What are the best practices for uncovering unmet consumer needs through surveys?

2 Choose the right type and format of questions

The type and format of questions you use in your survey will have a significant impact on the quality and quantity of data you collect. You can use different types of questions, such as open-ended, closed-ended, rating scales, ranking, multiple choice, or matrix, depending on your objective and audience. Generally, open-ended questions are more suitable for exploring unmet needs, as they allow respondents to express their opinions, feelings, and desires in their own words. Closed-ended questions are more suitable for quantifying and validating existing needs, as they provide predefined options and categories for respondents to choose from. The format of questions should be clear, concise, consistent, and easy to answer. You should avoid leading, loaded, double-barreled, or jargon-filled questions that might confuse or influence respondents.

3 Use techniques to elicit latent needs

Latent needs are the needs that consumers are not fully aware of or cannot articulate, but that still impact their behavior and satisfaction. Uncovering these needs can give you a competitive advantage and help you create innovative and differentiated products and services. However, it is not easy to identify latent needs through conventional survey questions since they require deeper probing and analysis. To elicit latent needs, you can ask "why" questions to understand the underlying reasons and motivations behind respondents' answers, "how" questions to understand the current processes and pain points that respondents face, "what if" questions to stimulate respondents' imagination and creativity, "trade-off" questions to understand the relative importance and priority of different attributes and features, or "scenario" questions to simulate realistic situations and contexts that might trigger or reveal unmet needs.

4 Analyze and interpret the data

Once you have collected the data from your survey, you need to analyze and interpret it to extract useful information. You can use a variety of methods and tools for this purpose, such as descriptive statistics to summarize and visualize the data, inferential statistics to test hypotheses and draw conclusions about the population, text analysis to identify themes, sentiments, emotions, and keywords from open-ended responses, cluster analysis to group respondents based on similarities and differences in needs, preferences, and behaviors, and gap analysis to compare the current and desired states of satisfaction and performance. The analysis and interpretation of the data should help you answer your research questions, validate or invalidate your assumptions, and uncover the unmet needs of your target audience.

5 Validate and prioritize the unmet needs

The final step of uncovering unmet consumer needs through surveys is to validate and prioritize them. Validation entails confirming the data's reliability and validity, as well as assessing its consistency with other sources, such as market trends, customer feedback, or competitor analysis. Prioritization involves ranking the unmet needs based on their importance, urgency, feasibility, and profitability. Different criteria and frameworks can be used to help with this process, such as a customer value proposition to evaluate how well your product or service meets the unmet needs and delivers benefits to customers. The Kano model can be used to classify the unmet needs into basic, performance, or delighter categories and assess how they affect customer satisfaction. Additionally, a value versus effort matrix can be used to identify the quick wins, big bets, hard sells, or time sinks. Finally, a roadmap can be used to plan and schedule the implementation of the unmet needs into your product or service features and enhancements.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?