Welcome to the Listening Post!

Going Wrong by Listening to Your Customers

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"How can you go wrong listening to your customers?" may sound like a rhetorical question. But, in fact, you can go wrong by listening to customers, if you hear them out and then assume that they are typical of other customers when they're not.

For one project, over 15 years ago now, a service organization commissioned us to do qualitative research with a handful of clients in the United States and Europe to determine interest in a potential new product.  The respondents were all quite interested and enthusiastically described how they could use the product to cut costs and improve quality.  Sounds like a sure-fire winner, right?

Unfortunately, we were not engaged to do the next step:  develop a quantitative market opportunity, applying the lessons learned from the qualitative research and estimating the percent of prospects that would be interested.  The service organization went ahead and developed the product, solely based on the initial qualitative research.

Alas, as it turned out, the firm's customers were not typical of the larger market.  Most prospects didn't have the same high usage and the same willingness to adopt the product as the firm's customers did.  As a result, the product sold fitfully for four years and was a market failure.

I'd like to say this is an isolated example, but it happens frequently.  Online communities and focus groups and personal interviews are great for developing ideas, but then those ideas need to be tested through quantitative research to ensure that the ideas resonate with a wider audience, an audience that is representative of the target market. 

So, to answer the rhetorical question: "Yes, you can go wrong by listening to customers, simply by incorrectly generalizing from what you hear."