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Nobody knows the quality of your customer service better than your customers do. So it stands to reason that constant communication with those who know your business best is an important aspect of growing your business.

One of the most effective mechanisms to achieve feedback from customers is a ‘customer focus group’.

A customer focus group consists of inviting 6 – 8 customers to meet with you for the purpose of providing answers to the following questions:

What are we doing right?

What are we doing wrong?

What would you like more of?

What would you like less of?

If you were running our company, how would you do it differently?

The advantage of having your customers answer these questions fact to face, is that you can quiz them further if their answers are not clear. The problem that often occurs with written surveys is that what is interpreted by the reader may be different from what the respondent intended.

I recommend that customer focus groups be conducted at least once a month. A good idea is to run them on a Friday afternoon so that staff can join the participants for a drink afterwards. This provides the added bonus of enhancing the relationship between staff and customers.

If you are open for business on weekends, Saturday mornings may be preferable when you can invite your customers in for coffee and muffins.

Make sure that each customer focus group is made up of different customers. Also be sure to mix up the demographics of participating customers in terms of age, gender, marital status, vocations, etc.

Some advocates insist that for customer focus groups to be effective, they need to be facilitated by an outside third party. Whilst I concur that some bias may occur if you do it yourself, I am of the belief that if businesses are prepared to go to the trouble of organising customer focus groups, then generally they are prepared to receive honest feed back from their customers.

It is also a good idea to record the meeting on audio or videotape so that your facilitation can focus on asking the questions and clarifying the answers that are given. If half your focus is on taking notes, you will miss a lot of the non-verbal communication from your customers.

To gain the optimum value from customer focus groups, it is essential that you conduct them on a regular basis. Whilst conducting them spasmodically is better than not at all, my strong recommendation is that you conduct them on a monthly basis to maintain momentum and to keep in touch with the ever changing demands and desires of your customers.

Until next week, many happy customer returns!

Graham Harvey APS

Watch out for Graham’s new book Seducing the Vigilante Customer – winning strategies to guarantee the return of happy customers and healthy profits, available in all good book stores early in 2002.

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