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Survey Research & Enterprise Feedback Management
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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Jun 29, 2009
 Far and away, the most common objection we hear from organizations considering extending their survey panel into an online community is that community members will hear each other’s negative feedback. When you survey customers, employees or other key constituencies, only the survey administrator sees all the negative comments. When you move to an online community, anyone who logs in can see the negative comments. This is more an opportunity than an issue. In fact, the absolute value of negative feedback is positive. Here’s why: - Criticisms provide authenticity. Imagine, for a moment, that you hosted an online community and never received any bad reviews or comments. Since every organization and its product and services has shortcomings, an online community where those shortcomings were never discussed would seem unauthentic. It would seem like a sham or a marketing exercise, rather than a true community.
- Negative feedback is scarcer than positive feedback. That scarcity makes it worth more. Online communities excel at generating thousands of positive ideas—more ideas than your organization can implement. Negative feedback is rarer than organizations realize and often clusters around key areas that your organization has ignored or handled poorly; negative feedback gives you a chance to prioritize these issues and focus on improving them.
- Negative feedback is actionable. Negative feedback gives you an opportunity to respond. If a customer tells you ten features they want in the next edition of your product or service, there is nothing you can do for them today but to let them know you are listening and building a list. If they complain about a product damaged in shipping, or a mistake on an invoice, or confusion around a feature, you can immediately help them resolve the issue. Quick resolution of these issues demonstrates that your organization listens and cares.
- Better to manage negative feedback on your turf. The fact of the matter is that people are commenting on your organization all over the World Wide Web: on Twitter, on Facebook, on LinkedIn and on the next big social networking site that we haven’t heard of yet. Brand monitoring solutions can catch some of this commentary, but not all of it: many social networks only show designated friends each other’s comments. Right now on Facebook there’s a long discussion going on about why your organization is awful to do business with, and you will never see or be able to respond to that discussion. When the criticism happens on your site, you can instantly read and respond.
For further reading:
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sat, Jun 13, 2009
 Kate Dibben, the Online Communications Officer of Education.au, mentions in passing using “Six Thinking Hats” within communities in her presentation Making Online Communities Work. It’s a good point, worthy of elaboration. If you’ve ever had important conversations in your communities run aground, then you might find the approach useful, especially in smaller private communities. Conversations in online communities, just like conversations around the water cooler, the soccer field or the bar stool, can segue from tangent to tangent to tangent. Oftentimes the journey itself is enjoyable, except when the conversation ends up back where it started, and you’ve made no progress on resolving the issue at hand. Sometimes such conversations are an awkward mix of brainstorming, negativity, new information, misplaced emotion, positive feedback and meta-discussions. This can be especially true in feedback communities, where you’re taught to value the feedback, whatever form it takes. For those times when an issue is being discussed for which you need to put in place an action plan, keep conversations on track by asking participants to take turns wearing the metaphorical Hats. - White Hat – “White is neutral and objective. The white hat is concerned with objective facts and figures.”
- Red Hat – “Red suggests anger (seeing red), rage and emotions. The red hat gives the emotional view.”
- Black Hat – “Black is somber and serious. The black hat is cautious and careful. It points out the weaknesses in an idea.”
- Yellow Hat – “Yellow is sunny and positive. The yellow hat is optimistic and covers hope and positive thinking.”
- Green Hat – “Green is grass, vegetation, and abundant, fertile growth. The green hat indicates creativity and new ideas.”
- Blue Hat – “Blue is cool, and it is also the color of the sky, which is above everything else. The blue hat is concerned with control, the organization of the thinking process, and the use of the other hats.”
A moderator can open a discussion by laying out a sequence through the hats: “We’re going to start by each metaphorically wearing the White Hat and providing information that we have about this feature and how our organization uses it. After that, and only when we are done providing objective information, we will wear the Green Hat and imagine how this feature could be improved. Then we will wear the Yellow Hat and talk about the benefits of the suggestions. Then and only then will we wear the Black Hat and look at the weaknesses of what we’ve talked about. Before we wrap up, we will put on the Red Hat and talk about how the issues we’ve discussed make us feel. Finally, we will wear the Blue Hat and come to a conclusion about what we think our priorities should be.”  As children we were told “to put on our thinking caps”, and De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats provide a simple but useful framework for helping groups think through issues. The Six Thinking Hats can be thought of as traffic cones to help you guide the conversation to its destination. Try it in your online community the next time your discussions need a little structure.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Jun 03, 2009
 Dean Wiltse's first book, Weapons of Mass Collaboration, is now available. In it, Dean demystifies the phenomenon of online communities and explains how businesses can derive lasting benefit from immersion in such communities. He discusses the importance of transforming customer relationships by promoting deeper engagement in a collaborative, online environment.
