In this episode of Getting to Aha!, Darshan Mehta is joined by Gail Conn, CEO at PhiPower to discuss the importance of customer insights for business success; the best practices for designing effective surveys, and what to avoid; and the importance of staying open-minded in your data analysis. 

Gail is the CEO of PhiPower, a market research consultancy that works with big name organizations, such as Apple and Disney, who need nuanced information to inform their business decisions. Prior to this, she was Co-Founder of MindClick, an online market research company, and a Senior Account Executive at Yahoo. She is also a volunteer Worker Bee Extraordinaire at Big Sunday. As a psychiatrist for business, Gail has provided consultation, marketing, and strategy for major corporations.

We can’t wait for you to hear what she has to share with us!

KEY TAKEAWAYS

👉 Surveys are boring, and participants completing a boring survey will not be engaged and share how they really feel. You need to create a storyline through your survey, but keep it short and snappy. Add in images and audio to keep your participants engaged. Gail describes creating a survey where each question builds upon the previous one, but is short in itself, and in the end the participant has made their perfect advert. If a respondent isn’t engaged in the beginning, they are just going to keep clicking through for speed.

👉 Gail shares her top tips for developing a quantitative survey. First - understand your sample, if the right people are not doing your survey, it does not matter what you ask. Second - work with people who know how to write a good questionnaire, that way you can ensure it will be engaging. Third - keep it short, people don’t have the attention span for a long questionnaire. Designing it in the best way will produce the best results for a corporation.

👉 With so many tools for creating them, there is now an overabundance of surveys out there. Thus, it is crucial to be distinct in your survey. With tens of thousands distributed daily, you don’t want yours to get lost in the ether. Gail’s team never repeats a survey, each one is unique, to combat this problem. Part of the job of a survey writer is to keep engaging your people, and keeping it insightful to the group, otherwise there’s no point in doing the service.

👉 Market research is really structured curiosity: learning about your customers through observing and asking questions. Ultimately, you are trying to understand what is driving their decisions, getting a glimpse into their subconscious. But they’re human beings, they’re complex, there are so many conflicting factors affecting their decision-making, so you need to be open-minded in understanding the data. Look for the hidden, seemingly unrelated factors.