New Year, New Job: Helping Employees Break that Particular Resolution

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One New Year's resolution that is perennially popular is the resolution to find a new job.  A significant number of employees evaluate their careers at the end of the calendar year.  As a result, expect to see many job fairs and more help-wanted listings (yep, even in a recession). 

If you are an employer or HR professional, you want to make sure that your best employees stay with you.  You want to help them seek those new career opportunities within your organization.  As I've written before, 47% of top-performing employees are actively looking for jobs, while only 18% of low performers are (Source: Leadership IQ).

All of which makes this a great time to conduct an employee loyalty study.  Because this is one New Year's resolution you do not want your best employees to keep!

Apostle Model Best Practices and Survey Template

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If a recession is a good time to look at employee loyalty, it's an excellent time to look at customer loyalty.  Selling an existing customer those of your products and services that you aren't currently selling them is the most cost-effective approach.  Doing it well requires a strong understanding of what drives your customers' loyalty.

Segmenting the results of your customer satisfaction survey by the attitude and intended behavior of current customers can help you identify what separates those customers you are likely to lose from those that are loyal.  It's a great foundation for a successful plan of attack.  The Apostle Model is a good approach for such work.

As I've written before, the Apostle Model segments your customers into four groups:

• Loyalist/Apostle - high loyalty, high satisfaction - "staying and supportive"
• Mercenary - low to medium loyalty, high satisfaction - "coming and going; low commitment"
• Defector/Terrorist - low to medium loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "leaving or having left and unhappy"
• Hostage - high loyalty, low to medium satisfaction - "unable to switch; trapped"

These segments are graphically represented as:

Here are the best practices for using the Apostle Model in your own research.

• Use a 1-10 or 0-10 scale, defining 10 as best.  This scale is easily understood by respondents and provides you greater dispersion of results than a shorter scale.  This greater dispersion  is helpful when you are trying to contrast loyal customers against at-risk customers.
• Use 9 and 10 to indicate high loyalty and high satisfaction. You want to understand the outliers who are exceptionally satisfied and exceptionally loyal.  Jones and Sasser reported in their original Harvard Business Review article that, for Xerox, completely satisfied customers (rating of 5 on a 5-point scale) were six times more likely to repurchase over the next year and a half than somewhat satisfied customers (ratings of 3-4).  Resist the urge to broaden the top box to ratings of 6 through 10.
• For each dimension, use an index (two to three questions) rather than a single question. Normally I preach that fewer questions are better, since shorter questionnaires certainly are better from a respondent's point of view.  That said, the advantage of using two to three questions is that by averaging them you have a more stable measure than a single question alone provides.  This reduces the volatility of your results.
• Conduct the analysis regularly, not just once. The most successful businesses thrive and grow by expanding their base of loyal customers. Don't do this analysis as a one-off project, but approach it as an ongoing benchmark to track your organization's performance.

Here are six questions that you could use in your Apostle Model:

1. Taking into account all of your experiences with [product], please rate your overall satisfaction with it. 
2. Think about all of your expectations for [product] before you purchased it. Please rate whether [product] falls short of your expectations, meets or exceeds your expectations.
3. Now consider your ideal [product category]. Please rate [product] on a 1 to 10 scale for how closely it comes to your ideal.
4. When you next purchase a [product category], how likely is that you will purchase from [vendor]?
5. Assuming you communicated your experiences with this [vendor] to others, how favorable would your comments be?
6. How likely is it that you would recommend [vendor] to a friend or colleague?

Use the first three for the Customer Satisfaction Loyalty index, and the bottom three for the Customer Loyalty Index.  These are simply suggestions. Depending on your industry and business model, other forms of these questions might be better for your organization.

Whatever the economy, those companies that focus on understanding customer loyalty will be the most successful, and the Apostle Model is a great method of achieving that understanding.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

Correlation between Employee Loyalty & Customer Loyalty

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Walker Information, Vovici's partner for employee loyalty benchmarking, has done detailed annual studies looking at customer loyalty and employee loyalty.   When Walker compiles its U.S. benchmarks, it finds that both types of loyalty move in parallel to one another, tracking each other for increases and declines:

While correlation alone does not necessarily imply never implies causation, Walker has found that high-risk employees provide poorer customer service than loyal employees: a sure way for employee disloyalty to lead to customer disloyalty.  As I wrote last week:

If you don't take care of your employees, they won't take care of your customers.  Loyal employees have a positive impact on customer loyalty and retention:  where 92% of loyal employees do tasks for customers "above and beyond the call of duty", only 54% of trapped and high risk employees do so, according to Walker.  Where 89% of loyal employees help coworkers who have heavy workloads, only 60% of trapped or high-risk employees do.  In a recession, of course, it is more important than ever to keep existing customers loyal, because the cost of acquiring new customers is so high.

