Customer insight can be gleaned from many different sources. In this presentation we look at 6 different ways to get a feedback from or information about your customers.
4. Customer Understanding
How can you learn about your customers?
• Ask them – customer feedback
• Meet them – Customer Advisory Boards, focus groups
• Watch them – ethnographic studies
• Monitor them – online activity
• Listen to them – social media and online user forum monitoring
• Ask about them - frontline employees
5. Customer Feedback
Surveys
• Web link
• Post call
• Link on a receipt
• Kiosk
Email
Face-to-Face
Webpage
• Tab (eg Kampyle)
• Screen pop
• Comments box
Comments Card
6. CABs & Focus Groups
Customer Advisory Board
A representative group of
customers that meets periodically
to offer advice on the product and
company direction.
Focus Groups
A small-group discussion on a
specific, focused topic guided by a
trained leader.
7. Ethnographic Research
Trying to understand how people live
their lives.
• Visit customers in their homes or
offices to observe and listen in a
nondirected way.
• Diary studies
• Recreate Use-Case Scenarios
Ethnographic research is all about
discovery of the unknown —
disproving assumptions about user
behavior and uncovering unexpected
insights.
8. Online Activity
What are users telling you without telling you?
Analytics
• On-page time
• Bounce rate
• Path report
• Funnel report
9. Social Listening
Direct comments or mentions
on social networks and in
online forums.
Use tools to gain insight about
every conversation happening
online about your brand,
products, competitors and
industry trends.
10. Employee Feedback
Harness the knowledge
contained in the minds of
employees working on the
front line.
• Surveys
• CRM
• Brown Bag Sessions
11. Feedback Best Practices
• The sooner the better!
• Same channel
• Real time
• Share it!
• Close the loop
What is the point of product innovation if its not centred on helping customers do what they want to do?
Steve Jobs said “you have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology”
Great product innovation (and indeed some of the best companies in the world) are built on an intimate knowledge of customers and what they’re trying to achieve.
In my presentation we’ll look at some sources of customer understanding that you’re probably not using right now and discuss how they can help you to deliver better products.
Scott D. Anthony et al’s book ‘The Innovator’s Guide to Growth’
There are three key things that really matter when it comes to prioritising which problems/opportunities to solve:
1. How important is it to the customer? 2. How frequently does it occur for the customer? 3. How frustrated is the customer with today’s solutions?
(rank each element on a scale of 1 – 5. That is, 1 being not important, and 5 being critical)
Then use the Opportunity Evaluation Formula: (Importance + Frequency) X Frustration.
These insights can be obtained through the use of effective engagement techniques such as establishing Customer Advisory Councils with a select group of customers as well as conducting Strategic Customer Discussions with a cross section of your customer base.
F2F - The more interactions you have with them, the more likely you are to glean insights from them.
CAB – C-level executives, senior managers
- Advice on strategic direction, industry trends, discussion on business challenges/priorities
- ongoing engagement, 1-2 day face to face meetings twice a year with conference calls in between.
- 2 way collaborative dialogue
- Mid-long term impact
FG’s - users
- tactical feedback on a very defined subject
- one time meeting, half a day at most, face to face, phone or web
- 1 way responsive dialogue
- short term impact
Ethnography literally means to “write (or represent) a culture.”
Even the most seasoned researchers can't always get people to articulate their unmet needs. The goal is to see people’s behavior on their terms, not ours.
Ethnographic research offers a number of benefits:
Identifying user needs that have yet to be met
testing market demand for products that do not exist
Validating your assumptions
Ethnographic research is all about discovery of the unknown—disproving assumptions about user behavior and uncovering unexpected insights. Whenever you’re in the field, something you see is going to surprise you, and those surprises are almost always at the root of innovation.
Examples – testing user interfaces with a group of subjects for intuitiveness, video diaries from customers, watching customers as they walk through your store
It may be challenging to get organizational buy-in to pursue ethnographic research because of its long time horizon for results, its cost, and the perception that it may not deliver actionable insights.
Sometimes the best feedback is found when users are candidly using your product (and not being asked how they use it). To get a peek at these sorts of insights, you should turn to analytics that showcase how users are interacting with your site.
If your FAQs section has a 0:09 average on-page time and an awful bounce rate, you know something is not being communicated clearly. People are visiting your support content but obviously not utilizing it.
In other instances, you might want to track how users who did not sign up for your product behaved.
74% of all internet users are on social media.
You can tap into over 650 million sources from Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, news and more to hear what’s being said about your brand.
In some cases social media listening is replacing survey research.
Some marketers are advocating doing away with counting impressions in favor of counting "expressions" from consumers about brands.
The sooner the better – “feedback collected immediately after an event is 40 per cent more accurate than feedback collected 24 hours after an event” - Gartner
Real time - Company agility, the ability to adapt to change, relates directly to profitability. In an Economist Intelligence Unit survey from 2009, nearly 90% of executives surveyed believed that organisational agility was critical for business success.
CXpert specialises in helping companies gain actionable insight from feedback. We recommend metrics, design surveys and propose best practice methodologies to capture the Voice of the Customer (or Voice of the Employee) to help our customers develop better relationships with their customers.
