Extendance - Customer Interviews

The Challenge: Collect Clear and Truly Valuable Customer Requirements

"The customer is king": Pretty much everybody involved in companies' sales and marketing activities uses this mantra. Interestingly, though, new products frequently fail to meet customers’ real demands. Often, the reason is the overwhelming number of tasks required to get new products onto the market. Neither the time nor the resources are available to do each individual task properly in both a qualitative and a quantitative way.

Furthermore, being too close to the problem sometimes leads to problem-blindness. In particular, when a product is new, customers often emphasize things that are different to the market's real needs. As a result, customer interviews can sometimes oversimplify the picture or lead to wrong assumptions.

Extendance has extensive international expertise in dealing with such problems, and supporting clients through the whole innovation process. We have used a huge variety of customer demand-sensing activities, and so are able to provide the customized set of tools most appropriate to our clients' exact situation and market. That means our clients are able to match their customers' real needs.

Don’t Assume You Know Better Than Your Customers

What does it really mean to listen to customers and prospects? Well, listening to the customer actually starts with listening to yourself. It means suspending your ego and setting aside your stubbornness. The advice comes from the book Guerilla Market Research, written by Robert J. Kaden. He also suggests that next time you are thinking of going it alone without first asking customers, you consider the following questions:

  1. If we are wrong, how much will it cost us?
  2. How long can we afford to be wrong before running out of money?
  3. Would input from customers or prospects that have no stake in whether we succeed or fail help us make better decisions?
  4. Do we know with certainty why prospects go to a competitor rather than us?
  5. Have we asked customers and prospects what they need and want from us and our business?
  6. Do we know if our customers think we are giving them what they need and want?
  7. Do we know what else we can provide customers so that they’ll pay us more – and be happier about it?
  8. Do customers and prospects know the benefits of buying from us?
  9. Do we feel that we can’t afford market research?
  10. Can we accept the possibility that our customers might be smarter than we are in helping our business grow?

So we hope we have made the case for asking your customers and prospects clear. But now comes the real challenge: How can you obtain enough depth from customer and prospect surveys or focus groups? This is where you need a professional approach in asking the right questions and digging down enough to find the truth. The truth is there to be found, but only if professional customer surveys and focus groups are done properly. In particular, it is crucial to probe customer motivation effectively; otherwise little will come from all your effort. Key is to find the values that your customers are really looking for in your product-market.

Extendance helps you to pin down these values if you are in the ICT business – and do it right the first time, saving you a lot of money further down the road. To do so, we conduct both qualitative and quantitative Customer Studies, using the research methodologies and techniques that will best suit your specific objectives:

  • Focus groups
  • Mini focus groups

  • Dyads and triads
  • In-depth personal interviews
  • Observation studies
  • Delphi analysis
  • Segmentation studies
  • Communication studies
  • Name, packaging, price studies using e.g. conjoint analysis
  • Screening studies
  • Product testing
  • Test marketing
  • Market share predictive modeling
  • Conjoint analysis
  • Discrete choice analysis