This is Reason #1 of the top five reasons to measure employee loyalty during a recession.  Make sure to review them all.

When Survey Incentives Run Amuck

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Sometimes you have to offer incentives to guarantee a sufficient response rate to your survey.  Good times to use incentives include when you are surveying a group that your organization does not have a direct relationship with, when the survey is long, when it is on a dull subject or when similar past surveys have had a low response rate.

On such occasions, you will get the highest response rate if you offer each respondent a small gift, rather than offering them the chance at a larger prize.

Here are some best practices for when you offer an incentive for each completed survey:

• Make sure that you state this incentive is only good for the original recipient.
• Set the survey to be closed or private, so that each potential respondent receives a unique link by email.
• Do not let respondents save the survey to return to it later (sometimes called "save and resume").  By setting up one-time use, subsequent clicks on the link will show a page indicating that the survey has already been completed.  Otherwise, if the recipient distributes the link, people clicking on it will see and overwrite the last respondent's answers.
• Set a quota, thereby capping the number of incentives that you must provide.  Make sure to refer to the limit in the email invitation ("the first 300 respondents will receive...").

What happens if you don't follow these guidelines?  Well, one Vovici customer, Plow & Hearth, recently offered a $25 gift certificate to each respondent.  Recognizing that this was a larger than average incentive, a recipient published the survey invitation to FreeStuffTimes.com, one of many web sites that link to special offers and freebies.  The result was a sudden avalanche of responses.  Plow & Hearth quickly realized the situation and shut down the survey.

The company generously and graciously handled the situation, by sending all uninvited respondents the following email:

Thank you for your participation in our recent Lifestyle survey.

Unfortunately, the survey you responded to was only intended for a very limited, pre-selected audience of our customers whom we contacted via e-mail. Without our knowledge or consent, the survey was subsequently posted on several coupon sites by one of the original recipients. Once we became aware of the issue on Monday morning, the survey was disabled immediately.

We do however value your feedback and appreciate the time you spent completing the survey. To thank you for your unsolicited participation, we would like to offer you a $10 appreciation reward for use with your next Plow & Hearth purchase. Please reference the reward code below to redeem this offer....

So, when offering incentives, make sure to follow the guidelines above.  If you forget, and do have a deluge of responses, you can usually find the date the link was made public.  Contrast the results before that time with the later results, to see if the freebie seekers differ significantly from the original respondents.  If they do differ, discard all of the late results.

And, finally, to forestall any negative publicity, make sure to offer later respondents some reward, as Plow & Hearth so gracefully did.

Age Question

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Yesterday's Pluggers cartoon made fun of the age-range demographic  question (please go read it; I don't want to violate their copyright by embedding it here). 

You wouldn't think this was a good idea for a comic strip, but it actually made the Top 10 Plugger comic strips for 2008.  Clearly it hit a chord with many readers.  When counseling new survey authors, I always advise them to avoid showing any bias, but showing an age range of "56 and over" reveals an interesting lack of perspective, grouping 70 million U.S. adults (almost a third of all American adults) into one demographic.

As I've written before, in general, you should avoid asking a respondent to select their age range.

• Ranges can offend the respondent. A 56-year old would not think that he had much in common with a 90-year old, yet he is grouped into the same category in the survey referenced by Pluggers.
• Ranges are arbitrary.  I could easily subdivide the "56 and over" into four segments (56-61 years old, 62-67 years old, 68-75 years old, 76+ years old), each with different attitudes and approaches to work and retirement, but you could probably come up with your own reasons for dividing it differently. 
• Ranges limit your analysis.  You can't report the average age of respondents from such a question.  You can't group the respondents into generational cohorts using a standard list of age ranges; for instance, Baby Boomers are part of the 36-45 age group, all of the 46-55 age group, and only some of the 56+ age group.

So what should you do?  Check out "Asking the Age Question in Mail and Online Surveys" (PDF) by Benjamin Healey and Philip Gendall of Massey University, who tested three different methods of asking the age question: 

1. Asking for the respondent's date of birth
2. Asking for their current age in years
3. Asking for their age within a series of ranges. 

