A practical intro to customer research tools and technology - Survey Monkey - Tools and Technology

BottomUp - Skills for Innovators

005 - Survey Monkey - Crash Course - A Quick Intro

[00:00:00]Mike: [00:00:08] Hello and welcome to the BottomUp podcast. I'm your cohost Mike Parsons, and as always, I'm joined by Chad Owen.

[00:00:17]Chad: [00:00:17] Hey Mike, I'm really excited to bring a hyper practical series here to all of our BottomUp listeners, and why don't you introduce the subject of this next series. [00:00:30]

[00:00:30]Mike: [00:00:30] Yeah, so episode five of the Bottom Up podcast, and we are taking a turn away from our WeWork series, which was a lot of fun. And we're going deep into the world of a tool that we use all the time. It's Survey Monkey. You can find it at surveymonkey.com and this opens up a world of surveys and surveys open up a world of quantitative research.

[00:00:55] And Chad Owen, I've got to start with, there is no better way. If [00:01:00] you want to get a quick baseline on what your customers are thinking, what your potential customers are thinking, what your employees are thinking. Knocking out a good survey is like a fast way to get going on your journey of design thinking and just trying to understand what users want.

[00:01:16]Chad: [00:01:16] Yeah. As far as like a reward to effort ratio, it's kind of hard to beat surveys oftentimes.

[00:01:23]Mike: [00:01:23] Yeah, that's true, isn't it? I mean, we get surveys, of all different sorts and flavors. I mean, customer feedback after you've bought [00:01:30] something, maybe as an employee, you have an NPS, maybe it's market research. We're probably all familiar with those. But what I love about surveys, and particularly what I love about Survey Monkey is they've made it very easy.

[00:01:43] And in particular, if you're like us, Chad, that you're either working with customers that are not geographically close to you, like in your city. Maybe they're on the other coast, maybe they're on another continent, Survey Monkey, stands above all because you can [00:02:00] quickly knock out a survey and get to people without having to get on planes, buses, and boats and all that good stuff.

[00:02:07] But the killer thing, Chad, I propose to you is, if you're after consumers, they will even help you recruit consumers and you can literally send your survey out at night and come in the next day, and all the answers are in. They've done the recruiting. I tell you what, creating user experiences, trying to just find out what people want from a [00:02:30] product,

[00:02:30] this is a must-have tool, right?

[00:02:32]Chad: [00:02:32] Yeah, but it's not the only tool in the research arsenal. I come to the table having much more experience in the qualitative side of things, doing things like interviews. But, you've kind of unlocked this magical one, two, one, two, jab, hook, jab, hook,

[00:02:51]

[00:02:51] sort of sequence here where we're combining the quantitative data that we get from surveys and then can follow that up, [00:03:00] investigating themes, you know, through qualitative interviews.

[00:03:02] And so there's this really amazing cycle, that you advocate for where you go between surveys and more qualitative, research to really just, exponentially increase the value of the information that you're gathering.

[00:03:16] Mike: [00:03:16] Yeah. So let's just try and quickly debunk what you'll hear a lot of people, talk about like Quan and qual research. In its essence, doing a survey is quant research. It's data-driven. [00:03:30] It's often very, strict question answer, and you want very statistical outputs, right? 10% of people like this, 90% of people prefer that.

[00:03:39] That's quant research, and that's what a survey is. Its sister field is qualitative, and this is rather than hardcore data. Qualitative is really like, a discussion. So it starts with, rather than having, structured Q&A, you just have a discussion guide. You conduct an interview, it's often over [00:04:00] Skype or maybe even in person, and you're looking for themes.

[00:04:03] And the biggest difference between a survey and an interview is often in the interview, you're more likely to be asking, tell me why. Explain more, why is that? How does that work? Whereas with the survey, you just need a statistical baseline. So I want you to imagine those two things. You've got your quant and you've got your qual.

[00:04:23] Something you and I have done a lot together, Chad, is in an order to work out like what's a great product, [00:04:30] to go and build, perhaps what's a good MVP? Or even if you're really living up to BottomUp thinking, what's a great prototype we should build? I want to come back to this one, two, one, two punch. If you conduct quant as a step one, you can get, a baseline, sort of what I call a deep mapping exercise.

[00:04:49] And, this gives you just an anchor point, a foundation like, who the hell is our user? What do they need? What's bugging them? [00:05:00] And Chad, we've done this together a lot of times. It's so powerful, isn't it? When you can just create that first step, that baseline, like who is our customer.

[00:05:09]Chad: [00:05:09] Yeah, and it's kind of like the top of a marketing funnel. We kind of cast the net wide just to understand who exactly is a potential target customer and what are some of their pains and gains, and once we get a little bit of signal from that first round of quantitative surveying, we can feed that

[00:05:27] information and insights into the [00:05:30] qualitative interviews that are done so that we're already kind of pre-qualifying the people that we're talking to, getting closer to the ideal customers. And again, kind of peeling the layers of the onion to understand, what our customers are thinking, feeling, and doing when it comes to the offers that we're making.

[00:05:46]Mike: [00:05:46] Exactly, and that step two often becomes a chance in one on one interviews to go much deeper on what you've learned from your first round of quant. And then at that point, you're really starting to dimensionalize how your customer feels. So the [00:06:00] third round, okay, this next round, you go back to quant and you start proposing solutions.

[00:06:05] You start proposing new ideas, new concepts on how an idea might help them get a job done, relieve some pains, create some gains. And then after you've done that, you can close the entire loop with this last round of qual where you're actually really starting to understand the constraints of this solution.

[00:06:27] If it's a product or the story, if it's more marketing [00:06:30] based, you can really start to find out how this all comes together as a complete set of user insights.

[00:06:39] Chad: [00:06:39] You could even make like customer propositions in that fourth round of qualitative, you can almost begin to try and sell the customer or even have the customers, you know, tell the story and advocate to another customer.

[00:06:50]Mike: [00:06:50] Now we're getting to the highest form of qual interviews and testing. Why don't you kind of explain a little bit more, I mean, I remember [00:07:00] when you recently went around the world testing for one of our clients. You actually had user to user testing. Do you want to just explain that as we...

[00:07:07] Chad: [00:07:07] It was not only user to user testing; it was user ...