I’ll never forget the questionnaire handed to me midway through a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney. It was massive. Page after page of detailed tick-the-box or circle-the-response questions – it seemed to me it would take the full 13-hour flight to complete. I started, but it was too much work and I abandoned it halfway through. I thought to myself: does management really believe they get valid and reliable data from these surveys?
Customer Surveys Are No Substitute for Actually Talking to Customers
A dozen interviews can be more useful than thousands of responses to a questionnaire.
January 17, 2019
Nico De Pasquale Photography/Getty Images
Summary.
Surveys are a pain to complete and, as a result, most people don’t invest much thought in filling them in, which means the information they give is low-quality and unlikely to provide strategic insight. Talking to customers and asking open-ended questions yields better results and in most cases your managers will not need to conduct much more than a dozen such interviews to gain a complete picture of customer needs and preferences.