Here's their conclusion:

The best advice for survey research practitioners is to ask respondents when they were born; either their date of birth or the year in which they were born. This format appears to work well in all survey modes, is parsimonious of questionnaire space, is easy to administer, and generally produces low non-response and high accuracy. The other piece of advice specifically for online survey researchers is to avoid drop-down response menus.

I would take this advice one step further and only ask the year of birth:

In what year were you born?  ____

If this was a web survey, I'd use a text box rather than a drop-down list and validate that the answer was between 1895 and this year.  (The world's current oldest person, Tomoji Tanabe, was born in 1895.)

You lose a small degree of precision asking the year of birth over asking the actual birth date, but you remove a degree of risk about privacy.  Governor Palin's email account was hacked by someone who used her birth date and zip code to gain access.  Marketers can use birth date, zip code and gender to uniquely identify individuals in many zip codes.  As a result, I expect more and more respondents to opt out of providing full birthdates, no matter what their age.

Sometimes, as in this case, the simplest way to ask the question will give you the best results.  And it will keep your survey from being lampooned in a comic strip!

Product-Customer Growth Matrix

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In the recession of the early 1990s, when I worked for BIS Strategic Decisions, our CEO, Graham Cooper, led a strategy session in which he drew his own variant of the Ansoff Matrix.  Where the Ansoff Matrix contrasts markets and products, Cooper's matrix contrasted customers and products:

The numbers indicate the relative level of effort required to acquire each type of revenue, from least effort to most effort:

1. Selling existing products to existing customers
2. Selling existing products to new customers
3. Selling new products to existing customers
4. Selling new products to new customers

A healthy company allocates its resources across all four quadrants.  For Cooper, our company's efforts during the recession had to be invested in selling existing customers those existing products that they were not currently buying:  additional reports, retainer hours, and custom consulting projects.  This would provide the best short-term return on investment. 

For me, this "Cooper Matrix" provides a concise argument for selling more to existing customers during a recession.  Survey research can help with each quadrant, but for the first quadrant the focus is simply on customer loyalty:  what are customers' current intentions to repurchase, and what steps can your organization take to improve that likelihood?

Five Reasons You Must Measure Employee Loyalty During a Recession

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With unemployment in the U.S. workforce rising more rapidly than it has in a quarter century, why am I discussing employee loyalty and retention?

First, it's a recession, not a depression.  Despite the negative headlines, organizations are still functioning.  Despite great uncertainty about the future, organizations still count on their employees to help them adapt, change and grow.  Those organizations that protect their invesment in people will come out of this stronger.

So here are five reasons that you must measure and improve employee loyalty during a recession:

1. To maintain customer loyalty.  If you don't take care of your employees, they won't take care of your customers.  Loyal employees have a positive impact on customer loyalty and retention:  where 92% of loyal employees do tasks for customers "above and beyond the call of duty", only 54% of trapped and high risk employees do so, according to Walker.  Where 89% of loyal employees help coworkers who have heavy workloads, only 60% of trapped or high-risk employees do.  In a recession, of course, it is more important than ever to keep existing customers loyal, because the cost of acquiring new customers is so high.
2. To keep your top talent. Because we are faced with tough decisions, we must keep our top players to help us reach the right decisions.  Unfortunately, 47% of top-performing employees are actively looking for jobs, while only 18% of low performers are (Source: Leadership IQ).  Having owned my own company for many years, I can tell you it is a bitter irony when the good employees leave and the bad employees stay.
3. To focus on the right things. Organizations must be efficient in times like these; avoid trying to boil the ocean. Don't ask questions about issues that can't be addressed. Too often the focus is given to attributes where the organization is rating the lowest, rather than focusing on the attributes with the highest impact on employee perceptions and behavior.
4. To maintain morale and productivity.  The economy has us all a bit twitchy and insecure.  Your employees are nervous - a loyalty survey opens up the dialogue and gives you a chance to listen and respond.  A recent Walker study of human-resource professionals found that three-quarters of those surveyed had seen a noticeable decline in employee morale in the past several months.
5. To emerge from the recession stronger. You want your organization to exit this downturn with an uptick in performance.  When the economy improves, you want to have a stronger, more loyal staff, giving you a competitive edge over your competitors as you look to hire and grow:  92% of loyal employees will recommend your organization as a good place to work, compared to only 39% of trapped or high-risk employees.

