Tag: customer service

53 Focus Group Questions to Ask for Better Insights

Posted on by Emily Louise Spencer

Focus group questions allow discussion to be used as a means of gaining detailed qualitative information. From issues regarding PR to product specifications, nothing brings more information than an in-depth, interactive conversation. Find out below how to ask the right focus group questions to understand the market better.

Focus groups can be highly useful, but too often, you won’t get the information that you need from them. They have disadvantages; whether that’s due to misinterpretations, misunderstandings, or simply recording information the wrong way, you can end up more confused than when you started.

Focus group questions can lead to confusing & conflicting information if not asked in the correct manner.
Focus group questions can lead to confusing & conflicting information if not asked in the correct manner.

The key to great focus groups appears before you’ve even opened your mouth, and that’s writing excellent focus group questions. 

In this piece, we’re going to help you nail this aspect. We’ll talk a bit about focus groups, and discuss use cases, but – more importantly – we’ll provide you with dozens of amazing focus group questions that will help you refine your market research and understand what your customers want and need.

Sometimes, it’s not what you say but how you say it that makes the difference.

What are the four types of focus group questions?

Focus groups function similarly to any conversation or debate you might have. You need to break the ice and introduce the main topics in a way that is easy to understand.

There are four types of focus group questions you can ask, and these should be used no matter the topic that you’re exploring. 

These consist of:

  • An introduction.
  • A prompt. 
  • A discussion.
  • And a way to wrap up the discussion without leaving anything unsaid. 

In that way, focus groups are similar to an essay or article in structure.

Let’s take a look at the four types in more depth and learn why they’re necessary.

Introductory focus group questions

Introductory questions are the foundations upon which your group will form their discussion. 

Essentially, introductory questions set the stage for what is to come next. They’re ideal for ensuring that everyone is on the same page, but more importantly, they allow the group members to relate to one another. 

They should be simple and easy to answer, as it can prove difficult for participants to answer fully and honestly to strangers.

Introductory questions also serve as a means to gauge everyone’s experiences with the topic that you will be discussing. Someone who’s been interacting with you on a monthly basis will have more insight on the topic compared to someone who does so once in a blue moon.

Some examples of introductory questions might be:

❔ “Welcome to our focus group. Today, we’ll be discussing [topic]. Could each of you please share a story about how you’ve interacted with [topic] recently?”

❔ “Hello, and welcome to our focus group. How did everyone find the journey here?”

❔ “We’re [brand], and today we’re leading this focus group. Can you tell me when you last bought something from us?”

In each of the above examples, a context is given, and a simple question is asked. While these might seem irrelevant to the larger discussion, you should always ensure that the results are noted down for context.

Information is power.

Exploratory focus group questions

These are the sparks that will light a fire in your participants.

Exploratory questions are always directly linked to the topic that you intend to gather information on and are designed to provoke discussion among the group. 

These questions should be carefully designed with customer personas in mind so as to steer the conversation in the direction that you desire.

Each exploratory question should be specific enough to determine what your group will discuss but vague enough so that there isn’t a straightforward and easy answer. 

While that might sound paradoxical, remember your aim is to get your participants talking, not simply to get a yes or no answer.

Some exploratory questions that you might ask are:

❔ “Could you give me an example of a bad experience you had with us?”

❔ “If you could choose {this feature} or {that feature} when looking for product features, which would you pick and why?”

❔ “What alternative features do you think we should include with our product?”

Follow-up focus group questions

Follow-up questions happen in the discussion period and are intrinsically linked to exploratory questions. They’ll always come after an exploratory question has been asked and are related to that specific discussion.

Because of this, some analysts might place them within the same category. However, there are distinct differences between the two.

The key difference is their focus. Exploratory questions are vague. They’re designed to provoke a whole host of potential opinions from coming forth. 

Follow-up questions are precisely the opposite. They’re designed to get pinpoint accurate information on how your participants feel, think, and might act. 

Some examples of follow-up questions are:

❔ “You said that you dislike this feature. Why specifically would you say that?”

❔ “You’ve pointed out that there isn’t much flexibility. How would you go about improving that if you were the designer?”

❔ “When you use this item, you said you felt frustrated. Could you tell me a little bit more about what frustrates you about it?”

In each of the above examples, context is taken from the previous discussion and used to form the question. 

It can be very tricky to write follow-up questions in advance since they’re so intrinsically linked to how the discussion evolves. Humans are unpredictable factors, and these discussions don’t always go in a direction that you anticipate.

After all, if you could perfectly predict what people were going to say, what would be the point of a focus group?

The key to forming good follow-up questions is thinking on your feet. It’s not easy, but if you know the topic well, you should have an idea of what information you need and how to aim these questions correctly.

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Exit focus group questions

Exit questions are exactly what they say on the tin, questions designed to end the discussion and wrap up the focus group.

While it might seem easy, there are several factors that you should keep in mind.

  • Not everyone may have gotten to air their opinion fully over the course of the discussion. 
  • Someone may want to mention something tangentially related.
  • Even with hours and hours, you’ll never be able to predict every facet of the topic that someone may want to mention.

Exit questions are designed to solve these issues. Essentially, their purpose is to ensure that you get all of the information you can possibly get out of your focus group.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

❔ “Thank you for your time. Before we wrap up, is there anything that you’d like to mention?”

❔ “Do any of you think there’s something that we missed in our discussion today?”

❔ “If we were to cover other factors involved, which do you think would be most relevant to the discussion we’ve had today?”

Each of these is short and to the point, but also open to interpretation. This way, any information not already given can be obtained with ease.

Are you ready for even more focus group questions?

Focus group questions examples to focus your participants

Describing the four stages of questions in an abstract sense is all well and good, but how do you make it relevant to your topic?

Don’t fret, for we’re here to provide you with some fantastic examples of focus group questions. Each of the following sections will contain several questions on a specific topic, as well as some general advice on how to use them. 

Remember, though, context is key! Be sure to mold the questions to fit your business, your products & services, and your way of doing things.

Focus group questions for new products

❔ “Were we to create an updated version of [product], what features would you like to see added?”

Features are the backbone of most products, and unfortunately, you can’t usually put them all into a single package. This is especially true of physical products but applies to software too.

