Customer Research: Nothing beats listening

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conversationConversations 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.

Cool Link for Collaborative Innovation Networks (AKA swarms!)

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Wonderful work out of the MIT Center for Collective Intelligence on Collaborative Innovation Networks (COINS) – see the link here http://www.ickn.org/innovation.html, and if you are interested, explore the rest of their site. www.ickn.org. Also see http://swarmcreativity.net

More to come on this. The work coming out of MIT on COINs is truly fascinating relative to how swarms – marketing, product and service development, or other – really work.

Competitors: Enemies, or part of your swarm?

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enemy beeHow can collaborating with competitors bring success?

An increasing trend in business as service organizations become more and more niche oriented is for businesses to actively seek partnerships with competitors. If you have strong and well understood unique skills and competencies, this does not need to be a “zero sum game”. Instead of the equation being weighted to “they win, I lose”; you’ll find that it is possible for both competitors to win, if you are open to partnering up through referrals, subcontracting, or some type of collaboration. And in an arrangement like this, your customer is much more likely to consider it a win.

Whether you partner or not, it is critical to both marketing and strategic planning to know and understand who your competitors are. Who are your customers choosing to do the work or provide the service? Who do they prefer? Why?

When you start out to make a list of your top competitors, keep three things in mind:

  1. Regardless of your knowledge of the community in which you work, your business landscape; if you have not asked this question of your customers, you don’t have an accurate focus on who your competitors are. Find an effective way in your dialogues with customers to make them comfortable sharing with you their ideas about where their options and alternatives lie, and why.
  2. Many organizations make the mistake of not including in their list of competitors the most frequent and often strongest option: DIY. In any decision about a service or program that answers a need, your customers will always consider build or buy. They may collaborate with each other to build their own service, or do it on their own – but count on the fact that it is a top candidate. This is especially true in a service industry, and particularly in a tough economy.
  3. Finally, if you are thinking strategically and plan to be around a while, always spend some time considering whether there may be the potential for disruptive “indirect” competitors. Are there ways that your customers can meet, avoid, or change the game that are outside the box completely?

The next step is where you will spend time understand what your unique strengths and weaknesses are compared to your top competitors. Whether you are serious about partnering with competitors, or you take a more traditional approach, “know thyself”. Identify the areas where your skills, services and expertise are much stronger than the others on your list – and understand the areas that may be weaknesses for you compared to others. In this way, your
communication with customers and stakeholders about where your value fits will be clearer. Additionally, it takes you a step closer to partnering. One good way to understand this is with a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) analysis; which I’ll cover in another post.

How is all this going to help you to compete more effectively?

If you are not interested in partnering to provide a solution, you’ll come out of this exercise with a much clearer understand of your own positioning. What should your messaging emphasize as a uniquely strong capability?

At this point, you should also start to see where opportunities to work together with competitors are surfacing. Do you excel at professional development and training, but you don’t have the systems to produce and publish the tools developed from your work? Is someone else known for their ability to evaluate a problem and consult on planning and implementation; but they don’t provide the training or staffing that their clients might need for the next steps? This is where subcontracting opportunities can become clear, if you are honest and careful in your appraisal. Remember that in an increasingly specialized world, it is unlikely that any organization can be a one stop shop. Partnering to solve a problem can be better for you, and better for the customer.

How does this work if your customers are doing it themselves, or partnering with each other to do it without you? Take a step back and work on understanding what about the solution they’ve found works for them. What does the DIY option offer? What need does it not meet, and are there gaps that might fit in with your specific expertise? If they are building a service that you already offer, why? Can you provide training to help them do a better job? Can you recommend partners that supply something they will need?

What are the benefits of this approach?

  • Better service for your customers and stakeholders.
  • A reputation for being a solution to problems rather than part of the noise.
  • A very effective potential marketing channel, through co-marketing with your competitors to extend your reach.
  • The chance to focus your effort toward building your strengths, rather than struggling to be everything to everybody.

Check your brand integrity with your most loyal fans

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mufasaYou have forgotten who you are and so have forgotten me. Look inside yourself, Simba. You are more than what you have become.
– Mufasa the Lion King

Brands are about business performance promises. They differentiate our promise in the marketplace. Strong established brands are about promises kept. As you look to expand upon and extend your brand, can you pursue growth by migrating, extending and expanding your brand and still maintain its integrity? At the heart of successful companies that have migrated their brands over time, there has been a crystal clear understanding of what their customer promise is, and how to keep it at the core of new business directions; be they acquisitions, adoptions of new technology, or new product lines.

