When deciding on conducting the interviews, you can choose to source the interviews to a specialized third party that does market research, or you can choose to commit the manpower and resources from your own organization to conduct market research. Of course, there are obvious benefits of using a third party. They will be able to free up the amount of time you and your organization will have to commit to this initiative, and they also have expertise in formulating questions, interviewing customers, asking questions, and documenting customers' responses.
While this is certainly a viable option for a lot of companies with more financial resources than personnel, I generally do not recommend it (and no doubt you do not either, as you are reading this book). If you use a third party to do your customer research, you may be missing out on insights you may have gleaned if you held the interviews yourself. Typically, the market research teams are very knowledgeable about interviewing processes and can ask all the right questions and statistically interpret them, but they do not have the breadth and depth of product and application knowledge in the same way that you do and cannot hope to provide the same level of insights that you could. You will find that third-party researchers tend to do a pretty good job of answering what is important, but in almost all cases they do not answer the question why.
One might agree that there are problems with third-party researchers, but one might ask whether we can just have the sales force do the interviews. After all, they are already visiting the customers and already have a relationship. There are a number of problems with delegating customer research to the sales team:
- The incentive structure for most sales teams is driven by sales volume, and the task at hand will not produce any near-term sales revenue. This could end up resulting in sales focusing more on short-term changes to the products and less about long-term strategic changes. There is also a considerable danger that the VoC interview would turn into a sales call.
- Most sales people do not have the disposition to be successful in research, which is what the customer inquiry entails.
- There is a potential loss of consistency across the interviews with so many people involved.
- Sales may focus more on their best customers' views and less on getting a holistic representation of the market.
- The communication funnel from customer to research and development will get longer and, potentially, more convoluted through loss of critical information.
Some might say, "well….ok, if I can't get a third party to do it and I can't get my sales team to do it, I'll just have my marketing team do the customer interviews. After all, that is part of their job isn't it?" They should report back what the customers want and then engineering can design it and manufacturing can build it? Of course, the answer is "No"!
If your organization truly wants to become market focused, engineering cannot delegate all customer contact to the marketing organization and expect to receive all the market intelligence they require to build your next great product. Figure 5.4 helps to highlight the issue:
Figure 5.4: Information exchange between departments
In the preceding illustration, engineering (or another technical organization) creates a technical development or breakthrough and passes it to marketing, expecting them to package the new technology into a product concept to present to the customers. Customers provide feedback on how the product concept could be adjusted to provide more value and then marketing adjusts the concept into a new proposal before passing it back to engineering. While this process is very easy for engineering as they focus on doing research or producing whatever marketing tells them, it does not lead to the product breakthroughs that companies need. Marketing has to perform a two-way translation in this model that often results in a loss of information, a loss of time, and distortions. In many industries, in particular B2B and technology industries, engineering/R&D is too important to be isolated from the customers. Customers value direct contact with the technical staff, and many of the technical staff values visits to the customers, as long as it is structured.
I recommend that one or more teams of two individuals perform the customer interviews. One person should be from the marketing community and one from the engineering or technical community. If there are other objectives for the visit (input on logistics, documentation, usability, and so on), you may also want to include a third individual from one of those organizations. You will find during your interviews that marketing and engineering tend to pick up different things during the discussions with the customer and by having both the business side and technical side in attendance, you should be able to paint a more complete picture of the customer input after the session.
While I do highly encourage you to use marketing, technology, and, when the project warrants it, another department to take part in the customer VoC, I do not encourage you to include sales as part of your customer visit unless it is absolutely necessary. Customers may not believe this meeting is focused on research and may believe it is actually a thinly veiled sales call. Even if it is not, most of the time the salesperson will end up trying to turn it into a sales call as that is what they are best at. Another problem is that customers may not feel free to speak their mind when a salesperson is in attendance.
This is not to say that the salesperson should be left in the dark about the customer visit as this would go against how many organizations are structured. More often than not, sales owns the customer engagement and their ability to make a living is determined by how well the customer is managed. I would highly encourage you to liaise with sales to help find the best customers to meet the profile you have created, but I would also explain to them that it is necessary to meet with the customer without their attendance and reassure the salesperson that you will respect the customer relationship that has been established and that you will brief the salesperson after the interview is complete.
There are a number of noticeable advantages in using a team from both the engineering side and marketing side, in particular around technology products. Many organizations have a defined marketing department and engineering department. Often, these departments are at odds with each other with respect to what should be built. By working and living together during the interview process, often a beneficial side effect is that these two teams tend to work together better in the future as they have developed a more personal bond. Another factor, and this is a considerable one, is that by actually interviewing the customer together and hearing the same things that are said by the customer, I have found the actual development process that happens well after the interviews are complete tends to go much smoother. By interviewing the customer together, I have, working with my engineering counterpart, been able to develop the marketing specification and the engineering specification in tandem as we both heard and saw the same things. This can shave months off your development process as it greatly reduces the amount of back and forth spec wars, which happens in so many organizations.
If you are doing eight interviews or fewer, one team should be sufficient. If you are doing more than eight interviews, you may look to create multiple teams. Of course, there are positives and negatives to using more than one team. The positives are that you do not have to commit so much of your own time to complete the interviews and you should be able to do the interviews in parallel, thereby completing this program in less time. The downside is that you will need to train and coach more people to ensure the interviews are delivered in a consistent fashion with the right things emphasized during the discussions with the customers. With multiple teams, you also have the potential problem of differing interpretations and variation in data collection, which is why I prefer to use as few teams as possible to meet the objectives of the project and timeline.