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While there are plenty of research methods in the market to obtain user needs, the fundamental question that baffles many of our clients is, “How do we actually identify our users?” In most of the cases, clients are sitting on a wealth of information which will help to answer this question, but most often this is dispersed within different departments. Identifying the users often becomes only a matter of looking at the right sources. Let us examine a few potential sources (direct and indirect) which can help in understanding more about users:
Direct – Method of identifying users through direct means by getting in touch with customers
- Sales and marketing team –Sales and marketing teams are constantly evaluating their strategies, promotions and reach based on their customer base. They are constantly running surveys, meeting customers in sales outlets and /or trade shows to know more about their needs. They won’t be able provide answers for all your questions but working in conjunction with this team can be really helpful in getting to know more about customers, their background, demographics, Internet usage patterns, website interaction behavior. This can provide you great deal of insights about the user, and helps you distinguish primary, secondary & tertiary users.
- Surveys – Surveys are extremely effective in obtaining the answers about who your users are from a quantitative perspective, but they do need to be planned and executed properly. Surveys can be executed in a variety of ways: hosted on your actual website; conducted in conjunction with customer delight questionnaires; incorporated within sale follow up questionnaires, to name a few. There are few do’s and don’ts about surveys. To highlight a few, don’t swarm your customers with surveys. Surveys should be planned in advance; prior communication to customers can avoid unpleasant surprises. If surveys are intensive and time consuming, offer participants a reward. Avoid asking personal questions and stick to the objective at all times. Analysis of data can reveal useful and powerful insights that can help in further research and design activities. The other biggest advantage of surveys is it helps you connect with users who are geographically dispersed.
Indirect – Using alternative or surrogate means to obtain information about the customers
- Contact or customer care center – The customer care centre receives enquires of varied nature – could be general, sales oriented or product/technical queries. Besides these, they also receive web enquiries. If you are receiving plenty of inbound calls/emails about how to get things done on the website, you can be rest assured that you are hosting an un-usable website. In many cases, the customer care center tracks a call in entirety – caller name, organization, nature of the call (concern or query), how callers describe their questions, call status and the like. You can leverage on this data to understand the critical issues on the website. A closer look at the data can help you draw out valuable information about users and their needs.
- Distribution channels/ Dealer networks - If the business model of the organization is such that their ‘go to market’ strategy is through strong dealer network or distribution channel, then the complexity of knowing your user is tad difficult. Most of the dealers are extremely possessive about their customers and find it difficult to share specific data about them. In such cases, we have found reaching out to the distribution channels and treating them as surrogate users to be fairly helpful. Dealers have a great knowledge about their customers. Surveys, semi structured interviews, focus groups can help us reveal more about primary and secondary users, information they seek, expectations and main concerns.
Don’t rely just on one source to reveal all the information. Branch out to multiple sources, departments and ask them the basic question - ‘Do you know who uses our website?’ Even a simple focus group discussion between departments can reveal much more than one can imagine. The rule is simple - ‘Know thy user, else your website will perish and die’.