When asking this question, you gain insight into what features that were left off would be of use to your customers, and by delving deeper with follow-up questions, you can find out why. By using this information, you can make your product better in the next iteration.

❔ “Who or what product do you think would rival any new launch we put out?”

There’s no use in launching a brand-new updated product if your competition surpasses it a week later. Knowing who and what your customers would view as competition lets you know what you have to account for in your marketing and placement strategies.

Remember, customer perception doesn’t always equal reality. You might judge your competition by cold, hard facts, but the general public won’t have access to all your information. It’s entirely possible for an inferior product to beat you out. 

❔ “Would you be interested in beta testing the new version of [product]?”

Not only will the use of this question potentially gain you willing testers that are enthusiastic about your latest releases, but it allows you to see whether your customers are interested in testing products before launch and/or becoming involved in the design process.

Focus group questions for marketing

❔ “How did you first come across us?”

If you know where your marketing strategies are seeing the most engagement, you’ll be able to judge how well they’re doing.

This question is most often used in surveys where you can judge proportions from a high number of responses but is useful in focus groups too. 

The discussion that comes with a focus group can reveal not only where customers first encountered you, but what their thought processes were afterward.

❔ “When you shop online for [product], what sites do you generally use?”

While not directly related to your brand, knowing where your customers would look to find a specific product or service tells you where you should prioritize your efforts.

To use a rather extreme analogy, there’s no use putting up a great big billboard in the middle of New York if your customer base is located in Los Angeles.

❔ “What methods of communication with us do you prefer?”

In the 21st century, there are dozens of different ways in which you can communicate with others.

The problem is, different demographics have preferences for different means, so which do you choose? Well, you ask.

Your customer will generally have qualities in common with each other, and one of those is communication methods. You’re likely to have more than one demographic of customers, so expect different answers here depending on who you ask.

❔ “How often would you prefer for us to communicate with you?”

If you’re anything like the average person, you probably get newsletters & similar email marketing materials that you subscribed to but don’t actually read.

While it’s a harmless nuisance to most email users, what you might not know is that unopened newsletters can actually harm your credibility as an email sender! Oh no!

By matching your customers’ schedules on when they prefer to receive communications from you, you can ensure that they’re more likely to actually open and read them as opposed to simply deleting them, or worse, sending you to the spam folder.

While a focus group is a great start to understanding your customers’ preferences, creating an email preference center where each subscriber can tell you exactly how they want you to communicate with them is a must.

❔ “Would you consider our advertisements intrusive, or say that they know too much? If so, where have you experienced this?”

When dealing with personalization, there’s a fine line between being relevant and coming across as knowing a scary amount of details about you. Computers, which we rely on for advertisement algorithms, aren’t the best at knowing where the line is; bless them.

A key factor in e-commerce is product recommendation, however, you need to balance that against coming across too strongly. Once you’ve identified the areas in which your advertisements put customers off, you can reassess the methods you use in order to lessen further damage.

Customer experience

❔ “How has your opinion of us shifted in the past X amount of months/years? Why would you say that is?”

Customer experience isn’t static, and knowing how opinions are shifting can help you decide whether your CX strategies are working or not.

One thing to keep in mind when asking this question is that time periods and the experiences tied to them are highly contextual, and the specific events happening around that time need to be taken into account.

❔ “Do you use our products more than you did in the past? Or would you say your usage is decreasing?”

Customer interactions are the basis of customer experience. You can’t say you’ve experienced something if all you did was observe it from afar, after all.

This question aims to judge how these customer interactions are progressing and whether or not you need to make changes to your strategies in order to retain customers.

Once again, this question is highly contextual. As the worldwide COVID-19 restrictions come to an end, a disposable mask manufacturer would expect purchases to decrease. This wouldn’t be a CX red flag for them, as the underlying reasons behind the drop aren’t within their control.

❔ “Are there any particularly positive experiences you’ve had with us? What made them stand out?”

When dealing with customers, it’s the standout experiences that affect opinions more than most. 

Let’s say you’ve had a particularly rough day, and the cafe you go to is busy. You don’t expect much, but the person behind the counter notices your bad mood and tries to cheer you up.

You’d remember that more than if they simply gave you your order and waved you away, right?

Standout experiences let you know when your brand went the extra mile and can give you a blueprint as to how to perform brilliant customer service in the future.

❔ “Are there any particularly negative experiences you’ve had with us? What made them stand out?”

On the other hand, there are bad experiences that stand out too.

To use the analogy from above, you’ve had a terrible day, and when you drop by the cafe, your coffee is cold! “That’s it,” you say to yourself. “I’m never coming here again!”

While not exactly a fair and rational judgment, it’s nevertheless the thought process that many of your customers (or ex-customers?) would follow if they had a particularly bad experience with you. 

It’s been proven that negative interactions are far more impactful on a person’s feelings than positive ones, and one bad experience can override dozens prior.

These experiences provide a blueprint of what not to do, essentially, as they’re the events that stuck in the minds of your participants as particularly bad. While it’s unfortunate that they had these experiences in the first place, you can turn them into teaching moments to ensure that they aren’t repeated.

❔ “From your experiences, can you say what you expect when purchasing something from us?”

Experiences create expectations. That’s true whether you’re talking about business or baseball, and the experiences that your customers have with you will shape what they will come to expect from their interactions.

Sometimes these experiences are controllable and influenceable, sometimes not. The key is to identify which parts of said experiences & expectations you can replicate and make a part of your repertoire.

Focus group questions for customer perception

❔ “Would you recommend our brand to others? Why/why not?”

This question lets you get to grips with one of the basic questions of customer perception, whether or not you’re a brand to recommend to others.

While it’s not absolutely essential in business to have customer advocacy, it is a huge boost to your sales ability without you having to spend a penny.

❔ “What made you choose us over the alternatives?”

The root differences between you and your competition reveal a lot about how your brand is perceived. Knowing what you do better than others allows you to maintain an edge, whether that’s an advertisement, product features, or simple availability.

❔ “What would make you choose an alternative over us?”

On the other hand, there are always things that your competition will have the edge in. By identifying these, you can factor them into your product strategy and hopefully overcome any weaknesses it possesses.

❔ “Where would you expect to find our products?”

