Companies continue to send out product surveys when the answers they get from customers have nothing to do with their behavior. The current podcast shows you how to get beyond surveys and actually look at what your website data can tell you about product or service development.
Surveys can tell you a lot, but often it is not the things you really want to know for product development. This occurs because surveys on what products customers want are based on their current points of reference. For example, if I asked a person in the 19th century horse and buggy age what products they wanted they would have mentioned a faster horse, a horse that ate less feed, or more comfort while riding in the buggy. I could guess with almost 100% certainty none of them would have said “Give me a horseless carriage.”
In the book Why We Buy, The Science of Shopping, author Paco Underhill makes the case that watching customer behavior is a lot more telling regarding product development. That is true because humans have a habit of saying one thing which is logic based while doing another which is more emotion based and to a degree 
unconscious. Asking what we want uses the logical portion of our minds when it is behavior driven by emotion that really moves us.
This is where analytics regarding customer behavior can help in ways that surveys might not. You can gain a great deal of information from your own website just by doing a comparison of what articles generate the most traffic or what products tend to sell the most at what times as an indication of customer preferences. The podcast gives you several examples of simple analytics you can use from your website. If you want to delve deeper, try Google Analytics to learn even more about the activities on your website and customer preferences.
So enough with the surveys already! Stop asking customers what they want because they really don’t know what they are going to like until you present it to them as a means of solving a problem. Yes, stop asking because what they say is generally very different from what they do. You on the other hand can know what they do and that information is golden… so use it.
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