Why Market Research Matters

Talking to your current customers on a regular basis is key to understanding how your business needs to evolve to become the market leader and stay ahead of the competition. Knowing how your customers feel about the level of service that your team provides, or what they think about the quality of your product or service, is crucial insight and feedback for you to establish actionable change.

There are a number of methods to gather feedback from your current customers, which all depends on the quality or quantity of feedback you require. If you are looking for quality feedback and insight, telephone customer surveys are a detailed way to gather this information. Having one-2-one conversations with your customers is an effective method to gather detailed feedback on a number of different areas. Feedback from telephone customer surveys can be gathered using yes/no and multiple-choice answers, but the crucial part of the conversation is establishing feedback on why the customer has answered each question in a certain way, and getting to the route of their opinion on your business.

If quantity over quality would be more useful to your business, online surveys is the best way to approach volume feedback. Although there is no guarantee on the number of responses you will receive, the benefit of online surveys is the ability to reach out to a larger audience to hopefully obtain a high level of feedback. Detailed reports and analysis can be created on the feedback received to provide your business with your areas of strength and immediate areas of focus.

Identifying a new customer’s opinion during their first interaction with your business is valuable to capturing and retaining them as a customer. Mystery Shopping is a helpful tool to gather this information as it allows you to replicate any touch point that a potential customer can interact with your business, be it in person, over the phone, or online, you can measure each process and the level of customer service provided. Mystery Shopping can identify attention areas for your business and create insight to use for training purposes.

If you are launching a new product or service and need to gather feedback before going to market, a customer panel is the best approach for this market research initiative. You can gather a number of your current customers together face-to-face, or virtually, to present your new product or service and ask them to provide their feedback. You may want them to use the product or service for an agreed timeframe and then follow-up with an online survey to establish their feedback at a later date. If you would like to present your product or service to people who are not currently your customers, the market research consultancy that you partner with will have their own panel of participants to take part in market research activities.