You will be able to name and search at least five sources of customer language for your product or service.
Priya runs a small maths tuition centre. When she sat down to rewrite her website, she opened a blank document and typed "We help every child reach their full potential." Then she stopped. After lesson 1.1 she knew that line could belong to any centre in Singapore. The trouble was that she did not know where else to look. Her phone was full of messages from parents, and it had never occurred to her that those messages were research.
Customer language sits in more places than most owners expect. This video goes through them in the order you should search them, starting with the material you already have.
Your own records come first. The words are about your product, and they come from people who cared enough to contact you. Go through these:
WhatsApp enquiries, especially the first message someone sent before you replied emails asking about prices, dates, refunds or changes notes from sales calls or consultations answers to any survey or feedback form, above all the free-text boxes support tickets, complaints and the questions people ask after they have paid
For Priya, the richest source was the first message a parent sends. Before she has said a word, they write a few lines explaining why they are asking. Those lines are nearly always the problem in their own words. "He was fine until fractions." "Her teacher says she rushes and makes careless mistakes." "Both of us work, so we need Saturday mornings."
Call notes help only if they record what the customer said. "Parent worried about exams" is your summary. "She said he goes blank when he sees a long question" is a line you can use. If your notes are summaries, start writing one direct quote per call from now on.
Reviews are customers talking to other customers, so they are franker than messages sent to you. Read the Google Maps reviews for your own business and for three to five competitors. If you sell products, read the reviews on Shopee and Lazada listings for items like yours. On Carousell, read the questions buyers ask under listings, because those are the doubts they had before paying.
Competitor reviews are the source owners skip most often, and they cost nothing. They tell you what people in your category care about. A parent who writes that a rival centre "gave lots of worksheets but never explained why she kept getting them wrong" has told Priya what to say about her own classes, as long as it is true of them.
As you read, ignore the stars at first and look at the sentences. "Good service, recommended" tells you nothing. "The teacher noticed she was copying the method without understanding it" tells you what a parent noticed and valued.
Five-star reviews tend to be short and warm. One-star reviews are often about a single bad day, a late delivery or a rude reply. A three-star review usually comes from someone who wanted it to work, got part of what they hoped for, and can say where it fell short. "Teacher was patient and my son liked her, but the class was too big for her to check everyone's work." That one sentence names a benefit parents value and a doubt they will bring to your page.
Sort by rating or scroll to the middle of the list and read the three-star reviews before anything else. Copy the part that says what nearly worked and the part that says what did not.
Forums and communities show what people say when no seller is listening. HardwareZone has long threads on almost everything, from renovation to tuition. Reddit's Singapore groups carry requests for recommendations and stories of bad experiences. Parent groups on Facebook, often organised by school, estate or a child's age, are full of questions such as "anyone tried group tuition for P5 maths, worth it or not?"
These places give you two things your inbox cannot. You see the problem before anyone has picked a provider, so the language is rawer. And you hear from people who never contacted you, including those who decided against your kind of product altogether.
Search with the customer's words rather than yours. Priya found almost nothing under "maths enrichment" and pages of discussion under "P5 maths tuition worth it" and "my child hates maths". If you are not sure what to search for, take a phrase that repeats in your own messages and search for that.
Two cautions. Some groups are private, so read under the group's rules and do not copy posts out to share. And treat what you collect as research. If you later want to publish a customer's words with their name attached, ask them first.
Every phrase you copy needs a short note of where it came from, such as "WhatsApp enquiry, March" or "Google review of competitor B, three stars". You will use those notes later. When you choose a headline in module 2, you will want to know whether a phrase came from ten parents or one forum post. When you check your claims in lesson 3.3, What your copy is not allowed to say, you will need to know whether a piece of praise was about your business or someone else's.
After her first search, Priya had five sources: her WhatsApp enquiries, her call notes, competitor reviews on Google Maps, one HardwareZone thread and two parent groups on Facebook. Your mix will differ. A shop selling baby carriers would lean on Shopee reviews and parent groups. An accountant who serves freelancers would lean on client emails and Reddit threads written in the weeks before tax filing.
In lesson 1.1 you worked through your own messages. The activity below takes you outside your inbox. Choose the three outside sources where your customers are most likely to be talking, and set a time limit before you start so the search does not eat the whole afternoon.
Search three outside sources for your category and add at least 15 new customer phrases to your list, noting where each came from.
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