integrating market research (MR) and user research (UXR) teams, and creating a hybrid organization, has been effective.

However, researchers (not just their organizations) also benefit from a more holistic understanding of customers. Blind spots that might form when market and user research are conducted separately can be avoided and a more complete picture of the customer journey is readily accessible. Both benefits yield additional context for researchers to weave into their work, positioning them to drive additional impact with their business partners. 

In building a team focused on MR and UXR integration, we’ve identified and implemented strategies to effectively merge two previously discrete disciplines. In practice, this means exploring customers’ actions while also trying to understand the business impact of those decisions. However, these strategies can also be leveraged by researchers and research teams to better position themselves as true business thought leaders, while also helping drive towards goals of informing experiences that encourage loyalty, delight customers and drive revenue.

Across companies, organizations and even teams, silos can be created due to lack of communication or trust, competition, structure, ways of working and/or a focus on organizational, team or even individual goals. However, when merging two research disciplines, breaking down these silos and fostering collaboration across multiple levels of the organization is critical. Following are five specific strategies that can contribute to this goal.   

Shared goals and objectives

  • Define common objectives: Ensure both MR and UXR researchers are working towards shared and clearly stated goals and with an understanding of what their work ladders up to. Examples include aligning around goals such as improving product adoption, increasing customer satisfaction and/or driving incremental revenue. When multiple researchers or teams understand a unified business objective, it’s easier to align their research efforts.
  • Develop joint research plans: To combat against operating in silos, create collaborative research plans that leverage the strengths of both MR and UXR. By establishing a written joint research plan, creativity can flow, with limitations only being tied to budgetary and timing restrictions. This approach ensures research questions are comprehensive and address both business and user needs.

Collaboration and communication

  • Regular meetings and workshops: Establish regular meetings or workshops where researchers and/or teams can share findings, discuss research plans and brainstorm ideas. This facilitates ongoing communication and helps identify potential overlaps or synergies. Conducting these meetings team-wide and on a per-project basis has proven most effective.
  • Training, upskilling and skill sharing: Encourage team members to learn other disciplines through formalized training, job shadowing (buddy system) or internal presentations of individual studies. This cross-pollination of knowledge leads to a newfound level of empathy and a deeper understanding of each discipline's methods.
  • Joint presentations and reports: When possible, present MR and UXR findings together. In examples where joint presentations have generated the highest level of engagement, research discipline is deprioritized and storytelling becomes the priority. A storytelling-first mind-set best highlights the value of integrated research

Integrating methodologies

There are various strategies for integrating MR and UXR studies, each with tradeoffs.

  • Sequential research: A sequential approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of the customer journey and has been the most common tactic used in the Verizon product space. However, sequential research takes advanced planning, is highly susceptible to timing requirements and requires aligning stakeholder road maps and decisions.
  • Parallel research: While a simultaneous MR and UXR approach can provide a more complete understanding of a customer’s behavior and preferences, you lose the ability to incorporate any iterative learnings from either individual study. This approach works best when a space is generally defined, and specific objectives/questions have been pre-identified to be addressed through a specific methodology.
  • Mixed-methods approach: Incorporating market and user experience questions within the same study, allows for a more nuanced understanding of customer motivations and behavior. This approach can range in complexity from being highly integrated (e.g., developing quantitative modules that simultaneously capture user click-through behavior) to a far simpler approach that utilizes a survey-based methodology but leverages open-ended questions to begin an evolved conversation with consumers. As recent examples, this a mixed-methods approach has been utilized to:
    • Explore preliminary experiential implications of exploration, discovery and purchase of add-on services available through one of Verizon’s family oriented products.
    • Understand how consideration of a Verizon protection product fluctuates based on consumers going through the specific, hypothesized design flows as well as the full existing product experience.

Organizational culture

  • Promote a culture of collaboration: Setting a clear vision and tangible goals is critical in creating and fostering an organizational culture that values collaboration and knowledge sharing. This can be achieved through leadership support, team-building activities and recognition programs.
  • Break down silos: Actively work to break down silos between MR and UXR but also between stakeholder organizations (e.g., marketing, product development, design, engineering). Early in the process this may involve creating cross-functional project teams and ultimately shifting how research teams are constructed. Examples include:
    • In January 2025, Verizon’s hybrid-team reoriented to a portfolio-first team structure which has centralized both business and design conversations through a single team lead.
    • In most cases, stakeholder representation from both the business and design organizations is required when kicking off, making critical project related decisions and socializing research.
  • Shared credit: As projects are socialized and discussed, creating a culture where credit is consistently shared between researchers and researcher teams is also paramount. As recognition is shared across researchers of different backgrounds, a willingness buy-in to the larger vision of cross-discipline collaboration often follows.

Each of these tactics have created increased empathy around the pressures and challenges of other job functions and have produced additional fluency around the responsibilities of both Verizon’s hybrid-team members and stakeholder teams.

Understand the realities

  • Integration isn’t always necessary: In some cases, single-disciplinary, direct and tactical research is still required and a recommended approach. In these instances, this more focused approach delivers the required outcome. However, it’s equally critical to identify when key business questions can benefit from collaboration.
  • It takes time: The process of consistently providing a comprehensive view of consumers through the integration of two discreet disciplines and often cultures is a learning experience, often requiring slight shifts and/or entirely new ways of working. This is a nonlinear process, and ups and downs are a norm.

Integrating research function yields benefit for brands, insights organizations and researchers 

By integrating market research and user research in both small and large ways, brands, insights organizations and researchers can benefit from a more nuanced understanding of its customers. This integrated perspective will ultimately enable brands to develop more customer-centric products and services, enhance customer engagement and drive growth. While insights organizations can utilize a holistic perspective to differentiate themselves as data becomes more widely accessible. And researchers can utilize a more complete understanding of the customer journey to amplify their work and drive additional impact.