There are a range of other ways to find out about your customer apart from surveys.
Focus groups
Not as widely used among small businesses, focus groups can be a great tool for understanding people’s perceptions, opinions and attitudes towards a particular product or service. All you need is a group of 6-10 participants, one moderator, who guides the group through discussion, and of course some tea and coffee to create a more pleasant environment. It is particularly useful if you are looking to launch a new product or service and want to discover people’s initial opinions and reactions to it. If you have conducted a focus group, then it is a good idea to record the conversation for analysis purposes. When analysing a recording, it is good to have some pre-coded topics that are easily identifiable. It will be best if the person interpreting the data is present at the discussion, so that they can recognise the individual voices and link the participants’ behaviour, reactions or attitude to their comments.
Mystery shopping
This is another assessment tool that you can use internally to measure the service quality delivered by your front-line employees. Mystery shoppers walk into your restaurant, hotel or pub, act as customers, purchase products, and ask questions, in order to evaluate the quality of customer service and compliance with certain regulations, and then provide you with a report.
Social Media
TripAdvisor ratings and comments on social media are a good indication of the types of things people think about your business.
Research Agencies
If you have a budget, you may wish to consider hiring a research agency. Information on market research companies and services can be easily accessed from a number of organisations via their websites. By monitoring what people are saying you can capture great feedback.
The Market Research Society (MRS)
The major industry body covering market research professionals, companies and organisations; publishers of the annual Research Buyers Guide UK & Ireland (www.theresearchbuyersguide.com). As a professional body, the MRS has a Code of Conduct for its Members, plus guidance is available on best practice (www.mrs.org.uk).
A research agency’s proposal in response to your brief should include the following sections and information. This applies whether the project is a quantitative or qualitative survey:
- Objectives
- Background (including discussion/interpretation of the brief)
- Use of results/actionability
- Methodology (how the survey is to be conducted and key details, such as length of interview, use of respondent incentives if appropriate, anticipated response rates if a self-completion survey etc.)
- Sampling (contact/planned achieved sample numbers, sample selection processes etc.)
- Outline of data to be collected (draft question areas, group discussion guide etc.)
- Analysis (data processing and tabulations)
- Report outputs (full report, management summary, presentation of findings, verbal debrief etc.)
- Timings
- Costs
And don’t forget, there are a lot of research resources out there already to help you:
