Text Analysis Makes Surveys Better

Text analytics really is becoming "Good enough" to change the way we collect feedback.

Until recently, Enterprise Feedback Management systems have been mainly web-survey based technology without integrated text analysis capability. Text analysis vendors emerged and made claims that their analytics could replace customer surveys. I've argued that Text Analysis alone couldn't provide the depth of insight and ability to formulate actions that a well designed survey provides. Yet, I've also made the case for text analysis as a means to provide qualitative context to survey results. And, that it therefore is a useful tool for helping to manage customer feedback. 

 

Societal and technology changes, particularly the time pressures people face, the increased complexity of daily life and the ubiquity of mobile devices with internet access, I believe, are forcing feedback professionals to consider alternatives to exhaustive (and lengthy) customer surveys. Survey response rates have been in decline. And, companies have reacted by moving to shorter surveys, making up for the lack of survey insights by doing more with analytics of all kinds. Concurrently, text analysis technology has become more capable. This has enabled the increased use of open answer questions in surveys, typically replacing multiple attribute oriented questions with single open answer questions. 

 

Trends and technology, I believe, now make Text Analysis a key component in any larger effort aimed at managing customer feedback. That said, I still think text analysis is most effective when applied to survey based verbatim text. Readers of this blog know that I use Etuma360 (www.etuma.com). And, having used it to evaluate survey verbatim text on several data sets, I’m now of the opinion that text analysis has the potential to substantially change how we do customer feedback.

 

For instance, in most customer surveys, we try to carefully design question sets that help customers tell us about various attributes of our product or services offerings. For firms with lots of products or services this often makes for cumbersome and complex customer survey projects with lots of back-end analysis work needed to get to actionable results. Needless to say customers today don't want to spend the time required answering all the questions we want to have answered. And, as importantly, executives today don't want to spend money on surveys that may take weeks or months to garner insights from. 

 

So, what to do? Obviously, without customer feedback data there can't be any actionable customer insights. We need an approach to customer feedback that is both powerful, yet concise. Text analysis helps us get to that place.

Figure 1 - Example Etuma360 Topic with Sentiment list

The chart above comes from verbatim text responses in a survey (using the net promoter question) I did for a local soccer club. The text analyzed came from a question asking for “any additional feedback” the customer wanted to supply, at the end of the survey. The survey asked specific questions regarding product / service attributes. In this case, asking about things like coaching, communication, venues, etc. When I examine the topics identified via text analysis, they look a lot like the topics we identified as needing survey question based input. If I had designed the survey to ask for open answer feedback specific to customer’s experiences, I think the text analysis results would have been even more closely aligned with the product/service attributes we were interested in.

Text analysis tools also provide additional analysis capability (Etuma360 does anyway). For instance, Etuma has the ability to compare topic / sentiment for different groups within the survey using background variables to filter open answers. This generates data that closely aligns with loyalty drivers and provides a measure of each topic’s relative value to selected customer subsets. For companies with customer behavior data (revenue tier, tenure, etc.) embedded as background variables in their surveys, even more granular insights can be generated. The example below shows a topic comparison of the data presented in Figure 1, filtered by “Promoters”. Getting this data was easy using Etuma360 in combination with QuestBack. More importantly, these insights can generate in real time, without weeks of analysis work, so executives can see and act on them quickly. 

Figure 2- Example Etuma360 based Topic / Sentiment Distribution filtered for “Promoters”

Companies today have to deal with the reality that their customers want their time respected and their feedback to be heard.  Asking for 5 or 10 minutes to collect feedback a couple times per year is about all they are willing or able to give.  Using EFM systems that employ web surveys and background data in conjunction with text analysis helps maximize action taking and insight discovery while minimizing the time commitment required of the customer.  

This seems like a combination that most companies want.  With QuestBack and Etuma, it seems to me that they can get it at a very reasonable cost.

If you are interested in trying Etuma360 they have a free trial program just Click Here.  QuestBack does too.  E-mail me if interested.

Stewart Nash
stew.nash2010@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash .

 

 

Etuma Text Analytics in Action

I've posted a couple of times over the last several months about Etuma360 and it's unique combination of powerful analytics, ease of use and low cost.  But, like many new applications that deal with often proprietary customer data, Etuma360 is hard to demonstrate as customers are typically unwilling to let their data be seen by people outside the company. 

Interestingly, Etuma has come up with an application that is entirely open to the world and which is  evaluating text inputs on a real-time basis.  The US Presidential Election.  Etuma has linked into the presidential campaign's Facebook pages for both President Obama and Presidential challenger Mitt Romney.  They have created web site that displays the results of their data analysis.  It's called "The BaraMitter".  The website is:  www.baramitter.com.

The website shows topic and sentiment analysis running for both campaign's FaceBook pages.  It's pretty interesting.  And, it's a good way to see an example of how Etuma360 can work using Facebook data feeds.  In addition, the website offers commentary about the analysis and advice on how to interpret the insights being displayed.  Fortunately, no political analysis is offered.

I encourage readers to take a look. 

If you are interested in trying Etuma360 they have a free trial program just Click Here

Stewart Nash
stew.nash2010@gmail.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
 

Next Generation VOC - Some comments on Temkin's recent report

I've just recently finished reading Temkin Group's new research report titled: "Prepare For Next Generation Voice of the Customer Programs".  It's an interesting read and worth spending a few bucks on ($195.00).  Anyone interested can purchase it at www.temkin.com.   After reading the report, I found myself agreeing with a lot of it.  I also wasn't surprised by many of the points Temkin makes.  Being in the business of selling and supporting feedback management tools, I help customers develop action oriented feedback programs all the time.  So, I see many of Temkin's VOC challenges and opportunities on a daily basis.

The report's main thrust is that businesses are getting less benefits from their current Voice of the Customer programs than they should be.  Temkin cites one main reason for this: A lack of action taking based on VOC.  He points out that current VOC practices divert resources and attention from VOC's real value (its usefulness in improving customer experience)  He specifically talks to three things that VOC efforts are too heavily weighted towards:

• Market research, relying on large annual customer surveys
• Management presentation of aggregated data (things like metrics and dashboards)
• Data analysis (In another life we called it analysis paralysis)

Most importantly, Temkin contends that Next Generation VOC programs will be much more focused on feedback based action.  He also notes that:

• VOC programs will have to incorporate more unstructured feedback sources (things like Facebook, Zendesk, Twitter, etc.)
• They will need to integrate customer feedback (however sourced) with CRM databases
• Organizations will have to shift over to Customer Insight and Action platforms (Systems Like QuestBack, EasyResearch and Listen & Act among others).

The following chart comes from an Aberdeen Research report I came across earlier this year.  I include it here because it demonstrates how acting on feedback builds value into customer feedback processes.  Clearly, Temkin isn't the only researcher seeing the shift in VOC best practice to more action orientation.

 

As I mentioned earlier, for folks like myself, Temkin's observations are not at all surprising.   I see companies with all the VOC issues he cites.  His insights are accurate, in my view, and correspond to what I see day-to-day. 

In fairness to large companies, when viewed at an enterprise level, VOC is tremendously difficult to boil down operationally, except within very defined silos (customer support, for instance). The ability to route customer specific feedback, either structured or unstructured, to a "person" like a product manager, account executive, third party representative (a reseller for instance) or someone else in a business composed of thousands of employees, hundreds of resellers, dozens of product managers, etc. is not simple nor necessarily easy. 

In my experience, when looked at more granularly, VOC is a lot easier to deal with and take actions on.  For instance, at a departmental level, the number of different paths customer feedback can take before finding a person is limited, it might be limited to only a few people.  So, implementing action oriented VOC doesn't need to be necessarily difficult.

I think it's wonderful that an insightful analyst like Bruce Temkin is promoting the concept of feedback based action taking while de-emphasizing the "Research" orientation that many feedback management initiatives adopt.  At QuestBack, we've been flogging the Ask&Act, and now Listen&Act, processes for many years.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

 

Maximizing Super Promoter Impact

I've recently been active on the topic of Super Promoters and the value they offer for businesses.  My earlier posts were mostly about finding out who super promoters are and the value they bring.  In my opinion super promoters bring value in two distinct ways.  They recommend a lot, bringing in new prospects.  And, they do things for you, either absorbing costs or contributing more revenue, that help you be more profitable as a business.  I believe most businesses have super promoters.  But, that they struggle with finding them and what to do to create new ones (or both).  Neither do most businesses know how to activate their super promoters.  Since my earlier posts were mostly about finding super promoters, I thought I would delve a little deeper into how to create more super promoters as well as how to "activate" the ones you may already have.

I've defined Super Promoters as "promoters who recommend a lot more than the average promoter". Other people who study customer advocacy have concluded that super promoters should also be "influential" with your customers and be demonstrably more profitable for your business.  I tend to believe that super promoters are likely to be influencial generally and are already provably more profitable.  So, I don't really believe in expending lots of energy, money and time studying your customers for "influentialness" or "profits" in order to identify super promoters.  Though, admittedly, there other good reasons to why you might want to study customers for those data points.  And, if you have customer influence or customer profit data, marrying it with results of a net promoter survey can't but help with the identification of super promoters.  Also, if you have a lot of promoters, the additional data could help you determine where to start with your super promoter activation program.

Finding Super Promoters.

My earlier blog post talked primarily about how to find super promoters and why you should know who they are.  So, I will only summarize the process here.  I've used a two question sequence:  The "likely to recommend" question followed by an additional question, "How often have you recommended in the last year", which is delivered only to promoters (9s and 10s on the "likely to recommend" question).  In my earlier post I arbitrarily assigned super promoter status to promoters who reported recommending ten or more times over the preceding year.  For your business the number may be different and its something to think about before asking the question.  My earlier blog post can be found here if you would like read it.

Creating Super Promoters

For many smaller and mid-sized businesses it seems to me that creating super promoters is the simplest and easiest way to create organic business growth as well as to build the basis for a marketing campaign that helps you go from a smaller to a larger business.

In my experience promoters require two things in order to become super promoters.  First, an opportunity to make recommendations.  And second, a triggering event that causes them to actually recommend.  Therefore, if you want to create super promoters you need to find ways to give your promoters opportunities to recommend and then to trigger events that spur the recommendation.  Big companies often do this kind of thing haphazardly by, for instance, inviting all their customers and prospects to company-wide user conferences.  These firms often feature super promoters in presentations, but have detractors (and promoters too, to be fair) mingling with prospects the rest of the time.  If you have lots of detractors amongst your customers this could have unintended consequences, as promotion triggering events (i.e. people meeting and talking) are mainly accidental.  Meaning that a prospect might talk with a detractor as easily as a promoter.

Making promoters into super promoters doesn't have to be an accidental process, nor does it have to be difficult to do.  Here are some thoughts:

• Invite your promoters to attend events that your prospects attend.  Make it free for them (its already likely to be free for prospects).  Give them special badges that identify them as somehow "knowledgeable" in ways that will appeal to prospects.  Then just let them mingle with prospects.
• Organize a special access on-line community just for your promoters.  Incentivize them to participate in the community.  Then, let targeted prospects ask questions of them as a group.  Promoters will become super promoters by making recommendations on-line.
• Reward your promoters.  Give them things they value at irregular intervals (provide them with an unanticipated moment of delight).  If you do, many of them will promote more (becoming super promoters).  An anecdote:  I'm a member of American Airlines Advantage program and have lots of AA miles to my credit.  I used to fly a lot, and when I'd check-in an agent would occasionally upgrade me to first class or give me an upgrade certificate to a future first or business class upgrade.  As you can imagine, after they had done that a couple of times, I became very loyal to AA.  Importantly, I'd tell my friends about how great AA was to me. 
• Use a Blog.  Send it to everyone, but only allow promoters to make comments (or at least un-monitored comments).  When promoters comment, if appropriate, tweet their their comments.  This will engage other promoters and will spur re-tweets that many prospects will see.

This isn't an exhaustive list of ways to create super promoters.  But, the point is that by engaging with your promoters in multiple ways you can offer them more opportunities to promote and trigger events by which they might recommend.  Thus, making them more likely to become super promoters.

Activating Super Promoters

The process for activating super promoters is the same as for creating super promoters.  But, super promoters should be engaged with at a deeper level than that for promoters.  For instance, super promoters should be:

• Asked to create blog posts (not just comment) on your company blog. 
• Put on the company's customer reference list.
• Invited to write articles in customer communications vehicles like newletters
• Invited to participate in prospect oriented marketing like webinars or user group meetings. 
• Asked to have their stories developed into abstracts for use by media outlets who want perspective on topics they are knowledgeable about.

None of this is new from a marketing perspective.  What is new is that these opportunities be offered to your super promoters, not just to your biggest customers.  Again, if you have lots of promoters you may want screen them for desirable account characteristics first, but the point is to do everything you can to push promoters and especially super promoters into contact with prospects.


Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to try QuestBack

Text Analysis as a Service - Low Cost, Highly Consistent Analysis

I have long wondered if there is a market opportunity for "one off" Text Analysis projects that utilize automated solutions.  It seems to me that the benefits of automated text analysis are equally valid at smaller sample sizes than the 10-20,000 verbatim comments per month that most Text Analysis vendors need to make the ROI to work. 

So, I have decided to try and test my theory by offering automated Text Analysis to the market as a service.

The service will essentially allow anyone with a customer, employee, partner or other survey to send in an MS Excel file and receive back a report detailing topics and associated sentiment for a given set of survey verbatims.  I'll also also be able to generate some number of filtered data subsets, based on background variables, whereby a topic / sentiment analysis on verbatims could be generated for a subset of a company's verbatims such as, for instance, "Detractors" or "Promoters" in an NPS scenario.

Sample Etuma360 Verbatim Analysis

I'm looking for a few test accounts that have significant amounts of survey verbatims they'd like to analyze.  My initial pricing model would be $1,000.00 for up to 2500 verbatim comments and $2,000.00 for up to 5000 verbatim comments.  At higher amounts of verbatim comments pricing would be TBD. 

The software that I use (Etuma) has a series of industry specific templates designed to easily interpret verbatim comments from customers, employees and others.  So, no set up is required to analyze the data. 

If anyone is interested in trying out the service you can contact me at: stew.nash2010@gmail.com.  Or you can click on the link below for a contact form and I will reach out to you after you complete it.  For the contact form Click Here.

Examples of the kind of report data that will come back from the service can be accessed at www.etuma.com.  I will provide specific examples as part of each engagement.

More Consolidation in the EFM space

A little over a year ago I wrote a piece on the consolidation occurring in the EFM market.  Just prior to the post being written QuestBack had announced the acquisition of Global Park, Germany's largest EFM player.  The subject of the post was the acquisition of Vovici by Verint a large vendor of contact center solutions.  The post I wrote can be found here.

Since July of last year SurveyMonkey has made two important transactions.  First acquiring a 50% stake in ClickTools, a UK based EFM vendor.  And, second the acquisition of the Zoomerang and Panels businesses from MarketTools. 

And, yesterday, MarketTools took the additional step of selling it's remaining EFM business -CustomerSat - to ConfirmIt, of Oslo Norway.  Consolidation in the EFM space is clearly continuing.  I expect more to come. 

So what is the rationale behind all this merger activity?  I have some thoughts and opinions....

Thought #1.  The EFM space is getting crowded at the top end of the market.  Gartner, Forrester, Aberdeen and others have been beating the drum for Enterprise Feedback Management for a long time, at least five years by my count.  Since most of the EFM vendors focus their efforts on selling to  "Enterprise" class customers, as time has passed more of them have adopted solutions, leaving less growth available to the rest of the players.  Hence, acquisitions of high-end products.

