Customer Profiling Survey in India: Question Bank and Profile Template

A profile describes your customers in plain facts. It answers five questions: what they do, what they need, how they decide, where they spend their attention, and what stops them. You then use it to brief creative, choose channels and write a sales pitch.

A profile is descriptive. It does not sort people into groups, and it does not map a whole category. Use the table to pick the right study.

Start with profiling when you have one customer group and need a clear picture. Move to segmentation when the profile shows that customers want different things. Profiling is often cheaper than both, because it needs no clustering step.

Write the screening rule before the questions. A profile of 'our customers' is only as good as the definition. Pick one of these:

• Current buyers of your brand, defined by purchase in a stated period, such as the last three months.
• Category users, which lets you compare your buyers with everyone else.
• Lapsed buyers, who bought once and stopped.
• Prospects, who fit the category but have not bought.

Where possible, field two groups: your buyers and a comparison group. A fact such as 'most of our buyers use UPI' means little until you know how many non-buyers do. Set quotas on city tier, age and gender so that no one cut dominates. Our audience targeting guide lists the fields you can set.

Keep the survey short, in the order below. Ask behaviour before attitude, and unaided before aided.

Ranking importance on a 1 to 5 scale for each item tends to give you a column of fours and fives. Use ranking (3 to 7 items) or MaxDiff (8 or more) for needs, and keep rating scales for satisfaction. For the open text, read a sample yourself. See open-ended survey analysis.

NCCS. The New Consumer Classification System is, in the words of a Research Live report of 21 February 2024, "based on ownership of consumer durables and vehicles". The same report says the Market Research Society of India has developed a new socioeconomic classification, ISEC, and that the Indian Society of Advertisers, Ipsos and Kantar are set to adopt it. Ask your client which one they report in. Age band, gender, city, tier and NCCS are already on the panel profile, so you need not ask them. Ask the underlying NCCS items only if the client needs to recode or your sample is off-panel.

Our panel can be targeted by NCCS A1 to C1.

City tiers. Profile by tier. A Tier 1 and a Tier 3 buyer of the same product often buy from different channels and see different media. Report the profile with a tier column, not one pooled column.

Language. Offer the questionnaire in the language people use at home. Translate needs and barrier statements with a second person checking the back-translation. A needs statement that reads naturally in English can sound stiff in Tamil or Bengali.

Device. The panel is app-based, so profiles describe smartphone users. Do not generalise to offline households without face-to-face fieldwork.

Use this layout for the report. Every cell is filled from a question above. Leave a cell blank rather than guessing.

Mark the 'How to talk to them' row as your interpretation. Every other row reports what respondents said. Show the base size under each number. For differences between your buyers and the comparison group, test before you write 'higher'; see statistical significance testing.

A profile is read in sub-cuts, so size each cut. If you plan to show Tier 1 against Tier 2 and 3, give each at least a few hundred respondents, and say how wide the error is in the report. Our sampling methods guide shows how to work out the margin.

• Profiling only buyers. You cannot tell what is distinctive.
• Averages hiding groups. If two thirds of respondents want price and one third want quality, 'average needs' describes nobody. Check this; if it shows, you need segmentation.
• Mixing facts and advice. Keep the description separate from the recommendation.
• Stating more than the sample allows. A panel survey of smartphone users does not describe all Indian households.

If your job is a customer profile of smartphone users in India, our platform suits it. Define the screener, set targeting and quotas, and field the question bank above. For a profile of 400 respondents, list pricing looks like this:

Pro is sold in bundles of 400 to 1,000 responses and costs 20% less per response than Plus. Enterprise plans come with a dedicated research team and are priced on request.

The panel has a 25M+ consumer footprint. The survey-eligible panel is a subset, and availability depends on your targeting. Members complete Aadhaar-based KYC once, and each study receives a zero-knowledge proof of verification. Surveys run in 8+ languages across Tier 1, 2 and 3 cities, and speeders, straight-lining and inconsistent answers are removed before analysis. See the panel methodology.

The limit: the panel is app-based, so respondents are smartphone users only. Offline households need face-to-face fieldwork.