The 8 most popular ways to use OpinionX
Because OpinionX is the first and only Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR) tool available, we get a looooot of questions about how it should be used. We do our best to answer all these questions in our Knowledge Base of helpful articles, but some questions require an entire blog post for themselves. Today's question is certainly one of those posts because it's the most important question of all; "When should I use OpinionX?"
In this post, you'll discover 8 popular use cases for OpinionX stack ranking surveys. But first...
What is Customer Problem Stack Ranking (CPSR)?
CPSR is a type of survey that provides you with a list of your customers' problems. The problems that they want to solve most will rank near the top of the list and the more insignificant problems will fall to the bottom. CPSR is a robust way to understand what is important to people. Below is an example of the results of a Customer Problem Stack Ranking survey that we ran with our own customers:
There is one really special part about CPSR; participants can add new problem statements to the list for others to vote on. This helps you to learn new things and fill in the unknown gaps in your existing understanding of a topic. As the survey creator, you'll have total control over which statements enter into the stack rank and which don't. If you'd like to read more about stack ranking, check out this ultimate guide on CPSR.
So without further ado, here are the 8 most popular ways to use CPSR:
1. To Validate Your Idea
Validating product ideas is the most popular use case for OpinionX. Originally proposed by Stripe's Product Manager Shreyas Doshi, CPSR helps you to understand if the problem you are planning to tackle with your new product or service is solving is a burning problem worth pursuing 🔥 or just a mild inconvenience 🙄 that nobody cares enough about.
Why is this important? Because 80% of new products and features are rarely or never used. And the number one reason for all this wasted effort? The problems these products are trying to solve are things that customers simply don't care enough about. So before you go building your next big idea, use CPSR to validate if the problem you're solving actually ranks highly among your customers. We have an in-depth, step-by-step guide with examples available to walk you through this process. It's a proven, data-driven approach to building validated ideas used by product builders around the world from early-stage startups all the way up to leading tech giants.
“OpinionX saved me months in research and building time, along with thousands in costs. I’m blown away by the outcome.”
2. To Understand Stakeholder Motivation
Data analytics can tell you "what" your users are doing but it is often difficult to understand "why" they are doing it. OpinionX demystifies user behavior by identifying the strongest motivations driving their behavior.
Take Feed The Heroes for example. Feed the Heroes is a nonprofit that launched as a rapid response from Ireland’s startup community to support frontline workers during the first COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 with free meals from local restaurants. After passing €1m in donations only 3 months after launching, Feed The Heroes wanted to understand why people were donating to their cause. They decided to use OpinionX because they knew they could (1) identify the biggest donor motivations and (2) uncover new motivations they were previously unaware of as such a new team.
Up until that point, the main messaging used by Feed The Heroes focused solely on supporting frontline workers, however, they found a stronger opinion among their donors through OpinionX. They realized that donors loved that they were supporting both frontline workers and local restaurants - two groups hit heavily by the COVID pandemic in very different ways - with just one small donation.
"This tool takes research to the next level." That's what Feed the Heroes Chairperson Helen Fullen told us after seeing the results of her OpinionX survey. "Blending qualitative quotes with voting data on OpinionX showed us what was most important to our donors in a way that a normal survey never could have. Understanding who they were and their motivation for donating was central to the success of the Feed the Heroes campaign." Read the full Feed the Heroes case study here.
3. To Plan Your Roadmap
At OpinionX, we believe in problem-focused roadmaps. Instead of building your roadmap around features that you plan to build, your objectives should be focused on solving your customers' biggest problems. This problem-focused roadmap does exactly what it says on the tin — it prevents unnecessary feature creep by making sure that you're building a product that solves real problems for customers.
But the thing is, you don't want to be solving just any random problems; you want to be solving big, frustrating, constantly cropping up, burning problems. These are the problems that your customers will chase after you to pay extra for while thanking you at the same time.
“I plan on introducing OpinionX into the workflow for every feature that my team develops going forward.”
Customer Problem Stack Ranking helps you to identify which problems need to be solved and also tells you in which order they should be solved (ie. starting with the most urgent and impactful problems first). Once you identify which problems are worth solving, you can put them on your roadmap as problem-sprints.
You don't need to know which features to build just yet — this will come at a later stage as you brainstorm ideas, experiment and iterate. Instead, your roadmap will look like a list of problems along a timeline. For example, in January the problem you focus on low customer trust and in February you tackle long waiting times during onboarding. Keep solving the highest-ranking problems in your stack rank and your customers will love you more and more.
4. To Crowdsource Internal Consensus
In March 2021, we did a Customer Problem Stack Ranking survey to understand the biggest needs that product managers face (we wrote about the results in this blog post). The third and fourth most important opinions were issues that likely impact people across all types of teams of every size:
3rd: "My attention is pulled in too many directions at once."
4th: "Coordinating efforts across teams and organizations consumes so much time and energy."
Alignment can be a really difficult thing to achieve in teams — especially when working remotely. Giving everyone space to share their ideas, balancing louder voices and quiet input, isolating outlier opinions - these are difficult tasks even small teams.
Over the past 6 months, we've seen OpinionX used in ways that we would never have imagined; from universities using OpinionX as a classroom engagement tool, to a national political party using stack ranking to pick their next annual slogan, to a company using our surveys to plan their office Christmas party. It turns out that a tool that gives everyone a voice and surfaces the ideas that have the highest consensus can help bring people together in amazingly creative ways.
5. To Perfect Your Messaging
In the earlier days at OpinionX, we spent almost 7 months stuck in a loop. We would acknowledge that our lack of traction was because our landing page wasn't good enough, re-write it, be happy for a few days and then restart the cycle again. Despite conducting over 100 customer discovery interviews to understand our target users’ needs and the problem we were solving, we were never happy with how we were putting these insights into words on our website. Gathering our metrics at the end of every week just reminded us that our messaging wasn't resonating with anyone. It was painful, disheartening and time-consuming.