Thought #2.  Serving the small and mid-tier customer segments normally requires that companies have either scale or distribution in order to effectively market.  SurveyMonkey has scale, QuestBack has distribution (I'm a QB reseller), Vovici has partnerships (Oracle in particular) and ConfirmIt now has scale at the high end of the market. 

Thought #3.  Many of the smaller players in the EFM market have neither scale nor distribution.  They have to rely on organic growth while competing with larger, better funded and more effectively structured companies.  It is amongst this group of companies that I expect to see further consolidations.  Some companies on the list:  Qualtrics, Medallia, Satmetrix, Allegiance, SNAP surveys and KeySurveys.  These firms serve Enterprise customers or mid-tier customers using a direct sales or assisted direct sales model.  They could all use more scale, more distribution or both.

All markets undergo consolidation eventually as they mature.  EFM is maturing and so is consolidating. 

Stewart Nash - stew.nash2010@gmail.com





 

Another "Super Promoter" discussion

In my last post I discussed an example of "Super promoters".   People who are both "promoters" in the net promoter context and who "report recommending a lot more" than the average promoter does. In the example I cited, a soccer club, "super promoters" also exhibited other value adding characteristics to the organization, making them very valuable to the organization in a number of dimensions.

Earlier today, in the "Customer Experience Professionals" forum on LinkedIn I saw a post on Customer Advocacy citing a recent study by Market Probe on Bank customers: "2012 Retail Banking Customer Advocacy Monitor".   To read the Market Probe's blog post Click here:

The folks at Market Probe use a term called "Advocates".  I equate "Advocates" to "super promoters". They define Customer Advocacy as:

"Customer Advocacy is a metric involving two constructs: (a) Reports of Recent Expressive Behaviors - How often a customer has recently made positive or negative statements about their bank to others, and (b) Attitudes – The emotional response to their bank that fuels or powers this expressive behavior. Rather than stop at hypothetically-asking a customer their likelihood to recommend, we go beyond that and ask how many times have they spoken positively or negatively about their bank."

The two things Market Probe is measuring: emotional attachment and recommendation behavior seem to be very similar what I'm measuring using the "likely to recommend" question (emotional attachment) and the "how of often have you recommended" question (recommendation behavior).

I don't know Market Probe's entire methodology, so I'm not sure what questions they are asking to determine emotional attachment.  But, it seems to me that for organizations seeking a simple way to get to the same place, the two questions I've used may work.

I encourage readers to look at Market Probe's research on Advocates. The article in their blog I reference above has a lot of good information in it about how Advocates add value in the form of providing better profits and higher revenues to the business (retail banks in this case).

Stewart Nash - stew.nash@gmail.com
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to try QuestBack

A "Super Promoter" Example

When promoters are really active, good things happen

Proponents of NPS (which I am one) argue that by increasing the number of customers who are "likely to recommend" you, your business will prosper.  They also argue that by focusing on increasing the numbers of an often indeterminate class of promoters who both recommend and provide "good" profits, businesses can generate out-sized growth over time.  I believe in this approach.  But often, I think businesses struggle with defining the characteristics of these extra profitable highly loyal customers - their "Super promoters".

In my own experience with NPS I have seen that promoters are found within all classes of customer profitability.  So, determining which groups to focus extra effort on often isn't easy, especially if the customer base being evaluated is large and diverse along product, business unit, revenue or other categories.  Knowing these challenges, I've always looked for an easier way to identify customer groups to focus on.  I think I may have found one.  I'll call it the "Super promoter" question: "How many times have you recommended [company] in the last year". 

I have a great example to share about the use of this question.  I just can't divulge the organization's name.

For the last two years I've been working with a fairly large local soccer club on their annual membership survey.  We ask a number of questions regarding people's experiences in the program, the coaching their kids are getting, the skill development they observe in their kids and their affinity with the club and it sponsors. And:

• We've asked club members the Net Promoter question: "How likely would you be to recommend [Club] to your colleagues and friends". 
• We also asked just "promoters" a follow up question: "How many times have you recommended [Club] in the last year".  Response options included: Never, 1-3, 4-7,8-10 and more than 10 times.

I looked at those promoters who recommended "more than 10 times" in the last year.   They were this organizations' "Super promoters".   It's my opinion that the growth this soccer club has experienced is to a large degree based on the recommendation activity of these "Super promoters".  But, more importantly, when comparing survey responses of "Super Promoters" to those of other club members (both "regular" promoters and the average of all respondents), "Super Promoters" exhibit substantially more loyalty across a range of value categories.  For instance, they are more likely to:

• Wear gear from the club's sponsor
• Be interested in becoming a team or club sponsor themselves
• Be interested in becoming a "Host" to one of the club's coaches (important as each hosted coach doesn't require a rent allowance as part of their pay). 

All of these metrics indicate a willingness to "add value" for the club, beyond just paying the club's (substantial) tuition fees.

Two other very interesting factoids stood out in this club's survey response data:

1. "Super Promoters" for this organization are more likely to be key influencers of other people (2/3 of them are town-based soccer coaches).  Clearly, when town coaches recommend a club, parents naturally consider that club for their kids.  This effect is clearly benefitting this club.
2. "Super promoters" report "Major improvement in their kids skills" at much higher rates than do other members.  Since the club's mission is player skill development, these members appear to be reacting very positively to the achievement of that mission for their kids.  And, it reinforces their recommendation by the increased skill sets their kids demonstrate in town games, in front of other parents.

