Monitoring & Evaluating Customer Care - Focus Groups

Question 1

What are Focus Groups?

Answer 1

This is where the organisation recruits volunteers from their regular customer base to join a group which meet regularly throughout the year to discuss with managers, the customer experience and any issues, big or small, and how to improve them.

Question 2

What are the Questions like in Focus Groups?

Answer 2

The questions tend to be fairly open-ended to encourage broad, discussion and allows group members the freedom to answer as they feel rather than the questions being too specific, resulting in directed responses, which may be less honest.

Question 3

What are 2 advantages of a Focus Group?

Answer 3

• Higher quality feedback can be received because customers are given time to provide more considered responses and more depth can be given in a verbal answer.
• A predetermined number of customers (which is representative of the full customer base) can be invited therefore the number of responses is guaranteed.

Question 4

What are 2 disadvantages of a Focus Group?

Answer 4

• In order to get a national perspective, larger organisations would have to hold many focus groups throughout the country - which is an even more complicated, expensive and time-consuming exercise.
• THere may be a time delay between the customers buying from the organisation and attending the focus group, therefore they may have forgotten some details about their customer service experience.