First-Person Intelligence
Capturing the True Voice of the Customer
Information Management Special Reports, March 18, 2008
Few people call themselves “consumers.” Consumers buy or use a product, service or solution. Period. The word connotes a one-way relationship between seller and buyer that fits poorly in today’s connected marketplace. “Customers,” however, do far more than merely consume. Depending on their needs, experiences and desires, customers are more inclined to get involved in the marketplace. Today’s technology offers ample opportunities to start conversations with and among customers, fans, foes, competitors and the press - any person or group who cares to listen and, perhaps, act on the messages received.
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Every hour of every day, directly and indirectly, customers place calls, send emails, complete surveys, and talk among themselves online in blogs, product forums and social networks. They share their thoughts about products and services, their likes and dislikes, and their hopes for future features. Customers tell companies about product failures. They request help. And they offer opinions about their experiences that may contain valuable insights for organizations that listen.
However, customers aren’t computers. They don’t speak in binary, and they don’t form thoughts in relational database form. Sarcasm aside, they rarely write in perfect grammar, but they do communicate. More challenging still is the volume of all that freeform correspondence. PriceWaterhouseCoopers reports there are approximately 75 to 100 million blogs and 10 to 20 million Internet discussion boards and forums in the English language.1 This overwhelming volume of naturally expressed content presents one of the biggest challenges companies face today.
This much is known by most large customer-facing organizations: the market is flooded with software that attempts to tag, sort, search, organize and manage much of this unstructured data. But discovering the facts in this data: who, what, where, when, how and most importantly why is a challenge that leaves most companies scratching their heads.
Companies conduct customer surveys, focus groups and interviews hoping to capture some sense of it all, only to pass along the results to marketing, sales or research to develop a product, service or response on the ideas.
“How sad it is, then, when the product or service is finally introduced - and the only reaction in the marketplace is a resounding ker-flop,” wrote Anthony W. Ulwick in “Turn Customer Input into Innovation” in the January 2002 issue of the Harvard Business Review. Why? Most companies only listen to some of what some customers say. Enough voices go unheard that innovation and the bottom line are adversely affected.
Are Your Approaches Falling Short?
Customer surveys and focus groups are a challenge to arrange and conduct in a method that gathers unbiased data. Though customers might describe some of what they want, the lack of detail in a coded answer or a limited discussion doesn’t tell companies enough.
In traditional surveys and focus groups, customers only give you answers to what they’re asked. The answers can be “programmed,” effectively silencing opinions and insights that don’t fit the scripted mold. Merely knowing that customers like or dislike a product doesn’t explain the reasoning behind their opinions. This lack of detail can mislead decision-makers and in some cases even undermine product development and corporate initiatives.
Focus groups were designed to give companies greater insight into a representative sample of customers or prospects. The groups are designed to gather primary opinions about specific topics. Even the best focus group leaders, however, struggle to control participants’ eagerness to give answers they believe interviewers desire as opposed to their actual opinions. This leads to biased results that often do not correlate well with the customer's actual purchases.
When asked formally, many customers do not know, or cannot communicate effectively, their actual needs and requirements. Moreover, companies often find there isn’t enough detail in the data to understand the root cause of a problem or potential concern - let alone what to do about it.
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