Conversations count

I was talking to a colleague today about my concern over inundating our audiences with surveys, and the message that this high-tech vs. high-touch method might send.

Customer research (like collaboration) is often an exercise in active listening. Fielding a survey is a great way to get more reliable and credible data about trends in response to specific questions.  But it will never do the whole job in terms of allowing you to listen to – and hear – the whole story.

“When you listen generously, people can begin to hear the truth within themselves, in the space that you’ve created for them.”

Your customers’ experiences with their challenges, and with you, come in many shades of gray. When the insight you seek isn’t black and white, you can’t beat a one on one discussion.  Here are a few methods for gaining customer feedback and insight that are not multiple choice; and how they are typically applied:

First, just listen, one-on-one.  Nothing can replace the one-on-one discussion with your customer. Face to face is best, but even on the phone, an open ended conversation to check in can offer valuable insight on the unpredictable. Remember that if you are able to visit your customer on site, it provides an opportunity to more fully understand the environment in which they work. Do they have an office, or walk around? Is there a computer handy? Wall space, clutter, interruptions?  All of the elements of the workplace they are in can influence how well your solutions might – or might not – work for them. Never assume that you understand your customer’s most troubling challenges until you ask. This is not a multiple choice question. It can be helpful to bring trigger questions:

• What is the most exciting work that you’re involved in right now?  Anything you’d like to be working on but don’t have the time or resources?
• What’s looming at this point that you are worried about – what’s keeping you up at night?
• What’s going to be (or what is) toughest about the job right now?

Informal conversations may not be the place to take notes or bring a tape recorder – but once you are out the door, capture what you’ve heard!  Particularly if you are having more than one of these meetings, your findings can start to blur together. If you are pressed for time, tape record a message to yourself with your “notes” about key points (you can do it on your phone); and then keep track later. After several conversations, you will very likely hear some trends that you’ll want to follow up on.

Follow up:  If you are hearing the same pain point from multiple customers, this is an opportunity to plan ahead for collaboration and think about asking a select group if they are interested in collaborating and brainstorming solutions.

Think about convening a group for more feedback or for collaborative work on the problem. 

Focus groups are usually not fishing expeditions, but are set up with willing customers to gain feedback about a particular product or service, challenge, or issue. These are carefully planned to maximize the interaction of the participants. The most useful number of people for a focus group should be from 6-12; and a strong facilitator is needed to ensure that multiple perspectives are gained, and attendees are encouraged and drawn into the discussion. Questions are preplanned. These are often used to get feedback on a prototype service or product in development, or on a brand statement or promotional approach. They tend to be most useful in testing out a concept “before you really build something”.

Collaborative work groups are something different. Customers who are experiencing a like challenge, but are not sure of the solution may be willing to meet with you to conduct brainstorming sessions that are more loosely guided, but still facilitated to get the most from the group dynamic. There are no wrong answers in a brainstorm, it should be well documented, and only at the end of the exercise does it make sense to conduct a check in to determine if members of the group have identified something they are excited about pursuing.

Now you’re building something.  By the time you get to a pilot test, you will have gained early feedback from some of your customers about the concept around your service or product and how it generally works. Especially if the service or product has an online component, or is a service that is complicated to deliver or explain, you will want to gather a small group of possible early adopters and ask them to pilot test for you. These need to be carefully set up, and their evaluations documented and heard. Assume going in that you may hear feedback that generates a change to your service or product. That’s the purpose. This is where you work out the bugs in your approach; or identify that you need to modify the road you are on. Side benefit: if your pilot testers are influential thought leaders, you are hoping at this point to be able to talk about how well the product worked for them, and identify them as development partners later.  The best of all approaches to design, although it can be time consuming and lengthen your process, is iterative design – where you look to your pilot testers to review and provide feedback at multiple steps in your development, and adjust as you learn from them. Then the process becomes much more of a collaborative one.

Keep checking in.  If you have an existing product or service and you are not collecting customer evaluations, start now. Any evaluation should include a valid way to measure customer satisfaction with the experience they’ve just had. You can start by asking the customer to rate their satisfaction.  But most satisfaction evaluations will also ask “how likely are you to use this service or product again?” and “would you recommend it to a colleague?”  These are usually better indicators of true satisfaction – or dissatisfaction – with what they have experienced. If you get a high number of “maybe” answers on using your service again, it’s likely you have some work to do in order to keep these customers; and those customers that would absolutely recommend you may be the champions and influencers you are looking for in your tribe. Don’t lose track of the power of verbatim comments in your evaluation. These can often shed real light on what is best or worst about the experience.

Remember in using any or all of these tools that the data you gain must be captured, documented, and shared effectively to be worth the effort. Even the insight you gain from an otherwise casual discussion can be reported out in some useful fashion to others.