Figure Out Who You Are Really Talking To (Con't) - Page 4

Is there agreement throughout the organization about who your end customers are and what matters to them? — Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak, and Jeffrey Lewis, The Customer Revolution

Ask about work:

• What's your offcial job title?
• What kind of content do you really use on the job?
• What tasks do you have to accomplish using that content?
• Where did you learn to do your job? (School, training, on the job training, stand-up classes, Web courses, gossip, whatever).
• Where does work come from, when it arrives on your desk, and where does it go after you get through with it? (Workflow)
• What is an average day like? A crunch day?
• How much leeway do you have to decide what you do when?
• Where do you turn for general news relating to your work, organization, or industry?
• What kind of Internet connection do you have at work?

Probe motivation and free will:

• What are your main goals at work? How do particular tasks relate to those goals?
• Is it your idea to come to our site, or are you required to do so?
• Do you feel you have the power to a¤ect the culture of your workplace?
• Are you regularly involved in decisions that revolve around our kind of content?
• What do you most like to do when exploring our site?
• Do you feel eager to learn new information that relates to your tasks, your job, your organization, or your industry?
• What are the consequences if you do not find the information you need on our site?

Segments are the passive targets of marketing initiatives. They don't try things out, ask questions, negotiate price and terms, make adjustments, substitute spending for one item by sacrificing another, or complain and seek refunds. — Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, Enterprise One to One

Focus on tasks at work:

• What are the main tasks you do on the job?
• What are the little tasks within one of the big ones? (Task hierarchy).
• In what sequence do you usually do all these tasks?
• Which ones do you do by yourself? With other people?
• How long have you done each of these tasks?
• How did you learn to do each task?
• How have the tasks changed over the years?
• Which tasks currently involve using our site?
• What tools do you use to perform those tasks?
• How comfortable are you with those tools?
• Which of your tools do you like most, dislike, and why?
• What problems come up when you are working on a task ?
• How do you generally solve the problems?
• How do you describe the process of analyzing and solving one of these problems?
• How well does our content match what you need to complete the task?
• What is missing?
• What other sites do you use in performing your tasks?

Ask about home, if appropriate:

• What are your aims in life?
• What do you do for fun?
• How much time do you spend on the Internet at home? TV? Radio?
• What kind of hobbies do you have?
• What kind of neighborhood do you live in?
• What kind of Internet connection do you have at home?
• How close are you with your family? Friends?
• What languages do you speak at home? Read? How familiar are you with languages other than the one you consider your primary language?
• What is your highest level of education, and how do you think that a¤ects what you do now?

Ask about mental models:

• How would you describe the content we provide?
• How should it be organized?
• What terms do you use for the key concepts?
• Which pieces of content are the most important for you?
• What other content do you need, for your job? Is that something we can help you with?
• What topics are associated with what other topics, for you?
• Do you prefer learning from a diagram or from text?
• If you want to learn something, do you turn first to another person, or do you go to TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, or books?

Explore personal differences:

• How do you prefer to learn new material? (For instance, trial and error, asking others, formal training, reading ahead of time, self-paced interactive training, online courses).
• What special needs do you have?
• Are you color blind?
• Do you have diffculty reading small type, or making small movements with your hands?
• How do you feel when you have to change the way you do your job?
• When do you prefer working together with a team, or by yourself ?
• How do you describe your gender? Your age?

Explore group identities and affliations:

• How would you describe your organization's culture to an outsider?
• What are the aspects you like most, least?
• What groups do you belong to, formally or informally?
• What volunteer organizations do you occasionally work for?
• What ethnic and racial cultures do you identify with, and how do you describe those? How would you describe my own ethnic and racial background?
• Do you have a preference for a certain way of organizing information, or carrying out tasks, based on the way you were raised in another country?
• How would you describe your socio-economic status? Mine ?
• Do you belong to any trade association, professional group, or union?

Obviously, you can't impose on someone for a whole day asking a thousand questions like these. But some responses are more important for you than others. Concentrate on those issues.

Pay people for their time; give them cups, t-shirts, products, attention, and, yes, money. For you, their answers are gold.

Online, people resent having to fill out a lengthy registration form just to visit a site or look at a particular page. If you are going to invite people to give you information to create an electronic profile, add to it incrementally.

1. At first ask only for the bare minimum needed for a transaction. Make sure that the visitor can see a single substantial benefit from giving the information and then make sure that you deliver. They are investing their time. You must give them an immediate return on that investment. Feedback delayed fails to ingrain any habit.
2. Log each visit by IP address, browser, date, and time, in the profile.
3. Record any downloads—along with the e-mail address needed for that.
4. Keep asking for feedback, and each time they offer some, ask a few more questions.

Do you have a customer-focused culture? — Patricia Seybold, Ronni Marshak, and Jeffrey Lewis, The Customer Revolution

Encourage people to look at their profiles on your site. Let them see their entire transaction history, and all the information they have provided you over all their visits. Let them modify their profiles. You'll be surprised how many more fields they fill in once they get started. As soon as a consumer enters updates, display those right away—not the next day. Convince your consumers you are listening.

• Never ask for the information the consumer has already given you.
• Supply names, addresses, preferences, without being asked.

You can see that you need a lot of time to explore all these questions with an individual. But once you have met with a dozen consumers, and read a hundred profiles, you'll begin to have a very deep sense of the di¤erent kinds of people you may be writing for. How do you articulate this "sense" in practical terms?

See : Beyer and Holtzblatt (1997), Hackos (1995), Hackos and Redish (1998), Jonassen and Hagen (1999), Peppers and Rogers (1993, 1997), Price and Korman (1993), Schriver (1997), Seybold and Marshak (1998), Seybold, Marshak, and Lewis (2001).

Figure Out Who You Are Really Talking To - Page 3
Hot Text: Web Writing that Works
Making Sense Out of What You Learn about Your Audiences - Page 5