Marketers Aren't Listening to the Voice of the Customer?*!

I find this data from today’s Center for Media Research newsletter so stunning that I’ll just quote it verbatim:

A new study by MarketTools revealed that 94% of companies do not yet use social media channels such as Facebook and Twitter to gather customer feedback, despite consumers' growing engagement with these mediums. The study found that the most common ways companies gather customer feedback are email/online surveys (51%), formal phone surveys (28%), and informal phone calls (28%).

As someone (and I doubt that I’m unique) who just refused to answer the email survey from the car manufacturer because I had already answered the one from the dealer and who uses ANI to select the phone calls I answer, I’m pretty sure these 94% of companies are missing the mark. While I’m engaging in self-revelation, I’ll also add that I don’t usually respond to emails for reviews of products I’ve just purchased. I do occasionally, and I would have done so for the car, had they asked me because it has one noticeable improvement over the model I previously owned. The car companies really have overdone the satisfaction surveys—especially since the sales and service people have been trained to ask customers not to say anything bad about them!!!—see #3 below and ponder. The rest of the data from the newsletter is also quoted verbatim:

1. 39% of executives surveyed said that their companies increased focus on customer satisfaction in 2010 versus 2009, with 21% stating that they invested more in customer satisfaction-related products and services in 2010 versus 2009
2. Despite the importance given to customer satisfaction, 14% of executives surveyed said their companies don't solicit customer feedback at all
3. 46% of the executives surveyed rate their company's performance on customer satisfaction in the top 10% when compared to their peer companies, and 93% rate themselves in the top 50% of peer companies.
4. Still, 56% of all respondents said their companies do not have, or are not sure if their companies have, a formal voice of the customer (VOC) program
5. Nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process.

I also have a personal perspective on #5. I made an online Christmas order for 9 items, none of which showed being out of stock. However, only 5 were shipped and the invoice listed 4 as out of stock (inventory failure). I was, however, billed for the total amount of the order (billing failure). I tried the call center several times to always find a lengthy wait. So I tried email—every day for one week plus some miscellaneous. I got 2 autoresponses for each email (marketing automation failure), but never a real response. My credit card took my word for it and refunded the difference. I wrote the above in considerably more detail to the operations VP. In the meantime, the company started refunding my money, one item at a time (another marketing automation failure)! The VP simply passed my email onto the call center manager, who has no responsibility for any of these things except possibly the wait time, although that’s probably a budget issue. But the VP got it off his desk, apparently happily ignoring the fact that it was business processes at fault, not customer service.

The opposite end of the spectrum is the social media mission control centers recently established by Pepsi’s Gatorade (video here) and by Dell. This 3-minute video is from the opening of Dell’s center with commentary by several industry experts.

Smaller companies/brands should not let the size of these “mission control” operations put them off. It’s a matter of scale and the listening issue of small brands is not the listening issue of Dell. Smaller brands, smaller companies need to think about their own processes, which I’ll lump under the Voice of the Customer rubric.

My recent personal experience says:

1. I would have done a customer review on the car because there was something (in this case favorable, though that’s not the issue) I’d like to point out to potential purchasers. I don’t care to waste my time checking Excellent on a mind-numbing set of Likert scales.
2. Even a VP can take a few seconds to acknowledge a customer email—even better to show that the real nature of the customer problem is recognized. This company is out about $25 in an undeserved refund—more important it permanently lost this customer!

How can you scale Dell’s and Gatorade’s listening activities to your brand? That’s the real issue and it can—and should be—dealt with! While they’re at it, corporate executives should come out of their protected cocoons and actually listen to the voice of the customer!!

Designing Customer Experience for Social Media

Having recently written a post about the Forrester Customer Experience rankings it’s no surprise that I paid attention when I noticed an article about Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group and her recent presentation on social media experience. It’s embedded below and it’s worth paging through. Her carton from the final slide represents the essence of the message.

There’s not a huge body of writing about customer experience on social networks like there is on designing for good experience on websites. Some of it is transferable, but most of it is not. Website usability is more about the mechanics; social media is about communication and human experience.

With that in mind, I found one recurring piece of advice; social media is about telling your story. For social media marketers that means it’s about telling the story of the brand. Actually, it’s even more about getting your customers to tell their stories; that helps to create a strong emotional tie with the brand.

Writing on the HBS blog, Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path has four useful rules. He says:

1. Only hire people who embody your brand. That’s the basic rule for customer service and it applies here. Further, it means you will have to do less policing of what your employees say in social media because they will have the brand story straight.
2. If you do need policies, keep them lightweight and human. Merholz admits that not all companies can be a Zappos and allow employees to participate in social media without restraint. He points to Intel’s social media guidelines as a good example. I also like Fresh Networks guidelines for writing a social media policy.
3. Experiment, prototype, pilot — try stuff out. There aren’t a lot of tactical guidelines when you get right down to the nitty gritty holding a conversation with your own customers. You must experiment, track and understand what works and what does not.
4. It's a conversation, which means you both listen and take part. Amen!

