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Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Nov 26, 2008
 If the code-of-conduct document is the Constitution of your online community, just as important is a "Bill of Rights" about what community members can expect. A key part of the social contract between community managers and community members is a statement summarizing how often you'll contact them and what you expect of them.
Often, in an MROC, the Bill of Rights will relate to surveying:
- A promise not to survey more than twice a month
- A promise to limit survey length to 10 or 15 minutes
- A promise to share the aggregated feedback and how the feedback was used.
The following is an example of a Bill of Rights for an invitation-only advisory council. Feel free to adapt this to your own needs.
Member Bill of Rights
Your participation is very important to us, and we value the information you provide. You will effectively be an "insider" to our Product Team. Therefore, our relationship will be one of respect and consideration, based on the following practices:
- Your privacy and the privacy of your answers will be respected and maintained.
- Your name, address, phone number, personal information, or individual responses won't be disclosed to anyone without your explicit permission.
- You will not be sold anything, or asked for any money ever for any reason.
- In the possible event that one of our employees or research agents wants to speak to you over the phone, before anybody contacts you, you will be asked for your permission for us to call, given a maximum amount of time the call will take and asked when we might call so that it is most convenient for you. You would also be told the name of the person contacting you in advance, and the reason for the call and the topic being discussed.
- Your decision to participate in any particular focus group, forum, survey or study is completely up to you. You decide whether to answer specific questions, or not - or to continue or discontinue your participation in the Product Advisory Council. Your decisions will be respected without question.
- You are assured that the highest standards of professional conduct will be upheld in the collection and reporting of information you provide.
- You will have the opportunity to not just be heard, but to have your ideas considered fully by the Product Team decision-makers, and frequently have those ideas acted upon.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 25, 2008
 Composing a code-of-conduct document for members of your online community is one of the less enjoyable tasks a community manager gets saddled with. It either feels like writing a set of rules for a kindergarten class or drawing up a prenuptial agreement. You may be tempted to find a boilerplate code of conduct licensed under the Creative Commons and run with that.
Don't.
Instead, take the time to express your community's code of conduct using the language and metaphors of your domain. Two sites that do this well are Channel 9, the Microsoft Developer Network community, and Yoga Journal.
Channel 9's main code of conduct is short and to the point and is expressed in the informal language of developers. Heck, it's even subtitled "Readme.txt", after the name of the file you always read first when installing new software. Summary of the Channel 9 Doctrine:
- Channel 9 is all about the conversation....
- Be a human being...
- Learn by listening...
- Be smart. Think before you speak...
- Marketing has no place on Channel 9...
- Don't shock the system...
- Know when to turn the mic off...
- Don't be a jerk. Nobody likes mean people.
- Commit to the conversation. Don't stop listening just because you are busy...
Now, since this is Microsoft, a $60 billion company, they do supplement this page with a more formal code of conduct and a legalistic terms-of-use agreement. But the "Channel 9 Doctrine" is the soul of the conversation for the community.
The Yoga Journal Community Code of Conduct also speaks the language of its community. Instead of developers, yoga practitioners:
When thinking about what is appropriate in the Yoga Journal Community, imagine that you are entering a social gathering made up of the students from your yoga class. As hosts of this yogic social gathering, we (the Yoga Journal web team) will invite and refuse guests according to their etiquette...
Above all else, observe ahimsa, the yogic principle of nonharming. If we do this, our community will be a fun and rewarding place to enjoy the company of other yogis.
This code of conduct is great for another reason as well: it has a short version and a long, or full, version. In the short version, each of the eight key principles is listed as a link that the reader can click on if they want more detail:
- Be respectful of others, especially when disagreeing with them.
- Do not post obscene, vulgar, or otherwise offensive content.
- Don't clutter the community with spam. Only post advertisements and promotions on your personal profile.
- Be yourself. Imposters are not welcome.
- Don't crash a party or study group by posting the same thing over and over again.
- Be careful about sharing personal information with others online.
- Do not engage in any criminal or illegal activity in the Yoga Journal Community or encourage others to do so.
