Customer Experience Crossroads

Free e-book: Painless Insight Planning helps you set objectives, avoid wasting money on qualitative research

 

I've refined a number of tools to use in my work over the years. A few of them are tools designed to help clients in one way or another. This free e-book, Painless Insight Planning, is one of these tools with some narrative wrapped around it.

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

One thing I've found that is often a challenge at the start of a project is getting clear objectives. People may have a problem or concern, but it is often not clearly articulated.

And I can tell you one thing for certain: a good way to waste money on research is not having clear objectives at the beginning.  I know this sounds perfectly obvious, but it is an issue more often than you would suspect.

Sometimes the problem is clear, but other elements are not. Such as -- who could we get insight from, otherwise known as "the research target."

I can't sit down with everyone individually and work through this, as I do with clients. So I thought I would put the whole thing into an e-book that you can download and use as much as you want. And then you'll have clear objectives for your research projects. And the world will be in a better place.

Because we really need insights these days, more than ever. And people inside companies can't afford to waste money or appear to waste money, get fired and be unemployed. Suppliers like me also can't afford to waste client's money. We all need to ramp UP on the insight quality and the innovation / ideation, but keep a lid on costs. 

What's it worth to get this answer?

An even harder thing for many clients is figuring out how much to spend. They ask me, what will it cost? 

WRONG QUESTION!  WRONG QUESTION!  WRONG QUESTION! 

The right question is "what is it worth to get good information on this situation?"

I have created a nice little rule to help figure this out. Not a complicated ROI on research thing. Just a back-of-the-envelope, cocktail-napkin kind of formula that I call the 10 Times Value Rule. It's a great place to start figuring out what you should consider spending to get some insight into your problem / challenge / situation.

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

Easy worksheets

I hate filling in forms. Most people do. So there aren't forms in this book. There are easy worksheets designed to spur creative thinking to get you started. Here's an example.

Bonus content

If you download the book and actually read it, you'll find a link to some bonus content that will save you even more time. 

A small request - no strings attached

I'm simply putting this handy e-book out there for free with no strings attached. You can even add this e-book (with no changes) to your own site or blog for your own customers and prospects to use.  But I do have a small request.

If you think this e-book is of any value, please add this blog to your RSS feed reader. I also send out a newsletter about six times a year. You can add yourself to that list if you want to hear about other e-books I plan to release, or just get the newsletter. You can check out the previous issues here.

Thanks for reading. And good luck with your insights research projects!

[Download Painless Insight Planning now]

How to Conduct a Panel Discussion: Not

I'm kind of down on attending panel discussions at conferences, because so often they are mini-presentations delivered in a linear fashion, that never actually obtain liftoff on anything that sounds like discussion. This is sad, really, because a good one can be trememdously stimulating.

Rick Wolfe sent me a video clip of one being conducted by Guy Kawasaki, who is clearly good at many things, but this isn't one of them.

Mr. Kawasaki is trying to liven up a conference presentation by bringing some of the target user group (young adults) into the room ⇒ a really good idea.

He puts the teens in a flat line at the front of the room  ⇒ not conducive to a discussion

He puts himself at a podium away from the rest of the group  ⇒ thereby setting up an unequal situation, also not good.

The first time he hears something funny he milks the entertainment value, not the learning value. [Start watching at 5:13] Everyone laughed at the girl whose parents cancelled her text messaging service when she sent 4,000 text messages in one month.  ⇒ The panelists are now either going to say something extreme, in order to get the desired laugh, or they are going to reveal as little as possible, in order to avoid saying the wrong thing and being laughed at.  And at 6:33, it's clear that this young man is nervously seeking the right answer to the question.

There are a lot of short, closed-ended questions. Each panelist is asked the same question.

Things start to get going for a minute at 8:37, as one panelist tries to explain text messaging to the audience. It's lovely and insightful. But not allowed to continue. Net result  ⇒ a serial interview and a lost opportunity.

Not long after that, the moderator starts polling people by getting them to raise their hands to questions like, "How many go to Blockbuster?" What a shame we couldn't just hear more talk from these very interesting panelists.

A better set-up might look like this:

• Put the moderator at the same table as the panelists
• Get rid of the "head table" feel, and seat the panelists so they can see each other
• Keep the mikes, get rid of the podium, and move the table into the room

If you're the one moderating the panel, try these tips:

• Get people comfortable talking by building an environment of trust. Gentle humour is good, laughing at panelists is not.
• Ask big, powerful questions to get things moving, then stop talking. Wrong way: "How many text messages do you send?" Right way: "What is text messaging all about?"
• Avoid setting up a norm of serial interviewing, by allowing a few awkward pauses, and forcing the panelists to take part of the responsibility for the conversation.
• Use a vote only to start a topic, or trigger discussion from different points of view, not as a poll. If you wanted statistics, you could have done a survey.