So what are you waiting for?  Conduct an employee loyalty study today, or start an online community to gather insights from your employees.

[This post was inspired by a presentation given by Chris Woolard of our partner, Walker Information.]

Vovici v4 Extends Survey Authoring & Analysis throughout Enterprise

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Today we announced the release of Vovici v4, the latest expansion of our flagship feedback platform.  Vovici v4 extends feedback throughout the enterprise: its assisted survey authoring empowers managers to write their own surveys in conjunction with internal mentors, while its powerful business intelligence empowers employees to develop and customize their own analysis of surveys reflecting their domain or geography.

Key features of Vovici v4 include:

• Uniquely combines Proprietary Panels, Online Surveys and Business Intelligence
• Embeds feedback into business applications and leading CRM systems to allow 360-degree views of customers
• Offers industry's most powerful analytics, data visualization and reporting
• Helps you manage survey creation workflows and approval cycles to protect your brand and eliminate feedback fatigue

Vovici v4 helps your organization:

• Improve strategy with deeper knowledge of customers and employees
• Drive enterprise efficiencies and cost reduction with robust, fast, accurate EFM
• Deliver enterprise-grade protection for your brand and critical business data

Vovici v4, formerly known as Vovici EFM Community and before that as Perseus SurveySolutions/EFM, is the fourteenth major release of the product that pioneered the Enterprise Feedback Management industry.

Unsubscribe Survey Templates

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When my quick survey of 30 unsubscription processes didn't turn up any surveys with a closed-end question, I went looking for them. 

From the Office Depot survey:

We value your opinion!

We would appreciate it if you took a moment to tell us why you unsubscribed:

• I don't remember subscribing to receive emails from Office Depot
• The offers and promotions are not as good as I expected them to be
• The content was not relevant to me
• I have found another retailer to shop for these items
• I receive too many emails from Office Depot
• Other

From the Microsoft Unsubscribe survey:

• I already receive too much e-mail
• I am not interested in receiving promotional e-mail from Microsoft
• Information in e-mail is not relevant to my job/company
• I have changed my e-mail address/job/location
• I don't recall signing up to receive e-mail from Microsoft
• E-mail address is no longer active
• Other (please describe your reason in the "Comments" box)

From the Borders unsubscribe survey:

Thank you. You have been unsubscribed from our email list.

We at Borders strive to deliver informative and valuable emails to our customers.

To help us continue to improve, we would appreciate it if you took a moment
to tell us why you unsubscribed (select as many as apply):

• I receive too many emails in general.
• I like receiving Borders emails, just not as often.
• I am having difficulty receiving or viewing Borders emails.
• I do not remember subscribing to receive emails from Borders.
• I do not find the content of current Borders emails useful.
• I am not interested in Borders at this time.
• Other:

I like the Microsoft use of a general comments box, so that you can get any open feedback the respondent wants to provide - the added color can be helpful.  I like that the Office Depot survey tracks for lost business ("I have found another retailer to shop for these items"). And I like the Borders approach of asking the survey question after the unsubscribe form: it flowed seamlessly, was clearly optional (you've already been unsubscribed by this point) and kept the unsubscribe form simple. 

Which choices you should provide in your own unsubscription survey depends in part on what decisions you are going to make from these results.  I hope these three examples provide you with a good start.

An Apostle Model for Employee Loyalty

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Where the Apostle Model analyzes customer satisfaction and loyalty, Walker Information - Vovici's new partner for employee benchmarks - has an analogous segmentation for employee loyalty.  The Walker model segments employees by attitude and behavior:

Unlike the Apostle Model's reliance on two questions, the Walker model integrates four questions into its analysis.  The attitudinal index used in the segmentation is derived from three questions, giving it greater accuracy and stability than one-question metrics.

The four Walker employee segments follow:

• Truly Loyal - positive attitude, positive behavior - These employees plan to remain employed and want to work for your organization.
• Accessible - positive attitude, negative behavior - Accessible employees want to remain employed but may not be able to, because of outside circumstances or better opportunities elsewhere.
• Trapped - negative attitude, positive behavior - Trapped employees plan to remain employed, but would prefer to work elsewhere.
• High Risk - negative attitude, negative behavior - High Risk employees do not plan to remain employed and no longer want to work for your organization.

Wallker has been using this segmentation for almost a decade now.  In its most recent study, Walker found that, in the United States, 34% of employees are Truly Loyal, 7% are Accessible, 23% are Trapped and 36% are High Risk.  How do your employees compare?  To find out, contact us today for your own employee-loyalty study.

