Ask HN: Review My Questionnaire - Is this Good Market Research?
We are focussing on Customer Service, and our product is a Q&A platform similar to Quora or Stack Overflow.
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ABOUT US
The idea is that the Q&A site will:
- reduce the number of times live support staff have to answer the same questions over and over
- get many questions answered without support staff getting involved at all
- help build/boost community among the company's customers
- boost the page rank (ranking in general, not the page rank number specifically) of the parent domain
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Who we think our customers are/will be:
- Businesses who sell to a relatively technical audience
- Businesses who make things
- Businesses whose customers think of themselves as "<business_name> users" (e.g., Mac Users)
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We've spoken with some companies who we think are aligned with those characteristics and some have agreed to answer some more detailed questions to help us out.
Are these the right questions to ask? Are any of them too invasive? Are we going down the wrong path with any of these?
Please, tear them apart :)
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OUR QUESTIONNAIRE (SO FAR):
1.) Do you have a customer support staff? How many employees is it? Is this a major cost center for your company?
2.) Tell me a little more about your product? What are your customers like? Are they technical users?
3.) How do you communicate with your customers right now? Phone? Email? SMS? Text Chat? Video chat? Contact Form (on your website)? Other?
4.) Is there an active community around your product? Are you trying to build one? Why or why not?
5.) Do your customers try to find information about you on Google? What kind of info? What do they find? Is this something you're trying to improve? What are you doing right now to take control of what people find about you on google?
6.) Do your customers find information about you or your products on websites other than yours? What kind of sites? Do you know which sites they are specifically?
7.) Which of the following sounds the most interesting to you?
- Software that helps your customers find answers to their questions online rather than through your other (more expensive?) support channels?
- Software that's designed to leverage the community you've already built around your products in order to reduce your support costs?
- Software that helps you take control of what your customers find when they search for information about your company and it's products.
8.) How much would you expect to pay (monthly or yearly) for the software you chose in the previous question? Would you buy it at that price?