This soccer club has grown substantially year-over-year.  It seems clear to me that recommendation activity of "Super Promoters" is driving much of that growth.  As a group "Super promoters", by my estimate, are responsible for roughly 35% of all recommendation activity made by all promoters. Since for this organization, "Super promoters" are influential to begin with, it's my guess that their recommendations had a very high impact on overall growth in club membership.

The "Super Promoter" lesson 1 - Identify and Engage them

The lesson from this club's survey data is that their "Super promoters" have an outsized impact on getting prospective customers to engage with them.  Organizations, and especially those seeking to grow by word-of-mouth, therefore should try to identify their "Super promoters" and get them engaged with other prospective customers.  For this organization, engagement with other potential customers is a natural consequence of their proximity with, and influence over, other prospective customers (both parents and kids).  Since most businesses don't have this natural mechanism for promoting engagement, the challenge is one of assisting "Super promoters" to engage with other potential customers in ways that will influence them to buy from that business.

The "Super Promoter" lesson 2 - Market to other potential "Super Promoters"

For this organization the "Super promoter" question easily identified the key group of potential customers to focus on.  Town program coaches.  Now, conceivably, a "super promoter" question wasn't necessary to figure out that developing affinities with town soccer coaches is key to generating recommendation activity.  But, it's my belief that "super promoter" customer characteristics will often be pretty easy to identify and leverage without a lot of expensive consulting and analysis.  By comparing "Super promoter's" survey responses with other customer responses, characteristics of "Super promoters" should almost self identify in the data. 

A couple thoughts on how to engage with "Super promoters":

I believe that for most businesses social media is the most suitable mechanism for engaging with their "Super promoters".  Once identified, I believe "Super promoters" can be stimulated to recommendation behavior in a number of ways.  Obviously, incentives are one way.  Others potentially include:

• "Liking" things they say on your Facebook page or websiet
• "tweeting" their posts on your website, Facebook page, LinkedIn forum, etc.
• Interviewing them on-line via chat sessions (what do like most about [company]) and re-posting (with permission) the conversation elsewhere
• Soliciting their input on blog posts, tweeting and liking what they say
• Setting up LinkedIn forums for them to engage with you via questions and tweeting, liking, etc.,  good comments.

Doing this kind of thing regularly would - in my opinion - generate lots of engagement between "Super promoters" and other potential customers, including other potential super promoters.

 A couple of notes:

For this soccer club, the "Super promoter" question characteristics were developed in completely arbitrary way.  "More than 10 times" might be too many for your company, or too few.  I thought about writing this article a year ago when I first noticed the correlation between high amounts of recommendation activity and high "value add" to the soccer club.  But, I wanted more than one year's data before discussing it.  My theory being, that some level of high reported recommendation activity will define an organization's "Super promoters".  And. that those customers can then be leveraged for business success.

I'd love to hear other people's comments on this.  Anyone wishing to dialogue with me privately can reach me at stew.nash2010@gmail.com

Stewart Nash
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to Try QuestBack

Tapping the business value of Facebook Fans

QuestBack has recently published a new white paper entitled: "Tapping the potential of Facebook Fan pages".  I've had quick read of it earlier today and I think it wll be really helpful for companies to understand their social media marketing challenge as well as how to ascertain and leverage the business value of their Facebook pages. 

Here's an except from the whitepaper discussing the challenge companies face with extracting insights from their facebook fans:

In many cases, questions such as the following remain unanswered:

• Who are my fans?
• What do they think of our brand?
• Are they really in our target group or did they perhaps merely become a (pseudo) fan to enter a sweepstakes?
• What is the difference between fans and "traditional" customers?
• How can I specifically engage with really valuable fan groups – such as brand ambassadors or as a source of creative ideas?

In order to answer these questions, marketing and social media professionals need to gain insight into the intellectual and emotional world of their brand fans. Brands have to understand what makes their fans tick.

A marketing investment in Facebook cannot be assessed, successfully managed, or shaped to create value in the long term until these questions have been satisfactorily answered. And only on the basis of this information will it be possible to determine standard marketing metrics, such as loyalty, purchase intention, purchasing power, the relevant set, and – a crucial factor in the social Web – the willingness to recommend, or the net promoter score (NPS).

Anyway, lots of good information, including examples of QuestBack customers getting business value from QB solutions applied to their Facebook pages.

To get a copy you'll have go through QuestBack's web site.  Click here to get a copy.

Multi-Language Topic and Sentiment Analysis at very low cost

I've recently written about a low-cost yet very powerful text analysis solution called Etuma360.  Etuma360 is designed and optimized for customer and employee verbatim feedback and can simultaneously analyze such feedback in English plus nine other European languages.  And, will then generate single language reporting from the results.  Etuma360's analysis is highly accurate, very fast and it's an easy-to-use solution.  To read more about it see my blog post from March 27th here. 

Etuma is a Helsinki, Finland, based company and is looking to acquire some US based customers.  I have offered to help them with the effort.  As an incentive for US companies, Etuma has created a very attractive trial program by which US based customers can get access to the Etuma360 product for a limited time period with some pretty liberal restrictions on the amount of text that can be processed during the trial. 

