Ask Customers What They Want to Say, Not What You Want to Hear

Here’s a riddle: what smells a bit like a barnyard and gobbles? Our American friends, who are still scraping gravy off the TV screen will be forgiven for guessing the obvious, but if you said a marketer with a fresh pile of data, you would also be correct.

We marketers love to gobble data. We’ll gobble the segmentation analyses, we’ll gobble the revenue reports, we’ll gobble sales trends, industry data, exchange rates, Net Promoter stuff, referrals, even longitudinal consumer whatch-a-call-its. We’re really not all that picky. And don’t get us started on overlays. My goodness.

Give a marketer a steaming pile of fresh data and they’re generally pretty happy to take it away and torture it until it confesses either to the reasons something has gone very badly or the reasons it will totally work in the future.

Most marketers I know have a particular data report they look forward to more than any other: the qualitative analysis on the base. This is that wee nugget of a report that unpacks why your customers buy, why they buy from you, what they think about it, how they like to be sold — all that stuff that we use to prop up the Insights that underpin the annual planning cycle.

Insights are magical things for marketers and agencies. They help us side-step difficult and confusing conversations about numbers and go to our happy place with stuff that sounds like: “Based on our Insight that 80 percent of our customers are moderately to very angry about owls, we see a market opportunity to upsell the base to square headphones.”

Here is the horrible little secret we never like to admit about this kind of data: our customers do not tell the truth. They probably mean to tell the truth but they come to our little barnyard with a wheel barrow full of biases and fears.

Here’s a fun example I ran into a few years ago at a telecoms company. Our mid-market retention rate was falling and we suspected it might be the hideous billing systems we used. Yet, when we did our annual attitude study with customers, billing scored in the average to high range.

Then we did a little audit of our recently departed customers and found that billing was, indeed the culprit. Customers were spending far too much time trying to decipher the bills and allocate them properly across their own cost centres, so when a handsome competitor showed up with pretty statements, we were losing business.

The disconnect? Our survey asked customers to rate billing accuracy, not billing experience. The invoices were accurate enough, but we never asked if they were incomprehensible, time-sucking instruments of evil. When we probed on why they didn’t volunteer the information in the little space provided, it turned out they didn’t want their own Corporate Overlords knowing how much time they were spending on the telecoms bills. They worried it made them look either incompetent or inefficient.

Another investigation revealed that a steep decline in add-on sales in a particular region had nothing to do with price, as our customers suggested, but everything to do with the departure of two popular sales people. Turns out the P-Cube doesn’t want to be outed as having friends and a bias toward buying from nice people. The Insight for sales was to hang on to nice people and the action item for marketing was to remember to ask if the relationship with the sales person was a factor.

Speaking of nice people, I had lunch recently with a friend who had just finished a very detailed look at her lost business qualitative report. Customers in the 55 to 75 year range were switching away from her financial institution in droves and offering vague reasons on the exit surveys. It appears they were leaving for a competitor that offered longer hours and better products, but the respondents didn’t want the staff at their branch to be penalized for the lost business so they entered Pants-on-Fire territory to cover up the reason for leaving. The Insight here is that well-intentioned old people can sling the BS with the best of them, and your survey needs to correct for that.

I will leave the solution to this one to the smart people in research firms but I would suggest that those of us gobbling data in yard should start looking for ways to ask our customers what they want to say and not what we want to hear.

Ask Customers What They Want to Say, Not What You Want to Hear