At what points do I need to involve customers in testing?
It’s good to involve customers at every stage of the development of a product or service.
At the concept stage – when the idea has just formulated itself in your mind – talk to some customers to seek their views about whether what you’re proposing is something that appeals to them. Don’t go into too much detail – just get their initial reactions and if they’re positive ones ask some basic questions, such as what sort of price they’d expect to pay. In light of customer feedback you may want to adapt your concept to some degree. You’ve now begun the process of using customers to help narrow-down which parts of the idea work and which don’t.
No matter whether your idea is for a product or service, it’s good to pilot or prototype it; give some customers a chance to experience it and to offer their opinions. For a food business this might involve trying out new recipes and letting customers have a free sample. For a training provider this could be sharing a course outline with potential customers.
Depending on the product or service, you may need several pilot stages. A food business might drop some recipes as a result of the customer feedback and fine-tune other dishes that received good reactions. A training provider may want to run a free pilot version of a course. Someone offering fitness training may want to run a reduced-price trial session. Piloting gives you the opportunity to fine-tune your offering stage-by-stage, until you have a tightly focussed product or service that’s ready to be made available to all customers. The process gives you the opportunity to involve customers at every stage and avoid costly errors.
How many customers do I need to involve in testing?
Deciding on the numbers of customers you need for any given market test is a question that vexes even professional statisticians! Generally speaking, if your idea is for a product or service aimed at a mass of individual consumers or thousands of other businesses, it’s a good idea to test it on as many customers as is practical and affordable.
Significant sample
You need to have what’s known as a significant sample – enough testers to ensure that the results you get are reliable and not just down to random chance.
Sales person 1: ‘The sales of our new T-shirts are really disappointing.’
Sales person 2: ‘I can’t understand it – every customer who saw our samples loved them.’
How many people does the second sales person mean by ‘everyone’? If they discussed their samples with 50 or more people in their target market, then they’re unlucky to have such poor sales. But if they only talked half to a dozen people that might not be representative.
If your idea is for a product or service aimed at a smaller market, e.g business customers within a certain geographical area or a certain sector, you may be able to test your idea with a smaller number of customers. If you find widely differing feedback it’s wise to talk to more people.
Test your ideas qualitatively and quantitatively
A qualitative approach, involves in-depth testing of an idea, usually with a smaller number of customers.
The aim is to thoroughly explore the customers’ views about what you’re proposing. Does it meet their needs? If not, why not? What would need to be changed in order for it to be of use to them? If it does appeal to them, how would they use it? How often? In what circumstances?
A quantitative approach, involves testing to much less depth, but with a large number of customers. Typically, customers are asked a dozen or so questions. This method enable you to quickly collect a large number of responses on various aspects of a proposed product or service. You then have a significant amount of data on which to base your decisions.