Customer Visits
Customer Visits Overview
Customer Visits is simply the practice of taking a few representatives (hopefully from different functional areas within your company) to visit a typical customer in their typical environment (be it their home or their office) to understand what a day in their life is like, and what role your product category plays in their success or failure. It's also a great opportunity to ask what additional needs they might have and if they wish that your product had any different characteristics or features that might make their day just a little bit easier or more convenient.
This is one of the least structured forms of market research, although it can provide some very powerful insights for those who are pertinent and great listeners! Customer visits don't even have to be with customers, sometimes they're done with your competitors' customers to find out what they're doing well and not so well, or even with potential customers to see if there are some unaddressed customer pain points that you might be able to address with a future product.
Customer visits can be led by a professional market researcher, or by a senior marketing person (you don't want the guy who knows everything and is determined to prove it to the rest of the world - you want a curious person who is a very good listener to lead the customer visits). Our recommendation is that you only take two or three people into a customer visit - because spaces are often limited and you don't want to make the respondent feel that they are on a stage giving a performance - you want them to feel like it's a low pressure discussion with people who simply want to know how they do things in their environment. Probe lightly - you really don't want to put them on the defensive or you'll learn a lot less!
Customer Visit Purpose
The purpose of a customer visit is not to sell anything, or to point out their inefficiencies - instead it's simply to understand the workflows that the respondent uses to accomplish their daily tasks (as they might relate to your product category). Some of the best lessons that can be found from customer visits is the importance that customers attach to your company's products (probably far less than your team believes they warrant), the types of tasks that are critical to the respondent, the limited amount of space that most customers have to work with and with any luck, some pain-points that you may be able to design a product or service around. Customer visits are often done for new employees so they can understand that not everyone lives the life they live, or knows what they know.
Setting up Customer Visits
There are a couple of ways to set up customer visits - if you want to talk to current customers of your company's products, and you're lucky enough to have a registration list, you can pick a couple of cities and cold-call customers in the vicinity and ask if they would be willing to show a couple of company representatives around their environment and walk you through their processes (as they relate to your company's part of the world).
The other option is to find a company that specializes in putting together customer visits - and there aren't many of them anymore. Generally a customer visit is scheduled for an hour, but you usually run out of discussion topics before the hour is up. There is typically an incentive for a respondent to give you the grand tour - sometimes it's a nice Parker pen or simply cash - in a Winnemucca truck stop you might get by for $50 and for a NY attorney it might cost $150.
Customer Visits Pros
- Customer visits are far from quantitative research because a typical round of customer visits might be three per day, Monday through Thursday gives you 12 - except that one or two people will probably have to cancel for some reason. In spite of this, customer visits are the types of things that have a great effect on shaping a marketers perceptions of what a typical customer is like.
- Customer visits are not an ideal venue to ask about potential product concepts, but you can ask customers if they might consider buying a product that could make a certain task easier, or would do it for them entirely. (Remember they're under a lot of pressure to say "yes" with all of you staring hopefully at them.)
Customer Visits Cons
- To do customer visits well, really requires another company with a local contact. Someone to make sure that the customer visits are scheduled in a way that minimizes driving time and ensures that you're not trying to drive an impossible route against strong traffic at the wrong time of the day.
- It's also nice to have the incentives to be sent to the respondents after the customer visits are completed - it just eliminates an awkward moment.
Customer Visits Example
Rumor has it that several years ago, a few employees from Mr. Coffee were conducting research (customer visits or ethnographies) with a Mr. Coffee customer when the customer grumbled something about having to wait until the entire coffee pot was completely brewed before he could start his first cup of coffee. After the team thought through this limitation, they developed a mechanism that would allow the coffee pot to be taken out of the coffee maker, pour a cup of coffee and replace the coffee maker without having the heating pad overflowing with burnt coffee. Still today, on their web site they have termed this capability "Brewing Pause 'n Serve" and have made it a primary selling point.
Customer Visits Timing
Depending on how much time is spent with each respondent it can take a long time to get a reasonable sample of a certain type of customer. Typically 2 or 3 ethnographies in a day is the most that can be done, and in some cases an Customer Visits may take an entire day with just one respondent. Conducting an entire weeks worth of customer visits (usually around 10 or 12) customer visits - and when you add planning, data analysis and the creation of a presentation of key insights or learnings, a typical project may take 4-6 weeks to accomplish.
Applications of Customer Visits
Customer Visits are really about educating employees on what a real customers life is like although they can really be a great, "eye opening" experience for employees who believe that the life they lead is the same one that the customers must live as well. Many times respondents will allow you to take a few photos and putting together a story-board is a good way of ensuring that even those who couldn't attend the customer visits, can get an idea of what was seen and learned.
