

Ask HN: Review My Questionnaire - Is this Good Market Research? - jiaaro

Hey guys, My startup (Rootbuzz) is doing a little market research and I was hoping you could help us out with our questions.<p>We are focussing on Customer Service, and our product is a Q&#38;A platform similar to Quora or Stack Overflow.<p>.<p><i></i> ABOUT US <i></i><p>The idea is that the Q&#38;A site will:<p>- reduce the number of times live support staff have to answer the same questions over and over<p>- get many questions answered without support staff getting involved at all<p>- help build/boost community among the company's customers<p>- boost the page rank (ranking in general, not the page rank number specifically) of the parent domain<p>.<p>Who we <i>think</i> our customers are/will be:<p>- Businesses who sell to a relatively technical audience<p>- Businesses who make things<p>- Businesses whose customers think of themselves as "&#60;business_name&#62; users" (e.g., Mac Users)<p>.<p>We've spoken with some companies who we think are aligned with those characteristics and some have agreed to answer some more detailed questions to help us out.<p>Are these the right questions to ask? Are any of them too invasive? Are we going down the wrong path with any of these?<p>Please, tear them apart :)<p>.<p><i></i> OUR QUESTIONNAIRE (SO FAR): <i></i><p>1.) Do you have a customer support staff? How many employees is it? Is this a major cost center for your company?<p>2.) Tell me a little more about your product? What are your customers like? Are they technical users?<p>3.) How do you communicate with your customers right now? Phone? Email? SMS? Text Chat? Video chat? Contact Form (on your website)? Other?<p>4.) Is there an active community around your product? Are you trying to build one? Why or why not?<p>5.) Do your customers try to find information about you on Google? What kind of info? What do they find? Is this something you're trying to improve? What are you doing
right now to take control of what people find about you on google?<p>6.) Do your customers find information about you or your products on websites other
than yours? What kind of sites? Do you know which sites they are specifically?<p>7.) Which of the following sounds the most interesting to you?<p>- Software that helps your customers find answers to their questions online 
  rather than through your other (more expensive?) support channels?<p>- Software that's designed to leverage the community you've already built 
  around your products in order to reduce your support costs?<p>- Software that helps you take control of what your customers find when they
  search for information about your company and it's products.<p>8.) How much would you expect to pay (monthly or yearly) for the software you chose in the previous question? Would you buy it at that price?
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jeremyjcohen
Too many questions. Narrow it to 3-5 actual questions, get a better response
rate for the surveys that you put out, then ask more questions individually
when your audience is engaged.

Question 8, Price. Nobody is going to answer 50k to your question above
without you showing them the pain point. People often do not know what they
would pay for things. Especially when they do not know that they need it -
yet. Show them a pain point (10M/year spent on customer service phone calls).
Show them that your software has saved others money: hard data, testimonials,
etc. Now that you have shown them that you reduce call volume by 10% and that
you can save them about 1M/year you put a price on it. Now 50k/year for your
software seems like a bargain (20X value).

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aorshan
I think that's a great set of questions. However I think there are one or two
areas where you could use some improvement. You're trying to reduce the time
customer service people have to spend on the phone, so ask how much time their
people spend on the phone. You're trying to make it so the customer service
people don't have to repeat the same set of instructions over and over again.
Ask if that is an issue with their company.

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jiaaro
That's a good question.

I've spoken with some people do actually do customer service and I had
overlooked this variable, assuming I already knew the answer.

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paulorlando
Looks like a good list. How about also asking if the businesses know the ROI
or at least costs of providing customer support the way they do it now? That
way, you might get more insight into whether they think of this as a problem
area and what would attract them.

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alyosha19
I agree with the comments about the questionnaire being too long. 3 questions
max, focusing on consumer experience. Sample questions: 1\. How do you
communicate w/customers? -- tick boxes with check as many as apply, with field
for other 2\. Where do your customers find info/bitch about you? (i.e. outside
the channels you communicate with them) -- tick boxes with usual suspects and
field for other

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sandeepnyc
Good list of questions, a bit wordy on 5 and 7. Assuming for 5 you are
questioning about the sites SEO viability. A more pointed question such as "
Is you current site optimized to take advantage of search engines? Why, Why
not? ", In a sales meeting you can follow up with your response on why
RootBuzz rocks for SEO.

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mattrecord
Its a good list but too long to get many responses. Better to get a lot of
smaller data bits than a few detailed responses because then there's a self-
selectivity problem.

I don't have the time to try to cut it down for you now but I'd strongly
recommend you get it down to 3 MAYBE 4 questions

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petervandijck
The questionnaire is pretty good. Good job.