Cost for an Etuma360 trial is very low.  And, volumes of verbatims processed can be as high as 50,000 individual "chunks" of text.

In my judgement, this program is ideal for any company who has a moderate size to large survey recently completed or in progress.  It seems to me particularly attractive for those kinds of companies collecting multi-language data from both the US and Europe.  In my opinion it's almost guaranteed that companies trying Etuma will save money and speed up their analysis of verbatims while uncovering insights they might otherwise miss.

Etuma360 can take an MS Excel file as an input (it can also plug into facebook, twitter, etc.).  Most web-survey products can generate the output file it needs to rapidly perform an analysis.  Anyone reading this who might be interested in trying out Etuma360 can click this link and begin the process.

Customer Engagement and Social Media

The new customer engagement challenge

Customer engagement is what business is about.  After all, you can't sell something without engaging at some level with customers.   The way engagement happens though, is changing.  It's become more social, more active - both pro, and re, active - if you will.  In my opinion, customers now have much more control over the dialogue.  Driven by technology, dialogues occur when they want them to, on the topics they want to dialogue about.  So, customer engagement today has to be about reacting to customer wants and needs, expressed through dialogues, and stimulating engagement from customers so that we can then react to them.

I believe that for many businesses it's a challenge to incorporate a social media based customer engagement strategy into their existing business processes. The interactive, multi-layered nature of social media is outside of their normal "controlled" process for distributing information.  It also doesn't fit well into their highly process oriented way of doing things.  Many businesses are  accustomed to generally controlling customer dialogues.  Research (Gartner and Forrester) shows that businesses are adopting social media in spite of not understanding it, and mainly because they're being forced to do so by customers.  Most still do not want to embrace social media as a means to grow their businesses.   So, they continue to do what they've done in the past even though it costs more now and is less effective than it used to be. 

Yet, it seems to me that most businesses fundamentally understand the challenges they face as well as the opportunity social media offers for engaging with customers.  They see declining e-mail open and click through rates, increasing lead generation costs, lower survey open and participation rates, etc..  At the same time they see the very rapid growth of social media adoption.  It also seems to me that most businesses haven't determined the optimum approach to engaging with customers via social media.  Nor, how to integrate the information being produced in various social media "channels" into their sales, marketing and support processes. 

As I see it, the challenge of social media integration with sales, marketing and support processes includes four functional elements:

• Gathering all customer initiated data from all the places where they put it
• Sifting through the gathered data so that all the essential insights are identified and categorized
• Making each insight actionable by the right people in the organization
• Ensuring the right action is taken a timely fashion

Addressing the customer engagement challenge - 6 steps

For B2B firms its easy to get started with a customer engagement strategy.  For most businesses, lots of the infrastructure already exists to promote engagement.  In my judgement, doing the six things listed below will help businesses create engagement paths and processes that will help them grow going forward.

1. "Plug" into all the places your customers and prospects go to for information relating to your products or services.  By "plugging in" I mean connect each engagement "channel" with some some analytical process that lets you derive insights from the dialogue taking place.  This could be as simple as manually monitoring a LinkedIn forum for potential leads.  It could be as complex as feeding a text analysis system with all the data coming from your Facebook page.  The dependency is volume of items to look at. More volume means more need for automation.  Easy places to start this process are your customer support forum or Facebook page.  
2. Sift, analyze and categorize the data (in real-time if possible).  In low volume situations this can be done manually.  In high volume situations it requires feedback management technology with verbatim analysis capability.
3. Qualify every "hit" identified through the analysis of verbatims or other social feedback.  In low volume situations, this can be done manually.  In higher volume situations it requires automation, typically a web-survey of some sort, delivered through the channel you are "plugged in" to.
4. Action each item of qualified feedback.  A couple of examples:
   - If a post to a support forum mentions a need for something you offer but that the customer doesn't have, that data has to be sifted out, categorized, qualified, and actioned. 
   - If a LinkedIn forum you monitor identifies a topic area of specific interest to lots of your customers.  That data needs to be extracted, qualified (sales lead, marketing opportunity, potential product idea, etc.) and actioned.  The action might as simple as to assign someone from the company to participate in the dialogue and monitor it further.  It might be to react with a countervailing viewpoint or it might be to try and assess if the topic requires investigation at the customer level via inclusion in some customer survey.  
5. Inter-connect insights and actions.  For instance, if you post articles in forums based on feedback from customers, do it with content that is first posted on your website or blog and then reference the url in your forum post. Tweet the post, reference it in LinkedIn, etc.  This drives traffic to your website or blog and enables web crawlers to find it based on its content and tags.  It also ensures that a larger audience than the forum will see what you said. 
6. Incorporate actions where relevant into business processes.  Data has to get to the people who can act on it and they need to be made aware of the need to act on it, and when. 

Selling and Marketing in the future means more engagement outside of the processes we are all accustomed to using.  Ultimately though, the engagement model should help us develop and maintain more loyal and emotionally connected customers, which is the success driver for most businesses today.

Of social media, text analytics and on-line surveys

Like many people these days, I spend increasing amounts of time using social media.  I visit LinkedIn forums regularly, where I find that other people are asking questions I might ask.  Or, where I am a resource to those asking the questions.  Besides the fact that I occasionally find leads and prospects this way, I find the give and take with people and the exchange of knowledge to be both personally enriching and often professionally useful.  I tweet from time to time too and have a Facebook page.  Given the growth in all manner of social media, lots of folks clearly feel the same way I do.

