Guide to Finding Out What Customers Want

Research your market in order to reap its rewards

By Matt Alderton

1. Why customers buy your merchandise.
2. What your customers' demographics are.
3. If your customers are satisfied with your levels of service.
4. What type of marketing works best with your customers.

Action Steps
The best contacts and resources to help you get it done

Surveys

Typically conducted by mail, surveys allow you to easily quantify, measure and compare customer data. Be sure to ask the right questions to get the answers you really need.

I recommend: Infosurv does everything from designing customer surveys from scratch to administering already-created surveys to your customers.

Online surveys

Surveys conducted via email or from your home page often are more affordable than their printed counterparts and generally allow businesses to gather data more quickly and analyze it more easily.

I recommend: Companies such as Zoomerang and SySurvey offer complete turnkey services with which to survey your customers online; they'll help you create, administer and analyze all your Web-based polls.

Customer panels

Customer panels — focus groups in which the business owner is present — are a cost-effective way to ask your customers directly what they want from you.

I recommend: You'll want to host your customer panel on neutral ground; public libraries are always a good choice and often offer meeting rooms free for public use.

Online focus groups

Web-based focus groups are popular for their convenience and their cost, which is slightly less than that of traditional focus groups. And because customers participate from their homes, online focus groups provide more geographically diverse responses and are less likely to be influenced by peer pressure.

I recommend: Companies such as e-FocusGroups and Itracks will not only host your online focus group, they'll also transcribe it and help you analyze it.

Interviews

One-on-one interviews are perhaps the easiest way to get inside customers' heads. You can perform longer, more detailed interviews by scheduling them directly with chosen customers, or shorter, ad-hoc interviews by randomly approaching customers in your place of business.

I recommend: Be sure to tape record any interviews you do — with permission from your customers, of course — so that you can refer back to them later; search for "voice recorders" at Radio Shack for inexpensive recorders that will do the job just fine.

Market research

If you've got the extra capital, it might be worth investing in a few professional market research reports. Typically quite expensive, they aren't necessary to your customer research, but can often prove useful in supporting it.

I recommend: MarketResearch.com is home to more than 95,000 research reports from more than 400 of the world's leading research firms.

Helpful advice for making the most of this Guide

• •  Be wary of biased results; enlisting a professional to design and administer customer research will help minimize exaggeration and bias.
• •  Before surveying customers, establish an information code of ethics to protect their privacy. Decide beforehand what you want to collect and how you want to collect it, and make sure your customers know that any information they offer is given voluntarily.
• •  Keep questions short and simple to ensure the quality and quantity of customers' answers.