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.