Using Interactions to Maximize Customer Insight

In the heyday of the dot-com boom, one online pet supplies retailer asked a single, fact-based, yes-or-no question of its Web site visitors that reliably identified the highest-value pet owners. While you try to figure out just what they asked, let me describe for you what Martha Rogers and I mean when we talk about “Golden Questions.”

This is the term we use for an interaction with a customer designed to reveal a great deal of individualized insight without subjecting the customer to a battery of marketing research. If it is designed well, a Golden Question can often generate this individualized insight without even appearing to be a survey or a marketing inquiry at all, and it can often be fun or interesting for the customer to answer. (Photo by "Photography by Ruben")

"Do you like horror movies?" OkCupid is a matchmaking Web site, and after analyzing hundreds of thousands of different questions it turns out that this is the Golden Question they found to have the most predictive power when it comes to how long a relationship will last. Go figure.

And in a previous post I mentioned an automotive company I once worked with that offered customers a free gift for joining their loyalty club. Members could choose a pair of racing gloves, or a package of children’s videos, or a travel umbrella and road atlas. For the auto company the point was not just to provide an incentive to join the club, but to generate insight into a customer’s needs and motivations, so it could better tailor its future communications with the customer. Another example of a Golden Question.

One of our former consulting clients at Peppers & Rogers Group was a vacation time-share company, and research had shown two principal types of customers with different needs and preferences:

• “Vacationers” tended to buy a time-share at a particular resort they liked, and then they would vacation there regularly, allowing the company to rent their property out in the meantime to defray the ownership cost.
• “Traders,” on the other hand, liked to exchange their time-share property for other owners’ properties at a variety of different resorts, and they would usually vacation at different times and places each year.

For obvious reasons, the company wanted to be able to tailor its offer and sales pitch appropriately in order to address the different needs of these very different types of prospective customers. But how could it decide, as soon as the discussion started, which category any particular prospect belonged to?

It turned out that the most useful and predictive characteristic of a trading family was that they had no children at home. So, during any discussion with prospective new customers, the sales rep would ask about children. If the family included young children, then it was almost a certainty they would not be trading their property much, at least not until the children grew older.

As these examples all demonstrate, it isn't always necessary to administer a survey questionnaire or subject a customer to detailed scrutiny in order to learn very useful things for serving the needs and interests of that customer. Figuring out the right Golden Question to generate the insight you need can greatly increase your ability to make the sale. And it can be fun, too.

As for the pet supplies retailer? Their Golden Question was: “Last year, did you give your pet a holiday present?” (OK, is that you?)