Answering your questions about collecting remote customer feedback

Our intention isn’t to sound like a broken record, but the reality is, we’re all experiencing a shift in the way we work, communicate, and generally experience life as we go about our days. Because of the coronavirus pandemic, human behavior is fundamentally changing. People are traveling less, they’re working from home, they're minimizing in-person interactions—both professionally and personally—and they're relying more on digital experiences versus in-store or face-to-face interactions.

As a result of this shift, it’s critical to keep a pulse on your customers and understand how they’re changing within this environment. Everything from their needs and motivations to anxieties and fears to preferences and reactions to new products or services to how they make purchasing decisions—everything you once thought you knew has probably changed to some degree.

In our recent webinar, Moving from face-to-face feedback to remote methods, we explored how, despite all that’s going on with the current health crisis, building customer empathy and understanding customer needs can’t be put on the back burner.

Following the webinar, which you can view on-demand any time, we had an amazing Q&A with our speakers. Here are some of the highlights and questions we didn’t have time to answer. 

1. How can I ensure test participants stay fully engaged when I'm not right in front of them?

I presume this question comes from the mindset of a self-guided approach where the researcher isn’t going to be present virtually. Specifically, you’ll want to set expectations and give people an out.

Here are three ways you can keep test participants engaged during self-guided, remote testing:

• Acknowledge the potential for technical difficulties and remind your testers it’s OK to stop if something malfunctions
• Use a variety of question types (multiple-choice, rating scale, answer aloud, etc.) to avoid monotony
• Let participants know that it’s OK to fail—sometimes the feedback you really need comes from watching people struggle or fail

2. Do you have any suggestions for incentives? What’s appropriate? 

How I think about compensating participants is by imagining that you’re paying them for their time. This will be dependent primarily on the length of the session—longer tests should be compensated more than shorter sessions.

Also, consider the location of the participant. What's appropriate in New York City or San Francisco (or another area with a higher cost of living) won’t be the same as compensation for less-populated areas. 

You should also consider who you're testing with. If they're in a demographic that's hard to reach, like in this particular environment, nurses and doctors, it's going to be fairly challenging to recruit them—be sure that they’re compensated with that in mind. And if you’re looking for B2B recruits, they’re often compensated a little bit higher than something like a general B2C type consumer.

Finally, be mindful of what you're asking your participants to do. If you're asking them to put a lot of effort into a diary study with multiple touchpoints, they should be compensated higher than something more straightforward, like a prototype review (a usability study that may take them only fifteen minutes to complete). 

In sum, it’s important to compensate accordingly to what you're asking them to do. It'll compel participants to provide more thorough feedback for their time and effort.

3. Do you have any tips around recruiting for B2B research?

When recruiting for B2B research, screener questions are your best friend. Start by asking some role-related questions to ensure that the person you’re interviewing or testing with is a good fit and meets your requirements. A lot job titles out there mean different things to different companies, so a product manager at one company could be completely different than the product manager you’re hoping to reach.

Connect with us on social media

As always, and especially during our webinars, reach out to us on Twitter with your questions and comments. We monitor them closely!

Most recently, we were so lucky to have been joined by folks at ConnectingBrains who tweeted us this virtual graphic recording of our webinar. Enjoy, and be sure to follow them for more visualizations like this one!