Are you a part of the eye-level shelf where the premium brands lie or are you on the bottom shelf with the discounts? Are you found solely in specialized stores, or could you be found in a supermarket?

When you know exactly where your customers expect to find you, it can tell you a lot about how they view you.

❔ “When you compare [product] to the previous version, how well do you think we incorporated customer wants & needs?”

This one is applicable to all types of products barring those expected to last a lifetime but is mostly aimed at those with short lifetimes.

Essentially what you’re asking is, “do your customers feel heard?” which has been rated as one of the most essential qualities for a brand to possess.

Focus group questions for competitor research

❔ “If you intend to buy [product], what brand comes to mind besides us?”

When you think of a certain product, there are usually go-to brands that you’ll look for, no?

In most cases, there is more than one brand that fits the bill. Knowing who your customers think of besides you when looking for a certain product allows you to identify your biggest rivals on a practical level.

❔ “Who do you see as our biggest rival? The Xbox to our Playstation, if you will?”

Sometimes you may have a direct competitor, and sometimes not. It’s always useful to see who your customer base sees as an alternative, even if, in practice, they might not purchase from them due to said rivalry.

❔ “Is there any situation where you’d prefer our competitor’s product to ours? Why is that?”

Knowing what your competition is doing is important. Knowing what they’re doing that’s better than what you do is even more so.

Specifics are key here. You should ask your participants to provide information on features, availability, etc., in order to judge these situations and how you might turn them to your advantage.

❔ “What would you recommend we do to become more useful/enjoyable than [competitor]?”

Specifics are good. By narrowing the field to a single competitor, you allow specific strengths of theirs to come to light, ones which you can learn from.

When you delve further into this topic, you can use follow-up questions to find out why these competitors are preferred to you.

❔ “In what areas does [product] succeed where its competitors fail?”

In the world of product design, it’s often more important to be better than the other option than it is to simply be good. By finding out where you stand out, you can ensure that future versions maintain and amplify these qualities to retain customers.

Focus group questions for branding

❔ “When you see our brand, what immediately springs to mind?”

Knowing what gut reactions customers have to your brand is important. These feelings are the root motivations behind every interaction that they will ever have with you. Knowing what customers feel will allow you to shape the way you interact with them in the future.

❔ “How much more would you be willing to pay for our products over an alternative?”

Brand equity is the ability to charge more for products with your logo on them. It’s a form of trust and it shows that customers value your brand highly. 

By asking this question, you’re able to both measure your brand’s value and quantify it with a numerical value (often a percentage).

❔ “What kind of reputation does our brand have when it comes to X?”

Of course, a brand can have a good reputation overall but a bad reputation when it comes to certain practices.

Knowing precisely how you are viewed in certain circles is key to improving your practices, as well as maintaining the ones in which you are held in high regard.

❔ “Can you name a few positive aspects of our brand?”

Another vague question, this one allows you to open the topic to any and all answers, not simply the ones that you anticipated. 

By asking about the positive aspects of your brand, you’re going to know what to continue doing in order to keep customers loyal.

❔ “Can you name a few negative aspects of our brand?”

On the flip side, there are going to be negative aspects, no matter how hard you try to purge them.

By knowing your weaknesses, you can improve upon them. Remember, these are merely the negative aspects in the minds of customers and can be inaccurate!

If that’s the case, you should look to spreading awareness about your practices rather than improving them.

Focus group questions for industry trends

❔ “Have you noticed any new trends in our industry recently?”

While you’re certainly going to want to keep on top of industry trends, there’s always a chance that you’ll miss something or simply not be able to see it because of perspective bias.

Not only can your focus group identify trends that you may have missed, but you’ll also get information on their perspective about what’s going on in the industry and what they expect to change in the coming months.

❔ “What sources do you get your industry news from?”

When you’ve identified where your customers obtain their news, you can look to involve yourself with these sources further. 

Whether that’s interviews, collaborations, etc., becoming more visible to your target audience should be your aim.

❔ “Is there anything in our industry that you think is lacking?”

Industries are made up of businesses, which are made up of people, and people miss things sometimes. 

There’s every chance that customers are looking for something but haven’t been able to find it because it simply doesn’t exist in the industry yet. If you’re the one who asks them about it first, you’re the one who gets a leg up on the competition.

❔ “Are there any individuals or publications that you see as industry experts and would trust their opinion?”

Whatever the industry, there are always those big-name sources or people with lots of letters after their names that are trusted more than anyone else.

Why? Well, mostly it’s because they’re seen as knowing what’s up. They can tell the good stuff from the bad, the value-for-your-money from the ripoffs.

Whether these big names are actually experts, that’s largely irrelevant. The important thing is that your customer base will think they are, so it’s best to either get them on your side or avoid their wrath.

❔ “When you’re keeping up with our industry, what type of content do you prefer to engage with?”

Knowing what type of content your customers engage with is just as important as knowing where they look to obtain it. 

Short-form vs. long-form, essays vs. articles, technical specifications vs. overall statistics, all of these are different forms of content that say and do different things. If you know which of these is preferred, you can keep your industry engagement in those forms so as to appeal to your customer base.

You’ll likely have more than one type of customer, which means you’ll have more than one type of content that is preferred. 

Focus group questions for positive aspects of your products

❔ “When using [product], what are you always satisfied with?”

By using the term “always,” you ensure that you receive the most positive aspects of your product. You can also use this question as a starting point to rank product features and aspects, asking when they are “mostly satisfied” and “usually satisfied.”

❔ “What situation would make you reach for [product], as opposed to an alternative?”

Asking for the motivations behind the purchase will grant you insight into customers’ thought processes. The strengths that are the root causes of their purchase are what you should aim to obtain, whatever those may be. 

❔ “What made you decide to purchase [product]?”

This question allows for any motivation behind the purchase to shine through, even some that you may not expect. Sometimes products have uses that even the creators didn’t think of!

❔ “When you first saw [product], what stood out to you?”

When looking through the eyes of someone unfamiliar with a product, the first things they see will shape their experiences with it. Ensuring that you know which features are the most prominent will allow you to influence that first encounter in a positive way.

❔ “What features of [product] are the most useful to you?

Product purchases are driven by their usefulness. If you know what features are essential, you can ensure that those are preserved and advertised further in the future.

