F4P Cards Aren’t Samples
I processed a lot of F4P (fit-for-purpose) Cards today. F4P Cards are a technique my firm, several of our business partners and clients use. We use it to survey our actual customers on what purpose they had for buying our products or services and how fit for that purpose the customers found what we delivered to them. We collect both data and narratives and we have methods to analyze them to extract insights.
To explain how F4P cards work, beyond this brief introductory paragraph, deserves a series of articles. It is actually covered in Chapter 9 of the upcoming book, Fit-for-Purpose: How Modern Businesses Find, Satisfy & Keep Customers.
One of the F4P card sets, collected at a recent training event, produced the following final F4P score:
93/5/2 (43) 23/26
How to read this score: From 26 customers, 23 returned their F4P Cards, and reported 43 different purposes for taking our training. Of the 43, 93% indicated our service fully met or exceeded their expectations. Five percent indicated it largely met their expectations, but with some reservations. Two percent, and this was really one person with respect to one of their three purposes, indicated our service fell short of their satisfaction threshold. I’ve seen many F4P scores in my practice and this example of a very good score.
Besides compiling the final F4P score, we can organize our customers into segments by purpose, understand what fitness criteria matter to what segment, and what their varying satisfaction thresholds are. We can change the design, implementation or delivery of our service match these various criteria. We can use strategies to choose our target customer segments and deliver various levels of service to them.
What I found “under the hood” of this particular F4P Card set was, 37 of the 43 responses, that’s 86%, represented one particular target customer segment.
A question I was asked recently, can we draw any conclusions from a set of F4P Cards about the general population?
The answer is, if we did our marketing well, we can’t draw such conclusions.
If we considered this F4P Card set to be a sample, it would be a highly skewed sample, totally unrepresentative not only of the general population, but also of any population of customers looking for similar services.
Somebody (not me) did a stellar job at marketing this training event, reaching these target customers, getting the right people in our training room, and avoiding getting the wrong people in it. (Well, there’s nothing wrong with these people as individuals, it’s just they don’t have a purpose for buying our service that we can meet. Or their purpose for buying it isn’t something we can meet.)
Conclusion: treat F4P Card sets as facts about customers actually received the service, don’t project the results onto larger populations. If the results are such that you can make such projections, something may be wrong with how we target customers with our marketing.
