Organisations are in the business of creating value for their stakeholders, customers and society more generally. To be successful in this requires a really strong understanding of the job that needs to be done and the service or product that will best achieve this. This may seem a statement of the obvious but often organisations are heavily focused on delivering a specified service to the best of their ability rather than thinking about the benefits delivered to customers or citizens and whether there are opportunities to innovate or improve what is offered.
There are many ways of conducting research to gather the views of customers and stakeholders including qualitative research techniques and quantitative opinion surveys. In our experience the key is to start with qualitative research in workshops or focus groups that gathers feedback to very open questions that don’t pre-judge the views of the people in the room. Building on this it is than possible to draw out interactively key themes or messages and to get participants to allocate scores using scales of satisfaction or relative importance. Opinion surveys can then follow through to provide larger representative samples of opinion for the themes or issues identified.
Organisations often seek external assistance with researching the views of customers and stakeholders in order to provide confidentiality for respondents and enable them to feel comfortable with giving candid feedback. External support can also provide expert advice on how best to design the event or process to gather the feedback that is needed.
We are very experienced in designing and undertaking customer and stakeholder research through the use of both workshops and questionnaires. We have undertaken research for a number of major organisations to capture feedback about customer and stakeholder requirements, how well these are met, the areas for development and implications for service design. The feedback gathered is often a powerful catalyst for change.