Conducting a focus group vs. a survey

A focus group is a small group of people who are brought in and asked questions about their experiences with your brand. You ask them questions, they answer, and you analyze the results.

So what makes this any different from customer satisfaction surveys or other forms of collecting feedback? Why should I bother bringing a group of people into a room together when I can just as easily send out emails?

The answer to that is simple, and it lies in group dynamics. 

You see, in a focus group, the participants don’t just rattle off answers like a computer. They talk about them with others and can come to conclusions that an individual couldn’t reach alone.

Ever had a feeling that you needed to put into words but never could, only for someone else to describe it perfectly? That’s the type of interaction that can happen in focus groups.

While surveys can give clean, easy-to-analyze answers, they often lack the depth that focus groups can provide. 

If you’re looking to the future and offering “what-if” scenarios, a focus group’s in-depth discussion will give you a much better idea of your customers’ responses to those scenarios than surveys ever could.

There’s also the fact that focus groups usually have a moderator, someone who represents the company and will be actively involved in the group.

They’ll ask the questions, set the stage, and keep things on track. You can think of them as being akin to a courtroom judge, only not as likely to bang on a gavel.

Why are focus groups useful?

So, focus groups can give you in-depth information. But how can they be used? What information can they help you find?

Well, as mentioned before, the key to focus groups is discussion. 

Focus groups are all about diving into the minds of your customers, about understanding what they want, what they need, and what drives them. 

Unique perspectives coming together

Different people will have different perspectives depending on their situations in life. That’s true in any regard, but especially important with respect to focus groups.

You see, different perspectives combined will give you a much clearer picture of the situation you’re in than simply seeing from those angles independently.

Thank you to our friends at CCRC for showing this concept perfectly. Their VIEWPOINTS podcast exemplifies this concept, bringing different perspectives togetherto fully explore topics.

Combined perspectives exemplify the saying “more than the sum of their parts.”

Non-verbal information

There’s a lot of information in what people say, but even more information in how they say it.

Take, for example, sarcasm. It’s hard to detect in writing, and might even cause you to think that a person believes the opposite of what they actually do.

There’s also tone, body language, and a whole host of other indicators that can tell you a lot about how a person feels. Using cameras to capture these provides you with an easily accessible, accurate idea of what’s going on.

The more strongly you feel about something, the more it shows up in how you present your case. You can say that you dislike two individual aspects or features of a product, but if your tone is clearly stronger when speaking about one of those, it’s obvious which one you hate more.

All in all, when done right, focus groups can give you a lot more information than any text-based source of information. 

Interactive questioning

When answering a survey, you’ll often put down the first thing that comes to mind when answering a question.

After all, most people’s aims when completing a survey are to get it done, not to think it over for any great length of time.

The facet that puts focus groups in a different light from other methods is the fact that you can interact and respond to the answers that are given to you. This provides more information, more depth, and a greater understanding of what the person in question is thinking.

Surveys, questionnaires, and ratings are all well and good, but nothing gets to the heart of the matter like a conversation.

Which focus group type should you pick?

It might not come as a surprise that there are multiple types of focus groups. These largely perform the same function but differ slightly in their methods. 

Let’s take a look at the most common types.

Single-focus

The single-focus group is the traditional focus group, where a group of participants actively discuss topics when prompted by a moderator. 

There is no split in the group, no division that sets participants apart from each other, and as such, all participants are treated as equals.

Two-way

In a two-way focus group, you have two separate groups. One discusses the topic, while the other observes the discussion. Following that, the second group conducts their own discussion.

The key to this type of focus group is that seeing the way the first group interacts with the topics can alter the way in which the second group thinks, opening them up to new ideas and perspectives without introducing a direct form of conflict.

Two-way focus groups are useful when you have a split customer base, where two or more demographics might think about your brand or product differently.

Dueling moderators

So, we get the moderators to face off with pistols at dawn, right?!

Hehe, no, that’s not the meaning of the word duel that happens here, but the general gist is the same.

In a dueling moderators focus group, you have two moderators who take specific sides in an issue that’s being investigated in order to prompt discussion of opposing viewpoints.

These types of focus groups are intended to investigate how an opposing viewpoint might affect customers’ opinions. You can think of it as playing devil’s advocate, whereby conflict is purposefully used to gain more in-depth information than you’d otherwise get.

After all, if everyone in the group agrees on a certain topic, you’re unlikely to delve further.

Wrapping Up

In the end, a focus group is about as useful as you make it.

The way you deal with the information that’s given to you by your focus group is just as, if not more important, than what you obtain from it. That’s why having a good brand strategy is crucial to modern business.

Your brand strategy should revolve around your customers – what they want, think, say, and do. Customers are the lifeblood that drives business, and without them, your brand will falter.

Great focus group questions can assist you significantly in creating a customer-centric brand strategy, using the knowledge you’ve gained to become relatable and reliable, and creating a brand identity that truly stands out.

You can find out more about brand strategy and innovation in our guide here.

 

Customer Perception: Making Consumers See Your Brand Positively

Posted on by Emily Louise Spencer

The concept of customer perception might seem like a simple thing, but in reality, there’s far more nuance involved than you might think. At its core, customer perception is your customers’ opinions of you and is a key factor in a consumer’s choices.

Being seen positively by consumers is a must to generate new leads while also retaining your current ones. Almost 70% of consumers say they’re more inclined to spend more money with a company they trust to treat them well, rather than go for a cheaper alternative.

And trust plays a big part in how customers perceive your brand.

But where should you start? Customer perception is a big topic, and countless factors influence it. 

This guide is a good start. It will help you understand what’s behind customer perception and, most importantly, how to measure and improve to thrive in today’s market.

Let’s get started!

What is customer perception?

Customer perception refers to your customers’ awareness, opinions, and general feelings about the brand and its products or services. 

It’s shaped not only by direct experience with your brand but by all surrounding interactions like news reports, advertisements, word of mouth, etc.

It’s important to remember customer perception isn’t the same across sectors. It can differ based on location and demographics.

For instance, Home Depot is very well regarded in the US, but when they tried to expand into China they didn’t consider Chinese culture’s adversity to DIY. By the end of their six-year expansion attempt, they had to shut their stores and deal with a $160 million loss.

