How To Talk To Customers

Most of your questions won’t bring you valuable answers

Steve Jobs?believed?customers “didn’t have a vote” regarding products or services. However, even though Jobs is a generally recognized marketing genius, most marketers believe talking to customers is a good idea. So, if you’re not Steve Jobs yet, you shouldn’t also neglect any opportunity to chat with them.

But asking the wrong people the wrong questions — a mistake many entrepreneurs make — won’t get you anywhere. Moreover, you can believe that the answers you get are correct, and it’ll lead you to the wrong strategic decisions.

The art of asking questions

Many years ago, I was a CEO of a company that sold some components wholesale. Once, when we were preparing for our annual strategic meeting, I assigned the guys from the marketing department to conduct a customer survey. I wanted to know what additional services our customers might have liked to have.

The guys did a good job, and we spent two days during the meeting discussing what kinds of services we could offer to our customers. To make a long story short, I can tell you it was a bad idea. We got the correct answer to the wrong questions, and that led us astray. I’ll tell you more about the mistake I made at the end of the article.

The Wrong People

Imagine you’re an online store’s CEO. And you ask your consumers to answer some questions by filling out an online questionnaire in exchange for a gift or a discount. Will the information that you’ll receive be valuable?

Yes and no.

1. Only a handful of consumers agree to participate in surveys. Others prefer to keep their opinion to themselves. So, it will be an example of the so-called unrepresentative sample.
2. It won’t be enough even if you somehow persuade all your consumers to answer your questions. There are three other groups of people whose opinions may be critically important to you. I call them anti-customers, non-customers, and people outside of your core target group.

An anti-customer is someone who interacted somehow with your business — in our case, by, at least, visiting your web page — but made a deliberate or subconscious decision not to buy from you.

Anti-customers are the most valuable source of information. People who make their choice and buy something then tend to ascribe positive attributes to their decision retroactively. It is called the?choice-supportive bias. So, if you ask only them, chances are you’ll get too positive answers. So, instead, you also want to ask people who decided against being your customers.

A non-consumer is a person who belongs to your target group but has never engaged with your business. Maybe she skipped your ad or simply didn’t notice it. Perhaps she’s a big fan of a competitive online store. By talking to them, you may find a way to get their attention.

People outside of your core target group are the consumers who don’t intend to buy your products. So, for example, if your online store sells diving equipment, you may not consider people who’ve never dived (and who aren’t going to begin) as the ones deserving your attention. But this is a superficial view. Maybe by talking to them, you’ll find a trigger that will turn them into divers — and your customers.

You have to talk to all the people who could, at least theoretically, be your customers to get what you need to make strategic decisions. If at least one of the groups drops out of consideration, your picture will be incomplete.

The Wrong Tools

Tools such as surveys or questionnaires are not the best for this task for several reasons:

1. Only few people usually agree to take part.
2. Questionnaires contain a limited number of questions. But the customers may have unique ideas or opinions they can’t express by answering them.
3. You may include the wrong questions (and not put the right ones) on the questionnaire.

So, to get invaluable insights into your customers, you need to be proactive and find a way to have face-to-face conversations with all the relevant groups’ representatives. The more conversations you have, the better.

Ask them to spend some time talking to you — in exchange for a gift, for instance. Ask as many different questions as you can, and improvise. Do not constrain yourself with the limited number of questions. Instead, try to learn as much as possible about them and their consuming habits.

The Wrong Questions

A typical customer questionnaire contains questions like the following:

1. What other stores did you visit before you chose ours?
2. What made you choose our store?
3. What did you like in our store?
4. What did you dislike?
5. Will you recommend our store to your friends?

I don’t want to say that these or similar questions are useless. The answers to them can help you improve the appearance of your online store or target your ads more accurately. But I doubt they’ll be particularly valuable if you need to make strategic decisions.

Getting answers to these or similar questions can provide some data on?whatcustomers do. But they help little with finding out?why?they do what they do.

The bad news is that answers to direct questions like “why did you choose this product?” rarely comprise helpful information. People often?make?the irrational choice while buying. And when you ask them why they made this or that decision, they fill in the blanks.

Once, I visited a nice oriental restaurant in the European capital. I liked the place in general, so when the waiter asked me to answer some questions, I didn’t object. However, I soon discovered that I was expected to assess certain aspects of the service, which proved to be challenging for me.

I couldn’t say what I liked more — the music, the interior design, or the cleanliness of the toilets. I was in a good mood, and I had dinner with a person I liked. The food was tasty, and the atmosphere was nice. So, my overall impression was excellent, but I felt it difficult to break it down into components. I filled out the form, but I doubted it greatly helped the restaurant’s management.

The Right Questions

The best way to get valuable insights into your customers is to ask indirect questions. And that’s why you’d better use face-to-face chats instead of questionnaires.

Ask them how they live (without crossing any ethical boundaries, of course). Take an interest in their problems and life tasks.

• What tasks did they solve (or tried to solve) by buying things or services?
• Why are these things important to them?
• What their theory of a perfect product or service is?
• What made them feel good along the way?
• What made them stressed?
• What emotions did they get while choosing between many options?
• What do they believe to be a product of good quality?

These are only some examples of the questions you may ask during those free face-to-face (or online) conversations. Your purpose is to walk in their shoes and look at the world from their points of view.

Conclusion — and my mistake

When we were preparing for that annual strategic meeting, I made almost all the mistakes I described in this story.

1. I used a questionnaire instead of open, free conversations.
2. I asked my customers what additional services they would like to have, but I didn’t ask them about the quality of the current products and services.

So, the clients answered only the questions I asked but didn’t share their opinions about their experience of working with us. Therefore, I didn’t learn that they were dissatisfied with the delivery speed and the fact that essential goods weren’t always in stock.

As a result, we launched a couple of services they didn’t want much but didn’t fix the major issues.

I learned a lot from this experience. Two years later, in 2008, when the worldwide economic crunch happened, I started regularly visiting my customers and having long dialogues with them. And I found out that nothing can effectively replace this form of customer interaction. The insights I received helped my company go through the crisis and beat the competition.

I develop Stratelogic, the concept of strategy as a simple tool, intelligible to everyone without special training. Subscribe to my newsletter to get exclusive articles, video courses, free templates, discounts, and more via the link.