Beware the consumer advisory board — instead, always be recruiting
Our team at GV meets with startups every week to advise CEOs, give design feedback, and help companies learn about their customers. A company recently asked:
We want to conduct research sessions with our customers more frequently, but I don’t want to send them recruiting emails every time we want to test our products. Should we develop a consumer advisory board?
Probably not. Consumer advisory boards and customer panels have a major downside: stale feedback from people who have become too familiar with your company and your product. Customer research is most valuable when it helps you see the world and your product through your customers’ fresh eyes. Even if you carefully stock an advisory board with “representative customers,” it won’t take long before they’re not. With their special status and exposure to you or your business, they may start to see the product and business from your perspective. Or they may try to represent for you what they think other customers will want — rather than react and speak strictly from their own experiences and needs.
One way or another, members of a panel are more likely to lose their “fresh eyes.”
Instead of using panels or advisory boards, or frequently emailing all of your customers with research requests, we recommend recruiting constantly and unobtrusively to fill a giant spreadsheet with research candidates. Here’s how to do it:
- Create a sign-up form. Use a simple survey tool (like Google Forms) to create a short recruiting questionnaire. You probably only need to ask for name, phone, email address, and a few basic qualifying questions. For example, if you use certain characteristics to segment your customers, include those as questions. Don’t forget to explain in the intro to the survey why you’re collecting their info this way.
- Track individuals’ participation. Add a column in your spreadsheet for tracking when and how customers participate in research. That will help you avoid emailing or talking to the same person too frequently.
- Invite customers to opt in for research. Add invitation links to your website, app, and emails to direct customers to your signup form. If you serve customers at a store or office, print business cards or pens with info and a short URL for the sign-up form. If you ship products to customers, include a postcard in the box with the URL. You get the idea.
Continuously gather customers who are willing to be contacted in the future about research studies. Just be careful you’re reaching all important segments of your customers, and constantly replenishing your spreadsheet with new volunteers. - Recruit great participants from your opt-in list. When you’re planning a specific research project, select an appropriate group of customers from your list of volunteers. Send a more detailed screener to that group. (For detailed instructions, read “How to find great participants for your user study”.) When you reach out to these customers, remind them that they had previously signed up to participate.
If you have other tips or experiences to share, please tweet us at @GVDesignTeam or @MMargolis.
Customer research is part of every sprint. To learn more about sprints, check out our book Sprint. It’s packed with behind-the-scenes stories and detailed instructions on how to run your own sprint.