- Please report any problems you encounter on the site.
Hopefully these two examples will inspire you to write a code of conduct that embodies the spirit of the community you are seeking to create.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Nov 24, 2008
 A Rice/NYU study showed that customers who took part in a customer-satisfaction survey were more loyal than those who did not. These customers were:
- More than three times as likely to have done new business with the firm.
- Less than half as likely to have defected.
- More profitable than the control group.
- Did new business at a faster rate and defected less than customers in the control group, even 12 months later.
The study, "How Surveys Influence Customers", published in the Harvard Business Review in 2002, has some important caveats, of course. But the authors, Paul Dholakia and Vicki Morwitz, theorize about how surveys can improve satisfaction:
Several theories of consumer psychology might apply. The simplest is that satisfaction surveys appeal to customers' desire to be coddled, reinforcing positive feelings they may already have about the surveying organization and making them more likely to buy its products. Surveys may also increase people's awareness of a company's products and thereby encourage future purchases. More subtle is the idea that the very process of asking people their opinions can induce them to form judgments that otherwise wouldn't occur to them-that they really do like a company's estate-planning services, for example. These so-called measurement-induced judgments, the theory holds, can influence later behavior.
Combine this with the use of survey triggers/email alerts to intervene when customers provide low satisfaction ratings, and you have two compelling arguments for how conducting customer satisfaction surveys can improve overall satisfaction levels.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Sun, Nov 23, 2008
PluggedIN, a full-service MROC firm with a proprietary community platform, has a valuable new blog.
Some good posts:
While I disagree with some of what they write, I appreciate their perspective. Worth checking out!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Nov 21, 2008
 Once upon a time, surveys were conducted quarterly or annually, and the results were used to understand the overall satisfaction level of customers in aggregate. Online surveys have transformed this process in many ways, two of which are of special interest here: first, web surveys are often conducted continuously rather than periodically, and second, surveys can now be used to intervene on the behalf of individual respondents. Measuring satisfaction in aggregate is no longer sufficient, when you can intervene to improve that satisfaction on a respondent-by-respondent basis.
Since at least 2003, our survey software has enabled authors to set up email alerts or triggers based on answers to individual questions. Indeed, it is an important part of enterprise feedback. Here are some representative examples of the types of alerts that our users have set up:
Reactive
- Help-desk ticket satisfaction - For a follow-on survey to employees who contacted the IT help desk, if the employee indicates that the issue is not resolved, send an escalation email to a help-desk manager.
- General dissatisfaction - In a satisfaction survey, if the respondent provides a low rating, skip to a choose-all-that-apply question that asks them for the reasons for their dissatisfaction. Follow that up with an essay question asking for more detail. Based on the reasons chosen, look up the appropriate department (e.g., service department, billing department) to email the alert to.
- Hotel-stay satisfaction - For a web survey taken from the settop box in the hotel room, ask for satisfaction with room service, housekeeping and the front desk, and immediately email the affected department in case of dissatisfaction.
- Major-account satisfaction - For every customer-satisfaction survey completed, as it is completed, send a copy of the results to the sales manager of the account for their review.
Proactive
- Customer-service satisfaction - The customer is satisfied and their past ticket is closed, but they have a follow-on question. Ask them if they need additional assistance, and send an email alert to the service department if they do.
- Literature fulfillment - Allow the respondent to select from a list of additional information on the topics of the survey, and send them an email with links to that information.
With email alerts, surveys don't have to be just for measuring satisfaction: they can be for improving it as well.
What other ways have you used survey alert emails?
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Nov 20, 2008
The virtuous circle of online communities makes for a powerful engine for increasing awareness of your brand. Stages:
- More Site Visitors - The more people who visit your community's web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community.
- More Members - The more members of your community, the more people there are posting ideas and topics.
- More Ideas & Topics - The more ideas and topics in your community, the more comments that are generated, with typically many comments per discussion thread or--in a research community--per idea.
- More Comments - The more comments, the more pages there are to the web site. (Think of those discussion threads that take multiple pages because of all the comments.)
