Customer Research Priority Ranking

There are many ways to gauge what customers want out of a product. There are ample market research tools at your disposal that you can use to find out how to create the perfect product (or services) that will lead to high customer satisfaction levels and a better product than your competitor. Many of these types of research though are fairly complicated.

They require considerable surveys with dozens of questions, focused on trying to learn everything you can about a product. While these methods are certainly useful – and arguably more useful than the method described below – they are also difficult, and take a great deal of analysis. When you are not ready to employ that type of research study, you can go a much more basic route, using a method known as “priority ranking.”

Priority ranking is, as it sounds, a method of ranking product needs in terms of priority. Customers are (in the traditional method) provided with a group of cards. These cards have various product features on them.

Customers then organize those features in terms of what has the most priority to them, rating them from 1 to X depending on the number of features you’re looking at. Once you have rankings from the customer, you assign these rankings a number based on their order, opposite of the place they ranked in priority (for example, if you have 20 cards in deck, the first priority would get 20 points, the second 19, the third 18, all the way down to 1). You can have any number of cards in these decks, although it should be noted that the more cards you have, the more difficult and time consuming the process of ordering them may be for the user.

Once you’ve collected the cards and data from a large enough sample, you can do some quick math and find out which feature needs to get top priority, all the way down to the lowest priority.

Priority ranking is not a perfect way of collecting data. For example, a card with an inventive or interesting feature may be given a higher priority than a basic and important feature because the customers are wowed by its innovation. Still, it’s a useful quick and dirty method of collecting data, and does reveal some very useful results.