Update: This post is part of the series The Apostle Model and Related Loyalty Segmentations.

The Top Ten Reasons for Building an Online Community in 2009

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If you don't currently have an online community, and you are not thinking of building an online community next year, you should be.  Here's the Top 10 reasons why, as Brian Koma and I presented in a recent American Marketing Association webinar.

1. You know 2009 will not be like 2008.  Will the recession end next year or will it become the longest recession in 60 years?  How will the economic and political changes affect your customers, your prospects, your partners and your employees?  You need an online community to get frequent insight into the changing attitudes and requirements of these key constituencies.
2. Give customers a place to discuss your organization.  With almost 150 million U.S. adults participating in online communities, they are already talking about you on the Internet, in social networks, forums and mailing lists.  Give them a place where they can talk about you, with you.
3. Increase loyalty just by having a community.  Just like conducting a customer satisfaction study can improve satisfaction, simply having a community can improve satisfaction.  The Deloitte and  Beeline Labs study, 2008 Tribalization of Business Survey, researched 140 organizations with communities.  Of these, 24% had already seen increased loyalty, and this was for young communities, as the majority were under two years old.
4. Introduce prospects to your organization. A virtuous circle of community engagement helps expand an open community and even win you business.  The more community participation, the more pages to be indexed by search engines: the more pages, the higher the search engine traffic: the higher the traffic, the more prospective customers discover your organization and engage with existing customers to learn about it.  (And she told two friends, and they told two friends...)
5. Generate thousands of ideas. Within eight months, My Starbucks Idea generated - and prioritized! - 55,000 ideas.  In its first 18 months, Dell IdeaStorm generated over 10,000 ideas.  As organizations and individuals adapt to the challenges of 2009, look to your online community for fresh ideas to help you improve your business.
6. Help your staff internalize and distribute feedback.  Dell has 40 employees participate in a team called Communities & Conversations.  CEOs always talk about making their organizations "customer centric": by talking to customers and evangelizing their viewpoints across the company, as these Dell team members do, the organization truly becomes centered on the customer.
7. Provide a rich source of qualitative insights.  Brad Bortner of Forrester said it best in his independent white paper, Will Web 2.0 Transform Market Research?: "Market research online communities (MROCs) will shock the qualitative market research world. They provide cheaper, faster, and newer types of insights that today's traditional qualitative research modes, such as focus groups, don't currently provide."
8. Provide comprehensive quantitative feedback. Integrate online communities with panel management or enterprise feedback management, and you can conduct projectable, representative surveys that help you size the problems and opportunities uncovered by your qualitative research.
9. Compress the traditional feedback cycle. In 2009, you don't have the time or the resources to use the traditional feedback cycle.  You need to streamline your market research with online communities, so that you can continuously act on the voice of the customer.
10. Sustainable competitive advantage comes from the changes you make. Community members will participate in your new online community because they want your organization to serve them better.  You will engage employees in the community so that they can be customer ambassadors.  Short term, you'll develop an infrastructure that will enable you to rapidly implement new ideas.  Long term, you'll develop a culture centered on customer-driven innovation and co-creation.

Build an online community in 2009, and your organization will be stronger and more successful in 2009, 2010, 2011 and beyond.

Employee Satisfaction Benchmark from Walker Information

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I'm pleased to announce that Vovici has partnered with Walker Information to offer our customers access to the Walker Loyalty in the Workplace benchmark.  A Vovici EFM Community customer can load the Walker employee satisfaction questionnaire into their account, add some additional questions to customize it, then field it to their staff through our survey software.  Once the results have been collected, Walker consultants will prepare a custom report and presentation contrasting our client's results to the Walker national benchmark.

The survey covers the following topics and takes about 20 minutes for an employee to complete:

• Attitudes toward the organization
• Work-related behaviors
• The organization and your work
• Work factors and their influence
• Opinions about the organization and its integrity
• Other comments
• Demographic information

Once the results have been analyzed, Walker provides our client with:

• An executive summary of the results, with comparisons to the national benchmark
• Detailed reports that break out every question on the survey by every demographic group (each segment with at least 5 employees)
• Loyalty segments by each demographic group
• The booklet A Guide to Understanding the Results
• A booklet that walks the client through developing an action plan to implement improvements inspired by the employee feedback

Interested customers should contact us today to start measuring employee loyalty.  Walker has been in business for almost 70 years (incredibly rare in the market-research industry) and is a great partner for Vovici, helping our customers transform employee-satisfaction surveys into increased employee loyalty.