Customer perception can be tricky to quantify. It isn’t necessarily directly connected to the overall quality of the products or services you provide but how they see you.

You must remember your customers are human, and emotions and logic mix together. It’s not enough to look at the value proposition.

That’s why you need to dig deeper to measure how customers feel about you. Good places to start are:

  • Analyzing customer reviews.
  • Looking at social media platforms.
  • Conducting surveys.

This NEPA global survey on food habits is a great example of how perception affects our purchasing behavior. When asked about sustainable meat alternatives, only 25% of UK consumers said they would like to see lab-grown meat on their local supermarket shelves.

What is the customer perception process?

The customer perception process is exactly what it says on the tin. It is the process by which customers sense, organize, interpret and respond to anything related to your brand – be it a particular product, the brand as a whole, or somewhere in between.

Let’s break down this process by looking at an advertisement.

  • First, the ad is seen by the customer.
  • Then, they organize the information, taking it in and understanding its meaning and the message it conveys.
  • The customer can then interpret the information based on the current situation and history with the brand.
  • Finally, the customer responds to the advertisement, forming an opinion and associating emotion with it. 

IG

This all happens within a second or so, leaving little to no room for conscious thought to be involved.

But just because this process happens quickly and automatically, it doesn’t mean we can’t predict quite well what will happen. 

When running an ad campaign, you don’t just whip up a graphic and run along with it. You try and understand what your target audience will take from it and how it will affect their perception of your brand.

Later, you can collect customer perception data via the previously suggested methods. This will help you better understand your ideal customer and the effects of your latest campaign.

You can find a great example of this if you look to KFC’s 2018 ad, which issued as an apology rather than a simple advertisement. 

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In early 2018, KFC in the UK ran out of chicken. That’s right, a business that mainly sells chicken ran out of chicken. 

Since this naturally grabbed the attention of the local press, KFC responded in a manner that resonated with the British public – posting a full-page ad in the Metro with their initials rearranged to almost form an explicit word. It’s almost as if they were going “FCK, this is embarrassing”, a phrase that struck the bullseye with the British public.

Underneath, the company apologised for it’s failure, promising to do better in the future. KFC’s ability to laugh at itself took classic British humor, owning up to their mistake, and an appropriate form of advertisement to create one of the best responses to a PR crisis in the last decade.

Why is customer perception important?

While a positive customer perception is bound to net you new customers, it can help also drive growth via repeating customers. 

By forming long-term, lasting relationships with your customers, you increase loyalty and customer retention rates.

Focusing on metrics such as these is key in ecommerce, as it’s considered much cheaper to retain existing customers than attract new ones.  

Customers who have already purchased from you, and have built a positive relationship with you, are far easier to convince to purchase again than those who haven’t. To attract new customers, you need to:

  • Convince them that their existing brands aren’t working for them.
  • Show them that your brand can fulfill something their current one cannot.
  • Overcome the human resistance to change with enough incentives.
  • Convince them to buy from you.

You skip the first three steps with existing customers, making it a much more efficient and cheaper affair. 

The key to customer retention is to align with their values and beliefs. This will depend on your market, who your customers are, and what demographics your customers belong to.

Older generations emphasize different things than younger ones, men on different factors than women. These are all generalizations, of course, and won’t hold for every customer of that particular demographic, but it’s important to keep them in mind.

Customer perception has two particular factors which promote strong loyalty and even advocacy:

Value alignment

A customer who perceives your brand as having the same values as them will intrinsically align themselves with you. Conversely, a brand with lacking or conflicting values will see customers migrate away to greener pastures.

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The same Ipsos Global Trends Report 2021 also found that consumers’ three most common expectations of brands are:

  • Committing to fighting climate change.
  • Standing up for social issues, and 
  • Paying their taxes. 

This is true worldwide, with the report looking at all six continents.

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Businesses that are perceived to have outdated or harmful business practices will be met with rejection and even protest, while those who keep an eye on the values their customers hold will be embraced.

But it’s not enough to talk the talk. You also have to walk the walk, with actions speaking much louder than words. Shallow and meaningless gestures will be seen through, yet genuine commitment will be held in high esteem.

Microsoft is an interesting example of a company that shifted its value to keep up with the times. Historically, it was known as a combative and aggressive company. But with the appointment of Satya Nadella as CEO in 2014, it shifted towards more collaborative tactics.

The software giant now provides support for open-source software, PaaS, and IaaS solutions and, in general, is far more open to working with other developers. 

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Trust

Good customer perception signals to the consumer base that you are a trustworthy brand that will not lie, misdirect or cheat customers. 

To build and maintain trust, the best practice is simply to be trustworthy, to say what you mean, and to be honest and open about your business practices. 

Costa Brazil, for instance, laid out their Roadmap For Change earlier this year, stating their sustainability targets and their pledge to plant new trees to replace those their products required. 

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Unlike similar press releases and statements from similar companies which only showed the positive, they were open and honest about the difficulties of building a sustainable brand and admitted that they weren’t experts in the field. Many other businesses switching to eco-friendly means of production haven’t been willing to admit difficulties, leaving Costa Brazil as one of the few who will publically acknowledge setbacks.

At the end of the day, customer perception is about developing positive relationships with customers, which leads to increased sales and success. 

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Past experiences

It’s no wonder that past experiences can determine loyalty and retention.

As we’re all conditioned by our past, our reactions and knowledge are entirely dependent upon our previous experiences. In this way, good customer perception relies on having consistent good experiences. 

A well-known phenomenon is hyper focus on particularly good or bad parts of an experience with a brand, with one bad experience tainting a person’s perception of that brand as a whole. 

Thus, consistency is key in building good customer perception.

How to determine & measure customer perception

We briefly talked about the ways you can measure the elusive customer perception. Now’s the time to dive deeper.

It isn’t easy to keep track of all the factors that affect customer perception, but with a little investigation, you can usually find out what customers expect of you. 

Using one method of information gathering alone will usually get you part of the story, but not all of it. For example, reviews, by their nature, are only left by those who have purchased from you. Thanks to the human tendency to only leave reviews in the case of particularly strong experiences, whether positive or negative, you’ll tend to get a skewed view of things.

You need to use multiple methods of data collection if you want to get the complete picture. That means complementing review data with other methods such as surveys and social media monitoring.

