It's said that what you don't know can't hurt you. In business, however, the opposite is true. In order to survive in the competitive marketplace, you must collect as much information as possible about your industry, your competition and — above all else — your customers. And really, there is only one way to find out what your customers want: Ask them. By doing active customer research, you can easily determine:
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.
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