Center for Strategy Research

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• Vol 12 Issue 3, March 2017

Hello!

The month of March is a time for spring cleaning — out with the old and in with the new! In that spirit of fresh starts, please enjoy this month’s edition of CSR’s newsletter, “How is this only now a thing?”

— Jennifer

How is this only now a thing?

My cousin, Joe, and his fiancée Melanie came to Boston for a visit last weekend. They live in North Carolina, so there was a lot of gloating about the warm weather there, and complaining about the cold weather here. Whatever.

As a hostess gift, they (and we all know it was really his fiancée who thought to bring a gift at all — my cousin’s gift to me has always been his presence) brought us something called “Death Wish” coffee. First of all, I LOVE the packaging; matte black, with a tasteful skull and cross bones logo. And even more, I eagerly anticipated the claim that this is “the world’s strongest coffee.” I can seriously get behind that. Then I wondered, why isn’t this already in my pantry?

It reminded me of that recurring segment on HBO’s Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, “How is this still a thing?” but in reverse (readers familiar with this newsletter already know that many of us are big fans). While he questions, hilariously, why Daylight Savings Time, tanning beds and Columbus Day still exist, I asked, about my new favorite coffee, “Why is this only now a thing?”

This, of course, made me think of market research: how do “things” become “things” in our world? The answer is that ideally, new products and services come to market in some way, shape, or form, through customer research. With growing frequency, such research is often conducted through customer panels, as such tools hasten the collection of more reliable and representative feedback than many alternative channels.

While customer panels tend to be quantitative and consumer-oriented, CSR also has unparalleled experience in creating and hosting high-value audience qualitative customer panels. Several case studies describing the variety of ways we establish, maintain, and use such panels, especially among specialized business-to-business audiences, can be found Examples of Our Work.

Nice twist, huh? Here are three of the ways that qualitative customer panels are the proverbial ‘gift that keeps on giving’:

1. Concept testing

One of the most frequent ways in which our clients leverage their qualitative panels is for concept testing. Ask B2B customers to evaluate a new product or service, and they are happy to oblige — and be brutally honest! For example, we recently conducted a test of new billing templates among customer panelists on behalf of a group benefit carrier.

Our client created multiple new bill templates for participants to evaluate, and we moderated 1:1, in-depth qualitative interviews via an online screen-sharing platform. During interviews, we probed rigorously about each template, uncovering very specific, actionable recommendations about which were best and how they could be further improved. For example, we got feedback such as, “I can’t use it unless it’s Office-compatible in this specific way,” and “The bill should always have the page number and total pages (like 1 of 6) on each page, so when I review it or send it to someone else, I know I haven’t lost any of it.”

This type of customer input into the final product allowed our client to avert some significant pains for its customers when rolling out new bills. And thanks to the panel, this entire initiative required only a few days to turn around.

Perhaps not as fun or raucous as this jewel of a process improvement, but valuable to our client nonetheless.

2. Exploratory research

Another fantastic way to use a qualitative panel is to crowdsource the idea-generation process, leveraging the wisdom and experience of customers who may also frequently be professionals in the field. While this “top of the funnel” research is often conducted online, we believe that with high-value participants, and B2B audiences in particular, qualitative methodologies are more effective. They inherently respect the expertise of the customer by giving him or her an open-ended forum in which to speak.

Another of our clients recently leveraged this idea-generation capability with 25 research panel members in 30-minute, exploratory phone interviews. We asked if participants had any experiences or recommendations about how best to accomplish a specific task without undermining or burdening work flow with additional security or related requirements.

Not everyone had brilliant ideas, but that’s not the point. This type of research is primarily about creative thinking, and if even one participant has a great suggestion, that makes the entire effort worthwhile. In this case, that’s exactly what happened; one of the panelists mentioned a process in use by a company in a completely different line of business that our client had not yet explored, but now intends to investigate.

3. “Oh, by the way…”; serendipitous insight

Of course, when companies make a habit of talking to clients about their day-to day experiences (often referred to as “the customer journey”), they can gather valuable insights at any time. For example, we use one of our panels to regularly talk with a subset of our client’s customers about interactions they have had with our client over the course of the past month. At the end of one of these interviews, a devoted panel member customer announced that she “had to share this idea” with our client.

She works in a region of the country where laws have been passed that affect local workplace benefits, and suggested that a carrier that could offer insurance products to accommodate those changes would be very helpful to customers, and would likely find the opportunity to be quite lucrative. Excellent synergy, in this case, of having ‘ears to the ground’; when we shared this idea with our client, the client team was impressed with its applicability and immediately set to work on its development.

This reminds me of a partnership-driven product that I purchased the moment I became aware of it. Not sure if the iconic retailer, Dooney & Bourke, recently learned that us women really like our football teams (duh), or if the NFL only just found out that women who buy (somewhat) high-end bags are huge fans. Either way, great collaboration, Dooney & Bourke and NFL — just shut up and take my money! NB: They sell bags with team logos other than the New England Patriots, but I’m not sure why.

Here’s the Twist: High-value audience qualitative panels are a gift that keeps on giving. From concept testing, to exploratory research, to useful, serendipitous suggestions from customers, these initiatives are worth their weight in gold. Establish one of these panels among your C-Suite decision-makers, your high net worth investors, or your high-end product repeat purchasers, and you’ll be saying, “How is this only now a thing?”

— Jennifer