Dean's market-research experience as CEO of Greenfield Online and Vovici offers him a unique viewpoint on the industry. Leading the merger of WebSurveyor and Perseus into Vovici, Dean championed the need to extend enterprise feedback management into online communities and was the executive sponsor of Vovici Community Builder.
The contents of Weapons of Mass Collaboration include:
- Online Communities Defined: A Different Kind of Neighborhood
- Why Build an Online Community? The Benefits of Holding the Conversation at Your Place
- Doing It the Right Way: Best Practices for Online Communities
- The What? and the Why? The Quantitative/Qualitative Divide
- Bridging the Quantitative/Qualitative Divide Good Things Happen: When "What" Meets "Why"
- Blending Online Communities and Surveys to Create a Weapon of Mass Collaboration: Reaping the rewards of being focused, faster and more-frequent
- Becoming a Feedback Driven Organization: Not if, but when?
The book can now be purchased from Amazon in hard copy. For a limited time, Vovici is making an electronic copy of the book available for free, simply for completing this form.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, May 18, 2009
According to an early peek at the 2009 Tribalization of Business survey, the top two reasons for creating an online community are "market insights/research" and "idea generation". So market research (which includes ideation) has become the most popular reason for organizations to sponsor proprietary communities, yet rarely are organizations turning to online community software built specifically for this purpose.
The Vovici Community Builder is one of the few community platforms designed for gathering market research. A common database coordinates information for panelists and community members across major components:
- Panel Management - By empanelling everyone your organization can email, you can reach beyond just those who participate in your online community to build samples that are more representative of all your customers and prospects.
- Online Surveys - The ability to build and field sophisticated questionnaires to members and nonmembers allow you to conduct detailed, extensive survey research. Community members see the surveys they have been invited to from a pane within the community, while nonmembers receive only email invitations.
- Business Intelligence - Integrating operational data and CRM information enables you to perform sophisticated analysis.
Vovici Community Builder also has the features you would expect in a community platform:
- Customize communities to maintain your corporate identity
- Add, delete, and modify pages, content, and modules using our visual interface-no coding required
- IFrames embed dynamic content from other websites or documents inside your community
- Use a variety of social tools to connect with your audience and understand perceptions, promote co-creation, and keep a pulse on sentiment.
- Forums - collect ideas, opinions and comments with moderated or un-moderated forums
- Suggestion Boxes - gather sentiments and ideas directly from community members
- Multimedia - add images, audio and videos directly into your community
- Blogs - communicate with members and even enable members to post comments
- Events - provide a social calendar where key events can be posted for your members to view
For those community platforms that lack built-in feedback management, the robust API of Vovici v4 can be used to integrate with standing communities to provide the robust market research capabilities that are driving the usage of proprietary communities.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, May 06, 2009
A presentation on the top 10 reasons to build an online community:
View more presentations from Vovici. Also see this related post: The Top Ten Reasons for Building an Online Community in 2009.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 24, 2009
 Most discussions of online communities for feedback involve communities of customers and prospects. Just as important are online communities of employees. Such closed, private communities can offer employers rich insights about workplace conditions and changes in markets the employer serves.
One Vovici client, an international bank, has been experiencing tremendous growth in an emerging market, taking advantage of financially weakened competitors. As a result of this growth, the bank is facing a number of new challenges, chief of which are increased competition for local sales talent and increased competition for customers. The organization implemented an employee community to help address both of these issues. Employee feedback gathered from the online community is used to help position the bank as the "employer of choice" in this region's financial market. The community is also used to provide a unique window on customers: employees share customer feedback from the field and submit product and service ideas of their own and those suggested by customers.
Another user of Vovici Community Builder has created an employee community that goes far beyond feedback. While employee satisfaction research is fielded through the online community, employees typically log in for other reasons:
- To view weekly sales numbers
- To participate in discussion forums
- To submit questions to senior management
- To view status reports for each department
- To see company news
- To access other employee portals, such as the benefits portal
What innovative uses of online employee communities have you seen?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Apr 14, 2009
 Open online communities are accessible to anyone. Often the content can be reviewed without creating a user account, though typically an account is required for commenting and starting new discussion threads. Closed online communities, in contrast, are by invitation only. Both types of communities have their place. While many B2C communities are open and public, many B2B communities are closed and private.