Then we decided to try using Customer Problem Stack Ranking to understand why our value proposition wasn't landing. One week after that stack ranking experiment, we had more than doubled our conversion rate, onboarding success improved 2.5x, we tripled website traffic and even saw organic referral between users for the first time. How did we do it? Easy!
We sent a Customer Problem Stack Ranking survey to 149 product managers (our primary target market). We then took the highest-ranking problem — in this case "Finding product-market fit for a new product/feature is an ongoing challenge as a PM" — and we just stuck this straight into our headline value proposition on our website (which you can see below). This problem remains the heading on our landing page today.
The ‘above-the-fold’ section of our landing page after implementing the results of our CPSR survey ^Then we moved down the results of our stack ranking list and turned the next highest ranking problems into each of the four benefits sections on our landing page. We kept the title of each benefit as close to the original problem statement from the survey and added a small paragraph under each benefit heading to explain it further, along with some images that reflected what we were communicating.
Benefits section of our landing page after implementing the results of our CPSR survey ^
6. To Gather Feedback
Let's face it, traditional surveys suck for gathering feedback. Multiple choice or rating scale questions limit you to asking about things that you already know instead of learning new things. And if you do decide to include an open-ended question, you have to spend hours manually reading through every answer on a spreadsheet as if you're still living in 1998.
Reading through a spreadsheet of open-ended responses is riddled with easy mistakes. See, most people look at a list of responses and assume that the topic that’s mentioned the most is obviously the most important. In reality, this is just the first thought that came into most people's heads when they took 15 seconds to decide what to put in that open text box. What you really need to understand is what is most important, which you'll struggle to find using SurveyMonkey...
For example, if you asked people why they don't go to the gym, the most common answer might be "I just don't have time." But if you asked those same people to rank a bunch of reasons why they don't go to the gym, I can guarantee that the top answers would look something more like this:
It feels like everyone is staring at me in the gym and it makes me feel insecure.
I feel stupid because I don't know if I'm using the equipment properly
Exercise doesn't make me feel good.
I hate how busy the gym is at only times I can go.
I don't really know where to start.
Moral of the story? The most common response ≠ the most important.
Customer Problem Stack Ranking can help you to gather better feedback by providing participants with an opportunity to share their thoughts openly and surface unconscious consensus that's harder to unlock with shallow traditional surveys. Best of all, you don't have to spend hours on manual analysis; stack ranking surveys just take one click to organize. What more do you want?
The most common way that OpinionX has been used for user feedback surveys is tied to trigger-based email automation. Put simply, that means that if a user performs a specific activity like canceling their subscription or finishing an online course, they receive an email that includes a link to an OpinionX survey. This is a great way to gather feedback right in the context you're interested in learning more about.
7. To Build A Content Plan
Everyone knows that content is king 👑 It has revolutionized how companies do business. As an industry, software companies have figured out that if we provide upfront value to customers through content, we can generate — and often qualify — high-quality leads. It's happening right now!! You're reading this blog post which (I hope) will help you to be more successful while also helping me explain the great benefits of our product for Customer Problem Stack Ranking :)
But there's one problem with content marketing. Generating quality content over and over again can be challenging. If you find that your ideas list is starting to run dry, consider using Customer Problem Stack Ranking. According to AI-content assistant Frase.io, the customer journey today starts with Googling a question. If question-based search has become the number one driver of SEO, then the key to writing great content is understanding the problems that your target customers are searching for solutions to.
Using a Customer Problem Stack Ranking survey, you can ask your customers about their biggest problems and then you can produce content to help solve these problems. BAM! You've just created a relationship based on offering upfront value. You've become an authority on a subject area that has proven important for your customers and you're competitors will be left wondering where you generate such good ideas.
We just used this approach ourselves at OpinionX — on a recent CPSR survey we found that a top 10 issue for survey creators is finding participants. Earlier this week we published a new blog post that explains the techniques that we personally used to find free participants for OpinionX surveys.
8. To Discover New Insights
After a few years at your company, you might feel like you've learned everything there is to know. But CPSR forces you into a state of Shoshin. Shoshin is a word from Zen Buddhism meaning "beginner's mind." It represents an attitude of openness, eagerness and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject — even when studying at an advanced level. Shoshin involves being alert to new opportunities and prevents stagnation, complacency and the tendency to overlook a changing landscape.
Customer Problem Stack Ranking forces you into a state of Shoshin because it helps you discover new things. On OpinionX, participants can add new opinions to the survey which other participants then vote on. The results of these new opinions often take survey creators by complete surprise. In fact, over 80% of OpinionX surveys finish with opinions added by participants ranking in the top 3 most important. Once you see these new opinions right at the top of your stack ranking results, they carry a new level of volume that brings you right back to that beginner's mind.
Discovering new things can also lead to idea generation. New problems — or old problems viewed in a new way — are often the spark you need to inspire innovation.
But remember...
These are just 8 popular use cases for OpinionX. But like any tool, OpinionX can be used in so many ways. I encourage you to experiment and let us know if you have any ideas for more use cases. We are also maintaining our own Shoshin mindsets 🧘
“I love this tool. It literally took less than five minutes to get started and cost nothing. There’s really no reason not to try it.”
We're constantly thinking up exciting new ways to use OpinionX. One of the newest use cases we've noticed is teams creating multiple identical surveys for different user segments to understand their different needs (aka 'needs-based segmentation'). We're super excited about this use case, but we're interested in understanding if it's something that would benefit you. If it sounds like something you would love to be able to do on OpinionX, let us know 😎
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