Mobile Customers are the New Focus Groups

What if I told you, that you didn’t have to wait for months to find out how a new feature is responding with your audience? What if you could hear from 25 percent of your audience on a regular basis – not just the vocal minority? What if we told you that mobile focus groups are the new focus groups?

According to Emily Carrion; this is possible. We looked at a few of her tips and tricks about leveraging your mobile audience, rather than wasting time with focus groups that take months to organise.

Focus Group Problems:

Yes, we know that focus groups are a great way to learn about how to a potential demographic will respond to a product that is still to be released. They can give you a sense of how your brand resonates in the market as a whole and they often provide insight usability, overall experience and more. They are a great way to learn about what’s going well and what can be improved with user online experiences.

Here are a few common issues with focus groups:

1. Small localized groups typically aren’t generalized
2. There is a gap between what focus group participants say and what they do.
3. The vividness effect can impact both the focus group participants and the observers.

So what makes mobile users a better option?

1. Well the obvious is that your mobile users are already customers and since they are already your customers, you can safely infer that your findings represent your larger customer base. And based on usage data, you probably already know how often they use your app, what features they use the most, etc.

2. Your mobile app will provide implicit data about each consumer. You know what device they use, how long they’ve had your and may even have the demographic data. Which means you can ask each audience or customer for the explicit data you need and expand on the customer profile data you already have.

3. Mobile customers are more engaged than desktop-only users, because on top of having a more robust customer profile, mobile customers are more engaged. You will find that 51 percent of the total digital time is spent on mobile as compared to 42 percent.

4. Segmenting your audience by Net Promoter Score can increase the volume and quality of your feedback from actual customers. You can segment your audience by promoters, passives, and detractors. You can get feedback directly from your promoters who are in your app on a daily or weekly.

5. Increase the speed of collecting feedback and depending on how you set up the targeting for your in-app survey, you could see responses within hours of launching a survey.

By replacing focus groups with your mobile customers, you’re able to come in with an understanding of the groups’ backgrounds, experience with your product and their loyalty and you are able to get higher-quality feedback really quickly.

Now, let us say that you are sold on the benefits of getting feedback from your actual customers by leveraging in-app customer feedback, what are some of the best practices for using it?

1. Decide what questions you’re trying to answer.
2. Hypothesize your outcomes before you begin and adjust for bias.
3. Selecting data points to support your hypotheses.
4. Select a group that reflects users you want to look at, but be careful to adjust for demographic data that might bias your findings.
5. Ask your questions at the right time. For example, if you want feedback on a new feature, ask them for feedback right after they use the feature, not two days afterwards. This way, the feedback you receive will be more accurate because the experience is still fresh in their mind.
6. Plan how you’ll distribute your findings and how they may affect future projects.
7. Follow up with your audience and let them know how you used their feedback; it will help you increase loyalty. 97% of customers are at least somewhat likely to become more loyal patrons if they know their feedback has been implemented.

While focus groups are helpful or useful, they are antiquated and present more problems than they are worth and mobile technology enables us to avoid the pitfalls of focus groups. This is why mobile customers are the new focus group and by using your mobile customers to conduct research, you are able to get collect feedback that you can trust reflects your customer base on a whole.