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6. HOW We Approach Voice of the Customer Research. We have a couple of approaches. One uses Voice of the Customer in-depth interviews exclusively. The other blends these interviews with traditional and online quantitative surveys. If you are looking for direction on how to focus or the number of people you’d like more of—the most profitable or otherwise top priority—is less than 100 people in the overall target market, talk to 25 people in in-depth, one-on-one interviews. Our near verbatim transcripts of the interviews along with an analysis of the situation, brings customer insight and concerns to life. (You want an outside resource like Religence because people are much more likely to open up about you if they don’t have to talk to you directly. It also gives them the option of confidentiality.) In our experience once the interviewer has established trust, the majority of people will choose to share their information freely and without the benefit of confidentiality. Almost always we find people who are generous with their time, candid with their comments and very willing to help. They are honored to be asked for their opinion. Our approach to the in-depth interviews could be likened to an ongoing focus group. We create a discussion guide that our senior people use to hold the conversation and probe for answers. We concentrate the interviews into a two-to-three-day period so that is the only thing our interviewers are thinking about. That enables easy connections from one interview to another and insight that would not be possible if the interviews were separated in time. Our senior interviewers are pros at using Voice of the Customer research to get inside the heads of our clients’ customers to learn what will motivate them to buy—and to stay. Or in a worse case, what made valuable customers like them leave. Our approach to research is key not only in promoting a client’s brand, but in helping clients enhance relationships with their customers. We understood early on that a company’s best potential customers are most likely the ones they have already. We treat them that way. If it is larger than 100, then have us talk to 12 people in-depth to define the issues. Then we’ll do a quantitative survey with the rest of the segment to validate the issues and identify the nuance. We use either online surveys or telephone interviews depending on the relationship you have with the responders, the budget, or the timeframe. In the survey we’ll ask a few open-ended questions as an insurance policy. If you are dealing with a number of distinctly different segments, we may need to talk to more people in-depth, upfront. And depending on the overall size of the target market and the number of segments, we’ll survey anywhere from 100 to 500 people. When clients have online survey tools themselves, we work with their in-house people to conduct the survey. But when our client needs to compare their results to others, we recommend working with one of our strategic alliance research partners where we can benchmark our client’s results with their extensive database of customer responses or evaluate how our client compares to statistically significant trends. Working with one of our global firm partners is naturally advantageous when multiple countries are involved. Customer Survey Research Analysis Options: For years we’ve analyzed survey data using cross-tabulations that allow us to look at how different segments of your prospects or customers answered the questions. (For instance, women versus men or more profitable customers versus the others or people with one set of products versus another and so on.) From these results we can begin to paint a picture of what your best prospects and customers look like so you can appeal directly to them—and others like them. And so you can address issues they may have in a way that will please them. While the cross-tabulation technique is adequate for most customer research assignments, there is an occasional need for conjoint analysis and Quality Function Deployment (QFD) analysis, especially for product/service development decisions. Here, prospects or customers are given a series of options to rank, with the goal of determining the optimal offering. We use results of this kind of analysis to form the basis of a market model that can be reused as the offering evolves. Similarly, we can build decision analysis models to help prioritize offerings or projects. These techniques are good ones. But now when we have a really large number of variables to consider, we like using predictive modeling techniques working with one of our strategic alliance partners to identify almost instantly which variables matter. With their tool to tell us what the drivers are in the data, we can focus our analysis and gain greater insight. Additional Research: On rare occasions, we may suggest a focus group to clarify an issue, but more likely we’ll suggest doing a few more one-on-one in-depth interviews. Of course, if your product/service needs to be demonstrated, a series of focus groups can be invaluable. For focus groups to be effective, however, the group needs to be homogeneous and balanced so that everyone has a chance to contribute. That means you may need to do a number of groups at different locations. It is much easier and less costly to get that composition and balance with one-on-one interviews and surveys. However, if your product/service can be self-demonstrated, then having people come in separately and take a self-administered survey is another less costly option. In Summary: Voice of the Customer research augments traditional research to make it more actionable, powerful, and relevant. Through the Religence Framework for Customer Relationship Intelligence, Voice of the Customer feedback is linked to strategy execution and operational results.
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