Organizing on-line surveys for action taking

People love to give feedback.  But, hate to take surveys. 

I see lots of surveys that start out with "Please give us feedback" or "your opinion is important to us" followed by "click here to take our short survey".  After clicking I get something that indicates the survey will take anywhere from 10-25 minutes to complete".  Like most people I immediately quit the survey.  In my mind, any time commitment beyond 5 minutes makes me a research subject, which I didn't sign up for when I clicked on the survey link.

Because most surveys are designed to collect data and employ longer questionnaires, lots of customer feedback doesn't get collected by companies that want and need it.  Surprisingly to me, even many surveys asking the Net Promoter (likely to recommend) question aren't designed to generate immediate follow up actions. 

What companies should be doing is designing surveys that customers want to take and that have built-in triggering mechanisms for enabling responses to feedback.  In my experience, key constituencies want good relationships and will take time to give feedback when asked, provided the process is respectful of their time and provides a value add (better relationship) for them.  These things become easily achievable with short, follow-up supported surveys.

Feedback surveys should use short questionnaires with 10 or less questions (presented) and a 2-5 minute maximum time commitment.  They should only ask questions that are meaningful to the customer relationship (one reason I like Net Promoter).  They should never ask for information that is already in their databases somewhere.  And, they should always have a follow up process for everyone who takes the survey.  Even if that follow up process comes later on and is general in nature.

How questions are asked should also be taken into consideration when doing feedback surveys.   Here's an example of a typical product oriented satisfaction question done to collect data:

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Here is the same question designed for feedback:

On the surface these two examples look very similar.  Except here the question is followed by a more specific question based upon the answer chosen.  If the answer chosen is:  Very dissatisfied, Somewhat dissatisfied or Neither dissatisfied or satisfied, the customer gets:

You indicated you are less than satisfied with ACME Company Product XYZ please tell us why.  We will contact you shortly by e-mail to follow up.

If the customer indicates Somewhat or Very Satisfied they get:

Please tell us what you like best about ACME Company Product XYZ.   We will contact you shortly by e-mail to follow up.

In addition to triggering a question branch, in the above example, each set of answer alternatives triggers an alert or notification to someone to take follow up action.  In QuestBack we generate an e-mail to a designated person.  In other feedback management systems (and also in QuestBack if needed) triggering is done through a CRM system.  But, in either case, the survey is optimized for feedback because no response or branching is triggered if Not Applicable is selected, and specific questions and triggering are set based on specific answer alternatives. 

Good feedback oriented survey processes should have at least a couple of trigger questions.  One for Loyalty or Advocacy, One for general satisfaction or experience, and possibly one or more based on product or service attributes that can be boiled down to some actionable response.

Surveying key constituencies with a goal of creating dialogue vs. data is a trend not to be ignored.  As people get more mobile and more "Social", surveys will have to be more feedback oriented. And, designing surveys for follow up action is a great way to collect feedback, increase customer dialogue and ultimately build better and more persistent customer relationships.
 

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