How do you do?
Guest Blogger: Fabiana Pereira, Project Analyst, iPerceptions
“How do you do?” was one of the first phrases I learned two decades ago, as a youth attending English classes back in Brazil. It probably came right before or after "Hello, my name is Fabiana. I'm a student." Little did I know that this last phrase would be so overwhelmingly useful, and I would use it repeatedly for the next twenty years to come.
“How do you do?” and “How are you doing?” are, however, very different kinds of questions. Early on I wondered what their usefulness really was. Why ask them in the first place, if we relentlessly get the same phrasing fired back? It intrigued me.
- How are you doing? - Question
- How are you doing? - Answer?
This made no sense to me and I pondered about it in those moments when hyperactive minds swirl around, philosophizing over any available abstraction. I noticed that in Brazilian Portuguese things were no more rational. In Brazil, people ask "Tudo bem?" – meaning "All's well?" and answer back the same "All's well," while trying to give the joyous affirmation the slight intonation of a question. In fact, it seemed even stranger, not only was the solicitation unconcerned with the sincere well being of the other, it actually demanded a positive response. Echoes of the military dictatorship? - I over-interpreted, amused.
Indeed, I now believe it is the cry of an ancient tradition, but not a military one: it is social protocol. In other words, automatically repeating How do you do? or even being more creative and personal and actually saying "Fine! You?" - just to hear, again, "Fine!" - is what we consider to be an example of good manners. Before the global movement towards urbanization and democracy, everyday people didn't make much use of what we now call good manners or refinement - which seems to have been initially developed as norms of proper behavior for the nobility in the royal court environment. However, urbanization and democracy brought the need of constant human interaction. While wanting to acknowledge each other's presence by asking how they are doing, not everyone necessarily wants to know the exact number of fellow citizens who had a terrible night of sleep, or even worse, why!
Unless you sell sleeping pills. And that's my point. When you are performing marketing research, especially in a democratized space such as the Internet - where you don't know exactly whom you are dealing with until you ask - you need to be polite. You need to greet with the most tact, and ask before engaging in any further interaction. Style is an asset in any form of communication, and the online environment is not an exception. This is why, instead of randomly jumping a pop up in front of the web visitor, iPerceptions developed a smooth two-stage invitation that at once makes visitors aware of their own web perception right in the beginning of their browsing, as well as making them increasingly more comfortable with the idea of giving their feedback in the end of the process. We got to a strategic combination of classy friendliness or, if you wish, shrewd democracy. This brings results, as shown by iPerceptions' superior rate of responses and survey completion.
Another thing I learned as a child much before going professionally into linguistics or marketing research was that, when we want to know how another person is really doing, we need to ask more specific questions. Again, there is magic in the right balance between specificity and generalization. You want to get to some details, but you don't want to be so specific as to restrict the range of the response and get only close-ended types of answer. You may call that common sense, but many marketing research companies are proud of their three-minute long questionnaires that in the end are too generalized and provide little insight into crucial business issues. It is very easy to ask people "How do you do?" and get it back as an answer, remaining perfect strangers with the visitor on the other end. To have developed a perceptual framework that provides successfully tested questions and reaches right into the core of your customers' online experience - this is the real business. That's why I had to go a little further in my English. I have long replaced my old staple "I'm a student" by "I'm a researcher". What matters is that, for a new environment, we need a new language. And iPerceptions is the company now establishing the language of online customer satisfaction.
