I was recently involved in a
short-term project with a Bank based here in the United Arab Emirates, one which
involved me talking to people from various walks of life and getting their “feedback”
on the bank and the services it offered. Yup, you guessed it; I had been hired
by the bank to conduct what is often described in academic circles as 'market
research', but is more commonly known by the layman as a ‘survey’.
Market research – which, by the
way, happens to be among the most frequently used phrases in MBA jargon – can be
loosely defined as an organized effort in understanding the needs of the
market, i.e., the consumer. If you have a systematic mechanism for gathering the
required information from your target market and are equipped with the tools necessary to interpret the acquired
responses, you can come closer to understanding the markets' needs and thus, be
able to serve them better (in theory, at least). Surveys can be very illuminating to an
organization if done right: there have been several instances in the real world
where research has helped a company launch a successful product – or fail
abysmally (HBS cases abound with such examples). As I found out over the course
of the next few weeks, it is easier said than done.
Before I go into my experiences
with the survey, let me outline the objectives of it: it was a satisfaction
study carried out on a yearly basis by the bank to understand customer feedback
on its services and offerings while trying to understand and address any grievances/complaints
they may have (Yeah I know, it sounded pedantic to me too). I was a part of a
7-member team of fellow students and we were tasked with the responsibility of
interviewing individual customers of the bank for their “opinion” - in total,
we were expected to record over 2100 customer responses from 52 different
branches spread across the 7 Emirates of the UAE. The entire exercise had to be
completed in 3 weeks.
Now, you may not know it if you
haven't met me before but, for the uninitiated, I am a sort of an introvert, a
quiet and shy kinda guy who likes to be left to his own devices. Hence the
thought of approaching random strangers in cities I had never been to before,
in a country I was just coming to grips with was intimidating at first (the
fact that the UAE is a melting pot of cultural interaction harboring over 180
different nationalities within its boundaries didn't help). However, as I got
used to the grind of whipping out my ball-point pen and jotting down responses
on a paper form, I started to realize there is more to a survey than meets the
eye.
The sharp-eyed reader amongst you
would have noticed the fact that I have book-ended the words ‘feedback’ and ‘opinion’
appearing earlier in this post, with quotation marks. Why? Well, while the
intention of any organization behind conducting any market research or survey
is to find out the target market's true needs/wants/desires, it often fails to
do just that. This is because of a variety of reasons, a few of which I experienced
while I was a part of the survey:
·
Non-responses.
What is the first thought that comes to your mind when I utter the words ’customer
satisfaction survey’? Probably something like – “I don’t have the time for this
stuff; I have more important things to do” or, “Why bother giving feedback?
Nothing is going to change anyway”. Non responses are the number one reason
most surveys fail.
·
Response
bias. Most survey respondents have a tendency (by virtue of being human) to
either agree/disagree to anything you might ask them. Their true opinion is
thus clouded by their proclivity to appear agreeable (or disagreeable) with
you, the interviewer (this is especially true when the interviewer happens to
be a lady).
·
Interviewer
errors. One can never rule out the possibility of errors creeping in while
recording responses by the interviewer, errors that are either inadvertent or
deliberate in nature.
·
Practical
considerations. The sample size of our survey was a mere 2100, for a bank
that had a customer base numbering in the millions. No survey this small could
ever be a true reflection of customer opinion.
So why bother doing market
research? I am sure the managers at the bank administering the survey knew all
of the above and more. Why do it then? That is when I realized the real purpose
behind the survey – the exercise was not done in an effort to identify actual customer feedback, it
was more of an effort to point management
in the right direction towards identifying it themselves. Market research,
more often than not, does not provide solutions to problems – rather it
provides us with the hints and clues we need in order to find the answer by ourselves.
As for my experiences from the survey? Well,
I had a whale of time interacting with a smörgåsbord of nationalities and quickly
got over my initial inhibitions (I realized the respondents were equally afraid
of me as I was of them). Overall, a very interesting experience I daresay.