Collecting feedback via surveys

Surveys are great, as they can tell you the little details that you specifically need to know. You can ask the specific questions you want answered, and those who complete your survey will give you the answers. Sounds simple enough, right?

In reality, things aren’t so simple. Consumers tend to only answer surveys when they’re particularly motivated to do so.

A popular motivational tool is a monetary incentive. While it will get people to answer your questions, some may simply tick boxes randomly to obtain the reward. 

That being said, you can somewhat overcome this by placing reverse-scale questions, helping you to weed out such responders. 

For example, if marking 5 means an excellent experience in most of your questions, create an item where marking 5 means a terrible one. In surveys where all items are marked with 5, you’ll know people didn’t bother reading the question, and you can disregard their answers.

Another issue with surveys is they’re usually limited to your clients. Would you look at an email from a company you have never interacted with directly and think, “I’m going to complete this survey!”?

Finally, only people interested in answering questions will complete your survey. The issue is that your sample is limited to a specific subset of people that don’t necessarily depict your entire audience.

That said, surveys are still a great tool to gauge customer perception. You just need to keep their limitations in mind.

Once you’ve opted for one, it’s important to know how to read them and what you can get out of them.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

The net promoter score is a value that’s based on a specific survey question:

“On a scale of 1 (very unlikely) to 10 (very likely), how likely is it that you would recommend us to someone else?”

Those who answered 9 or 10 are considered “promoters” of your brand, whereas 0-6 denotes a “detractor,” those who will decry you. 

The relative ratios of these will give you an idea of how well your product or service is received and help quantify your overall customer perception.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Similarly, the customer effort score is based on the question:

“On a scale of 1 (extremely low effort) to 5 (extremely high effort), how difficult was it for you to find a solution to your problem with us?”

The CES measures the effort that customers feel like they have to go to in order to get what they want from you, which is a crucial component in a customer having a good experience with you and therefore having a good perception of you.

Analyzing review data

Review data is solid. It’s information on your products or services provided by those who purchased from you and therefore is a reliable data source, right?

Well, not exactly. 

First, you have to consider that you’ll get a skewed perspective from reviews thanks to people’s tendency to only leave them after standout experiences. 

I’m sure you’ve come across review STAR ratings online and seen a lot of 5-star and 1-star reviews, but not very many in between.

Customer reviews

Secondly, reviews can be faked. Whether that’s by competitors, the platform you’re using to sell on, or by people who have nothing better to do than make everyone else’s life difficult, you can’t necessarily rely on review data that isn’t directly linked to a purchase. 

The problem then comes that, by only taking into account verified reviews, you might leave out plenty of genuine reviews that simply didn’t bother going through the verification process. 

With Revuze’s data collection engines, you can take information in brands, product lines and even individual products, analysing them from every angle in order to pull as much information as you can from that data. 

We use sentiment analysis, SWOT analysis, and more to give you a full 360 degree view of your brand, market standing, and competitors.

Social media listening

With the advent of the internet, the things people talk about daily suddenly became recorded and publicly available to analyze. 

Using software, you can collect millions of text pieces relevant to your brand and analyze them with sentiment analysis in order to get a clearer picture of how customers feel about you.

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Like previous strategies, social media listening is not without faults.

Social media is volatile, and one negative opinion can turn into thousands when passed on, then die out. If you’re not segmenting your data by time, this can give you a much lower figure than you’d otherwise expect. 

Furthermore, not everything that people post on the internet is their actual opinion. Influencers get paid to say certain things; some people look to fit in by posting opinions others might hold, and others look to stir up outrage for amusement.

The lesson here? Take everything you get from social media monitoring with a grain of salt. It’s a good indicator, but it might not be reliable.

As you can understand, all data-gathering tactics present challenges. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use any. Quite the opposite. By acknowledging these challenges and employing more than one tool, you’re bound to get as close as possible to the real picture.

And once you have that, you can start working on improving your image.

What factors influence customer perception, and how do you improve them?

Factors that influence customer perception

Many factors affect customer perception. In fact, almost every facet of interaction between customer and brand that you can name will have an impact of some kind. These can be tangible, measurable things or more abstract ideas.

The key to positively influencing customer perception is to do these things regularly, as it not only will tell you how your actions have been perceived but can tell you if customer expectations have shifted in the time between surveys. 

This might seem far-fetched, but large scandals and world-shaking events can shake up the market and shift customer priorities over just a few months.

The top factors influencing customer perception will depend on your market, target demographics, location, etc. 

In the previous section of this article, we talked about value alignment, trust, and past experiences as factors that affect customer perception and loyalty. Now, let’s take a look at other common ones.

Pricing/Quality 

Pricing and quality often go hand in hand, so let’s discuss them as a pair.

A product’s overall quality strongly impacts customer perception, with certain prices bringing expectations of quality standards. When the quality of your product or service meets or exceeds expectations, customer perception rises.

Prices that are too high will put customers off, and ironically, so too will prices that are too low as they give the impression that your products have some hidden defect.

Setting a price for your products when launching them is never easy, but you can look to the other similar quality products on the market and what they are charging as an indicator of what might be a reasonable price to charge.

This doesn’t mean you should blindly follow your competitors’ pricing strategies. You should always monitor the sentiment around these prices, ensuring that customers are happy to pay these prices.

For an established product, the key is to keep an eye on the sentiment around your products’ pricing, quality, and how they combine. 

You can do this with the help of sentiment analysis, text mining, and other forms of social monitoring, which tell you more about the overall picture than a simple survey would.

There is also the factor of brand value: a well-established brand can charge more for its products than an unknown one, owing to the trust consumers have in you. 

You should also keep in mind that prices are dynamic. What customers were willing to pay upon initial release won’t be the same as what they’re willing to pay six months afterward, for example.

Customer service

When customers have an issue with your products or services, your ability to make them feel heard, listened to, and have their feelings respected greatly impacts your customer perception.

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Good customer service relies on knowing your audience, what they desire and what they expect from you. In general, you should be able to learn a few things about your customer base and what they expect by monitoring reviews, social chatter, and surveys that you put out. 

You can go further by segmenting these into demographics, allowing for personalization of customer service to a particular demographic or even individual if enough data has been collected.

