Three easy informal research techniques for communication pros

November 12, 2010 at 1:30 am | Posted in informal research, marketing research, measurement, resarch techniques, research methods | Leave a comment

Informal research is useful for getting quick feedback or a general sense of how people respond to an idea, action or product. Here are three brief examples of what a communication/pr/marketing pro can do with no-cost informal research.
Idea one: Talk to your front-line customer service staff, whether they are face-to-face with customers or talk to them on the phone. Let’s say your business reduced the hours it is open and you want to know about customer reaction. Meet with your customer service staff. Collect a short list of the most frequent comments. Then over the next few hours or days have each rep tally the times he or she hears each comment. This will give you a general sense of the feedback; while it is anecdotal, it is useful information.
Idea two: If you have on-site traffic to a bricks-and-mortar business, set up a very short, and I mean VERY short, three question intercept survey. Use a five-point Likert scale to adress your main issue in two questions. Use a third follow-up question to get verbatim comments to explain the answer. Use observation to code demographics such as gender, age range, etc. Have an inexpensive give-away or coupon to encourage customers to take the survey. Keep the contact to less than three minutes. Don’t try to capture people in a group. Space out the interviews over the hours of business. Add the time of each interview to the data. Then you can do some frequencies as well as cross-tabs. If you do this yourself, be sure to be neutral and friendly in approaching people and don’t try to influence their answers. Try to collect at least 50 completed interviews. Code the verbatim comments  into major categories and tabulate the frequencies.
Idea three: Carefully write out three questions that having the answers to would help your decision-making. Call your mother or your best friend or someone you trust but who doesn’t work in your company. Test your wording with them. Can they understand the questions. Make the questions open-end such as “When you read the names the new chicken dishes on our menu (Heavenly Harvest Chicken and Cheesy Almond Chicken) what words or images first came to mind?” Have follow-up questions so that you can conduct the interview in three minutes. Call about 12 customers randomly and ask the questions. (We’re assuming you have a customer database. If not, develop one.)
These are three quick ideas you can use. Remember, this type of  research is NOT representative of all customers, but is useful in obtaining insight. If you discover major issues you may want to follow-up with a more extensive survey with a larger sample.
Let me know if you try any of these. Tell me how it works for you.