- More Pages - The more pages there are to the community's web site, the more content there is to be linked to and indexed, leading to higher search engine rank.
- Higher Search Engine Rank - The higher the search engine rank of your community web site, the more site visitors your site will attract.
- More Site Visitors - The more people who visit your community's web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community...
Once a public online community is spun up, the centripetal force of community activity will lead to ever greater community activity, in a virtuous circle. Online communities are the perpetual motion machines of marketing!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Nov 19, 2008
 Last week, a prospect who was interested in our online community software asked me what the best size of an online community was. I wanted to reply "150.2 members," but I realized it was a joke only a few of my friends would get.
The 150 is Dunbar's number, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's book The Tipping Point. Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary biologist, looked at the tribe size of non-human primates and estimated that humans could maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people. This number has been twisted to many uses beyond its original purpose. Some have used it to argue that 150 is the ideal size of an online community, but I don't believe that primate tribes, which are organized by instinct and for survival, are applicable to online communities, even if some members act like monkeys sometimes!
So that's the reference to 150. As to the 0.2...
Years ago, on a romantic walk on Humarock Beach with my then girlfriend (now my wife), the subject strayed to children. I asked her how many children she wanted to have. Her answer: "2.2. Somebody has to have the average."
This was a rare geeky quip from my wife, who is anything but a geek. So, 150.2 members is not the ideal community size. What is? Well, my actual answer to the prospect was something like, "There is no ideal number, no one-size-fits-all. It depends on the purposes of your community."
Some community software vendors advocate only small communities. Others advocate only large communities. Sometimes this argument can take on the aspect of religious zealotry.
If community size is a religion, Vovici is agnostic. Here are some of the advantages to a large community (400+ members):
- More members generate more discussion, making the site more compelling.
- The larger the community, the larger the segments, enabling targeted research of key demographics.
- Large communities become self-sustaining, needing very little outside direction or content seeding.
Here are some of the advantages of a small community (fewer than 400 members):
- The fewer members, the easier it is for a community moderator to direct the energies of the community.
- The exclusivity of small communities can make membership in such a community more attractive, with greater perceived value, than membership in an open community or large community.
- Small communities build an intimacy that leads to fuller disclosure and richer insights. This is especially valuable for health-care related communities, where members discuss quite personal experiences with disease and chronic illness.
Both large and small communities have their value. And both have their challenges. The optimal size depends to a large degree on your purposes for building an online community in the first place.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Nov 17, 2008
 While I try to avoid industry jargon when I present, I confused some people last week by using the term firmographics. Turns out it only had 7,000 hits on Google and has been used in just 31 books. So a definition is in order.
firm'o-graph-ic - adjective - Pertaining to characteristics of an organization, such as employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations and location of headquarters.
firm'o-graph-ics - noun - The characteristics of an organization, especially when used to segment markets in market research.
The earliest citation I could find was from 1992, from the paper Best Practices in Disk-by-Mail Surveys: "It is recommended that respondents without access to PCs be asked to respond to primary demographic and firmographic questions, as well as attitudinal questions about the subject being measured to analyze the potential for bias in the non-respondent sample."
Some other good uses of the term:
- "The models estimate the probability of purchase at the product-brand level. They use training examples drawn from historical transactions and extract explanatory features from transactional data joined with company firmographic data (e.g., revenue and number of employees)." - Analytics-driven solutions for customer targeting and sales-force allocation
- "Like any company that sells to consumers, these business-to-business sellers seek to target their offerings to segments of customers (companies in this case) that meet certain firmographic requirements like industry (e.g. ‘Financial Services') and company size (e.g. ‘annual revenue between $50M and $500M')." - Customer Targeting Models Using Actively-Selected Web Content
When analyzing survey results, it is often helpful to be able to segment those results by different firmographic data. The following are some standard questions that can be used for profiling organizations. The size breakout for organizations matches that used by the U.S. Census Bureau.
Q. Location Size
Including yourself, how many employees work at this location?
- 1
- 2-4
- 5-9
- 10-19
- 20-99
- 100-499
- 500+
- Don't know
Q. Organization Size
How many employees work at this organization across all locations?
