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ince 1979, an automotive-parts manufacturer had one premier product that is used by automakers such as General Motors, Toyota, Ford, Honda, Mercedes, and Daimler-Chrysler. For competitive reasons, this business didn’t want to share their name for this article.

Overview

In May 2008, the company conducted a survey to help the product-development team, which was considering branching out to make another automotive product. They wanted to solicit customer input to verify that their design direction would meet customers' needs. By designing a targeted customer survey, the operations, engineering, and maintenance departments gathered eye-opening customer feedback that led to several significant design changes that better aligned the new product with customers' priorities.

The survey process also identified customers to test prototypes, identified a set of possible early adopters, uncovered several sales opportunities, and created a sense of goodwill toward the company among customers. In general, online surveying yields are much higher than paper-based surveys and much more cost-effective than phone-based research. While there are times when these other two surveying methods make sense, the approach here was to start with a low-cost online survey and then to follow up with phone conversations to clarify answers and expand where appropriate.

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