Companies can end up spending a lot of money on market research and customer feedback, which should tell you just how important both of these things are. With the right information, you can get a better idea of how to improve your product and where to invest your time and money in order to get the best results. However, market research is expensive and time-consuming and, at the end of the day, it’s not always applicable to your particular product or the business decisions you need to make. A cheap and very effective alternative when you are getting started is the customer feedback questionnaire.
While the questionnaire itself is a relatively simple document, writing it well is something of an art that needs mastering and the value you can realize from a well-written form versus one that is just thrown together can be ten-fold. In a bootstrapped company run by a founder without a significant marketing background, the customer questionnaire can be the holy grail to getting the answers you need to steer your marketing in the right direction.
Qualitative vs. Quantitative Data
The first thing to understand when creating your feedback forms is the distinction between quantitative and qualitative data. Essentially, this means ‘hard numbers’ vs. ‘subjective feedback’. It’s important to understand both as they are each useful in the right situation. Only by getting numbers (such as ratings in a multiple choice question) is it possible to understand trends and the results relative to each other that can help you to identify patterns and find averages. Qualitative data on the other hand can help you find out why people feel the way they do and get ideas for future features.
One example of this difference is in the following: “Answer on a scale of 1-10 how happy you are with the appearance of your product” versus “How could this product be made to look more appealing to you?” While the questions are similar, the information you garner from the results is very different. When you are making your questionnaire, keep in mind what questions you are trying to answer about your business and define your questions qualitatively or quantitatively as necessary.
3 Key Questions
In general, a good number of questions for a questionnaire is ten. You don’t want the questionnaire to be too long as it will quickly reduce the number of people who take the time to fill it out. Ten is a pretty good round number that should keep the time to fill it out less than a couple minutes, which is generally an acceptable amount of time to your respondent. Seven of those questions can be related to particular features, user environments, customer demographics or a number of other aspects you would like to know more about. There are three questions though that can, very simply, provide a lot of information that should almost always be in your questionnaire.
1. How satisfied are you with the product (1-10)?
This gives you a general barometer of your customers’ satisfaction with your product. You can measure it over time and see if the changes you are making are improving your customer satisfaction, or not, and by a measurable quantity.
2. How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend (1-10)?
The answers to this question will help you calculate your Net Promoter Score. This is one of the single most useful metrics available in marketing research. We’ll do another post on this in more detail soon, but you can learn more about it here:
http://www.netpromoter.com/why-net-promoter/calculate-your-score/
These results will tell you how many of your customers are extremely loyal that will not only come back to support your business, but will likely help spread the word about your product to their friends and network.
3. If you could change one thing about the product, what would it be?
This is a great general qualitative question that gives your customers the opportunity to share their ideas with you about how to make the product better. Many of the features a particular customer might want may not be cost effective or desired by others, but if you find a common theme among many of your respondents, that may be a key addition that could help you expand your sales to a great number of new customers.
Connect Early and Often!
A common mistake many Hardware Startups make is that they wait too long to get feedback from their market. Especially those with an engineering/inventor mindset often want to make the perfect product before they show it to others. Swallow your pride! Eat the frog! Connect with your market and potential customers as early as possible and as often as possible! You won’t know what the perfect product is, only your market can really tell you. If you can get feedback on what your customers really want early enough, you can make course corrections before you’ve invested a lot of time and money going in the wrong direction.
Stay connected. As you make changes, don’t just be satisfied with some improved sales. Get feedback from your new customers and compare your results to your earlier research. This will allow you to better understand what the real affect of those changes was and what the true drivers of your sales numbers are. Getting an understanding of your market and customer base is a huge factor in the success of any Hardware Startup. There are lots of ways to do it, but many are expensive and time-consuming. Don’t forget about the low hanging fruit of the Customer Questionnaire!