But for businesses social media is a challenge.  Businesses are typically not equipped to take advantage of social media and appear to be struggling with it.  But, as businesses become more aware of social media and raise their participation in it, they need to understand that they are creating multiple feedback "channels" that all need to be listened to. 

For  instance, today many businesses use on-line panels or communities to collect feedback from designated customer subsets.  But, in the social media world, is a product oriented LinkedIn forum simply a social media based panel or community?  I think the answer is Yes.  The difference is that in LinkedIn or on Facebook, members of the community initiate (and respond to) topic dialogues.  And, the forum or page may be "owned" by some member of the community and not by the company.  Members of the community / forum dialogue on subjects they feel are important or relevant and do it when its important or relevant to them.  Whereas in company directed panels and communities customers mainly react to company initiated dialogues.  So, social media is a different model requiring a different approach to the feedback being generated in the community.

Data flowing in from social media channels can be revealing as to customer needs, wants and issues (especially current ones).  Often, forum posts will illustrate needs for upgraded or enhanced products or services.  Yet, businesses have few options or even mechanisms available to help them organize and use this kind of feedback, with many relying on their people to scan LinkedIn forums and Facebook pages for relevant opportunities or challenges that require action by the business.
Needless to say, vendors of EFM platforms (like QuestBack) have mobilized to help businesses to dissect and analyze this kind of data so that it can be used to the benefit of the business.  Since much of the conversation occurring in social media environments is customer initiated, it's important that businesses have tools that enable "listening".  Many businesses use text analytics to provide this automated listening capability.  I work with a product called Etuma360 and find it very useful in interpreting text based feedback. 

However, pure text based feedback analysis can only take you so far.  In my experience, text analysis results typically need augmentation from more structured feedback - usually survey based - in order to provide actionable insights.  Text analysis can tell you what is happening and if it's good or bad.  But it doesn't tell you who its happening to, why, or if you should do anything about it.  For instance, text analysis might highlight that a problem exists amongst customers.  It typically won't tell you that the problem is within a certain customer subset.  If you have lots of customers, that can be a critical data point that determines how to react.  Being able to quickly deploy a survey into the social media environment that collects respondent profile information provides the additional insight needed to generate action at the business level.

Businesses therefore need to use social media, text analytics and survey technologies together to interpret dialogue, understand its meaning and provide insight into how to act.  Potentially a tall order.  But the technology is getting there.  Stay tuned.

Benefits of EFM compared to web survey tools

Why you shouldn't "monkey" around with your customer's survey feedback.

I've encountered many companies who use inexpensive web-survey tools in their customer feedback initiatives.  These people are always interested in the added capabilities offered by EFM versus their web-survey solutions.  But, on balance they are skeptical about spending money to achieve the added benefits an EFM based approach and tool offers.  So, I thought it would add some value to the discussion to revisit EFM's value proposition versus web-survey tools.

Admittedly, some web-based EFM products cost a lot of money.  Some cost many thousands of dollars per year.  However, others (like QuestBack) are priced so that smaller businesses can afford them.  Point is: there's a wide range of EFM price points.  But, almost always, if used for customer feedback it's highly likely that their all-in cost of ownership is lower than the cheap web survey tool.  Needless to say, there are dependencies when calculating EFM's benefits versus survey tools.  Customer lifetime value, customer churn rates, customer acquisition cost, win-back cost, etc., have to be considered.  Of course, they should be part of the calculation because if you are doing customer feedback it's probably because you want preserve or improve customer relationships, reduce churn, lower customer acquisition cost, etc.

A couple of EFM benefit calculation scenarios (there are many others):

What is the value of a lost customer?  If your customers have high "lifetime" value, the cost of losing just one customer is high (by definition) and thus painful.  Losing one because your cheap web survey tool couldn't automatically notify an account manager of an issue after receiving feedback raises the cost of that cheap web survey tool by the value of the account you lost.  Losing multiple accounts because of a "follow-up gap" compounds the cost.  My belief is that companies with customer lifetime values above five thousand dollars should be using some kind of EFM approach and tool.  If your company meets this test and does customer feedback using one of the cheap web-survey tools out there, I'd suggest you are almost certainly and unnecessarily losing customers that you might not have to lose.

What is the cost of pursuing the wrong opportunity?  Suffice to say, companies with long, complex sales cycles have to test their opportunities periodically for alignment to customer needs, budgets, technology environments, etc..  Often this is done through account reviews or occasionally it is outsourced to an agency as a form of market research.  But, if your company supports opportunity analysis using a web-survey process you are likely missing opportunities to react quickly to changes in customer needs during the sales cycle and spending money (and FTE time) where you shouldn't.

EFM's Value Add
EFM guarantees that a person (or persons) in your company will be automatically tasked with reacting to feedback from a customer person who provided that feedback.  Web survey tools don't enable this.  The value add of EFM comes from the action taking this enables. 

Other EFM Benefits:

In addition to action-ability, EFM tools offer other capabilities to find and use insights that surface from customer feedback.  EFM tools have built-in analytical, reporting and dashboard tools that allow group level customer insights to be quickly identified and distributed to the managers or teams in your company that need them.  This is often done in real-time (Something QuestBack makes possible).  In contrast web survey tools tend to simply push data out to other systems (MS EXCEL anyone?).  Where a person has to then build the analyses and reports.  An inefficient, expensive and unnecessary use of FTE time.  And, often an overlooked cost of web-survey tools.