- 1
- 2-4
- 5-9
- 10-19
- 20-99
- 100-499
- 500+
- Don't know
Q. Locations
How many locations does this organization have?
- 1
- 2-4
- 5-9
- 10-99
- 100-499
- 500+
- Don't know
Q. Headquarters
What country is your organization headquartered in?
____________
What state is your organization headquartered in?
_____________
Q. Industry
What is the principal industry of your organization?
11 Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting
21 Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction
22 Utilities
23 Construction
31 Manufacturing
42 Wholesale Trade
44 Retail Trade
48 Transportation and Warehousing
51 Information
52 Finance and Insurance
53 Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
54 Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
55 Management of Companies and Enterprises
56 Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services
61 Educational Services
62 Health Care and Social Assistance
71 Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
72 Accommodation and Food Services
81 Other Services (except Public Administration)
92 Public Administration
The above Industry question uses top-level sectors from the 2007 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Most organizations tailor the list of choices to their specific business. If you are integrating your survey data with your CRM system (as you should be!), you should adapt your CRM system's data definition to use for your standard firmographic questions.
Update: At Esteban Kolsky's suggestion, I added a Firmographics entry to Wikipedia. Please feel free to contribute to that article to improve it. Thanks!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Nov 14, 2008
 For the recent Forrester/Vovici webcast, "Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities", one attendee asked how Return On Investment could be calculated for implementing market-research online communities.
Brad Bortner said that ROI would depend in part on how your organization was currently collecting qualitative data and how much you were spending on that methodology. In his part of the presentation, he pointed out that online communities were less expensive than focus groups and provided much more data.
Our CEO, Dean Wiltse, pointed out that Vovici offers a complimentary feedback assessment to serious prospects. We will conduct a survey across your organization to get a true picture of what the opportunity for implementing next-generation feedback might be; invariably, we find that our prospects and customers are using far more survey tools than they are aware of and have more ongoing research initiatives than their market-research department is keeping track of.
The assessment is valuable regardless of the platform vendor you end up choosing. We prepare a cost assessment and presentation to people who are thinking about implementing online community software and enterprise feedback management; this provides an estimated ROI they can use in their planning. This is an excellent way to determine the financial benefits of implementing research-oriented online communities.
Brad concluded his answer to the question by pointing out that this is "early days" for online communities for many of the companies he has spoken to. Many such organizations are not yet thinking of replacing other research modes, but are just experimenting. Once they see the success of the experiment, then they start moving money from qualitative research to online communities. As Brad concluded, "If you are running focus groups, the payoff from MROCs is pretty substantial. You can easily run $100,000 for a series of focus groups for location [facilities], moderation and analysis. Compare that to the cost of running your own community, which has a huge capacity for running not just one project but many projects over the years, and it pays for itself in one or two traditional projects a year." Brad pointed out that for groups that aren't doing qualitative research, these insights are purely additive, providing new insights, and calculation of the ROI needs to be done differently.
Once the community is implemented, you will discover many other common applications for it, providing an even greater ROI. I encourage you to view the webinar with Brad and Dean. To request your own complimentary analysis of ROI, please sign up for our feedback assessment.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Nov 13, 2008
 Esteban Kolsky, a principal analyst with Evergence, and one of the patron saints of EFM, asked, in the comment section to my post Panel Management 101, "How does the integration work just for panel management? I have integration as critical for EFM - but not directly related to panel management... am I missing something?"
Most panel management software systems have profiles of panelists, where demographic, transactional and attitudinal information is stored for each panelist. Integrating other data sources with these profiles provides users of survey software a number of key benefits. Data integration lets you shorten questionnaires by piping in answers to profile questions behind the scenes. It lets you pipe in questions that you can use for more detailed cross-tabulation and survey analysis. It also provides you with questions that you can use for "on demand segmentation", targeting specific groups for special surveys. And data integration saves your panelists from having to re-enter information your organization already knows about them.
 Here are some examples of the type of panel-management integration work that we've done.
- CRM Data - Using CRM connectors to synchronize a demographic profile of an empanelled customer with information from their customer-relationship management records.
- Transactional Data - Storing the most recent customer transaction or series of transactions in the profile. For help-desk surveys, storing the last time the customer contacted technical support, along with details of the type of contact, the resolution, the date of the contact, and so forth. For course-evaluation surveys, storing the most recent classes attended by the student. For retail-satisfaction surveys, storing details about the most recent purchase.
- Benchmark Data - Importing records from past surveys for use as historical benchmarks (especially from phone or paper surveys or other methodologies that predated web surveys).
While enterprise feedback management systems can certainly have other types of integration (we've integrated with third-party communities, besides our online community software; we've exported survey data back to CRM systems), most data-integration opportunities have actually been around panel management profiles. I hope that answers your question, Esteban!
And if you find my blog useful, I think you will find Esteban's blog worth reading as well.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Nov 12, 2008
A survey from one of our customers was recently lampooned in a popular blog about “curious perversions in Information Technology”.
Clearly, the author of the questionnaire didn’t intend to set the validation for question 8 to limit to one choice, given their instructions to the respondent (“please tick all that apply”). This was simply an honest mistake on their part.
But why should our survey software even allow the author to limit a choose-all-that-apply question to one choice? If only one choice is permitted, then the system should use radio buttons or a dropdown box. Early on, in fact, I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t even an option for questionnaire authors, but our customers pushed back that they wanted this functionality, for two reasons:
- Some users don’t value the difference between radio buttons (shown in question 9, limited to one choice) and checkboxes, a distinction in user interfaces that dates back to at least 1984. These users like the visual esthetic of the checkboxes better and choose to use checkboxes on all questions, even those where only one choice is permitted.
- Some users dislike the fact that you cannot unselect a radio button, and prefer to use checkboxes so that a respondent can uncheck a choice if they decide no choice is applicable.
So, while you can certainly use checkboxes in this way, the best practice should be to use radio buttons when you only want the respondent to select a single choice, and to provide a “Not applicable” or “Does not apply” choice on radio-button questions when you want respondents to be able to “unselect” a choice.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 11, 2008
 Last week, Brad Bortner, a principal analyst with Forrester, joined our CEO, Dean Wiltse, to present a complimentary webcast, "Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities". Brad presents his analysis of MROCs (Market Research Online Communities) and discusses how online communities can reduce your costs, improve the effectiveness of market research and provide lasting competitive advantage. Dean discusses how online communities enable deep insight into market drivers, deliver timely information on trends and opportunities specific to customers and prospects, drive innovation and increase revenue.
Here's an outline of the topics covered:
You can view the webinar for free.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Nov 07, 2008
 The Pew Internet & American Life Project has conducted regular, extensive surveys on a wide variety of online behaviors of U.S. adults, including participation in online communities. I did a statistical "mashup" of Pew/Internet data with U.S. census data to come up with the following table, illustrating growth in community participation. In the first quarter of 2000, 80.1 million U.S. adults participated in online communities; by the end of 2007, this had increased to 146.6 million adults.
| Quarter |
Community Participants |
| 2000 Q1 |
80.1 million |
| 2000 Q2 |
82.1 million |
| 2000 Q3 |
84.3 million |
| 2000 Q4 |
90.0 million |
| 2001 Q1 |
92.1 million |
| 2001 Q2 |
94.3 million |
| 2001 Q3 |
96.6 million |
| 2001 Q4 |
102.4 million |
| 2002 Q1 |
108.2 million |
| 2002 Q2 |
103.3 million |
| 2002 Q3 |
109.3 million |
| 2002 Q4 |
102.6 million |
| 2003 Q1 |
112.0 million |
| 2003 Q2 |
112.5 million |
| 2003 Q3 |
115.0 million |
| 2003 Q4 |
117.4 million |
| 2004 Q1 |
116.1 million |
| 2004 Q2 |
116.6 million |
| 2004 Q3 |
115.4 million |
| 2004 Q4 |
114.1 million |
| 2005 Q1 |
125.8 million |
| 2005 Q2 |
128.3 million |
| 2005 Q3 |
136.5 million |
| 2005 Q4 |
125.8 million |
| 2006 Q1 |
139.7 million |
| 2006 Q2 |
137.5 million |
| 2006 Q3 |
135.3 million |
| 2006 Q4 |
136.0 million |
| 2007 Q1 |
138.6 million |
| 2007 Q2 |
141.2 million |
| 2007 Q3 |
143.9 million |
| 2007 Q4 |
146.6 million |
This a mashup, in the sense that neither the U.S. Census nor Pew would recognize the final output. I took the U.S. adult population (according to the Census), multiplied it by the percent of adults who use the Internet (according to Pew), then multiplied it by the percent who participate in online communities (again, according to Pew). For some quarters, where Pew did not field surveys with those particular questions, I interpolated estimates.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Thu, Nov 06, 2008
How do survey software applications typically differ from enterprise feedback management solutions?
