This has become a hot topic in the LinkedIn forums I follow as well as in some of the voice-of-the-customer focused media. The headline would lead you to believe that social media based feedback will over time replace customer surveys both for Market Research and Customer Management purposes.
In my opinion, social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys. Here's my logic. When an issue is surfaced via a social media channel, organizations need to answer at least four questions when determining response:
Secondly, surveys and especially web-based customer surveys, simply provide organizations with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being the core feedback management tool for most companies. As EFM technology improves and cost-of-ownership declines this technology will be deployed by more organizations, more often than it is now.
Having said all that, social media is a wonderful new tool for listening to customer (and other constituency) feedback. It allows for the almost immediate gathering of qualitative feedback. Which alone, and when used with survey based feedback, can provide very rich insights. In the absence of structured feedback though, this unstructured form of feedback might just as easily be not valuable, or worse resource consuming while not adding value.
Lastly, it seems to me that social media, because of its interactive nature, could be expensive to rely on as a feedback mechanism. People, after all, have to monitor and act on it (as well as decide how to act), determine if it should be acted on to begin with and potentially do it all quickly at all hours of the day or night.
In the end I think Social media will be additive to the toolset used for listening to customers and creating dialogues with them. What its best uses will eventually be, I think is still an open question.
In my opinion, social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys. Here's my logic. When an issue is surfaced via a social media channel, organizations need to answer at least four questions when determining response:
- What is the issues' potential effect on the business
- What is it's relative importance
- Who owns it
- Who's going to respond
Secondly, surveys and especially web-based customer surveys, simply provide organizations with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being the core feedback management tool for most companies. As EFM technology improves and cost-of-ownership declines this technology will be deployed by more organizations, more often than it is now.
Having said all that, social media is a wonderful new tool for listening to customer (and other constituency) feedback. It allows for the almost immediate gathering of qualitative feedback. Which alone, and when used with survey based feedback, can provide very rich insights. In the absence of structured feedback though, this unstructured form of feedback might just as easily be not valuable, or worse resource consuming while not adding value.
Lastly, it seems to me that social media, because of its interactive nature, could be expensive to rely on as a feedback mechanism. People, after all, have to monitor and act on it (as well as decide how to act), determine if it should be acted on to begin with and potentially do it all quickly at all hours of the day or night.
In the end I think Social media will be additive to the toolset used for listening to customers and creating dialogues with them. What its best uses will eventually be, I think is still an open question.
The classic "survey" may be dead, but the collection of data from all of the customer feedback is important because they're going to be a reference for further improvement. If a business really insist in using a survey to collect customer satisfaction data, then I guess the owner or the researcher just has to make the survey a little more interesting than just the typical "shade here-shade there".
ReplyDeleteI would say that certainly the way surveys are designed will have to change for both research and customer feedback applications. As you say, surveys will need to become more succint, interesting and better targeted in order to maintain their effectiveness in the future.
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