"If you don't know where you're going, any road will take you there". | ||
| ---Exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll | ||
In the previous chapter, we talked about the various tools and methods available to reach out to customers to get their feedback. We reviewed how to construct and administer surveys, developing focus groups and the benefits and shortcomings of them, focusing on your power users through lead user analysis, discussed incorporating ethnography into your interview process, as well as a number of other VoC methods. While all these methods do have their place in customer research, none are as complete or provide as rich of a view of the market as actual face-to-face interviews that you have with your customers. Customer interviews, if they are done correctly, can provide the insight into the customer's unarticulated needs that few other research techniques can duplicate.
But before you start scheduling interviews with customers, you need to develop a plan. You need to understand which markets you wish to focus on, which customers you wish to interview and what job titles they have, who will do the interviews, what questions you will ask, and how you will schedule the meetings. In this chapter, we will answer all these questions about preparing for the customer interview, and in Chapter 6, The Interview Process – The Interview, we will take the next step and talk about how to actually conduct the customer interview.
In many organizations, customer visits are not planned to elicit feedback, but are rather a reaction to an event (typically a negative one) or are part of the sales process. As a result, there is no consistent quantifiable data that comes out of these visits, but they are rather a necessity of running the day-to-day business.
For those organizations that do plan customer visits as part of exploratory research, quite often these visits remain unstructured and are typically opportunistic. For most businesses, customer visits are also very expensive as there are many costs involved, including travel, expenses, and most importantly, time.
To successfully embark on a customer visit initiative, it is necessary to develop and quantify the goals you are hoping to achieve and formulate a plan to achieve the goals, thereby justifying the expenditure of time and resources that the company will be investing. A plan for customer visits that are designed to elicit customer feedback outside of the day-to-day sales or addressing customer complaints or issues will typically have the following elements:
- A clearly defined, written objective of what questions the customer visit program will help answer
- A team who is assigned to plan and execute the customer visits (and who is given the necessary time and budget)
- A method of choosing the correct customers to interview and getting their buy-in
- A discussion guide that helps the team accomplish the written objective through a consistent methodology of investigative inquiry
- A process for conducting the customer interviews
- A process for analyzing, reporting, and internalizing the results
We will address the first four points in this chapter. The fifth point will be covered in Chapter 6, The Interview Process – The Interview,, and the sixth will be covered in Chapter 7, Understanding the Customer's Voice, and Chapter 8, Validating the Customer's Voice, where we will discuss the ways of analyzing and presenting the data you collect in the interview.