Running product trials is a really important part of selecting the right protective equipment and ensuring that you continue to use the best protection available in the market. 

Making sure that they are well-run and effective can be a challenge for our customers. 

When they are not, they don’t deliver useful or even accurate insights and often hinder choosing the best products. 

To help you we’ve compiled a list of DOs and DON’Ts 

DO 

Trial the products with a variety of different personnel. Make sure that they are the workers who will give you honest and truthful feedback.   

Provide a standardised form to enter feedback onto.  Making sure that you can easily collate the feedback is an essential part of making your decisions easier. 

Make the feedback data driven.  Data is much more useful in making decisions than anecdotes.  Get your workers to provide scores on different performance and protection aspects of the product. 

Compare the products performance to your existing products scores for the same areas 

Put a time limit on the trial.  Ensure this is long enough to get the most out of the products lifetime but not so long that it will stifle any decisions. 

Hold a trial debrief with the workforce that participated and the supplier who recommended the product.  This will help plan meaningful actions following the trial. 

DON’T 

Run the trial across the whole workforce.  This will generate too much data for you to process and use and also provide wildly varying feedback levels so that you won’t achieve any consensus. 

Measure too many performance and protection aspects.  This will lead to confusion and data overload.  Measure a maximum of 5 different aspects (performance and protection). 

Make the feedback subjective and opinion based. Stick to the facts and data. 

Trial too many different products at once.  This will confuse your workforce as well as any following analysis of the feedback.  You really need to trial a maximum of 2 products (in addition to the product already in use) at any time, ideally you want to focus on just one. 

Forget to follow up and action the trial.  Even if it’s just noting that the products aren’t a good fit, this will help you and any suppliers you work with to ensure that you have the best equipment catalogue at any time. 

Fill out the below form to download our product trail feedback form.