EPISODE 77 OF WHAT WOULD THEY DO? THE CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE PODCAST FOR SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS
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In this episode, I’m taking you behind the scenes of a recent client project that completely changed the direction of an established membership.
Like many business owners, my client thought she had a pretty good understanding of what her members wanted. But instead of relying on assumptions, we went straight to the source.
The results uncovered messaging gaps, feature requests and blind spots that simply wouldn’t have surfaced if we’d only listened to the loudest voices inside the community.
In this episode, I explain why customer research is one of the most underused growth strategies, and how you can start gathering better insights for your own business.
What we cover:
Why assumptions are holding many businesses back
The three audiences you should include in your customer research
The gap between the metrics businesses track and what customers experience
How better audience research improves both retention and conversions
The biggest mistakes people make when designing customer surveys
Why hearing uncomfortable feedback can become your biggest competitive advantage
Soundbites:
“And the only way to close that gap is to ask as painful and as inconvenient and as confronting as this process can be, if you strategically ask your community, they are going to give you everything you need to design a retention engine that works for you in the long run and supports your members, but also a conversion runway that gives you the messaging and the angles potential members need to hear to fall in love with your community.”
“But that’s not what your members are judging their experience on, right? They’re judging their experience based on how long it took them to get a first win, how clear their path to success is, whether there’s a support network for them to get the results that they signed up for. And there’s a real gap between what we measure as online business owners and what our customers experience.”
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Episode Transcript:
Hey, hey, and welcome back to another episode of the podcast. In today’s episode, we are going to shake things up. I am going to take you behind the scenes of a recent client project because I feel what I’m going to share with you happens somewhat consistently and frequently in the online business space.
because as online business owners, we are basing our decisions often on assumptions. We think we know what our audience wants, we think we know what they need, we think we know how they want it delivered. And those assumptions can often look very different to what people tell you.
if you just asked them. So I recently worked with a membership site owner who has had her membership for a number of years. It’s going really strongly, hundreds of members. she booked me for an Intensive because she wanted to shape the future direction of her membership based on firsthand insights and data or data if you’re in the US.
Rather than assumptions. She thought she had a pretty clear picture of what her members wanted, but somehow she felt there was conflicting information around. Some of the signals were pointing left, while other signals were pointing somewhere else entirely. So rather than guessing or going with her gut, we sent out a super strategic survey.
But not just to current members. We decided to survey three distinct groups. We surveyed current members. We talked to people who had at some point considered joining but never went ahead with it. And we also went back to people who were members at some point but decided to cancel for whatever reason.
And that third group is often the group that people forget about. they might have an automated one question cancellation survey, like I do in my case. But in this instance, we really wanted to go back to people who were members at some point and gather more in-depth data because often that can be super revealing. And what came back identified
Clear messaging gaps and very specific features that needed to evolve. and some of the things she had never even considered because she’d only been listening to the most engaged and the most prominent, the most outgoing members. and
She really didn’t have the complete picture because a lot of your members, have a lot of opinions, but might not feel comfortable sharing it in a public space.
and in this instant, I’m not blaming my client for not being onto what her members are thinking, feeling, experiencing. She absolutely cares deeply about her members and her member experiences, but it’s so easy to miss because,
We are very emotional about the experience and the community we’ve built. It’s very close to our hearts. So it can be super tempting to listen selectively. So you might notice feedback that confirms what you were thinking, but you might conveniently ignore feedback that might be hard to digest that might be leaning towards something that feels a bit harder to pull off.
we also tend to listen, as I said, to you know, the people that are still in the community. We give those people a platform to share what they’re thinking, but we’re not giving those who cancelled for whatever reason an opportunity to, share super valid opinions and advice with us that can absolutely help us to make the experience in the current community even better.
This also is something I found in my 2025 State of the Customer report. as I mentioned previously, the new one’s coming. Stay tuned. But business owners often track metrics like lifetime value and churn rate, particularly inside memberships. But that’s not what your members are judging.
their experience on, right? they’re judging their experience based on how long it took them to get a first win, how clear their path to success is, whether, there’s a support network for them to get the results that they signed up for. And there’s a real gap between what we measure as online business owners
And what our customers experience.
If you strategically ask your community, they are going to give you everything you need to design a retention engine that works for you in the long run and supports your members, but also a conversion runway that gives you the messaging and the angles potential members need to hear to fall in love with your community.
But often the best intentions to survey your members and to ask your community don’t go anywhere because it is a somewhat overwhelming process. A lot of business owners get stuck because they don’t know what questions to ask, who to ask, how to design it in a way so you actually maximize your outcomes and your insights. Because let’s face it, you get one shot at this.
So you need to be intentional with how you design the survey, how you set up the questions, and how you define the audience that receives said survey
and that’s exactly why I built a brand new interactive survey question generator.
For my retention lab incubator members. You basically just tell it a little bit about your business, your offer, and who you want to survey. And it gives you 10 tailored to you questions built specifically for your situation and based on my survey framework that I have developed and refined over the past 10 odd years that I have carried out audience research for my own clients.
This tool takes the guesswork out of getting started. So you can get straight to the good bits, the juicy answers.
And as it happens, I have just launched a free version, slightly stripped down, of this Tailored to You survey question generator that you can give a go over on my website. I’ve linked up the tool in the show notes. That’s where you can tell it a little bit about your business, your audience, and your offer, and it will give you 10.
tailor to you questions based on my framework. So make sure you check it out so you can send that first or next audience survey, which might just be a game changer for your offer, your messaging and the future of your business.
And once you’ve sent out that first or next survey, that’s where step number two comes in because surveying is only half the work. the much harder part is being willing to hear something that might contradict what you assume. In the example I just shared with you earlier, the membership site owner client.
The findings that we uncovered meant that she had to rethink parts of her membership that had felt somewhat settled for a while, which was somewhat uncomfortable, right? But in the long term, it’s going to deliver an experience for her members that they’ve been asking for and that they’re going to stay for, which then means increased recurring revenue for my client.
if you want my support working through what the answers to your survey might mean for your business, your offer, your messaging, that’s the kind of work we can do together in the incubator. And if you want someone to run, design, and analyze the entire survey for you, plus the next steps that flow on from that, like my client did in this instance, we can do that together inside.
The intensive. Both of those are linked up in the show notes. and if you want to chat it through, absolutely DM me, send me an email. I would love to see how we can help you be super strategic about your audience research and then take the next steps from there. This is it for today’s episode. I hope I have inspired you to try my free survey generator tool to see what your strategic audience survey could uncover for you.
and thank you so much for listening. If you haven’t hit that subscribe button yet, please do so and hopefully I’ll see you in next week’s episode.
