I’ve spent the majority of my blog entries thus far talking about how to meet the needs of your customers as well as how to make their experience better but all that’s fairly meaningless if you don’t know who they are and what they’re thinking about when they purchase (or exit). Unless you’ve already got the research aspect handled, chances are you don’t know enough about your customers to really be able to do the things they want (your assumptions don’t count, even if you are in the demographic – a sample of one isn’t a sample) and even if you do the research, chances are you can do more.

From an online perspective it always seems like it would be so easy to know what’s going on if you had an offline marketing job but the truth is there’s still plenty of ways to get to your consumers online and they work pretty well. So here are a few ideas for how to talk to your customers and prospects online as well as a few that cross over into the offline world for those of you doing multi-channel business…

1 – Ask them. (Duh) This one is fairly easy but so many companies fail to do it consistently. When I complete a transaction, ask me about it. Not just for a user review or PR purposes but for your own internal QA and understanding. The hotel and travel industry is starting to get this down, especially the travel booking sites (big time kudos to Priceline on this one) with nearly immediate and automated emails after a booking and it works great. Spitting out a simple survey email is basic and if you’re really working to improve the customer’s response, pair it up with an outbound call center to address those bad remarks (and even some of the good ones as means of building the brand).

2 – Survey the lists & website visitors. Immediate product surveys are a great first stab but they only speak to people who bought, bought online and opened the darn email. Step things up and encourage a wider audience to chime in. This audience can come from your in-house lists, website visitors or a combination of the two – both are familiar with the brand so you’re not going to measure awareness but you can get at site satisfaction, technical issues (IT will just love this one), competitive concerns and a whole heck of a lot more. Throw up a Zoomerang or SurveyGizmo survey on the cheap end (under $600 a year each) or get sophisticated with a consumer confidence score like what Forsee Results offers. With a few simple and fairly quick surveys you can get a great pulse on things in a statistically significant and meaningful way plus since you’re surveying your own base the costs are all but non-existent and even better, you can repeat the exercise over time to see how things change.  

3 – Survey beyond the people who take the survey. The problem with web surveys is that they only talk to people who stick around. If there’s a real site issue, product mismatch or something else major, chances are the people seriously affected are bailing which means you don’t get an opportunity to talk with them. By asking broader questions about the website, about the offering, even about the brand to a general sample, you can get a great sense as to what resonates and what offends or just doesn’t appeal. I’ve been included in a fair number of these types of surveys and some have even gone so far as to show me a few page mockups or banners, almost as if it was mass-usability testing. While I didn’t give as rich an answer as I would have in a focus panel or one-on-one testing scenario, I sure did give my opinion and the company had a great chance to get some broad and narrow stroke responses to pages well before they actually got coded.

To really get at this you may want to consider surveying offline as, well, let’s face it, online panels have their own skew and while offline ones are no different, you want to measure the right audience so if you suspect your users are more casual web surfers, asking a bunch of people who can sit through a 45 minute survey online for a couple of bucks isn’t always the right place to start. But on the flip side, if you’re FaceBook, asking people who refuse to take a survey online may not be a great way to find out anything except how it is that doesn’t have any chance of using your website… which while interesting wouldn’t help you in an exercise to improve visitor retention or anything of the sort.

4 – Talk to them, in person, ya, in person – really. Focus groups don’t mean much of anything to your statisticians but they mean an awful lot in getting imperial and detailed answers. If you’re launching a new site you must, must, must do some basic focus panels for usability testing but more importantly, upfront focus groups help you understand what people are actually looking for. There’s nothing worse than building or starting to build an app with a five or six figure budget than to find out no one cares about having their own calendar on your website. The same is true of basic info – you don’t want a hundred hours of designer time wasted because your category labels are wrong. So ask people.

Side note for anyone trying to justify a redesign or upgrade: Asking people can be a great way to prove just how bad things are on the site currently (although sometimes you’ll find out they aren’t that bad).

4b – On the subject of talking to people in person but a bit different than meeting customers in the open, you can always go super informal and have your office bring in a few friends and family. You can even spin your site around on a laptop and show it to a local group you belong to or your own buddies. There’s lots of bias and you may not even talk to people in your demo but hey, at some point you really just need to get an external set of eyes spotting those huge, but hard to see confusion points. Some people will know the brand and bring that awareness, others will be in the dark and therefore completely off the wall in their vision so while you can’t take every comment back to the designers, you’re still likely to get a few insight points from people that may be just what you need to find the next good test or serious upgrade concept.

