How to conduct Telephonic Market Research ?
Recently I had an opportunity to interview 50+ North Indian Farmers to understand problems they generally face in their lives. I was able to identify problems ranging from online frauds to poor yield. It took me 10 days to complete this activity & here are my learnings.
User’s tongue matters the most: I remember the very first call I made to a Farmer who belonged to Haryana. Initially we had a nice talk in Hindi but suddenly he switched to his Haryanvi dialect making things difficult for me. Unfortunately the call didn’t last long. That day I spent hours on YouTube and Google Translate to imbibe Haryana’s local jargon.
First 20 seconds decide next 20 minutes: Initiate your intro with a polite tone. A simple and quick intro could be “Hello sir, This is Manjeet from XYZ firm. Are you available for couple minutes to talk about XYZ topic?”. The way user responds to you will decide your next approach.
The Point is to get around the Point. Once you finish with the intro do NOT directly jump to asking about problems the user is facing. Start a convo around a topic and go with the flow. The user will surely take you to their pain points once a nice conversation is struck.
Feedbacks are good but don’t interrupt. Provide short feedbacks like “You are right”, “I can understand”, “Alright” etc. once in a while. The key is in finding the right moment i.e. when the speaker takes a pause while talking. Do NOT interrupt him (User) with your feedbacks when he is talking.
Summarize at the end. After you are done with your interview try to summarize the entire conversation from start to end. You can talk about points you have noted down and ask the user whether he wants add anything.
Reflect & Extract. Once the call is finished you can ponder over points you have noted down. Try to create a raw problem statement from information gathered during the call. After multiple calls you can improve your ability to generate Problem Statements.
PS. Will write on how to create Problem Statements some day in future. For sure!
