Today I want to express my opinion, only my personal opinion. I will not rely on any reference as I usually do, since I want to share with you my purest thought.↑

The growth of a business today depends on the value that the customer perceives, and that value can vary for many reasons. However, the most important one is your thinking. Unfortunately, there is still no machine that can read the brain and understand both the cognitive and emotional aspects that make up this rich thought. Perhaps something will be invented in the future, technology is advancing exponentially, yet it doesn't exist yet. Let's get back to what I think.

Polls: a silent enemy

Knowing what the customer thinks is difficult. I used to like to answer surveys, but since they were digitized and with globalization, we interact with hundreds of companies, and most of them want to know your opinion. What do they resort to? To a survey. Our email and now even WhatsApp are bombarded with links to surveys. Some make them up with beautiful colors and eye-catching animations, but in the end they're the same thing: questions and more questions.

The truth is that I'm already tired of them, and I answer them only when it's strictly necessary. Usually, never to give my real opinion. On the other hand, I've been on the other side, where I have to do surveys. I have conducted surveys to research in the workplace and to understand customer behavior. There are so many questions that it takes a long time to analyze them the first time. Already in the second one, one is faster, but the reports end up being gigantic, and sometimes customers evaluate questions such as “Are you satisfied with the quality of the parking?” when they don't even go by car to the service. In the end, they generate data that doesn't impact decision-making.

In addition, response rates are low, and if the person responds out of commitment, they end up answering anything, generating worthless data. Here I found a giant problem: both customers and companies have problems with surveys. Talking to diverse clients from industry, entertainment, retail and education, I realized that this problem is real. Polls are a silent enemy. But since they're the only method we know of, we use them when we want to know what people are thinking.↑

The Joker sitting in a room, with a sarcastic expression while holding a rainbow in his hands. The text at the top reads 'WHAT DOES THE CUSTOMER THINK? ' and at the bottom 'ANOTHER SURVEY... '.

The richness of free conversation†

By participating in various innovation and product development processes, both in my undertakings and at the business level, I discovered that what I really like is the extended conversation, where the person can give their opinion freely, without undergoing a scale of 1 to 5 or similar. But anyone who has processed more than 40 interviews knows how tedious and tiring it is. However, the information that is obtained is exquisite.

In an innovation process that I led in a dental clinic where I worked, when asking a group of people to say what they wanted, we realized that many were embarrassed to see the current state of their oral health. They didn't want to see the X-rays because they felt sorry for them. This led to the idea of developing augmented reality technology to show the patient what they would look like after treatment, removing that insecurity about their current situation. I'm almost certain that such a discovery would have been impossible with surveys.↑

From these lessons I understood that we must direct opinion, but also give the person the freedom to express what they want. Natural language, what the person has to say, is very valuable information for solving problems and creating new solutions that impact customer satisfaction and business profitability.

A more humane solution↑

At woku, we direct the person by identifying what we want to get from their opinion with an image or video, in addition to a name. We then ask you to rate from 1 to 5 and to leave your opinion about what you experienced freely, in text or audio, without the extensive format of the survey. That's all, in less than two minutes.↓

Then, the platform, with a file and folder system, configures the analyses and they are obtained with a single click. But these analyses are not about scales, but about the words that come out of people at the time they experienced what you are evaluating, capturing emotionality and their thoughts. That same wealth of information that I achieved with the interviews in the innovation process.↑

An Invitation to Change*

If you feel uncomfortable or dissatisfied with survey-based systems for understanding your customer, I invite you to work together to create a different solution. A solution that is more friendly to our customers and to ourselves, but that generates the impact we need. That the work is not in the measurements, but in creating those solutions that will impact the satisfaction of our customers and the profitability of our business.