At the end of the day...
You shouldn't monkey around with your customer's feedback. It could be dangerous to your company's health.  Web-survey tools have much higher costs than their license fees.  And, they don't actually resolve your needs for timely and action-able customer feedback.

If you would like to learn more about me or QuestBack my LinkedIn profile is:
http://www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
Click Here to Try QuestBack

Etuma Text Analysis - Cloud based, fast and effective. All at ~$3K / month

A couple of months ago I posted on text analysis vendor Etuma - www.etuma.com   (Click here to read).

At the time, it seemed to me that an affordable, cloud based text analysis solution like Etuma would offer businesses an easy alternative to the expensive, harder to use solutions currently on the market.  And, could potentially broaden the market for text analysis in general, by allowing companies with lower budget thresholds to apply powerful text analysis technology to smaller scale business problems.

As I've become more familiar with Etuma's capabilities and seen it in action, I've been increasingly impressed. For example, I recently loaded an Excel file representing the results of a survey I conducted for a local soccer club.   With no "tuning" of the lexicon and no setup from Etuma, it was able to give me very useful topic and sentiment insights on a data set it had zero experience with. 

Because I loaded the survey results from an Excel file that included all the other (non verbatim) responses, Etuma also immediately allowed me to segment verbatims using the responses to non-verbatim questions as background variables. For instance, I could aggregate verbatims from Promoters, Passives and Detractors and see what topics they were talking about and see how they felt about those topics.  I could then drill down to the actual verbatims in each response "bucket" (Promoter, passive, etc) for further analysis.

Granted, I have some expertise in customer surveying. So, I'm not a total neophyte when it comes to text analysis.  But, by no means do I know anything about programming a text analysis solution and I didn't have to with Etuma.   So, to me, this test showed that people with reasonable experience levels in customer surveying could take Etuma and quickly use it as part of their VOC, Customer Experience or Customer Feedback strategy with very little assistance from Etuma.

Having some understanding of how text analysis solutions are priced today, it is quite remarkable to me that for around $3,000 a month Etuma can process 5, 6 or 7 thousand text items per month, while providing powerful and user friendly tools for data analysis, report design and dashboarding the analyses for business end users. 

For businesses with ongoing customer survey processes (either transactional or relationship) and generating 10-50,000 responses a year (assuming 2-5 verbatims each) text analysis is currently pretty much out of reach due to the cost of the solutions available.  Etuma puts text analysis back into these companies "wheel houses".

If anyone is interested in an Etuma Trial just click here

Anyone who'd like to speak with me about Etuma360 can reach me at: stew.nash2010@mail.com

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash
 

Referrals from Customer Feedback - More impactful than ever

I was talking with a potential new customer recently who articulated a business challenge with their referrals process and was thinking about using a customer feedback based process to help with it going forward.  I had posted on this topic back in 2009 in a post titled: "Revving Up Your Referrals Engine with Customer Feedback"  (Click Here to Read).  After reading through my post, I realized it needed updating based on the changes in technology and culture we've undergone since that time. 

Essentially, changes in technology and culture have made customer referrals an even more potent and high impact source of new business opportunities than they ever were before.  Referrals or Testimonials used to be used by marketers to validate sales claims of capability, reliability or ROI.  In today's business culture "sales" often doesn't get a chance to make any claims until potential buyers have determined capability, reliability and ROI.  Buyers do this by researching on the internet and checking out referrals or testimonials they find before engaging with vendors.  As a result businesses need as many referrals as they can get and need them to be fresh, cogent and widely available to potential buyers doing research via the internet.

My old post discussed five different ways to leverage customer feedback towards building a self refreshing referrals "engine".  

• Identify referral candidates.  They are "promoters", "apostles" or "raving fans".
• Understand a candidate's willingness (and intensity) to engage in your marketing.
• To create actual engagement with referral candidates (via Closed Loop follow up)
• To feed CRM processes with referral information.
• To continuously provide new or refreshed referrals.

Since 2009 technology changes, mobile and social media in particular, have enabled feedback derived referrals to have rapid and powerful business impacts.  Today, it's possible to launch a web survey and immediately start receiving responses from automatically identified potential referral candidates.  Then, using an alert or notification process, to quickly inspect comments for usable remarks.  After selecting referral candidates, permission forms can be automatically  provided to them and, after grant (anonymously or by attribution), their comments "flowed" through to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or a web page.

This process can take a few minutes to a few hours or can almost even be continuous if feedback is implemented via event driven processes such as customer support or through social media itself.  The "time-to-impact" from survey to referral to business value can be very short.

EFM systems (like QuestBack) enable these types of dynamic feedback driven referral processes.  What's remarkable though, is how cost effective this type of referral engine is for businesses.  When I was a "pup" in the marketing world, a referral came about via an interview with a customer followed by a draft write up, an approval by the customer and only then could the it be used in a product brief or as part of a story in a publication.  Each referral cost thousands of dollars to generate and use.  Today, using EFM, a referral can be identified, accessed and deployed to market for a few dollars or maybe tens of dollars.

Why more businesses aren't using EFM in this way surprises me.