Good customer experience is like the facetious definition of pornography: “you know it when you see it.” That’s important; it’s part of the humanity of social media. Take your own good customer experiences and translate them into interaction with your customers. It’s also the Golden Rule; treat them as you want to be treated.

Understanding good customer experience is important because we certainly don’t know how to measure it. It is more than customer satisfaction, so don’t let that well-understood metric get in the way of trying to understand the experience of your customers at each of your brand touchpoints. That will take qualitative understanding as well as wise choice of metrics.

I’ll fall back on my long-time favorite and suggest you read Bruce Tempkin’s 6 Laws of Customer Experience.The bad news is that designing good customer experience is more art than science. The good news is that each one of us has potential to be an artist—we are, after all—all customers!

It's the People Stupid

View more presentations from deb schultz.

Celebrating Income Tax Day

Ok, I’m being sarcastic; it’s nothing to celebrate—at least it wasn’t for me this year! But it is one of the certainties of life, and it’s interesting to see how firms in the industry are handling it.

I’ve written about Intuit before, so I retained a couple of articles from Peppers and Rogers 1 to 1 Weekly newsletter (not archived on their website as far as I can tell) over the past few months. In November 2008 they wrote about Intuit’s dissatisfaction with the rate of abandonment on their website. Their existing metrics gave no information about why visitors abandoned before they purchased. However, Intuit had a more basic problem, chronicled in the newsletter on February 09, 2009. When Brad Smith took over as CEO in 2006 he realized he didn’t understand the product line and that employees didn’t either. I love what he did:

So Smith put himself in the shoes of the customer and visited a retail store that sells Quickbooks. He stood in front of the shelves for 17 minutes and still chose the wrong version from the dozens offered. How would he ever know how to improve the product if he couldn't grasp how it was supposed to work?
Smith decided to bring in a small business owner and Quickbooks customer to spend a day in his shoes experiencing his pains with the product. The customer, a bike shop owner, volunteered and handed over all his invoices and paperwork to Smith and his team, who then holed themselves up for a day in a boardroom trying to figure out Casey's typical interaction with their product. The outcome was confusing and cumbersome. "At the end of eight hours and close to tears, our leadership team was very clear about what we needed to do," Smith says. (1 to 1 Weekly, 02/09/2009)

Solutions included simplifying the product line. The most sweeping solutions involved a “Quickbooks Challenge” based on the experience above for all new employees and throwing out a lot of the policies in the contact center that made it difficult to resolve customer problems. The most significant action appears to have been a program called True North that focuses on improving customer experience.

Bruce Tempkin recently wrote about the True North program on his customer experience blog with a link to a post on Net Promoter (measuring satisfaction by a single measure of likelihood of recommending the product). Bruce’s posts on a presentation by Brad Smith and the one that includes Net Promoter are highly informative. So is one by a Canadian blogger who got Intuit to admit that they made some mistakes in implementation. They keep working at it, however, and they seem to be getting a lot of things right. According to Tempkin, Brad Smith said in his presentation that 81% of sales are directly attributable to word of mouth. That represents both careful attention to the voice of their customers and really good metrics to be able to say that with assurance!


So it’s tax day; what are they doing with Turbo Tax. They have active customer support and a vibrant community of customers helping other customers. At least I’d call it “vibrant;” over 30 thousand questions on Schedule C for Personal Business (whatever that is!) looks vibrant to me!

On a broader scale, Intuit has employees Tweeting about a variety of topics. Take a look at their page on Twitter for a thoughtful approach to corporate strategy there. They are promoting the basic Intuit community; Intuit Labs, where they are getting customer input into product development; the new Intuit initiative in India; and other strategic corporate initiatives. Each one seems to be drawing its own group of followers, some small but all focused on a particular issue. Good job!

What I don’t see is a Twitter stream for tax preparers. Think about it; taxes are seasonal (thank goodness!). Who wants to follow that all year, as opposed to the Quick Books products, which businesses use for daily operations? The community on the site seems to work for users of Turbo Tax at tax time; I’ll bet it’s pretty quiet the rest of the year. The Twitter streams are ongoing conversations that provide important feedback to Intuit on specific products and issues.

That’s strategic use of social media!

Happy tax day!!

User Satisfaction With Your Social Media Site

In last week's post about objectives for social media marketing programs I argued strongly for program-specific behavioral objectives over marketing/branding objectives. I’ve seen no reason to back off that position; the program-specific metrics provide a direct assessment of customer activity, if not the achievement of overall marketing goals, which are affected by many channels and many programs.