Survey of 30 Unsubscription Processes

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I have never declared email bankruptcy but I certainly fell into default.  I've had the same personal email address from NetIdentity for almost a decade, and had 4,725 messages in my In Box, 90% of them unread.  A friend had complained about my sporadic checking of my email, so last night I decided to unsubscribe from many of the mailing lists I had ended up on. 

After unsubscribing from a few, I saw a pattern and started to keep notes.  It turns out that most organizations can do a much better job handling requests to unsubscribe from mailing lists.  For the last 30 mailing lists I unsubscribed from, here's how they handed the process.

• 17% by Email - I found this to be the most annoying method, since it varied for each list.  You have to find a special email address, copy it into a new message, then type "Unsubscribe" or something similar into the subject or body and send it.   I find web forms much more convenient.
• 13% by Instant Link - Click the link from the email and it opens a browser window or tab that tells you that you are unsubscribed.  So quick and convenient it seems anticlimactic!
• 60% by Link to Form - The majority of unsubscribe proccesses require you to change your email preferences on a form, sometimes allowing you to opt out of different categories of email.  This struck me as a desperate "we can still be friends, right?" plea as I tried to break off the relationship. Despite that, I did appreciate the granularity in a couple instances, where I chose one of the options for receiving rare, important messages, and there were some times when I would have downgraded but couldn't, because the opportunity wasn't offered.
• 10% by Link to Survey - The best unsubscribe forms make it simple to unsubscribe but capture some additional content with a quick survey question.  In each of the three cases, this was an open-ended response, asking why I was leaving.  You wouldn't think you could get asking an open-ended question wrong, but one unsubscription form had a single-line text box that was too short, and one had a multi-line text box that counted down some arbitrary character limit as I typed, as if each additional letter was an imposition.  Apparently, hard-drive costs are soaring for this particular company.

Obviously, this is a qualitative assessment of unsubscriptions, not a quantitative assessment.  The mailing lists I ended up on were not randomly chosen and therefore are not representative of mailing lists in general.  In my case, the list was made up of retailers, etailers, web services and charities I supported once at some coworkers' request. Your mileage may vary.

Still, from this quick survey I think most organizations can do a better job handling unsubscription requests.  Some suggestions:

• Let the reader opt out of some but not all channels of communication - List the available types of mailings and the current email settings.  A couple forms gave a bullet list of the different types of messages I would no longer be receiving; I would have opted in to one or two, but didn't want all the email they were currently sending.
  • Offer a separate channel for "Feedback Surveys" -  That wasn't available as a channel in any of the 18 web forms I used. There were a few vendors for whom I would have taken surveys, even though I didn't want to get their marketing messages anymore. Surveys are targeted emails, and I imagine people would keep receiving these. It's worth asking them.
  • Offer a separate channel for snail mail - I figure if people are willing to spend money to mail me something, I'm open to reading it.  I checked this box on a couple forms, but it was rarely offered.
• Ask them why they are unsubscribing! - Since they are already at a form, you might as well ask them a survey question. 
  • Make it short and sweet. "Why are you unsubscribing?"  Don't be longwinded, like these real examples:
    • "To better serve readers in the future, we would like to know your reasons for unsubscribing."
    • "Please take a moment to let us know the most significant reason you have requested not to receive further promotional e-mail communications from [us]. Your comments will help ensure we provide timely and relevant messages to our other subscribers."
  • Give them a list of common choices. It's not rocket science why your readers are unsubscribing:  they get too much email in general, you are emailing them too often, and your email messages are not compelling enough.  Chances are if you just ask them an open-ended question you are rarely going to even read all the comments, let alone categorize them.
  • Don't ask them more than one question. If you have multiple questions you want to gather data for, randomly choose which one to ask. Be considerate of your respondent. They are trying to unsubscribe after all, not provide you detailed feedback about your marketing initiatives.

Thanks to this little bit of research I temporarily staved off email bankruptcy, deleting the messages from each vendor as I unsubscribed.  Only 3,212 emails to go!

Update (12/17/08): Three survey templates for unsubscription

Social Networks vs. Online Communities vs. Panels

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The terms "online community" and "social network" are sometimes used interchangeably, but an important distinction between them is how members interact.