Let’s go again.

A few years back, I went to see the Lion King 3D. I was immediately captured by the emotionally engaging musical score (a hallmark of Disney movies), the beautiful colors, and then finally, the memorable and well-told story. It’s just a great story, folks, start to finish. And that is what you expect from a Disney animated movie. The 3D effects were a nice embellishment to something that was already worth seeing again and again. Disney movies are treasures that you keep on your shelf to pull down and watch on a rainy day. Everybody’s got a “remember the part where…” spot in a Disney movie.

Will 3D be the new tech steroid that re-introduces Disney to millions of new viewers? Probably not. But it will trigger millions of loyal fans to remember what they loved, becoming active champions to expand Disney’s fan base to their own kids, friends and families – thus growing the brand.

 First, know who you are to your most loyal fans.

Your customers have long memories, and if they have engaged with your brand in the past, then your brand has over time become a collaborative effort. They know who you are, perhaps better than you do. They communicate what they know to others. If you understand what your brand really is, you can build upon it for a stronger future than you may have expected. Before you do anything else, dig in. Do the homework, talk to your customers and understand what they perceive your brand’s promise to be. If you’ve been in business a while, then your brand has a life. So as Rafiki says,

You can either run from it, or… learn from it.

What is your customer’s story?

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storytellingThe power of personal stories can create a visceral understanding of your brand and its value that are difficult to achieve in any other way. They can help to provide a clear understanding of what is at the core value of your brand that is unique and makes you stand out from the crowd.

How do you communicate your customers’ experiences, and why? You could load prospects up with a list of features, talk about key benefits, and describe for them the problem/solution set that your offer provides.

Or you could tell a story in which they see themselves.

If your organization hasn’t yet figured out how to reach out to your customers in a dialogue about what they truly love about your brand (and what they don’t), well, you are in good company. But you can’t afford to wait to seek out those voices and those stories. And if you already have, make sure that you have an ongoing process in place to keep talking.

Many organizations have evolved to the point of conducting customer satisfaction research, event, service and product evaluations, and even collecting testimonials from their customers.  These are all worthwhile activities – lending credibility to the assertion that your service has been successful for your customers, and can be so for others.

But to communicate to both your own organization and others outside your organization the true benefits of your work – the ways in which what you do changes lives – there is nothing more illustrative than a story told by your customer.

A compelling story is one in which we care about the storytellers, and we see ourselves in their faces. If your relationships with customers and members are too distant to know those stories, then you have larger problems than marketing mix. It’s possible you have lost sight of what the real benefit is to your  work. If that is true, my best suggestion is to meet and talk face-to-face with your customers.

Don’t sell it.

If you are thinking of using customer profiles, case studies and stories to strengthen your brand; be very careful about coupling these with a sales message. Stories are compelling stuff; but believability is at the heart of their power. A customer story is not a testimonial, it’s much bigger than that.  It goes to the heart of your brand and values.

How can collaboration lead to co-creation?

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co-creationI was recently approached to talk to an organization of education services agencies about marketing.  In my state, these agencies are called educational collaboratives (see www.moec.org – the state organization of collaboratives). The name describes well the ways in which these organizations are meant to work with their member schools and school districts.

In solving marketing challenges for these types of collaborative and membership based organizations, how can collaboration be a possible engine for their marketing success?

If the marketing activity for a membership organization feels like a struggle, it’s helpful to go back to the beginning and ask – is this service, product, or initiative really collaborative?

An educational collaborative brings together its member school districts and schools to find solutions to problems and enable innovations that each member does not have the capacity to pursue alone. But what happens when you find yourself having to sell your solution to a potentially unwilling customer/member?

The days of creating a product in a vacuum and then selling it to your customers by persuasion (ice to the Eskimos) are pretty much past us. Classic wisdom dictates that the creators of a service or product should first make sure it meets a need that the customer actually has – and solves a problem that’s important to them. The next natural phase of this approach is to enlist the customer’s help during development to refine the service or product.  This is customer-centric product development.

But there is a way to use collaboration to take the approach a step further. Think about something like crowd sourcing.