These private B2B communities often take the form of product advisory councils or key-account advisory boards. The content produced by such communities is sensitive and competitive, often involving feedback that will be used to shape future products, services and promotions. Accordingly, organizations do not want their competitors to be able to access and review this information, and a closed community is the preferable approach.
Once you decide a community will be closed, however, you dramatically increase the workload of the community manager: he or she needs to promote the community to potential recruits, they need to get new members engaged in the community, they need to encourage members to return to the community frequently, and so on. Further, because private communities are typically smaller than public communities, sponsoring organizations need to generate more content themselves at the beginning, and it is harder to get the community to the point where it is thriving and self-sustaining. That said, the results are often rich and instructive, and therefore worthy of the extra labor involved.
For a full contrast between the two types of communities, check out this Public vs. Private Community matrix.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Apr 02, 2009
 I wanted to elaborate on one of the Seven Deadly Sins of Online Community Management: "Greed: Failing to share with community members the results of feedback and the changes inspired by the community."
When surveying customers, employees, community members and other key constituencies, your respondents complete the survey because they value their relationship with you, and they want to see you improve. Implicit in the fact that you sent them a survey is your intention to learn, adapt and change based on the results. Accordingly, to close the feedback loop with respondents and community members, you should:
- Explain what you're using the data for
- Share summaries and slices of the data
- Identify actions you're taking as a result of survey
- Consider using web seminars, video conferences and meetings to share data
Many survey-software applications include the ability to send a thank-you notice to all respondents. This is an excellent way to point out some of the above.
With the survey completed, use the occasion to stimulate additional participation and tease out feedback that elaborates on some of the points raised. For the long-term success of your online community or survey panel, you have to demonstrate to participants that you value their participation and will use it to serve them better in the future. Closing the feedback loop is the best way to achieve steady participation and response rates over time.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Mar 23, 2009
Brad Bortner, a principal analyst with Forrester Research, has a new independent white paper, "Fused Research Modes Will Save You Money: How To Master The Faster And Cheaper Imperative In Stark Economic Times". Here's the summary [the links are mine]:
The economy is both eroding financial wherewithal to conduct market research and putting a larger burden on market research professionals to identify successful markets. While vast economies have already been realized in quantitative research using online panels, the same benefits are about to be realized in traditional qualitative research. New fusions of qualitative and quantitative research approaches have finally emerged that are economically viable alternatives to traditional and expensive approaches. Companies must harness them or resign themselves to doing less with less at a time when sharper market insights are more necessary than ever.
A graphical representation of one form of this fusion of techniques:
A standing online community takes the place of a series of focus groups. Questions can be posed to the community regularly to develop qualitative insights. These qualitative insights can then be used to shape survey instruments; members of the panel - which includes, as a subset, active community members - are invited to take the survey. Fielding the survey beyond the community provides better representation than using just the community itself.
Why is that important? Too often qualitative insights that illustrate a subset of the target population are taken as representing the overall population. Catharine Taylor recently posted "Listen Up, Marketers: The Focus Group Is Dead", which she illustrates with examples of four brands that mistook qualitative research as being representative of their target audience: Tropicana, Motrin, Facebook and The Sci Fi Channel. Each brand faced a public-relations backlash as a result of the changes they made based on that research.
Clearly, as Brad writes, the fusion of qualitative and quantitative research is more important than ever. If you haven't considered deploying online community software and connecting it to your survey tool, now is a good time to do so.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Mar 12, 2009
A survey portal is a web site which your customers or employees can visit to see a list of surveys they've been invited to, as well as to review or update their profiles. The portal is a convenient destination for customers to use to manage their interactions with your enterprise feedback management system.
Common components of a survey portal include:
- A list of profiles that panelists can complete. Well-designed profiles should be synchronized with your CRM or HRIS system.
- A list of surveys that panelists have been invited to. Outstanding invitations are listed.
- Completed questionnaires. For later review by the panelist.
- Shared survey results. Aggregate reports from completed surveys, as well as discussions of how the organization is responding to the feedback it gathered.
Some of our customers have reported that their survey response rates doubled once they added a portal! One advantage of portals is that even if a member unsubscribes from receiving survey invitations, they will still be able to log on to the portal and see the surveys that they've been invited to. While many survey portals are standalone, those survey portals that generate the highest response rates provide respondents multiple reasons for logging in: for instance, to check on the status of open support tickets, see vendor headlines and news, and access other customer-only documents. Survey portals cannot be considered MROCs because they do not provide a method for panelists to communicate with one another. While they start as simply interfaces to panels, survey portals are one step away from reliance on email lists and one giant leap toward online communities.
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