For instance, in a traditional research panel, the researcher communicates with a panelist (typically sending a survey request) and the panelist can only communicate with the researcher.  It's a one-to-one relationship.

In an online community, that panelist is now a community member, and he or she can talk with any other community member, much to the chagrin of sponsoring organizations!  Sponsors are often afraid of what members will say to one another and are concerned that bad news will spread.  Yet it is this member-to-member interaction that unlocks much of the value of online communities, as members riff off one another's comments and ideas to provide new insights.  It's always worth the risk.
   
Whenever I talk about proprietary online communities, people can't seem to help but ask me to compare them to Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and other social networks.  Where social networks differ from communities is that not all members can see one another.  If you register for a new online community today, once you log-in you can typically see all the forums and all the recent comments from all participating community members.  When you log in to a social network for the first time, you can't see any activity.  You need to find and add "friends" (nodes in the social network).  Once you've done that, you can see their activity and profiles, but you can't see everything.   If an online community is a party, a social network is a multistory club with multiple stages, but you can't leave the room you're in (let's hope the band is good!).

For researchers, the nature of a social networks means they need to "friend" those they wish to research, and they can only research that subset of the social network-which makes social networks very different from proprietary online communities.

Over course, reality is never quite as neat as a diagram:  some online communities enable members to have lists of friends, whose comments they can then conveniently read;  some social networks enable members to post public comments for anyone to read.  Over time, most communities will properly blend the two into public and private spaces, but for now I find this diagram to be a useful introduction for people new to social media.

Online Communities in the Product Development Lifecycle

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Sometimes in seems like research communities are only discussed as being useful for product ideation and brainstorming: the first step of the product-development lifecycle.  In fact, online communities can actually add value at each step.

Conceive

• Discuss unmet needs with customers and prospects to identify new product or feature opportunities
• Investigate novel uses of the product to identify new segments and their requirements

Design

• Gather reaction to proposed new products or features
• Prioritize opportunities by importance to community members

Prelaunch

• Propose communications themes and messaging for a product launch
• Test reaction to product packaging

Service

• Evaluate early experiences with new product for surprises and disappointments
• Maintain diaries of product usage

For a great case study of using a research community at each step, check out the Novartis brief, Delivering Continuous Insights: Involving Consumers in Every Decision.  By using communities for these purposes, organizations can lower the cost of innovation and create a continuous feedback loop that turns online communities into sustainable competitive advantage.

Survey Analysis & Business Intelligence

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Last week we announced the latest product in our enterprise feedback management suite:  Vovici Feedback Intelligence.  Most EFM and survey software applications take a traditional view of survey analysis, providing frequent reports, verbatim lists and cross-tabulations.  While a survey tool can report on each question intelligently, using a pie chart for a choose-one question, a bar chart for a choose-many question, and so on, most survey tools are not meant for ad-hoc analysis.  Such tools often make it difficult to manipulate and share survey data.  In fact, many of our prospects were exporting survey data to Excel, SPSS or SAS.

The genesis of, and the genius of, Vovici Feedback Intelligence is that it for the first time marries the flexibility of Business Intelligence with survey data.   The new system:

• Puts powerful data mining, survey data analysis and reporting in the hands of everyday business managers
• Dramatically reduces the time and cost of creating usable data - from weeks to hours
• Allows easy configuration and sharing of executive-level dashboards with drill-down capability
• Enables easy online report sharing and hierarchical report management

Feedback Intelligence is available as a new module in our enterprise feedback management suite.  Watch our two-minute tour or sign up for a demo!

Turning Online Communities into Sustainable Competitive Advantage

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What's the hardest part about using online communities for feedback?  It's not the technology.  Thanks to community software, a community site can be up and branded within hours.  It's not marketing the community to customers, employees or prospects.  The marketing department can approach that with gusto.  It could be getting members to participate; that can be hard, and spinning up the virtuous circle can take time.  But I think the hardest part about using online communities is preparing your organization to receive and act on the feedback.

Who is going to spearhead evaluating ideas for cost and impact on the business?  Not the community manager.  Who is going to take the community's priorities and identify the organization's priorities?  Who is going to implement each idea, champion it throughout the organization and see it through until it is complete?  Definitely not the community manager!

Remember, community members participate because they want your organization to serve them better.  You owe it to them to follow through.

Short term, you need to develop an infrastructure that will enable you to rapidly implement new ideas.  This should be a cross-functional team charged with evaluating the big ideas-the major initiatives-for ROI, prioritizing them, championing them to the executive team, then transitioning each idea to the appropriate department for implementation.

