Understanding Your Customer
No matter what medium you choose to assess your customers, you must formulate your questions well.
Interviews are most useful when you have a restricted set of issues for in-depth discussion.
Focus groups are a powerful way to collect ideas, opinions, experiences, or beliefs about issues or programs because they allow for in-depth discussion, and the opportunity to clarify ideas and statements.
Surveys are probably the most common method of gathering information from customers, and are particularly useful for understanding the proportions of your customers that fit a particular description.
If you have a larger number of customers, or will be using interviews or focus groups, you would need to select a subset (a sample) to contact.
If the retailer doesn’t know what the customer wants, or ignores requests, clientele may lose interest and choose to shop elsewhere. Instead, the ideal course of action would be to learn about their consumers and then to learn about their interests. This provides the basis for developing a product mix that would be attractive to clientele.
