Listening to the Customer Should Be Literal, Not Metaphorical

Sometimes you just have to take your focus group right to the customer – in person. 

Are you listening to the voice of the customer? Really?

Literally or just metaphorically?

Listen to this story.

I took my son to a college open house, and about 20 minutes before the start of a general session a suited gentleman approached the boy and asked: “Could you take eight or 10 minutes to help us decide on a new cover for our university publication?”

Having effectively appealed to my son’s ego and instinct for altruism – and to my own lifelong interest in publications (“You can come too, dad”) – this gentleman, who turned out to be the university’s admissions director, trotted us off to a nearby makeshift focus group room to which they were directing successive waves of students.

With four of their would-be “customers” captive, the admissions director and a publications editor displayed foamcored mockups of admissions brochure cover and ran the students through a series of rapid-fire questions.

...But wait, what does this have to do with online media? Simple: we should be doing the same thing with our customers, which is to say, our audience. That is, we should be conducting focus groups – live and in-person rather than from behind the scrim of email and SurveyMonkey. Just as college-bound high school students are bombarded with mailings from universities, so our audiences have dozens – nay, hundreds, thousands, thanks to Google – of websites vying for their attention. By understanding their visceral reaction at the moment of deciding whether to view, we can make sure our products are more "signal" than "noise."

Here are big lessons I took away from observing this simple but savvy student focus group.

(1) Get right to the core question: Do or would you even look at my product in the first place? The first question asked of the students was the most important: Do you think you would pick up any of these first publications if they were lying on a coffee table or in a stack of mail? Likewise: Looking at our website or enewsletter – is this something you would take upon yourself to engage with? If you can’t get past this first hurdle, the rest is academic.

(2) Ask why. Once the students had come to a loose consensus on what they didn’t like – i.e., the type on this artsy cover is too hard to read; those two have just typography and don’t look very inviting – they vocalized what they did like about the winner: It had a big photo of the campus; it helped them to visualize where they might be living for four years. This was an obvious but very valuable insight, I thought. In fact, any insight is valuable. If a segment of your audience told you that your information-packed home page gave them everything they need to quickly review, at a glance, would that be bad? Negative comments can lead to good improvements; positive comments can bolster marketing campaigns.

(3) Keep the discussion objective. The designers – I assume they were students – were not present at the focus group discussions. So the administrators, perhaps less vested in the outcome, were quick to briskly remove the rejected covers. Might we also consider not having a website’s developer, designer and editor present? Having them in the room might hinder the focus group's objectivity (and maybe even the facilitator's).

(4) Consider the power of group dynamics and peer pressure. I thought it was interesting that the students were brought in in packs of four. One might argue that this could lead to groupthink but I thought it prevented any of the students from dashing off an answer or telling the researchers what they thought they wanted to hear. As the students warmed up to each other, each comment of their comments was greeted either with “I agree completely” or with “Really? I was thinking more like…" Through the participants' back-and-forth banter, an evolving and probably really accurate picture began to emerge.

Long story short: If you’re thinking about improving your emedia products – and you should be, all the time – it may be back-to-school time.