5 – They’re already telling you. Seriously simple one here – step outside of your office and visit customer service. I’d guarantee you any long time rep can tell you 5 problems with the website and 5 ways to improve it without missing their next inbound call. Customers call when they get stuck, not in great numbers, but as I always said to my CSR agents – if one person called you, chances are a dozen more took off for the same reason. I suggest going beyond just occasional “checkins” and establishing a point person in the service department and a point person in marketing or the web team to have a scheduled update with a list of issues. Often times you’ll end up going over known issues or things you don’t want to fix, but hey, if you just get one good bug, one good insight you’ve got a winner. Plus through those conversations you and your interviewing of the CSR team, you can get some great insights into the personality nature and type of clients visiting your site, or at least the segment that’s willing to call.

6 – Use your analytics. It may seem counter intuitive – analytics group people and certainly don’t capture comments or feelings, but don’t they? When someone visits a page and bails, there’s a reason for it. Web analytics don’t often tell you what that one person did but in aggregate you can get a very good feeling for what people are doing. Path analysis is great for this sort of exploration – are 50 or 60% of the users who make it to a campaign landing page clicking in to the same next page, adding an item to their basket but bailing the second shipping information is shown? Bingo, we’ve got an insight.

These days there are a few tools that let you watch users in real time, most interesting to me are the chat solutions with proactive capabilities. What I love about this is you can track a user around your site and if it seems like they’re getting stuck or confused, invite them to get some assistance. Many will decline, few will accept but when I ran a chat program a few years back we had great results and, since we got to move from analytics to person-to-person interaction, we got insights too. There’s nothing wrong with having your agents throw a couple website usability or experience questions into their conversation to tease out feedback in very real time.

Of course you don’t have to use chat to get visitor level analytics, there’s plenty of other tools to do it. Whatever you use, try adding in some additional segmentation variables to classify people (return customers, new, campaign origin, etc…) and spend some time going through each of their common experiences. It can be difficult to figure out why they left but it opens the door for testing as well as for using some of the other tactics with a specific question in mind – if everyone bails on product 42 and testing all the pricing, color and image options doesn’t fix it, you know what you need to ask your next focus group, survey or just a couple of buddies down the street.

7 – Get offline and hit the pavement yourself. Most of us sell something offline, have retail stores or customer who experience our brand in a retail way and even if you don’t, chances are you can still find your customers at a tradeshow or local event. Every now and then you have to throw conventional measurement to the wind and just interact. Yes there’s bias, yes it means you have to talk to people, yes it means getting your hands dirty but if you’re an executive or someone up in the marketing chain and you’re not talking to people on the customer level, how can you ever expect to understand them. So many executives and managers get caught up in running things and looking at demographic generalizations that we forget to find out the issues and challanges that our customers are really facing as well as the ideas they have for how to make things better for their needs.

I’ve heard about Disneyland Execs who make regular rounds at the park with no special badges, Walmart c-levels who drop by for visits and talk to people on aisles and many other examples and these are downright amazing to me. If your company has a lot of face time (i.e. retail, an airline, hotel, etc…) why not consider hiring someone at a high level to work in marketing or ops that is just there to help mingle with customers, blend in with customers and at times resolve issues for customers at a low level. Nothing would make my day more than getting off a late, rerouted flight than to have someone with real authority there helping us after he or she experienced the same thing.

A flip side to this is letting your bottom-level employees actually access management. If you’re a larger retailer this is difficult and takes work but having managers report up to regional managers who report up to corporate just doesn’t cut it. Sure you have to do this most of the time but some days you also have to talk to the field and get a few part-timer employees giving you their individual gripes and those of the customer. This is where the insights live. These are the people who know what little things would make customers love you. Don’t forget that while the bottom rung may not have the MBA, they know what would make life easier for themselves and the good ones can almost always see where it would help the company up top… not every idea is good, but they all come from some inspiration that’s probably worth being aware of.

8 – There is an eight… What was it? Oh, that’s right… get yourself to tradeshows & events and see what’s happening in the industry. There’s a ton of people doing research online and a ton of companies with new products and services from analytics to surveying to a million things not listed here that you should be exposed to. Lots of people skip shows because for a lot of reasons (I loathe the “sales presentations” myself) but at some point you have to put those aside and realize that all the products and insights sent out in newsletters and from cold calls aren’t going to give you half of what you can get from chatting to a dozen people in the same world who’ve had a couple of drinks and are willing to share their techniques (but hopefully not their results) to getting into the consumers head.

Have your own research method or suggestion? Please share it as a comment and yes, this includes posting your relevant service offering if you have one.