Survey software is typically designed for the individual user, working on one or more survey research projects. Core functionality includes:
- Survey Creation - Writing multi-page web surveys with open-ended and closed-ended questions.
- Templates - Starting with a wide selection of customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, course evaluation and other standard survey instruments to choose from.
- Basic Conditional Logic - Skipping over certain questions and pages based on the answers to other questions.
- Multi-Language Support - Fielding one survey in multiple languages.
- E-mail Invitations - Sending out invites with hyperlinks to potential survey respondents and following up with periodic reminders.
- Basic Reporting - Viewing a frequency report or a list of verbatim responses for each question.
- Exportable Data - Saving survey data to file formats such as Excel and text files.
 Vovici knows survey software well. The PC Magazine roundup of six survey software applications in February 2000 featured three products - Perseus SurveySolutions for the Web, Websurveyor 2.0 and EZSurvey 99 for the Internet - that are all part of Vovici's heritage (Vovici was formed from the merger of Websurveyor and Perseus Development, and purchased the Raosoft EZSurvey assets). While Vovici knows survey software well, we've made a business of supporting customers as they've outgrown the needs for such software. Vovici pioneered enterprise feedback because so many survey software customers needed more functionality.
Today, enterprise feedback management systems typically extend the core functionality of survey software with:
- CRM Integration - Where users grow tired of exporting email lists from their CRM system, CRM connectors can keep the EFM system in sync automatically.
- Advanced Analytics - When users want to drill down on results in detail, EFM survey analytics go beyond simple reports.
- Triggers & Alerts - When users begin to think about survey processes, rather than projects, they can set up email alerts triggered by specific answers to the survey.
- Report Distribution - When users want to share results widely across an organization, or customize reports for different audiences or even for each individual, EFM report distribution can save time and energy.
- Quotas - When users want to limit participation in surveys, for purposes of offering incentives or for balancing responses by key segments, they can easily set survey quotas.
- Panel Management - When customers or other key constituencies are complaining about receiving too many surveys, panel management can be used to set up limits on frequency of surveys.
- Page Rotation - When respondents complain about surveys that are too long, page rotation is one tool for shortening the questionnaire from the respondents' perspective.
- User Management - A key part of sharing usage of surveys throughout an organization is defining different roles for different types of users: some can write questionnaires, some can create reports, some can only view reports, and so on, as appropriate.
- Workflow Management - Users can draft surveys and then submit them to reviewers to edit, approve and publish, thereby by ensuring that research best practices are followed.
- Online Communities - In the past year, EFM systems have expanded to support online communities, providing better qualitative research than ever before.
- Advanced Branching - As questionnaires grow in sophistication, authors often add more complex rules around which questions are shown to respondents, so that they are answering only the most relevant questions and do not have to manually skip over questions that aren't appropriate to them.
- Response Randomization - Finally, to remove any order bias, the choices for questions can be shown in random order.
If your organization has any of the above needs, it is time to consider moving up from survey software to enterprise feedback management.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Nov 05, 2008
 Why should you consider adding panel management to your survey software?
- Your response rate to web surveys (the percent of people who complete the survey) is declining.
- Your respondents, like those of this auto manufacturer, are complaining that they are being sent too many surveys.
