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.