You will be able to name at least five places where your customers talk about your product or service, and search them.
Owners who sit down to describe their business tend to reach for the same stock phrases as everyone else in their trade. The wording your customers use is far more specific, and it turns up in more places than you might think. Go through those places in a fixed order, beginning with records you already hold.
Take Priya, who runs a small maths tuition centre. When she started rewriting her website, the first sentence she typed was "We help every child reach their full potential." She stopped there. Lesson 1.1, where you went through your own messages, had shown her that a line like this could belong to any centre in Singapore. Her difficulty was knowing where else to look. Her phone held a long history of parent messages, and it had never occurred to her to treat them as research.
Your own records are the first stop for two reasons. Everything in them concerns your product, and each person who wrote went to the trouble of contacting you. Work through them in this order:
WhatsApp enquiries, paying most attention to the opening message a customer sent before you answered emails about prices, dates, refunds or changes notes you made during sales calls or consultations survey and feedback form replies, particularly whatever people typed into the free-text boxes support tickets, complaints, and anything customers asked after they had paid
A customer's opening message, written before you have said anything, usually describes the problem in their own terms. Priya found these first messages gave her more than anything else. One parent wrote "He was fine until fractions." Another wrote "Her teacher says she rushes and makes careless mistakes." A third explained "Both of us work, so we need Saturday mornings."
Notes from calls help only when they capture what the customer actually said. One of Priya's entries read "Parent worried about exams". That is her own summary, and she has nothing to build a sentence from. A different entry read "She said he goes blank when he sees a long question", a direct quote she can use as it stands. If most of your call notes look like the first one, write down one direct quote per call from now on.
In a review, a customer is addressing other customers, which makes reviews franker than the messages people send to you directly. Look up the Google Maps reviews of your business and of three to five competitors. If you sell products, go to Shopee and Lazada as well and read the reviews on listings for items like yours. Carousell is useful in a different way: the questions buyers post under listings show what they were unsure about before they paid.
Of all these sources, competitor reviews are the one owners leave out most, though reading them costs nothing. They tell you what matters to customers in your category. One review Priya could learn from said a rival centre "gave lots of worksheets but never explained why she kept getting them wrong." A point like that can shape how you describe your own business, as long as what you say is true of you.
Read what each review says before you look at its stars. "Good service, recommended" gives you nothing to work with. A specific review shows what the customer noticed and valued, as in "The teacher noticed she was copying the method without understanding it."
The ratings follow a pattern. Five-star reviews are mostly brief and warm. A one-star review is often about one bad day, a delivery that came late or a reply that came across as rude. Three-star reviewers usually wanted the thing to work, got some of what they hoped for, and are able to explain where it fell short. A single sentence from them can contain both a benefit customers value and a doubt they will carry to your page: "Teacher was patient and my son liked her, but the class was too big for her to check everyone's work." Read the three-star reviews before the rest, either by sorting by rating or by scrolling to the middle of the list. From each one, copy out the part that describes what nearly worked and the part that describes what did not.
Online communities show how people talk when they are not speaking to a business. HardwareZone runs long threads on nearly every subject, renovation and tuition included. Reddit's Singapore groups carry plenty of requests for recommendations and accounts of bad experiences. Facebook parent groups are frequently organised by school, by estate or by the age of the child, with posts such as "anyone tried group tuition for P5 maths, worth it or not?"
These places give you two things your inbox cannot. People post there before they have chosen anyone, so the language is rawer. You also read people who have never been in touch with you, some of whom decided against your kind of product altogether.
Type in the words a customer would use when you search, and leave your trade's terms out. Priya tried "maths enrichment" and got almost no results, then tried "P5 maths tuition worth it" and "my child hates maths" and found pages of discussion. When you cannot think what to search for, pick a phrase that keeps coming up in your own messages and use that.
Two cautions apply. Some groups are private, so read them within the group's rules and don't copy their posts out to share. Treat everything you gather as research, and ask permission before you publish a customer's words with their name on them.
Beside each phrase you copy, record where it came from, for example "WhatsApp enquiry, March" or "Google review of competitor B, three stars". These notes come back into use later in the course. When you pick a headline in Module 2, you need 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 need to know whether a piece of praise was about your business or a competitor's.
Which sources matter most varies with the business. A shop selling baby carriers would rely mostly on Shopee reviews and parent groups. An accountant whose clients are freelancers would rely on client emails and on Reddit threads posted in the weeks leading up to tax filing. Priya finished her first search with five sources: her WhatsApp enquiries, her call notes, competitor reviews on Google Maps, one HardwareZone thread, and two Facebook parent groups.
For the activity, pick the three outside sources where your customers are most likely to be talking. Before you start, decide on a time limit so the search does not take up the whole afternoon.
Search three outside sources in your category, add at least 15 new customer phrases to your list, and write down where each one came from.
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