Continuous vs. Episodic Feedback - Continuous is better

I've recently received a number of survey requests. 

The requests are coming from companies that, apparently, are having business "issues" of one kind or another and are looking for feedback to help them address it. The issues range from "low open rates" on electronic content to subscription cancellations to non visitation to websites. 

It's a good thing that these businesses are seeking feedback. And, late is after all, better than never. The feedback these businesses get will help them address the problems they've noted. Though, their remedial actions will come a lot later and as a result be less effective for their businesses than if their feedback programs were continuous in nature. Furthermore, I can't help but think that if these businesses had on-going customer feedback programs, they probably wouldn't be experiencing the issues that created the need for the surveys they're sending out now. 

Continuous customer feedback is known to be better than episodic customer feedback for understanding customer experience. This doesn't mean that periodic relationship surveying isn't necessary. For most businesses, both continuous feedback surveys and relationship surveys are extremely important for understanding the overall health of the customer relationship.

Businesses that continuously collect, analyze and act on customer feedback are able to detect issues before they become widespread. This means that actions can be taken to mitigate or eliminate issues before they impact too many customer relationships. This often reduces direct costs and even more often avoids indirect costs (typically discounts given to "make things right" for customers impacted by issues).

Continuous analysis of feedback to detect trend changes is the key to a feedback program. After all, data is just that without analysis. Analyzing for change in NPS or CSAT scores, topic popularity, topic sentiment changes, etc., gives the Analyst the insights to visualize what issues might be cropping up in the business. The tools for generating these analytical insights are now both available and reasonably priced for most businesses.

I work with QuestBack AS for surveys and Etuma Ltd. for text analytics. Businesses implementing both are able to get continuous feedback process monitoring and analytics.  

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Etuma - Best in Breed Sentiment Analysis

Here's an awesome quote from the Insight Now Blog about Etuma's text analysis solution.

"Arguably the best in breed automated sentiment analysis is provided by Etuma" - Insight Now
Click Here to read the entire blog post from Insight Now

I'm sure its going to generate a lot of discussion on the internet amongst companies using automated text analysis services as well as from vendors in the space.

Sentiment analysis has always been considered the most difficult thing to do when interpreting streams of text based feedback. But, doing it using Etuma, combined with key background variables (like NPS categories or scores) and some "eye ball" time on key sub-sets of comments (Which Etuma also makes easy to do) can give you a very accurate, actionable, picture of what customers or constituencies think about your products, services, systems or actions at different points in time.  That an important research house thinks Etuma is the best automated solution means a lot.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Text Analysis - Understanding Operational Change

I had a very interesting conversation with a customer recently.  The conversation resulted in the customer signing a contract for Etuma's text analysis service (Feedback Categorizer / Insight Portal).  I had been in discussions with this particular customer for a number of months with the dialogue going something like this:

- Customer: We really like Etuma's ability to categorize and sentiment rate our transactional NPS Survey feedback. But, we know what we need to do to improve our NPS scores and we're investing heavily to make lots of those changes. So, we can't justify the time and effort to buy and use Etuma right now.  

- Me: I understand, resources are tight all around and taking them from things you know you need to do, to do things you may need to do can be a difficult sell.  Let's revisit this in a few months when your investment and resource commitments have stabilized a bit. I'll touch bases then.

I've known this particular customer for several years. So, instead of pushing what I knew is good argument for Etuma, I thought it better to just wait until things calmed down for him.  So, what changed?  Why did this customer reach back out to me and decide to acquire Etuma Text Analysis?

The answer of course is simple.  The boss (CFO in this instance) wanted some way of understanding if all the financial and other resources they were investing into "doing the things they need to do to improve" actually were helping them to improve. What happened was this company's NPS scores started rising, which they hoped / expected would happen. But, the question they couldn't answer easily was which of the operational changes they made were driving the change in NPS scores. With Etuma, the changes in feedback, both from a topic perspective and a sentiment perspective, are easily mapped to implementations of operational changes, giving managements a very rapid and correlated understanding of the effects their decisions are having on customers.

Fortunately, implementing Etuma is almost as easy as deciding to buy it. So, getting data on NPS and its changes is a fairly simple matter.  Its great to have another Etuma customer. Its even better to see that corporate management is willing to invest in methods for understanding if their actions are producing the results they seek. Better still for this company, the investment needed to aquire Etuma Text Analysis was very modest.

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Try Etuma for free.  Click Here

The Survey is Dead, Long Live the Survey - Part 2

Four years ago I wrote a post here titled: "The Survey is Dead - Long Live the Survey".  At the time over-surveying was a problem being talked about a great deal in the trade magazines and blogs. Response rates were declining across the market research industry. The argument then was that social media data streams would replace a lot of Surveys.

