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!!

Collaborating with Customers - B2C and B2B

Step 1 - Listen
Step 2 - Respond
Step 3 - Engage

I’m ready to write a post about the 4th step in the revised social media strategy development model. The old model called it CoCreate. This one uses the term Collaborate. Collaborate maybe sounds a little less formidable, a little easier to do. The more I’ve thought about that, the more I’ve realized it’s just not so. It’s really hard. Sometimes it seems impossible. I’m going to explain why by using recent data on Forrester’s Social Technographics data and add some insights I’ve derived, virtually all from mistakes I’ve made.

I’ve written about the Technographics ladder before, because it’s a real asset to understanding what’s going on in this space. With the 2009 data, they’ve added a new rung on the ladder. It’s called “Conversationalists” and it primarily reflects the influence of Twitter on the social media scene. Obviously these categories are not mutually exclusive; most of us fall into one category at some point, or in connection with some brand, and into another category in a different situation. That’s life. But what is key to understanding the difficulty of encouraging collaboration--of getting customers to create content-- is the size of the Spectators segment; 70% of consumers fall into that segment at least part of the time. Add to that the next step on the ladder. Joiners aren’t cocreators; they have a profile, but beyond that they are consumers, just like Spectators. In fact, it’s not until you get up to the Critics and the new Conversationalists that you get content creation, from ratings to status updates to Tweets. Those are fine and increasingly important to marketers. However, it’s only a small part of the online population that creates content that generally goes beyond 140 characters!

Looking at the total population is, of course, useful. But it’s not your target market. I found a good example in the B2B space. I used Forrester’s profile tool (which doesn’t yet have the Conversationalists), just set for the entire B2B market. I got a profile that’s not hugely different from the consumer population profile, which isn’t particularly surprising because these activities carry over from our private lives to our business lives—and vice versa.

Josh Berman fortunately published a more detailed example in early 09, also based on their survey of business buyers. I’m including the chart with his commentary, which just deals with the “overall” and “for business purposes” categories on the right. Virtually everyone in the B2B space falls into the Spectator category—that’s a critical insight. 69% of them are doing so for business purposes, and in the blue bars you’ll notice that is not really different for IT managers and managers in a line of business who make technology decisions. A few more of these business decision makers fall into the active categories of Critics and Creators. That gives them an opportunity to be influentials in their business discipline.

And that begins to get to my points. I would suggest that:
• It’s really hard for a brand to get people to contribute if they already do not. You can—and should work on it—invite people to write reviews, for example. In the consumer space, it’s relatively easy to reward people for doing it; loyalty points are an interesting consideration. Incentives are always useful, and you may be able to find useful incentives in B2B as well as B2C.
• Once you identify customers who are taking the “baby steps” of, say, writing reviews, can you encourage them to do more? Whether it’s a blog comment or a wiki contribution, it’s a good step. Business customers love to give their opinions and ideas as sites like Dell’s IdeaStorm demonstrate, so it may be easier to give them an opportunity and let them go to it.
• All the chicklets that are encouraging us to Tweet or Digg content items are trying to get people to be more active in the conversation arena, and it’s worth making it easy to do. I’m not sure how much it contributes to a feeling of collaboration, but it’s great additional visibility. It might even create a customer perception of supporting the brand over time.
• Can you encourage customers to become Creators? All the B2C video contests like “Help Flo” are an example that you can. And those will probably continue to work well in the B2C space as long as you have a creative campaign.
B2B seems to offer a lot of opportunities to help customers become thought leaders. It’s the standard “speak at the conference” appeal. Now that can be expanded to blogs and other content repositories. That clearly leads to a feeling of being valued and I don’t see how it can do anything but strengthen the relationship between brand and customer.

I see two key take-aways in this. First, you can’t easily get people to participate in activities they aren’t already familiar with. If you have a target audience that’s pretty much Spectator-only, don’t try to make them Creators overnight. It’s just not going to happen.

Second, the marketing practice of trying to locate the opinion leaders (influentials) has come into its own. Customers are self-identifying by their blogs and other online creations. Find them and reach out to them. The case of the Coke fan page has become the classic case of doing just that. Your outreach may not always have such spectacular results, but it will be worthwhile. It just takes the patience and persistence that’s mandatory in the social media space!

Responding in Social Media

For quite awhile I’ve been using a conceptualization of social media with 5 steps:

Listen > Speak > Engage > Support > Cocreate

Recently I’ve noticed conceptualizations that have these three elements
• Listen
• Respond
• Engage
They aren’t necessarily in this order (although Listen is always first—always!) and some have an additional element; I’m going to call it
• Collaborate. That covers working with both B2B and B2C customers in way that is supportive and that encourages them to add their own content. It gives me a more concise strategy concept to work through over the next week or so, starting with the two listening posts on Friday and Monday. All are issues I’ve written about before; all need updating.

The other thing that occurs to me as I’ve read through posts and articles is that there may be a discernable difference in the terms that public relations and marketing practitioners use in talking about responding. There is the true crisis situation, for which PR needs to have a plan in place. I’m talking about responding in a marketing sense—responding to everyday brand-related conversations. Some of them are positive, some may be negative. Some can spiral into a real crisis or at least a black eye for the brand. Such was the ill-conceived Motrin ad last fall. Frederic Lardinois, writing on ReadWriteWeb, points out that Motrin bowed to a vocal minority and removed the ad, ignoring whether it was offensive to a majority of their target audience and not engaging with that audience on the web. See the ad on the RWW link (or many other places!) and judge the ad for yourself. RWW points out that the brand response was a press release. I’ll have to take their word for it; I can’t find it on either the Motrin site or the McNeil Pharmaceuticals site. That’s a really effective response, right??? Sounds to me as if they were embarrassed and trying to forget all about it!

So how should you go about responding to everyday conversations? I found this chart by Laura Bergells that really squares with my own experience. I’ve come to think of it as ‘social media triage’ and someone (or a team) has to be responsible for responding. Unless it’s an assigned responsibility issues are likely to fall through the cracks. Of course, that assumes that the business saw it in the first place—is your listening operation well honed?

My own experience says:

• Deciding whether it’s positive or negative is the essential first step. That’s usually easy, although sometimes you may not be entirely sure and have to keep watching that specific line of conversation to be sure.
o If it’s positive, seriously consider saying “thank you.” All of us get thanked too infrequently, and it’s just nice. Beyond that, it may start a useful conversation.

• If it’s negative, there’s a consideration that a lot of people don’t think carefully about. Does it really need to be answered? Laura Bergells calls them ‘trolls;’ I have some other names for them; ‘boneheads’ is the nicest. They are actually rather easy to identify. What they say often doesn’t make sense and it is borderline, if at all, relevant. They tend to be ‘serial commenters’ either on a specific subject or just for their own entertainment. You may have to follow comment feeds for awhile to be sure. But no one takes them seriously—you shouldn’t either. They will quickly move on to something else or they will get entangled in arguments with other commenters. Either way, stay out of it.

• If it’s a factual error, you need to fix it, politely but immediately. Do you need internal experts you can call on to ensure the accuracy of your facts? If so, make sure they are lined up before the need arises.

• If customers are reporting a negative experience with your brand, you need to respond in a way that resolves the issue. That simply goes back to good customer service—apologize, take ownership of the problem, fix it, or at least explain why you cannot provide a perfect remedy. People are the angriest if they are ignored. Saying you are sorry, offering whatever restitution is appropriate, goes a long way.

Some of this is policy. I like Fresh Networks posts on writing your social media policy. Here’s an interesting post about an experience ESPN had that includes their policy. I recently ran across a discussion of Cisco’s social media policy; this appears to be the current posting.

The very existence of those policies suggests a tension in the way social media is handled by organizations. On one hand, certain people must have clear responsibilities for things like monitoring brand-related conversation. On the other hand, everyone in the organization should consider social media part of their job description. (Does that remind you of discussions of “customer orientation” in Marketing 101? It should!) In fact, a lot of communities rely heavily on members for monitoring; they can be an excellent early warning system. How do you keep these roles straight?

I come back to a simple rule from customer service. Everyone in the firm must be concerned about the customer; not everyone is a good customer service rep. As long as we’re talking about training and internal organization, that’s controllable. In today’s brave new world of social media a lot of that control has flown out the window. That’s why companies must have not only social media strategies, but policies about how they deal with customer conversations and the participation and response of their employees!

Strategy for Effective Listening

On Friday I wrote about the importance of listening to brand-related conversations on the web. It’s an important source of information these days. It’s also a potential source of qualitative data.

The problems with thinking of web conversations as data are twofold:
1. There is so much of it
2. It is qualitative.
A lot of us use Google Alerts to manage our own personal brands or brands with limited reach. Google Alerts are great, but if there’s a lot of conversation taking place, it quickly becomes unmanageable. I’m also not smart enough to filter what comes in so I only get the specific types of items that I’m looking for. Google Alerts picks up items that have a URL but in order to monitor microblogs and other social media conversation you have to use different services.

I’ve tried Social Mention in the past. I used a rather generic search string and I was inundated. That tends to cause the user to just give up and cancel the alert. Fortunately, cancelling them is easy, so you shouldn’t hesitate to give it a try. I just set up another one on Social Mention with a very specific search string. It immediately sent me an email to catch me up on what I think was the last month’s activity and the first dozen or so entries (of 28 for this specific, local issue) were spot on.

When there’s a problem web entrepreneurs arrive to try to solve it. I wrote about Techrigy last summer as a social media metrics service. Obviously, in order to produce the types of social media metrics described in the post it has to collect social media data. That huge database made it attractive to a larger firm and Techrig recently became part of Alterian. According to the site, the SM2 monitoring product continues to grow in line with the ecosystem it monitors.

What really interested me on Friday, though, was a firm called Clarabridge. They describe themselves as providing data for customer experience management, another recent subject. They do it by content mining. Data mining for quantitative data; content mining for qualitative data—concept makes sense, doesn’t it?


The relationship is that Clarabridge uses the Techrigy database of social media activity and puts its proprietary content mining algorithm on top of it to produce actionable insights in various aspects of marketing operations.

And that’s my point. Every business needs a listening strategy. Start small, say with Google Alerts. If that works for you, fine. But you also need to be monitoring social media and that requires another service. If the volume is high, you will need more help.

But that’s not all you need. This is a lot of effort; it’s going to require some resources. That means you must have a thoughtful listening strategy. Jeremiah Owyang outlines 8 Stages of Listening. We all must be progressing through those stages as our needs and our resources allow.

Evolution: The Eight Stages Of Listening

View more presentations from Jeremiah Owyang.

Listening for Customer Understanding

I’ve expended a lot of energy trying to get marketers to really grasp the difference between marketing research and the analysis of behavioral data as avenues to customer insight. Sometimes I despair. We academics are partly at fault. Most marketing courses, especially the introductory ones, teach marketing research as the way (read that the only way) to learn about customers. We forget that there is behavioral data of many types, from many sources, that should be mined before enterprises spend time and money on marketing research.

Senior marketers have the same hang-up. Marketing research is what they were taught. They may feel comfortable with how it is done and the results it produces (or they don’t use it at all). But I thought an Ad Age headline (subscription required) earlier in the month captured the essence of the problem. When I used this slide in class last night, I got a lot of puzzled (disbelieving?) frowns. Let me see if I can restate the issue in terms of why companies need to listen as their first step in understanding customers in a way that leads to viable marketing and business strategies.

The ARF held another conference on listening yesterday and I looked this morning to see if any material had yet been posted. Not yet; I’ll keep looking but I did find a great quote in a blog post from ARF president Joel Rubinson. He says:

Listening is about hearing what people [say] rather than the marketer wants to talk about, (emphasis mine) and hearing it in people’s own words. It’s a window in the mind, heart and emotions of people, one you need to have your nose pressed up against continuously. Because things change…really fast…giving agile marketers great opportunities leaving traditional marketers wearing the WTF happened look on their faces.

As I looked, I found something else really good. I don’t know whether the ARF is happy having this report, clearly marked ‘confidential’ posted on the web, but for now at least, it’s there, so I’ll link to it. As all good researchers do, they start with an operational definition of listening:

“The study of naturally occurring conversations, behaviors, and signals, that may or may not be guided, that brings the voice of people’s lives in to the brand” (p 11)

They parse the definition in a useful fashion and go on to say a lot of important things about developing a listening strategy. You should read it for yourself. It’s long, but the main concepts take up only about 20 pages, followed by an incredible number of good short case studies, and ended with a discussion of technology and platforms. Let me leave it with the brand-related objectives that can be realized, in full or in part, by a well-crafted listening strategy. Their list is:

• Discover New Customers
• New Product Development and Innovation
• Improve Existing Products
• Maintain Sales Momentum
• Drive Brand Growth
• Re-brand or Re-position
• Tackle Public Policy Issues
• Manage Reputation
• Manage Brand Health
• Customer Care
• Increase Loyalty and Customer Value (pp 13-14)

I don’t think any of us can disagree with the desirability of any one of these objectives. That still begs the question of how to produce the best data to meet the selected objective(s). Try this conceptualization.



We have to listen to conversations that relate to our brand. That’s one kind of qualitative data. Behavioral data from everything to site visits to transactions is one type of quantitative data. Each of those types of data quickly becomes gigantic. Together they are mega-gigantic. For a brand of any size or reach, they have to be thoughtfully mined to come up with actionable insights.

Then the question is whether there is anything missing. In researchers’ terms, not just something interesting that we’d like to know, but data from which we can draw actionable insights. If the answer is ‘yes,’ we may need to do marketing research. It could be anything from a poll (or a series of them) on our website to a custom marketing research project. If it’s really important to a full picture of the customer, then do the marketing research. All the while behavioral and conversational data floods in. Also, the world moves on, which is another problem with pausing to do conventional marketing research.

That’s the nature of the challenge and it’s formidable. In the process of this investigation I’ve learned more about useful platforms that can help meet the challenge. More about that next week!

Starbucks Listens--and Acts!

Earlier in the week Michael Estrin had a good advice in iMediaConnection for those who want to have a good blog, either personal or corporate. The graphic from Starbucks caught my eye. It perfectly captures the concept of a community being involved in idea generation for a brand.

I always wonder whether companies follow up on good ideas so I checked it out. Here’s what I found.
















The My Starbucks Idea site seems to be the home page of the enterprise. It’s where you can sign up to be part of the idea generation process. It’s on a SalesForce.com platform, so clearly it’s intended for CRM. Do the numbers in the Categories section represent posts and comments—5,483 for Tea & Other Drinks, for example. Probably. I checked some of them and there are active postings, comments and discussions.

The Idea page links to the Ideas in Action blog where Starbucks employees give feedback. I captured a post that’s reporting on the number of ideas launched in a given week. Posts are frequent.

What’s really interesting is that there tend to be 2 or 3 comments on those employee blog posts—agree, disagree, whatever—there are a few comments on each post. Comments on the Idea site tend to be more active, and assuming that a point for a post represents a vote, the voting is very active. My point is that there seems to be more action on the site that’s mostly UGC than on the blog where employees, chosen for their expertise according to the site, blog about what they have actually done. Worth thinking about! Does it mean that brand enthusiasts enjoy talking with one another even more than they enjoy talking directly to the brand?

All in all, it’s a site—and a concept—worth exploring. Starbucks has created a community around something everyone loves to do—telling you how they think you should run their business. They’ve found a way to involve and engage, and they are following up in a disciplined fashion.

I’m not saying any of this is particularly easy, especially the follow-up. I am saying that it’s worth seeing what you can learn from Starbucks about engaging customers in your own brand.

