In my Customer Journey Mapping Workshops I teach the fundamentals of how to undertake in-depth customer interviews and I’m frequently asked for my opinion on incentives.
In this customer-centric #growthhack we explore the reasons to incentivise your customer empathy interviews.
Essential in mapping an end-to-end customer journey is capturing the customer’s viewpoint. The customer view can only be understood by undertaking regular deep-dive conversations with them about their experiences.
What I’m hearing more and more from workshop attendees is that their organisations are reluctant to incentivise customer research. When I ask why, often there’s a strongly held belief that incentives aren’t warranted.
I’ve even heard the comment (said with the best of intentions), ‘Our customers should want to help us improve our service, after all it is for them were doing this’.
There’s also concern that incentivising in-depth customer interviews biases the quality of the data. What’s not realised is there are many inherent biases that can affect results such as research methodology, question design and even the interviewer.
3 Reasons to Incentivise Customer Empathy Interviews
Values Customer Time and Opinions
The message that’s sent to customers by offering an incentive for their participation is loud and clear; we value your time and your opinions.
Be assured, there are a million other things that your customers could be doing. Improving customers’ lives starts with a ‘we value you’ mindset and is embedded into day-to-day actions.
Inherently we all like recognition, appreciation and a special thank you for our efforts. It’s the same for customers; incentivising demonstrates that their time and opinion is valued.
Improves Recruitment Efforts
Offering your customers incentives to participate can greatly improve your recruitment efforts.
Recruiting customers is time consuming and can be costly. Choosing to incentivise using the right incentive, speeds up the recruitment process; getting your interviewers in-market talking to customers faster.
Positively Impacting Results
The role of incentives can also have a positive impact on the validity of the research results.
Studies of customer research show that people who tend to participate are more likely to be either ‘very unhappy’ or ‘very happy’ with the services they have received.
Their motivation for participation in research therefore is the desire to express their satisfaction, or alternately dissatisfaction. So what about ‘the silent majority’? Unfortunately they tend to not have a strong motivation for participating and therefore don’t.
Incentivising can give customers motive to participate and therefore make the research sample more representative overall.
Want to learn more about customer empathy interviews?
In my 1 day intensive Customer Journey Mapping Workshop you will learn how to:
- Undertake customer interviews
- Synthesise customer insights
- Empathy map to create personas
- Map an end-to-end customer journey