In an insightful post, the strategy guru Roger Martin talks about the different facets of customer feedback, from a product development perspective.
You can read his entire post here. If you are a product manager or in any way responsible for collecting customer feedback, I would highly recommend that you read his entire post first.
He explores this question from the lens of the context within which the customers are requested for feedback, which brings a very interesting perspective to the topic.
He takes a topic that is very divisive and thought of as “binary” by most people (customers know the best or customers have no idea) and converts it into a continuous topic to be explored deeper. He takes an “Either/Or” topic and adds the “Yes/Also” flavor to it.
If i have to summarise the entire post in a few lines, it would be as below:
- If we seek to refine a current offering, ask and observe “What customers are doing”
- If we seek to understand what they have done, explore “What they have done in the past and where have they done it?”
- If we seek to understand what they would do, explore “Talk to them about the offering 1-1. Let them experience it first hand.”
- If we seek to identify new product / service ideas from scratch, either crowdsource them as one of the sources.
So, the kind of feedback we elicit from our customers would depend on what we are trying to accomplish. In his own words,
If you are honing and refining and don’t care why, then listen by way of A/B testing. If you are trying to understand prior behaviors, listen by way of quantitative sampling. If you are trying to predict future actions, observe customers yourself — not through intermediaries — to build a model and then figure out how to make bets to test and refine your customer model. If you are trying to come up with a new offering, supplement observing and modeling customers by crowdsourcing ideas from them.
– Roger Martin (https://rogermartin.medium.com/should-we-listen-to-customers-7e3c198e4207)
My take on this is simple:
We get the answer for the question we ask. And it is always better to watch the actions of our customers within their regular, normal context than to ask them about their behaviour.
Modern psychology has made it abundantly clear that we make up a reason for an action we did based on the story we want to tell about who we are and rarely is it the same as who are really are.