Merriam Webster defines crowd sourcing as

the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers.

Replace the word “obtaining” with “developing”, and you have the concept of collaboratively developing and funding the creation of something that all of the members of the group need.

Co-creation: In other words, skin in the game.

When a new startup seeks crowd sourcing funds, it takes donations from as wide a variety of early adopters (champions) as possible.  Kickstarter is a great example of this; but for some really diverse cases, visit www.crowdsourcing.org. There are some terrific case stories there with examples of how this might work. This model has surged along with the rise of social media as its most powerful engine.

There have been crowd funded startups; crowd sourced volunteers coming together for a single cause; even crowd sourced talent websites bringing together a diverse and varied pool of like talents for hire.  Etsy is a crowd sourced ecommerce site for crafters and artisans that couldn’t afford to have a marketing platform as individuals.  Key is this: these initiatives and projects were created, fueled and sourced by their members and contributors, who are also their customers. Talk about a captive audience.  Is it for everyone? Most certainly not. If you have a diverse base, there will be customers and members for whom the product of this type of initiative does not work to solve their problem. But by making the “ask” for help and resources up front to create a solution, you will find out very quickly if the problem; and the potential solution, can be adopted and championed by enough participants to have merit.

What is a marketing swarm?

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swarmWhere many people move together as one unit, to do something that no single one can do alone. Each individual contributes something to the overall endeavor, often something unique.  When bees wish to establish a new colony, they do so in a swarm.

The key to swarming is the reliance on a multitude of diverse actors having input, with each of those actors motivated to contribute to the goal or the project. Each member is fully engaged and they all have skin in the game – think of crowd sourcing.

Swarming allows groups of animals to accomplish tasks they can’t do alone.

Swarm intelligence is about collective wisdom applied to a shared goal, where the interaction is the key.

National Geographic talks about the genius of swarms thus:

A single ant or bee isn’t smart, but their colonies are. The study of swarm intelligence is providing insights that can help humans manage complex systems.

Seth Godin’s Tribes, and the Power of 10

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tribesSeth Godin talks a lot about tribes – an idea not so different from a swarm. A tribe is a group of people connected to one another, connected to a leader, and connected to an idea.  A group needs only two things to be a tribe: a shared interest and a way to communicate. Members of a tribe contribute to and take from like-minded people.  Tribes used to be local, but now the internet eliminates geography and crosses boundaries. This makes tribes bigger, more influential, and potentially more diverse.

With choice expanding faster than the speed of light, consumers are less and less interested in an off the shelf solution; and more and more interested in finding something they can believe in.  What ties them together in the hunt for that solution is not geography and not the limits of the marketplace. They pursue an idea, and are brought together by leadership that believes what they believe. And they are willing to do something about it, but need a focus for their collective energy. Create a movement, not a product – and you will be leveraging more power than your own.

Marketing has always been the act of telling stories about the things that we make. But now more than ever, marketing is about engaging with the tribe and co-creating – not just delivering, but co-creating products and services with stories that spread because they grow naturally out of the needs of a group and are developed as a solution for the group.

Seth Godin talks on his blog at http://sethgodin.typepad.com/, about the power of finding the 1,000 people that are in your tribe. The ability to find and organize 1,000 people, he says, is a breakthrough opportunity. One thousand people coordinating their actions is enough to make significant change.

  • 1,000 people willing to spend $250 to attend a day-long seminar gives you the leverage to invite just about anyone you can imagine to fly in and speak.
  • 1,000 people voting as a bloc can change local politics forever.
  • 1,000 people willing to try a new type of service gives you the ability to make project successful.

 “What’s difficult? What’s difficult is changing your attitude. Instead of speed dating your way to interruption, instead of yelling at strangers all day trying to make a living, coordinating a tribe of 1,000 requires patience, consistency and a focus on long-term relationships and life time value. You don’t find customers for your products. You find products for your [tribe].”

Does that 1,000 number seem insurmountable? Realize, then, that you can get to the 1,000 people by finding first the 100. And if you follow that logic further, you can get to the 100 by finding the 10. We used to call these champions; but building a tribe requires more interaction than that. If you find 10 people with tribes of their own that can commit to making your tribe work, and they are willing to engage with you, they will bring their tribes to the task. And so on.