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.

Some characteristics of "Great" feedback management programs

Many organizations today have programs, initiatives and technology (EFM) for gathering and managing customer, employee or other constituency feedback.  As with many new technologies, lots of them haven't received the benefits they expected.  In my opinion this is because they are still doing "research" and not "feedback management".  I think these organizations have simply swapped EFM in for something else they were doing (outsourced market research mostly).  But, haven't changed their feedback approach to "engagement" with customers, employees or other constituents.  As a result, they don't realize their feedback management programs could be giving them a lot more than they get today. 

So how to tell if a feedback management program works well?  My anecdotal thoughts on how to tell if a feedback management program is working:

• Business users clamor for the data coming from the EFM platform and use it, unprompted, to interact with the customers, prospects, partners, employees, etc.  This is especially the case if no "top down" management edicts are required.  If "line" managers, directors and vps want the data, use it and act on it, its probably a good program.
• Processes simply wouldn't function nearly as effectively without the feedback.  Whether it's customer support, lead generation, learning management or anything else, if the objective of the process can't be accomplished without feedback its a sign of "good" feedback management.
• Customers (or other constituencies) get anxious about not being asked for feedback and say so to sales or support people.  This indicates the feedback management program is perceived as valuable by customers.
• Incentives.  If you don't need them to achieve reasonable response rates (25%+), your feedback program is probably delivering value to your constituents and is "good".

In my opinion good feedback management programs have some defining and yet easy-to-evaluate attributes:

• Win-Win.  Good feedback initiatives provide "wins" for everybody involved.  Those providing feedback benefit by doing so as much, or more, than those receiving it. 
• Closed Loops.  Good feedback programs continually "close the loop".  Moreover, it's done on a one-to-one basis. 
• Time investment.  Organizations with good feedback management programs invest substantial amounts of staff time to respond individually to each person giving them feedback. 
• Expectations met. All feedback gathering activity (as opposed to research) creates some  expectation of action or dialogue.  Good feedback initiatives take this into consideration and ensure any expectations are met. 

If you aren't sure about the benefits your feedback management initiative is generating, it's easy to ask some pertinent questions: Does your customer "win" by giving you feedback?  Are you always closing loops? Does your staff invest time regularly to respond to feedback?  Are you meeting the expectations your respondents have for follow up (are you closing the loop in the right way)?

The benefits of doing feedback management "right" are compelling, with increased profitability typically accruing to organizations that do it well.  It seems to me that more organizations could be doing it well using these simple guideposts.

More on Operationalized Research

In my last post I talked about concept, and reality, of operationalized research and how it's changing the EFM marketplace.  But I was a bit disjointed in my presentation.  So, I thought a little  clarification was in order.

The key concept: The more rapidly an insight can be discovered and acted upon, the more valuable the discovery/actioneering mechanism is.  My contention is that EFM tools that automate insight discovery and action processes are more "valuable" to a business than those that require manual intervention in insight discovery or insight action-eering.

I closed the post with the statement: "By applying operationalized research capabilities to social media based feedback, businesses will be able to accelerate their understanding of prospects, customers and markets".  My thought was that speed of insight discovery and action-eering is even more important when the feedback source is a social media channel.

As many of my customers can attest, I've been very exited about QuestBack's new ability to implement it's Ask & Act process on Facebook based feedback (More info on QuestBack Social Insight).  Businesses that use QuestBack to implement "Act" processes on Facebook  feedback can designate staff to receive "rules" based insights using QuestBack surveys running inside Facebook via a Facebook application.  Those people can then immediately act on those insights with actions taken being delivered via Facebook messaging or e-mail. 

The words "research" and "operational" are not typically used in conjunction.  They in fact connote different processes.  But, QuestBack, and to be fair, a few other EFM vendors have succeeded in developing solutions that allow research to be "operationalized" using social media.  Businesses or membership organizations with Facebook strategies could benefit from deploying this kind of solution, as it will help them utilize staff more effectively, respond more rapidly to issues and opportunities in their markets and promote their responsiveness to customers.

Operational Feedback as Strategic Input

I've been posting recently on the topic of Operationalizing Market Research.  My focus has been on how research approaches and techniques can be applied to generating operationally significant insights (meaning useful for solving day-to-day business challenges).  In this post, I thought I'd take the opposite perspective and talk about how tactical or operational feedback processes can provide strategically valuable insights.

I work regularly with businesses to help them build and benefit from "closed-loop" stakeholder feedback processes.  In my experience, with my own clients as well as with other organizations where I'm familiar with their feedback management processes, I see the primary goal for feedback being operational in nature. i.e. Specific feedback is desired for a specific purpose.  And granted, much of the value that stems from that feedback, whether customer or employee oriented, is tactically useful, identifying a need for some type of short-term response and providing enough data to contextualize the action required.

Yet, I believe that operational feedback, if correctly designed and implemented, can and should be a strategic input too.  Take for instance customer satisfaction surveys.  In C-Sat surveys, lots of operational data is collected, disseminated and acted on, usually by account managers or customer support, with action triggers being based on responses to satisfaction or loyalty questions.  In C-Sat surveys other questions normally are asked about "drivers" loyalty or satisfaction. Product or service "quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value" or other characteristics are asked about so as to provide context regarding possible reasons for a satisfaction or loyalty rating.  This additional contextual data provides the required insight about customer issues or opportunities that dictate how a response to feedback should be formulated and implemented at an operational level.  However, in this example, the operational feedback becomes strategically valuable if two things occur:

1. Feedback data on "product/service quality", "effectiveness vs. competition", "value", etc. is connected with customer information like "account category", "industry", "geography", etc. 
2. If feedback data is gathered (and connected) regularly over time.

By doing these two things with operational feedback, strategic insights result.  For instance, "unsatisfied customers" can become "unsatisfied large customers in industry A and geography B who find "quality" to be poor, "competitiveness" neutral and "value" low.  Though there is operational insight in this example (we need to talk to these customers right now!), if this data were to persist over multiple survey cycles and across more industries or geographies, a strategic challenge (or challenges) would be highlighted. i.e. Are we marketing to the right customers? Are we devoting the right mix of resources to the Product or Service we sell?  Etc.

Strategic insights have long been the province of market research organizations.  With the broad deployment of EFM tools for operational feedback, data is now being collected on an operational basis that with a small amount of effort can be transformed into a strategic input to be used by senior management.  All that has to happen is for companies to pay attention to it.  And, use products like QuestBack that facilitate the transformation.