The whole idea is to get a conversation going that the rest of the audience can listen in on. Once it's going, you let it roll as long as it's on topic and productive, and no-one is taking over. 

Update on Zopa and Prosper, online un-banks

Zopa is an un-bank of sorts, a peer-to-peer finance operation. Zopa brings lenders and borrowers together in an online marketplace, letting the lenders (i.e. people like you and me) offer funds at a specified rate, for a specified term, with limits on the level of risk. Borrowers look at the funds on offer, and choose whether to take at that rate or wait for a better deal.  Zopa makes the market, provides administrative and matching services, and underwriting services, but it does not itself lend money.

Zopa has recently launched in the US, from it's UK origins, and decided to do some focus group research in advance of the launch. In the spirit of open-ness that seems to define this company, they have disclosed clips of the focus groups through a link on their blog, here. Or go directly to the clips here. (Quicktime required. And it takes a minute to download.)

The remark I found most interesting was the woman who wanted to help struggling artists, but couldn't figure out how to find them, and thought Zopa would be a way to lend them money safely. I guess the instinct to be a patron of the arts continues, even though most of us don't have the money of the Medici.

Zopa uses some clever marketing tactics, such as paying for referrals.  If you are an active Zopa lender and bring in another member who completes a transaction, you both get paid 30 pounds.

Zopa's blog invites guest authors to write.  Here's an example from Philipg27, a Zopa lender, who writes that Zopa is not a community, it is a market, and compares it to Lloyd's of London insurance. Philip27 takes the company to task for weaknesses in it's online functionality.

...most importantly for Zopa the message is that Zopa should be working towards making the market easy to use rather than attempting to foster a sense of community. The website is notoriously difficult to use, it should be as simple to use as my online-stockbroker, and provide me with enough information to make informed decisions on the most effective options to lend money. I don’t really need pictures of people jumping over mountains whilst baking bread. I need cash flow statements, better reporting and maybe even some idea of what’s happening to my loans being processed that are currently lost in the Zopa Triangle …

Prosper is the other major peer-to-peer lending operation, with a few differences from Zopa. 

Prosper permits lenders to form syndicates on their own, and choose their borrowers. Borrowers can also become part of a group, where the group's reputation rises and falls based on repayment patterns, which then affects their interest rates and ability to attract lenders. 

Prosper is a bit more wild and entrepreneurial in approach than Zopa, permitting lenders to take undiversified risks by lending a lot to one individual or group.  Zopa forces lenders to diversify.  Now that they are both operating in the same market, it will be interesting to see how things shake out.

I expect it will be a few years before we really see how these approaches work as a business.  Meantime, it's fascinating watching how both operations differentiate from banks in their communication approach.  If this approach really works, it seems obvious that a big player would try to enter the action, perhaps with a sub-brand, just as a few are now in the payday loans business using subsidiaries.

What is Good Qualitative Research?

I've decided there must be a lot of bad qualitative research going on.  Otherwise, why would so many people make disparaging comments about it?  I saw another one today, in an issue of Internet Retailer  -- a quote in an otherwise good article by Mary Wagner on listening to customers. 

One of the experts Ms. Wagner quotes provides a list of things marketers should monitor, like blogs, e-Bay, newsgroups, Flickr, etc.  It's a great list. Except for when he says you can learn things from Flickr "that would never be found in a focus group". 

Well, now just a minute there. You certainly can learn things from Flickr and from blog searches and e-Bay with a relatively small investment of your own time and resources. You might call that "Poor Man's Qualitative", and of course you should be doing it. Indeed, these are some of the things I do to brief myself when I start a new project for a client. But if you didn't get at least that much learning and much more from your paid research, you didn't get what you paid for.

So I think there is a lot of bad research going on, so much so that people no longer know what good qualitative research looks like and how to get it for themselves.  And getting good qualitative is a bit like understanding fine art -- there's a considerable amount of judgment involved. The good stuff has tremendous value. And you need a bit of education in the topic to be an informed buyer.   

Insider secrets will be revealed. Tips and tricks of the trade will be shared.  But I'm not worried about letting you in on all this. Because, oddly enough, the more informed you are, the less likely you are to think you can paint a masterpiece in your basement, and the more you'll want the good stuff. 

Here's the short list of topics that I plan to include, just to whet your appetite:

1. Asking the indirect question
2. Using imagery
3. Using storytelling
4. Talking to the right people
5. Going beyond rational and functional
6. Lying
7. How to find a good qualitative researcher – questions to ask, where to look
8. Homework
9. Anchoring
10. Listening at right angles
11. Having a conceptual framework to put the content into
12. It’s not just leading a group discussion
13. How to introduce bias, and how to avoid it
14. Putting people at ease
15. Research ethics

We probably won't need 15 articles to get there.  As I tell clients, "we will cover all these topics, but not necessarily in that order".

References:

Mary Wagner, Talk it up: The web turns up the volume on the consumer voice. Internet Retailer, May 2006 issue. link

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