What do broadband and utility consumers think about you?
Are there ways for you to improve community connections, strengthen existing programs and offer new services? Quantitative surveys are helpful, but they work best when complemented with open-ended questions and strategically led consumer discussions.
Pioneer partners with electric and broadband utilities to create an open, friendly space for consumer dialogue and feedback. Then our focus group reports transform frank consumer feedback into action items to support your brand’s strategic plan.
Emily Walls
“The focus groups helped me so much in our marketing plan and creating an overall strategy. The feedback guides our message, our visuals. It’s highly beneficial for us to have those insights, and we’d definitely recommend it to anybody. The feedback is invaluable.”
Have you surveyed consumers before? Send us any quantitative survey data you have available. We’ll review these documents to create a baseline for focus group discussions.
Does your utility have a strategic plan? Share it with us to help guide the alignment of the focus groups with your strategic objectives. Based on the review of both the quantitative survey data and your strategic plan, we’ll propose focus group topics.
We’ll propose a set of open-ended questions, then work with you to finalize topics and questions.
Once we know the goal of the focus groups, we’ll work with you on the logistics.
Do you want one focus group or a series of conversations? We recommend inviting no more than 20 people to join each discussion.
Who do you want to invite? You may want to invite all members to participate, or you may prefer to target invitations, using a digital marketing campaign, to consumers from specific areas and/or demographics (age, gender, race, income).
Where will consumers talk? We recommend hosting focus groups in the community rather than at the utility to preserve a sense of confidentiality.
Who (if anyone) from your utility will attend? We’ll discuss the pros/cons of your staff attending the focus groups in person and how discussions should be recored (notes, audio, and/or video).
Decide on consumer gifts. Will you give participants a bill credit, local business gift card, or something else? We’ll walk you through the pros and cons of different gifts.
Choose whether you’d like to solicit focus group participants or if you need help. We recommend reaching out to consumers through email, bill inserts, your website and targeted social media campaigns. Some consumers may not follow through with a commitment to attend; if you opt for more than one discussion, consider offering different day/time options to make it easy for consumers to work into their schedules.
Pioneer conducts the discussions, then debriefs your team on key findings. You’ll receive a report with your strategic objective and preliminary findings and observations. The report includes:
(503) 357-2105
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