Fast forward to 2015. I think the exact opposite has occurred. Today, more people are being offered more surveys than ever before. And response rates appear to have stabilized or maybe even gone up.  In 2011, I said that: "social media may actually increase both the frequency as well as the value received from customer surveys". I believe this statement has been proved even more true than I had imagined it would be. But, its been for different reasons. Or, maybe for reasons related to those I had mentioned. I had thought that social media would force businesses to respond to feedback in more real-time ways. And, today many do so, mainly through on-line chat applications. But, almost all electronic methods of communication with businesses today offer some kind of feedback capability. Virtually all of them employ some kind of survey technology to collect and distribute the feedback.

So, In point of fact surveys today are more ubiquitous than ever before.  And the reason is simple, businesses need to know something about the people giving them feedback in order to act on it.  Also true is that transactional and even relationship surveys are even more widely used now than then. Again, for the reasons I had described. They simply provide businesses with too much valuable, actionable feedback (at a very low cost) to stop being a core feedback management tool. What has changed is that surveys are being better designed and are a lot more respectful of people's time than in the past. So more people are willing to take them.

Of course survey technology is improving. Today, many web surveys are Mobile Device Enabled (MDE). MDE surveys appear to generate higher response rates. In my opinion, because people can use their smartphones on the subway, train or bus (or anywhere else that's connected to the internet) to take surveys. Also SMS text messaging can be used to deliver a survey to mobile users, meaning people don't even need e-mail accounts to be reachable anymore. Survey links are embedded in social media now all the time, further extending their potential reach. As a result, survey-able populations are larger. And, with larger populations and higher response rates, its no surprise that more surveying than ever is going on.

A plug for QuestBack.  All QuestBack Essentials surveys are fully MDE. They can be delivered via URL, Email, QR Code, Pop Up Script, embedded in social media or even sent via SMS text.

Surveys aren't dead at all.  They are more alive than ever before, used in more places and for more purposes than ever before and providing more value to businesses than ever before.  Long Live the Survey!

Stewart Nash
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Surveying in support of unsolicited verbatim feedback

I've written a number of posts her focusing on ways to employ outbound processes for soliciting customer feedback. But, by definition, outbound feedback collection requires enough customer knowledge to determine which customers to engage, when to engage them and what topics to try and engage them on. Some of that data can be drawn from CRM databases. But, what about when no solid information exists about a customer?  

In my most recent post I discussed how text analytics can be employed to categorize verbatim feedback from transactional surveys and how this categorized data might then be used to trigger follow on topic driven surveys. This post is going to elaborate on that topic and extend into other arenas where verbatim customer feedback can be analyzed, categorized and potentially used for input to survey processes. 

One important type of unsolicited feedback companies receive is from social media and company websites, where customers visit without being asked to, or are responding to some level of marketing. The feedback businesses get from these sources can be difficult to take action on, unless it is reviewed at the actual comment level. This, of course, takes lots of resource. Text analysis tools are a logical mechanism to employ so as to reduce the manpower needed for follow up. Since topical categorization of social media based feedback is a simple matter today for text analysis systems, using them to create feedback categories is a logical step. However, most verbatim feedback - taken without context of customer data is also hard to act on.  So, surveying subsets of customers based on their topic and sentiment profiles also makes logical sense.  The same way drill down surveys can help with simple transactional feedback (last months post), they can help with understanding unsolicited feedback. 

It seems to me that getting survey questions out to people interacting with social media or survey like data into social data streams would clearly add value to the data. An example of how this might work:
- "Business A" had 10,000 comments come in last month through their web site, where they offered a feedback form with a single NPS question and a verbatim comment box. The 10K comments were run through text analysis. 1000 comments were categorized as referencing "product quality". And, of those, 200 were from "detractors" and 200 from "neutrals". 
- In situations like this, the product management (PM) team would want to try and ascertain if product quality was in fact a driver of NPS score. By sending a follow up survey to this specific group of detractors and neutrals regarding products, company A's PM team can generate further and more detailed data about any product quality issues customers are experiencing. 

The benefit of a process like the one I'm describing above is that it eliminates the need for a person to go through all the "product quality" related feedback to generate the needed information about product quality issues. People taking the follow up survey would provide quantitative data about specifics of product quality. And, the qualitative data in the text would then make a lot more sense. Reacting to feedback using a process like this would help businesses react to the right issues, as well as not over react to non issues.

With more and more customer feedback being unsolicited in nature, its important for businesses to begin thinking about ways to attach specific quantitative data to the streams of text entering their processes.  Adding surveys to text analyses based on results, can help.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash