#24 How customer research can define your business with Sue Holz

Enterprise Excellence Podcast with Brad Jeavons

• 23 min

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Introduction Welcome to episode 24 of the Enterprise Excellence Podcast. I am so pleased to have on the show today Sue Holtz. Sue is the Principal Analyst and Director of Research by Design. Sue is a specialist in both qualitative and quantitative customer research. Sue has 20 years of experience helping organisations understand their customers deeply, allowing them to refine their strategic and continuous improvement efforts.Summary Sue believes the key to conducting good customer research revolves around asking intelligent, short, sharp questions. She talks about survey fatigue because of the poorly structured surveys that ask the same question in many ways. The best practice is to ask intelligent questions that allow you to find deep and meaningful insights and link the dots. Sue spoke about the use of quantitative and qualitative surveys in today's market. Sue believes that 10-12, even up to 15 interviews (no more than 20) will provide quality information to base your decision-making capability. Intelligent questions, asked in person, or over the phone can give you the insights you require from a small group. The data gleaned will not change because of the higher number of interviews that you run. One or two of Sue's projects each year give the insight "Do not proceed", and she provides a great example of what can happen when you do not have customer research. Asking intelligent questions to your customers should be part of your everyday business running. For someone looking to do some customer research, Sue advised to: <ol> <li>Think deeply around the problem that you want to solve. </li> <li>Develop specific questions that relate to that problem.</li> <li>Write out the shortlist.</li> <li>Halve the shortlist. </li> <li>Structure the questions intelligently.</li> </ol> You should be able to nail it with five questions. Sue is delighted to chat over the phone and help people feel comfortable at having a go. Links Sue's website offers a range of free resources:  <a href="http://www.researchbydesign.com.au" rel="nofollow">researchbydesign.com.au</a> <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/sueholz/?originalSubdomain=au" rel="nofollow">Sue's LinkedIn profile</a>Key Takeaways The key takeaway from this episode was the power of capturing your customer's voice and how simple this is. Customers of an organisation will ultimately determine the success or failure of the venture. Taking the small amount of time to define who your customers are, create a few open-ended, intelligent questions and interview several of them seems time well spent. I have always found the insights that organisations gain from this approach are excellent, and in some cases, transformative. We spend a lot of effort every day overcoming challenges and trying to move our organisations forward. If this effort can be targeted based on our customer's voice, we can achieve a lot more with a lot less effort. Thank you for your time and sharing your passion Sue. We genuinely appreciate it. Bye for now.  Quotes 11:56min but what they don't realise, and is actually a part of our mission, would you believe, is to convince the SME's the importance of research and how easy it is. You don't need big numbers in your qualitative research. Yeah. You just don't need 30, 40 interviews; you can actually do 12-15. That will give you an incredible amount of important information on which you can base good quality decisions.  16:36min No is a good outcome. People do not like to hear it, but there you go. 17:26min so think very deeply about what problem you're wanting to solve. Think about what questio To learn more about what we do, visit <a href="https://www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com/" rel="nofollow">www.enterpriseexcellenceacademy.com</a>. Thanks for your time, and thanks for helping to create a better future.