Customer research is an essential part of managing their experiences to foster customer loyalty. However, many firms look at customer research as a one-and-done project. Worse, they often don’t know what to ask to find out what they want to know. Today, we look at what is essential to do with your research, and how to do it, and in this article created in partnership with YouGov, the importance of getting results as fast as possible.
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Seven Years Is a Long, Long Time Regarding Research Relevancy
Many, many times I have asked clients to see their most current customer research and they hand me something that they did seven years prior. Then, I get to tell them that their research is out of date, and they need to update it.
Seven years is a long time relative to customer markets. Consider the previous seven years and how they changed the world.
We had a pandemic for nearly two years that stopped the world and devastated businesses.
The pandemic resulted in an acceleration of the digital transformation of analog experiences at an unprecedented pace, changing the way people communicate, work, and shop.
Next, double-digit inflation in all areas of consumer goods has wreaked havoc on consumer spending habits.
When grocery bills look like what people used to pay for car payments and car payments look like what people used to spend on mortgages, people don’t have as much to spend. Moreover, their responses to a survey question might be a little different.
Customers Don’t Always Know What They Want, But Their Answers Say a Lot
Another common mistake is trusting customer answers to give you the proper results. However, regular readers will recall that people don’t always know why they do what they do. Or they know, but don’t want to admit it on a survey. So, how can we trust that their answers are telling us what is really going on?
That said, those answers are telling you something interesting and important, even if it’s not necessarily what you were asking. Moreover, those results will change over time, which tells you even more about the market.
For example, my podcast partner and I did a survey using YouGov’s self-service platform. YouGov is a highly regarded survey organization in the UK. We put photos of ourselves up and asked survey respondents to say at which of several provided restaurants we were likely to eat lunch.
The results were funny. The respondents said I was more likely to eat at Panera and my podcast partner was more likely to eat at Chipotle. These responses were based solely on our pictures, so they do not mean anything, per se, but they do reveal a lot about the respondents’ perception of the restaurant brand.
Moreover, they can tell us more over time. Suppose we did this again in a few months and the gaps between our indexes were much smaller or we both came out the same amount of likely to eat at one of the options. Those results wouldn’t indicate that we were or weren’t more likely to eat at the restaurant. They would indicate who the customers associated as the target customer for the restaurant’s brand promise.