Research your customer base first. Your present customers are probably your most important market. Know as much as you can about who your present customers are, where they find you, what they like about you, and what they don't like. Your present customers can lead you to future customers too.
Use customer surveys, random interviews, feedback sheets, and a lot of common sense.
Unless you are a brand-new business with no customers at all, your market research should begin with learning as much as possible about your present customers.
Start by classifying your customers into useful groups, or segments. Market segmentation can lead you to better marketing. Classifying customers can help you understand their needs, channels, and differences.
More is not necessarily better when it comes to customer data. If your company sells three products a year, the crucial data will come from these key customers. After collecting some demographic information, your company will be able to focus on the best way to get feedback from the customer. For example, if your company sells home and garden tools, your best target might presumably be the married, dual income, weekend shopper. As soon you have qualified the customer, move on to the surveys and complaint responses.
Look as well at complaints and problems as a valuable source of customer market information. Studies show that only 2-4% of dissatisfied customers complain, which leaves 96-98% unaccounted for. Can you identify these other unhappy customers? By contacting them you may learn of a product problem, discover a solution to a problem, and/or repair and save customer relationships. Remember, if they are not talking to you, they may be compaining to your next potential customer.
User Satisfaction Surveys
Consider using customer survey information to find out more about your customers. The obvious information includes general characteristics that help divide the customers into segments. Do your customers divide into groups:
- by age, income, or gender?
- By profession or educational level?
- By type of company or industry?
- By how much disposable income they have?
This information can be extremely useful. However, you may need to filter information from questions that might encourage customers to give incorrect answers, such as questions about age, income level, and intent to buy.
(Following material is taken from the book Inc.'s How to Really Deliver Superior Customer Service, published by Inc. Magazine.)
After systematically gathering targeted expectation data, consider using the following information to design a quantitative survey. Here are some guidelines for that survey. These were provided by Tom Carnes, of PDQ Printing in Las Vegas, NV:
- Obtain an inside agreement as to the purpose of the survey. Too many have eight purposes, none of which is served very well by a short survey. Firms need to ask all critical stakeholders: How do you think we should use the satisfaction data? Then consensus should be reached before the survey is designed.
- Keep the survey fairly short. The response rate drops significantly when a survey starts to take more than 10 to 15 minutes to complete. At 10 or 15 minutes, though, you can achieve an average response of 65% to 75%.
- Send the survey to more than one contact within the account. If this is not done, you run the risk of getting high levels of satisfaction and then having the relationship ended by a dissatisfied and unsurveyed account contact.
- All responses need to be confidential. The rule of research is that unless confidentiality is guaranteed, you are probably not going to get the whole truth.
- Use the appropriate scale to generate actionable data: account-prioritized improvement areas. A comparison of performance data with expectations provides comparison of the most robust improvement data.
Focus Groups
Consider using focus groups to find out more about your customers, and what they think of your products and services. Most people know the focus-group technique, where customers are brought together and asked their opinion by a professional facilitator. In initial business-to-business satisfaction focus groups, we usually ask key account contacts a number of pointed questions about their expectations and how well the supplier is meeting them.
Focus groups take up more time and effort than surveys, but the interactivity of a focus group may provide clearer feedback.
Many companies use focus groups to look at new products, or focus on identifying solutions to problems. Software publisher Intuit used focus groups to assemble people who hadn't purchased its software, but were considered potential customers. It asked them why they weren't customers, what problems they had in related areas, how software could help them.
This case study was included in Inc.'s 'How to Really Deliver Superior Customer Service'.
Phelps County Bank of Rolla, Missouri, whose case is included in the same Inc. book, turned to focus groups to ask senior citizens what they liked and didn't like about the bank. The bank invited 80 seniors from among its customers, and was surprised when 60 people, instead of the 20 it expected, showed up for a discussion. The facilitators broke the group into three separate groups, and ran three focus groups. Among the important discoveries was that seniors wanted special treatment, but didn't like most existing programs in competing banks. Eventually the bank created a seniors group, called PC-Bees, that became very successful.
At PDQ Printing in Las Vegas, NV, focus group discussions with customers are videotaped and used for several related purposes. With the tapes there is an edited record of customer responses whose uses are limited only by the firm's creativity. Such tapes can be used to:
- Tighten and align the questions on satisfaction surveys.
- Bring the voice of the customer directly into internal training programs.
- Help determine which internal delivery systems are out of alignment with customer expectations.
- Develop quicker employee buy-in for any process or system improvement.
Video focus groups are among the most powerful ways to create a sense of urgency about service quality. Employees tend to listen to customers more than they listen to their own supervisors. At the same time, video focus groups are a powerful way to capture targeted customer expectations systematically. There's no better way to leverage a research investment.
