To Trust or Not to Trust the Customer?

During the summer of 2014, I interned for a small cafe & coffee roaster in Worcester, MA called Acoustic Java. It was an easy choice: I was a loyal customer and business seemed solid. But I soon felt overwhelmed by the marketing challenges of a small business. So I created a customer feedback card to enable customers to speak for themselves.

This, I thought, would help solve the question of promoting the new product, coffee and tea subscriptions, to the actual customers who were physically coming into the store. I could worry about fortifying our online presence later.

The back would gauge how many of the actual customers were even aware of the social media presence and what aspects of the business's activities and products they would engage with - which would also be promoted by the new email list. 

Then while doing marketing research, I came across this article by Josh Piagto on Entrepreneur.com, called 4 Steps to Knowing What Your Customers Want Better Than They Do.
Right off the bat , it destroyed my approach.  

Basically Pigato said that you need to start using "implicit data," which is gathered from observations of actual customer behavior versus "explicit data," which is provided by customers. His approach explicitly privileges observing customers over listening to them to predict their behavior.

This left me feeling stumped. Listening was all the business could afford.

Reading Listening to the Groundswell, chapter 5 of the text, helped me reconcile my instinctive trust in the customer with the statistics about implicit data. There are definitely flaws with surveys like the one I designed, but it's not because customers don't know what they want. 

Main Points

1. The right incentive. Instead of offering an extrinsic reward, you should make responders feel part of a community in which their feedback is valuable. A survey with a one-time reward (like a free coffee) doesn't encourage the participant to care what happens after the survey is completed. Online communities like the ones created by Communispace recreate social networks that provide the users with a sense of belonging.
2. Natural interaction. Communispace tapped into the popularity of the social media network, which can easily become a part of a user's routine. 
3. Observation of the user in their natural habitat. This seems like a necessary tool to monitor the success of products already out there. 
4. Generation of insight. Narrow-minded questions might not tap into the issue you're actually trying to solve. For example, I could ask "What are you interested in...?" on the customer feedback card, but the language I used in the choices provided might not connect with the reader. 
5. Prediction. Pigato may have been right that explicitly asking a customer to predict what they will want can be unproductive. However, customer feedback can help immensely if you can pin down insights and apply them to your company.