In the discussion, however, one of my students argued for a customer satisfaction measure. I’m accustomed to thinking about customer satisfaction in terms of the more global measures of the ACSI or the annual Accenture survey that recently became available for 2008. It took me awhile to wrap my head around site satisfaction as an important objective, but the more I thought about it the better idea I thought it was—thanks, Ted!

The tip he gave me was to Avinash Kaushik’s free tool. Yes, it’s a pop-up and those are annoying. But it’s free, easy and allows the user to do a reasonable amount of editing within the basic 4-question template. So I set up an account and took the tool for a test drive.

It’s easy to revise the basic 4-question survey template, but you can’t add additional questions DIY. They do offer custom surveys if you need more. The “reasons why I came to the site” question didn’t offer exactly the reason I would have preferred “free content,” but “research” and some of the other options were close. When I was satisfied with it, I submitted it and waited for the code to show up on my results page.

My only real annoyance with the system was that I got a marketing email from 4Q before the survey was even processed and available. They have a clever approach, though. If you’ve had a bad experience with the site, send them the URL and they’ll try to get the site to install the satisfaction tool. Good thinking!

I installed it on my website so you could try it yourself if you’re interested. The installation was easy. Having set the frequency on 100% it should show up whenever you go there. The survey seems to work on both IE and Firefox but to be very sensitive to pop-up blockers, which is good. It also may set a session cookie so it doesn’t show up if you go back to the site. If I’m right about that, that’s good for the visitor, although I found it annoying when I was trying to get this screen capture!

In the process I found an interesting article. Dan Greenfield is arguing for a ranking system that would allow benchmarking of social media efforts. As he notes, we’re pretty far from that sort of a standard for social media metrics, but it’s an interesting concept to watch.

In the meantime, serious thinking about how to measure the success of your social media efforts is in order!

Customer Service Still Rules!

A new customer satisfaction survey report from Accenture just crossed my desk. It’s about customer service generally, not on the Internet specifically, but that’s ok. As the report points out, we live in a multichannel world. That makes excellent customer service at all customer touchpoints essential.

Overall, the report sees three important trends:
• Globally, the perceived quality of customer service declined in 2007, although it is still rated as “good” in many countries, especially developed economies
• Customers say their expectations of quality customer service continue to increase. This is especially true in developing economies.
• Two of three respondents reported they had switched patronage during the year as a result of poor customer service; half had switched patronage in multiple industry segments as a result of poor service?
Is the Internet at least partially responsible for rising service expectations and increasing ease of switching suppliers? I think so.
And customer service does still rule. In most of the countries where data was collected, poor customer service trumped lower price as a reason for switching, often by a large amount. The exceptions were Germany and France. Interesting.
This somewhat complex chart gives more detail. It shows the importance of various factors to respondents who did switch and did not switch. Most of these factors are almost equally important; that’s worth thinking about, especially in light of the satisfaction data. It’s also worth noting that the two most important factors have to do with company representatives—their knowledge and their courtesy.

Equally important—and even less surprising—is that the higher the level of satisfaction, the less likely respondents were to switch. But look carefully. The levels of satisfaction are not that different between respondents who switched and those who did not. That’s not a new finding, but it should be worrisome to marketers.

Besides some general issues about satisfaction that we already knew, what should we take away from this study? First is that satisfaction is really important, but it doesn’t keep people from switching. And it often was not price that caused them to switch. So what did?

Two things are worth thinking about. First, the switching data looks at individual customer service factors; is it the overall customer experience that really makes the difference? Second, “price” may not capture the effects of powerful promotional offers, whether price-based or not.

Accenture’s summary points to the importance of individual customer service factors but relates it to overall customer experience. They say:

Accenture’s high performance business research has found that leading organizations enhance customer loyalty by mastering specific activities. Of these activities, our research shows providing a consistent, differentiated customer experience has the most impact on customer loyalty, which in turn contributes to growth, profitability, and shareholder value.

I’m still betting on overall customer experience as the determinant, but the power of a single really good feature—or even more one really bad aspect of customer service—cannot be denied. I suggest that this research provides a good framework for thinking about customer service and customer experience and there’s more useful data in the full report (download from this page). However, it can’t substitute for research that gets very specific about what causes customers to switch in your product category or for your own brand, as discussed in the recent post on Forrester's customer experience survey. And what if the importance factors still don’t differ a great deal? Then marketers are going to have to set some priorities based on where they are loosing customers or where they have the most chance to exceed customers’ expectations and create real loyalty. No one ever said that exceptional customer service was easy!