Posted by Dean Wiltse on Fri, Dec 28, 2007
Are you a leader or manager of a retail organization? Imagine if you had a "community" or "online panel" of your customers who have agreed to provide feedback to your company from time-to-time. How could you use it today? What would you like to ask?
I bet if you could look at purchase history of your good customers that bought more last year than this year, you could think of a few things to ask. How about "why"? Would that be valuable for you to know?
If you measured their attitudes constantly you may be able to predict future buying trends in advance. This would give you additional data to make decisions that could impact your business. Start a sale earlier or begin testing promotion ideas with your "community" in time to make plans to improve your business.
The more you think about having this capability -the ability to survey your customers constantly - the more you will think to ask. Stop for a minute and think about it. If you had a room full of your best customers in your office today, what would you ask them?
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Tue, Dec 11, 2007
This is an art but you can do it. Beware though, traditional market research firms to help may not be your best advisors. They certainly can assist with helping you to design the survey and analyze the results but you really need expert advice on how to keep your community members, typically customer and perspective customers coming back to your brand time and again. Some of you should build online survey communities of your employees and partners too.
The research industry as a whole has not been very friendly to us. Have you taken a survey online recently designed by a research firm? Their online surveys look like offline surveys that have been put on the Internet. You read a question and check off your answer. You are rarely told how long the survey will take to complete and many times after you invest several minutes in taking the survey you reach a point where you are told "you don't qualify". (Do that to someone and see if they will come back to take another survey or have a positive feeling towards your brand.)
Did you know that today in 2007 more customer satisfaction surveys are done on the telephone than on the Internet? I know I keep bringing this up but really, how stupid can we be? People have signed up in droves to the Do Not Call list, telling us that they don't want to be bothered with phone calls. Yet companies continue to do customer satisfaction survey on the phone. That is like telling one of your customers... we just don't care about what you want - we need to ask you some questions.
Off track for a minute there...
So what should you do? At Vovici we are providing companies the necessary technology and expertise to manage their customers, employee and partners in survey respondent communities. Advanced knowledge management turns survey data into a permanent, shared asset across survey projects and teams. It has proven to be a differentiating factor when competing for new customers.
Direct feedback creates a combined voice to provide a formal voice, and therefore the feeling of influence. The community feels able to shape the future direction. Incentive programs within the survey process delivers reward for participation. Providing community members comparatives - what are other people like me thinking - is often viewed as a valuable incentive. Special options that create a deeper sense of identity and membership like double opt-in panels and special survey groups provide extended opportunities for involvement and more consistent feedback from key demographic groups.