An unstated problem of trying to gauge customer (or prospective customer experience) is orthogonal to this article: people are very reluctant to tell you to your face that your baby's ugly.

I have had the experience of launching a product where people gave the idea rave reviews, were willing to pilot it (and the pilots met their success criteria) but garnered almost no sales. The fact was though it addressed what CxOs claimed was one of their top 3 problems, they just didn't want to do what was necessary to actually deal with it. (I think if we had actually had the problem ourselves we would have known this).