The processing power required to personalize customer service isn’t something a human brain can output. However, advanced AI can assist you by analyzing the data and providing recommendations for how to approach the particular customer, problem, etc., based on previous customer service interactions that were successful.

You can take this process even further with hyper-personalization, which takes the philosophy to the individual level, using data and information collected on a specific individual.

Take, for example, the following interaction:

  • You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
  • The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
  • You then must explain everything you’ve already explained to the second person, wasting your time and theirs.

You’d feel quite annoyed at the repetition, wouldn’t you? Well, if the company had a database of information on their customers and their problems, the interaction would go more like this.

  • You phone a company helpline, asking for assistance setting up your software.
  • The person taking your call asks you for information on your software, enters it into a database, then redirects you to another person who is more able to help.
  • The second person now has all the information that the first person entered into the database and can take over without wasting time.

In that case, you’d feel like somebody listened to you. The company took your words, kept a record of them, and used them further down the line to help you.

Businesses can also take things a step further by noting down common issues, keeping a record of their solutions, and making them accessible to users. Why bother calling a helpline if you can find the answers on the website? 

At the end of the day, speed is key in customer service. Providing a personalized customer service experience can help solve problems quickly and efficiently. 

Branding

Your branding sends a clear message to customers. 

Your logos, artwork, packaging, and all other visible, tangible factors specific to your brand affect customer perception.

You can think of your branding as an extension of value alignment. You need to position yourself in a way that attracts your audience and aligns with their beliefs.

Brightly colored, shiny plastic packaging will catch customers’ eyes. 

However, plain, more recyclable packaging may boost your customer perception with certain audiences. 

Usability

The customer’s ability to use your product significantly impacts customer perception.

Placing step-by-step instructions on your products will make use easier, including easier-to-read instructions on boxes or packaging. You can even delve further into the design process by editing the shape of your products so that their use is intuitive even to someone unfamiliar with them.

Usability

A highly specialized brand of computer parts aimed at consumers who can construct their own devices doesn’t have to be as simplistic as a brand that focuses on the general public, who aren’t expected to have the computer know-how of the aforementioned specialized customer base.

Further additions you can make include so-called “poka-yoke” or “mistake-proofing,” where your products are made so that misuse is made difficult to achieve to prevent customers from damaging your product while attempting to use it.

A good example of poka-yoke is USB cables, which can only be connected in the correct direction and will refuse to slide into ports the wrong way, preventing any potential damage that could arise to both the device and the person operating it from a backward connection.

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Advertisement

How you deliver your advertisements, as well as the contents of them, have a massive impact on customer perception. This is especially true of the former, with different target audiences having different preferred modes of communication.

Choosing the wrong mode of communication for your target demographics will have a net zero impact at best, as customers simply either ignore or do not see your advertisements, and a negative one and worst, as they see you as out of touch.

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Gen Z, for instance, rarely pick up the phone if they don’t recognize the number calling them, nor do they answer the door if they’re not expecting someone, so cold calling and door-to-door sales will misfire as communication channels.

Instead, you’ll need to utilize digital and social media to reach this demographic in an effective manner.

Don’t forget the context, though. Knowing when and where to place your advertisements so that they grab attention but don’t distract from the current situation the customer finds themselves in is the key.

You’ve probably come across pop-up ads on smartphone apps or websites, those that cover the entire screen and completely derail any process or train of thought that was taking place beforehand. It’s extremely distracting and annoying.

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This is an example of bad advertising, which will hurt your reputation if you allow yourself to be placed in those positions. Picking and choosing where you want your adverts to go is crucial to maintaining a good perception.

Passive advertisement, on the other hand, doesn’t affect the usage of the website or app in question. It’s a term that covers top banners, side adverts, and any other form of online advertisement that goes out of its way to avoid disrupting the user experience.

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As you can see in the example above, the Forbes website uses banner adverts across the top of its page. While these adverts catch the eye, they can simply be scrolled or looked past to access the website’s content without interacting with the ad in any way. This makes the advert less intrusive, less annoying, and less likely to be met with a negative reaction.

Furthermore, the quantity of advertisements matters also. While it might seem intuitive that more advertisement equals more customers obtained, there comes the point where this is inverted. Too many advertisements can cause irritation, which is then associated with your brand and puts potential customers off interacting with you.

Customer reviews

Almost all customers who purchase online will take the time to read product reviews before purchasing. 

The reviews that have been left, their content, quality, and even their number have a big impact on purchasing decisions. It’s been shown that consumers are weary of purchasing products with few reviews, even if the product in question is newly released.

While having good reviews is important, addressing negative reviews will have a positive impact overall on your customers’ views of you. It shows you are willing to listen and consider your customers’ problems.

Social media listening tools, dedicated CX teams, and sentiment analysis all play a part in keeping up to scratch with your customer reviews. 

The key here is speed, with computers doing most of the work identifying and flagging especially positive or negative reviews in order for a human to see and respond in a short amount of time.

Recommendations and advocacy

People listen to the opinions of those they hold in high regard, whether that’s influencers, well-known names in a certain sphere, or friends and family. Your ability to improve customer perception in those people’s eyes can also have a knock-on effect that leads to improved customer perception overall.

By using influencers, promotional discounts for those who recommend your products to their friends & family, and making other forms of advocacy easier, you allow your customer base to do the hard work for you. 

Unfortunately, besides paying influencers to advertise your products, the mechanics of recommendation isn’t exactly straightforward to influence, as they rely on nuances and factors beyond your control. 

Ultimately, the best way to get customers to recommend your products or services is simply to give them a great experience – from the moment they search for you and buy your product, up until they need your help with it.

Location & shipping services

Convenience is a big factor in choosing a brand, with a location close to your target market’s preferred area of purchase being important. Your location will depend on your target audience, with younger, more tech-savvy customers being far more likely to purchase online, for example.

If you’re already an established business, it’ll be very expensive to move to another place to perform commerce there. 

Luckily, shipping networks these days can stretch all across the globe. With the right setup, you’ll be able to reach those distant markets with ease. 

So, what is the right setup?

Firstly, you need a good distribution system. By this, we mean that you need to have pre-existing plans for getting goods from one place to another across all options you plan to ship to. 