Survival of the Fittest--Marketers, Media, Agencies

I saw the Digital Darwinism article in Booz & Co’s online Strategy+Business magazine a few weeks ago. I read it, thought it summarized important ideas, then pushed it to the side of my desktop where it languished until a couple of days ago. When I received an email that it had been republished as a Resilience report I reread it and was again impressed with its insights.

Part of the reason is some good case studies; author Christopher Vollmer talks about HP and there are sidebars written by Carolyn Everson of MTV Networks and Ajaz Ahmed of digital agency AKQA. That represents their three key players in this struggle for survival; businesses, media and agencies.

The report identifies 5 behaviors that the fittest will use to survive:

1. Getting close to consumers. Hardly a surprise! The point is to “activate” consumers, making them “prosumers.” I think we used to call that brand advocates, but whatever we call it, it’s hard to do.
2. Stimulating conversation. Again, not a surprise. Advertising is out; listening and dialog are in.
3. Recognizing that content and context are inextricably intertwined. This puts a premium on careful media choice and integration.
4. Making better use of customer data and insight. In this fragmented media environment we lack integrated metrics to measure the progress of our efforts.
5. Building new, more collaborative relationships. This is where marketers have to work in close collaboration with their agencies and media to create the kind of meaningful, two-way dialog that will “activate” customers.

This report is essentially analysis of the fall Marketing and Media Ecosystem 2010 report, which I've written about a couple of times previously. While there is nothing startlingly new in the analysis, it is cogent, focused and a good reminder.

A friend commented to me recently that a brand of our acquaintance didn’t seem to have the basics in place. Good point. These are the basics. If your company/your brand doesn’t have them in place your chances of survival in a challenging environment are seriously diminished!

Reputation Monitoring or Brand Management?

In another effort to tie some issues together for my social media students, I’ve just prepared a presentation on Reputation Monitoring and Management. I’m not a PR specialist, but it seems to be an important topic to include in a social media course. In the process of putting this presentation together and focusing primarily on Web 2.0, I learned some things and formed some opinions.

When I began, I had a vague idea that the lines between PR and marketing were blurring. That perspective strengthened as I worked through the story line of this presentation. It seems clear that both disciplines use the same tools, especially for monitoring (listening). They both have responsibilities for managing. Does it make sense to say that the responsibilities of marketing lie in the area of brand management and the responsibilities of PR lie in the area of reputation management? It seems so to me.

Another clear theme that emerged is the large—and growing—effort required to monitor the diverse and ever-growing channels of communication. Just one example is that a year ago, not many of us paid much attention to Twitter. It has grown rapidly as a significant channel with business uses and implications. Even I have TweetBeeps set up for myself and for the organization I work with.

In my recent posts on metrics I recommended using behavioral metrics from the platforms themselves in the absence of integrated metrics solutions. I started on reputation management from the same perspective. I quickly realized, however, that the issue is different. As much as we look forward to metrics that integrate social platforms, metrics are by definition aggregations. Monitoring requires assessing individual communications; aggregations are relevant in the same way.

The more I thought about it and the more I looked, the more I began to see a process. The basic idea was confirmed by students who are engaged in monitoring. It’s possible to monitor one or two channels that have relatively low volume in what’s essentially a manual fashion. That could include RSS feeds and filters, but what it implies is a labor-intensive effort to deal with (respond, etc.) to relevant communications and to understand the strategic implications of the stream of communications. As the number of channels and the volume of communications grow, it becomes an impossible task.

The graphic represents a series of steps that make sense for learning and growth in social media channels. The presentation has details on tools available at each step, some examples and an interesting case history of NPR’s transformation to digital PR. The tools are just a representative sample of the many tools available. The issue is a strategic approach to reputation monitoring, not emphasis on the tools themselves.

I liked the metaphor of the ostrich with its head in the sand as the ending. What is being said in the communications ecosystem is being said. We can’t change it. We can, however, listen, deal with issues that arise, and establish relationships with our customers and affinity groups.

Two questions:
1.Can we afford not to do RMM?
2.How can we do it in the most cost- and strategically-effective way?

Your thoughts?