- You need to easily target surveys to segments and subsegments of your customers for detailed survey analysis.
- Your respondents are complaining that surveys are too long. You have to ask respondents questions you already know the answer to, such as the products of yours that they use and the services that they subscribe to (for consumers: their gender, age, location; for businesses: their size, industry, region).
- Your survey authors have to wait on IT to export mailing lists from your other systems.
Panel management assists with each of these items:
- By empanelling all potential respondents in a central database, you eliminate the need to rely on IT resources to generate recipient lists.
- By centralizing "touch management" for your survey research, you can make certain not to oversurvey panelists. Oversurveying is a leading cause of declining response rates.
- By profiling potential respondents in detail, you can segment "on demand" when sending out survey invitations.
- By integrating respondent profiles with CRM systems through CRM connectors, you can embed that customer data as hidden fields within a survey, streamlining the survey from the respondent's perspective.
Once usage of surveys has spread across an organization, panel management is a logical next step to begin to bring that research under control, while moving along the path to implementing online communities and true enterprise feedback management.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 04, 2008
 On Election Day in the United States, it's appropriate to momentarily consider the argument for not voting. I predict that not one election today will come down to a single vote. Therefore, casting your vote doesn't make a difference, and by skipping it you can save yourself the hassle of standing in line. Or, to put voting in economic terms, as Glen Whitman does, "the marginal benefit of voting is essentially nil, since a single vote almost never decides any election, while the marginal cost includes the opportunity cost of your time, the cost of travel, the risk of getting hit by a truck on the way to the polls, etc."
This sprang to mind last week when I was introduced to Cathy, a woman who-after discovering what I did for a living-was quite curious about web surveys. "Why would anyone take the time to fill out a survey? It just seems like a waste of effort." She concluded proudly, "I have never taken a single survey!"
Living in Massachusetts, I then went out on a conversational limb. "Do you like Starbucks?" I asked.
"Oh, I love Starbucks!" Cathy said. (Most Bay Staters love Dunkin' Donuts coffee over Starbucks.)
I then explained to her about MyStarbucksIdea and how people could submit their own ideas, because they were passionate about their Starbucks experience and wanted to see Starbucks serve them better. I said people filled out surveys for the same reason, to provide that feedback.
She instantly understood. "I once wrote the president of Starbucks a letter!"
"Well," I said, "people answer surveys and participate in online communities for the same reason you wrote that letter."
And people vote for the same reason. No, it may not be rational to think that that one survey response is going to make the company a better place to buy a cup of coffee from. But the collection of survey responses and community feedback helps Starbucks tremendously. No, if you're a U.S. citizen, your single vote today won't decide any outcome, but your public commitment to voting and your engagement in the process will help improve the country. On a day when both major-party candidates advocate change, your vote may even help transform the country.
See also:
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Mon, Nov 03, 2008
 Brad Bortner has a new Forrester independent report out last month, "Best Practices-The Next Wave In Customer Satisfaction Studies Is CRM Integration: How Firms Move From Measuring To Fixing Customer Problems". Abstract:
A rising tide of customer satisfaction research is also lifting the tide of another type of software enabled solution to harness these insights. They are enterprise feedback management (EFM) systems that combine elements of survey tools with tight customer relationship management (CRM) integration to create centralized repositories of customer insight and allow almost real-time attempts to resolve customer satisfaction problems. These solutions can be either good for market research groups or just another internal headache - depending on how they are embraced. Forrester believes that they represent a rising tide in research, and we advise savvy researchers to embrace them and use them to guide their deployment.
Jessica Tsai provides good coverage of this research for CRM Magazine, with a detailed interview of Brad in "Survey Tools Step Up: Even if customer surveys don't interest you, real-time alert capabilities might".
We at Vovici have been ahead of this curve, integrating EFM with CRM systems since at least 2005. It started out as custom development, then moved to custom development with SOAP APIs, before evolving into configuration using prebuilt libraries as CRM connectors. We also recently announced a partnership with Oracle for integration with Oracle CRM on Demand.
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