This can be as invested as dedicated couriers, to as simple as knowing the local post routes. It’s up to you to decide what’s necessary, based on what is feasible from a financial standpoint and also what is expected of you.

Secondly, you need to factor in time. Certain borders take longer for goods to cross than others, and some shipping lanes can be disrupted by accidents or by human interference.

Distribution centers, places where you store your goods before the sale, can be dotted about in various places. You can refill stock there as necessary by keeping an eye on what is purchased in specific locations, either directly from the manufacturers or from a central distribution center. 

In this way, while the overall distance the goods travel is the same, the distance between you and the customer is much smaller, making for shorter delivery times and increased customer perception.

Wrapping Up

The key to having good customer perception is understanding that customers’ reality is not necessarily yours and that what they see & do will vary from person to person. 

There are plenty of factors that can affect how customers see you, from value alignment and trust, all the way to pricing and service. 

Collect and analyzing this data is crucial to driving growth. With it, you’ll be able to pinpoint what consumers think of you and how they see you

In the end, though, the best way to gain good customer perception ultimately is to provide them with an excellent customer experience. Not sure how to do that? Check out our comprehensive blog on the topic.

Customer Empathy: The Ultimate Guide

Posted on by Simone Somekh

Why Customer Empathy Is Important in Customer Service

Customer empathy is more than simply doing what your customers want. It’s the process of understanding your customer base, what they want and need from you and how you can best provide it. Empathy in customer experience has been rated one of the top concerns of consumers, with the need to feel valued by brands growing more and more in recent years. It’s utilized to create new products, improve the customer experience and more, all of which drive a business’ success, hence why empathy is important in customer service.

Empathy and customer service improvements go together like peas in a pod — if you don’t understand your customers you won’t know how to go about building customer empathy and therefore improve their journeys. In a customer service environment empathy is absolutely essential. By immersing yourself in the concept of empathy in customer service you allow your consumers to connect and share their lives with you, rather than simply existing in a vacuum outside of their needs. You’ll keep yourself relevant, keep new innovations tuned to customer specifications and most of all provide great products and services for the public to enjoy.

Practical Steps To Grow Customer Connections

If you’re reading this you’re probably wondering: How do you show empathy to a customer? There are several key ways in which you can go about this, all being based on listening, recording and understanding your customers’ concerns and requests. Of course, not every piece of feedback is going to be addressed and no matter how hard you might try it’s impossible to get every customers’ journey perfect, but using these tried and tested tips you can start to make a difference.

Information Exchange: Getting information from your customers, about what they like or dislike, need and don’t care for etc., can be tricky. Not only can customer feedback be chaotic and unstructured, but the sheer amount of useless information in feedback forms and similar can make patterns hard to see. By coordinating information exchange with your customers, your product team and customer service team can make strategies to improve their future plans. Perhaps you’re scheduling regular Q&A sessions with your consumers, maybe you’re setting aside sessions for customers to air grievances. Both are structured ways of getting information that is easy to record and categorize.

There’s also the matter of degrees of separation – no matter how well meaning your design or management team might be, they won’t know the needs of your customers better than your customer-facing staff who see them regularly. There’s an old saying, “in matters of boots defer to the bootmaker”, and this applies here too. By giving your front-facing workers a voice you can easily see possibilities that might never have occurred to management alone.

Leverage Your Staff: Information doesn’t just come in the form of formalised feedback. To carry on from the above, your front-facing staff will see little hints and see customer interactions in a way that management/design never could. By asking said personnel to note and record common complaints and compliments in order to pass them higher up the chain you get a better view of what’s going on down on the floor level, rather than simply dealing with an abstract idea of a customer. Customers like to talk, they like to air their wants and needs to people who will hear them. Anyone who directly interacts with customers will gain indirect insight which, when paired with formal feedback, can prove very useful indeed.

Of course, as with any experience that involves talking to people, some will be louder than others. Take care not to let the particularly loud voices drown out any quiet ones that are less open with information. Getting your staff to directly engage with customers, giving them empathy training for customer service and allowing them to put it into practise, will yield far more information than simply listening – some people will only talk when they feel they will be listened to, after all.

Mapping Customer Empathy: Customer empathy maps are a tool you can use to gather and process insights that your personnel might gather on your consumer base. It roughly splits customer actions into four sections, what a customer says, what they think, what they do and what they feel. By connecting these four ideas you can gain greater insight into what your customers experience when they make contact with your business. The Think and Feel sections are often extrapolations of the Say and Do, allowing you to see the effect that social protocol, politeness or uncertainty has on customer actions. 

Maximizing Customer Empathy

One thing you’ve got to understand about people is that they’re flawed, their memories aren’t perfect and nobody will recall every last step of their customer journey with you. The parts of the customer experience that stick with a customer are the most intense (whether that be good or bad) moment and the end of the experience, as the most recent interaction with your business. This is called the Peak-End rule, and it’s vital that you keep that in mind when analysing customer feedback or dealing directly with a customer complaint. This is why voluntary feedback is often skewed towards the extremes of positive and negative – only the strongest of emotions will motivate customers to leave feedback unprompted.

When you’re connecting with customers through empathy you don’t need to look at the whole picture, merely the most intense moments that generate the strongest feelings in said customers, whether good or bad. By looking at these moments your staff can utilize empathy in ways to make the consumer feel listened to and valued, whether it’s certain empathy phrases for customer service staff that will show understanding, or empathy statements for irate customers slotted into emails that customer service send as replies. There’s even guides for how to show customers empathy on the phone, with tips ranging from tone to word choices – these are also known as empathy lines for customers.

Conclusion

Some might consider customer empathy a soft skill, one that’s more abstract than practical and might ignore it altogether when planning for the future of their business. However, time and time again it’s been shown that customers want to feel valued, listened to and understood by the brands they interact with and those who manage these feats will come away with a far better reputation than those who do not.

Customer empathy can be a difficult practice to do from afar, you need to get into the nitty-gritty of the situation and see what customers are thinking and feeling for yourself. Remember, it takes empathy to create loyalty, and understanding to promote goodwill. Consumers aren’t simply interested in taking what they want and leaving any more, they want a positive experience that you can provide, and in turn they will show a positive attitude towards you. One good deed leads to another, and one piece of empathy can help kick-start a revolution.