Turbo charge your surveys with customer insights
Before you go any further, read this post if you haven’t already. That’ll bring you up to speed on why you should be researching and the few free methodologies you should look into to build a baseline and make sure any subsequent research you do is a wise use of your time and efforts.
Now our path moves into the realm of qualitative and quantitative research. Think of this as a primer. You’ll walk away with a better understanding of the two approaches and how they work together. I’ll hopefully also give you an idea of which methodologies you might employ to help you improve your business.
What
Qual vs quant
Qualitative research
Think open-ended questions where you're going to get deeper, more detailed responses from your customers. Usually, you'll conduct interviews or focus groups to find the answers. The easy way to remember it is the 'qual' part sounds like quality - as in you're getting a deeper level of ‘quality’ answer.
Quantitative research
Think numbers-based, and countable. They're generally surveys based on a fixed and structured set of questions which you can then apply maths to form a view, conclude or confirm a hypothesis. Like qual, there's a hint in the name. Think 'quant' as in quantity, because we want to be able to count our results and show them in numbers.
How
Using them in sequence
Quantitative measurement will give us the numbers we need to validate and back up our insights so we know they're statistically significant (more on that below). And it'll make sure we're not wasting our time or money on things that aren't going to work.
But a quantitative survey is only as good as the questions you put into it. What it won't do though is help you ask the right questions in the first place. That's when qualitative research is our friend.
By speaking to our customers and asking them more about what we're researching - we'll get a much better view of what questions we want to ask and validate in our quantitative reach
I'm going to shamelessly pinch another Mark Ritsonism to demonstrate how the two work together (again, go check him out).
Say I conduct a qualitative survey of all my customers with the question...
Should I turn up at the shop tomorrow wearing:
A leopard print G-string
Nothing
(You can probably see where I'm going with this…)
When I turn up in (or more accurately, not in, for one of the options) either option and inevitably get removed by security and/or the police, I'll point to my data that said I was right to choose that one.
What I didn't do though was conduct qualitative research that would have (hopefully) dismissed either of them as an option for my survey and replaced them with more suitable options like a suit, blazer, jeans etc.
How
Qualitative research
How you approach qualitative research will depend on your objectives.
Here are a few examples of qualitative research and what they can be good for:
Focus groups
A group of your customers or target market and discussing a specific or series of relevant topics.
Great for testing concepts or getting ideas from the people using your end product. Ideally, you’d perform this with a trained and somewhat objective facilitator.
In the classic focus group, the marketer or business representative would observe from another room via video or from behind one-way glass.
Focus groups are great when you want participants to riff on one another and come up with ideas. That allows you to go down paths you might not have even considered (you don’t know what you don’t know). The downside to this it can go too far and get off-topic.
The other big watch out is groupthink. All that means is because people are largely non-combative they’ll go along with the consensus of the group. That means where you end up and the conclusions you draw mightn't be representative of how people feel. The good news is we can still validate anything at this stage with quantitative research later.
Panels
Similar to focus groups but usually conducted at an individual level. Panels are preselected groups of participants who you pose questions to. They’re often repeated over time with either consistent participants or more commonly, with participants representing consistent demographic segments.
Interviews
Pretty straight forward - usually one on one conversations with a customer about their experience with a product. These can be long and detailed, especially if you have someone familiar with your product. User experience (UX) testing is a facet of this where you watch someone use your new product (usually digital) to see how intuitive it is and whether it helps them reach the outcome you intended.
How
Mixing up the format
Just because you’re talking to people that doesn't mean it all has to be face to face (except focus groups which you might struggle to manage over the phone). You can bang out a stack of back to back phone interviews at short notice as the ask of the participant is lower than asking them to turn up to a physical location to take part. The downside is you’ll miss all their non-verbal queues which might be important. There’s always a trade-off as you’d expect. It’ll be easier to get people to turn up to research over the phone or online, but you mightn't get the results you need. Similarly, it’ll take more to get people in a room to work with you, but you’ll likely get better results as there are more queues you can take from them.
How
Quantitative research
After spending time talking to your customers you should have a better understanding of your issue. And you could proceed from here to take action with a fair bit of certainty. If you’re like me and don’t like taking chances - the nest step is to verify what you think you know with a statistically significant quantitative survey.
These days anything customer-facing is online. The best thing is for most surveys you’ll need to run you can use free versions of market research tools like Survey Monkey or Qualtrics. Online surveys are great because they’re:
Scalable and automated
Easy for people to do in their own time
Non-intrusive
Easier to report on (as the data is captured at the source)
Difficult to go deeper into customer answers (although you could ask to follow up with them later)
Of course, there are going to be circumstances where an online survey won’t work. I’ve assumed so far that you’ll focus your research around your customer with their input. That mightn’t always be necessary.
E.g. Say you own a coffee shop. You conduct a focus group that tells you most of your customers will come and get a coffee after they’ve gone to the bakery next door. If you have the time or desire, you could sit outside your shop and observe how many customers do that. That’s another form of quantitative research. More commonly though, you’ll do this with your website analytics.
How
Statistically significant sample audiences
This next part isn’t mandatory, but if you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right. If you’ve done STATS101 or some sort of equivalent, skip this part as you probably know more than me…
If you’re going to conduct quantitative research and then take actions off the back of it, you’re better off having a statistically significant sample audience. That just means you’ve asked enough people out of the total potential population to make sure your findings are representative. Think of it this way - at the other end of the spectrum if you want to test something that you believe to be true to a million people and you only ask two people, how representative do you think their answers can be? The bigger the population, the more people you’ll need to ask to be sure the answers you have are representative.
The good news is you can use an online calculator to figure out how many people you need to survey go get at statistically significant sample audience. This is the one I use.
Summary
That’s a quick summary of two types of research you can deploy to help you better meet your customer’s needs.
Remember, you’ll need to conduct qualitative research first to make sure you’re validating the right assumptions with your quantitative research.
You’ll need to weigh up the ease of getting customers in an actual room and the benefit it brings vs calling them up or conducting qualitative research online.
When you go to conduct your qualitative research try and ensure you survey a statistically significant audience.
Ready to conduct some research, find out how to serve your customers better and make more money? Let us take your six.