What’s in it for me?
by Andrew Smith on 16/11/07 at 9:43 am
1 comment
Yesterday I registered for RescueTime, an application that monitors what you’re doing on your computer and then shows your reports of how you spend your time. The claim is that once you realise you are spending 3 hours a day on Facebook, you’ll adjust your habits and “rescue” more time in your day. Once it’s gathered some information on me I’ll let you know…
Anyway, the interesting bit in this experience was the sign-up form. Most forms that ask me for my age, address, occupation and income freak me out. “I’m not telling you that!” is my usual response. If they force me to answer, I often lie.
Rescue time did something different – they told me what was in it for me. If I gave accurate demographic information I would be able to compare my time stats with other people my age, or who earn the same as me. That enticed me to answer!
Now let’s be honest – RescueTime isn’t asking me these questions just for my own statistical pleasure. Every company wants to know more information about their customers. It’s particularly useful if you’re trying to support your company with advertising revenue, because you can make it much more targeted. But RescueTime made the effort to think about how giving them that info would benefit me. And it worked.
It amazes me how often companies fail to put themselves in their customer’s shoes. A restaurant will ask us to fill out a customer survey without giving any “what’s in it for me?” reason. The only people who take the time to answer are disgruntled patrons who need to vent – which isn’t exactly a true reflection of your service. An easy way to solve this is to turn your survey into a competition – each week one customer who answers will win x.
Many forms that I fill in (online and offline) ask for my age, without giving me a reason why I should be honest. They could solve that by saying “Tell us your birthday and we’ll send you something special on your big day”. They obviously don’t need my birth year for that, but I’ll usually fill that box in without thinking.
A while back Pete Curruthers from the Business Warriors Forum wanted his members to start paying into his UK bank account rather than his South African one. If he had just asked the members to switch, I reckon a tiny percentage would have, because there was nothing in it for them. So Pete offered a R10,000 prize each month for 6 months for one member who made the switch during that month. I did it on month 1 (but unfortunately didn’t win).
The next time you’re about to ask a customer to do something that benefits you, pause and say, “If it’s no worth rewarding the customer to do this, is it worth asking for?”.
Andrew Smith is the pedantic systems guy behind Live Alchemy, a SA e-commerce company. Andrew writes for Ideate in an attempt to make the world a more efficient place. View more articles by Andrew Smith.
Deon
Nov 16th, 2007
I was actually thinking about the form filling thing a while back – Those people who do the surveys by shopping centers and malls – what kind of response would they get if they changed ’simple survey’ to ’single question’? Perhaps not too useful general marketing data, but with some thought, maybe one could come up with something effective.