Long term, you want to diffuse the smaller, easier to implement ideas throughout the organization:  you want to foster an organizational culture centered on customer-driven innovation and co-creation.  Engage employees in the community, so that they can be customer ambassadors.  Dell's Communities and Conversations team is a great example of this.  Employees who would not normally interact with customers-people from shipping, from logistics, from the purchasing department, from finance, from HR-now have a place to engage with customers.  They carry back that customer-centered viewpoint to their departmental colleagues.  The organization as a whole gets closer to the customer than even before, inspiring staff to adapt.

Remember, a research community is only as good as the changes it inspires.  The sustainable competitive advantage of your online community will come from the changes you make as a result of it.

Don’t Treat Community Members Like Respondents

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In traditional market research, respondents are considered disposable: just another domino to be knocked down to complete a survey.  The researcher's organization doesn't have any relationship with the respondents.  They are invited to the survey by a third party, who has typically built a panel for just such use.  The researcher doesn't care if the respondent finds the survey to be long, tedious and frustrating, so long as a sufficient number of respondents answer the questions.

In feedback communities, on the other hand, community members are valued partners.  They are customers, prospects, employees, students or investors.  The researcher's organization has a direct relationship with these respondents, and the researcher needs to treat them with respect.  The worst that can happen is for a survey to so antagonize a customer that they wish to take their business elsewhere.  This is rare, but surveys designed for respondents rather than partners can definitely lead to customer dissatisfaction, as with the auto club survey that was so long that it poisoned an otherwise exemplary service experience.

Researchers can't treat community members the way they would treat third-party panelists.  Special requirements:

• Don't survey members too often
• Don't subject members to long or tedious questionnaires (see these tips for shortening questionnaires)
• Don't ask members questions your organization knows the answer to (e.g., profile information)

Above all else: treat survey takers like royalty!

How Using a 5-Point Scale Costs Netflix Sales

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To celebrate Cyber Monday, let’s look at product ratings on online retailers.  The New York Times has a great article on precisely this subject, “If You Liked This, You’re Sure to Love That”:

When Netflix customers log into their accounts, they can rate any movie from one to five stars, to help “teach” the Netflix system what their preferences are; the average customer has rated around 200 movies, so Netflix has a lot of information about what its customers like and don’t like….

Cinematch is the bit of software embedded in the Netflix Web site that analyzes each customer’s movie-viewing habits and recommends other movies that the customer might enjoy. (Did you like the legal thriller “The Firm”? Well, maybe you’d like “Michael Clayton.” Or perhaps “A Few Good Men.”) The Netflix Prize goes to anyone who can make Cinematch’s predictions 10 percent more accurate. One million dollars might sound like an awfully big prize for such a small improvement. But in fact, Netflix’s founders tried for years to improve Cinematch, with only incremental results, and they knew that a 10 percent bump would be a challenge for even the most deft programmer. They also knew that, as Reed Hastings, the chief executive of Netflix, told me recently, “getting to 10 percent would certainly be worth well in excess of $1 million” to the company. The competition was announced in October 2006, and no one has won yet.

The choice of a 1-5 scale is hurting Netflix here.  A rating scale of 1 to 5 stars is fairly ubiquitous in online retailing, but the scarcity of choices hurts the predictive ability of Cinematch.  The five-point scale is practically a three-point scale, with ratings of 3-5 stars accounting for 85% of the ratings (source of ratings: Ilya Grigorik).

Distribution of Netflix 1-5 Ratings

Most likely this is because of the bias of which movies Netflix users have watched: most users only watch movies they think they are going to like, and their ratings reflect this. It even becomes a positive feedback loop: the average rating has been increasing over time.

With most of the ratings bunched around 3, 4 and 5 stars, there is too little distinction and the average is 3.6 stars.   Commenters on the blog Hacking Netflix have asked for half-star ratings, which would double the refinement of the scale.

For purposes of comparison, let’s look at the ratings of board games at BoardGameGeek, which is not an online retailer but a community site. (Hat-tip: Ratings export provided by Joe Grundy.) Board games are rated on a 1-10 scale, shown in the outer circle below, with the Netflix ratings distribution shown in the inner circle:

Distribution of Netflix 1-5 Ratings vs. BoardGameGeek 1-10 Ratings

Where 23% of Netflix ratings are 5 stars, only 13% of BGG ratings are ratings of 9 to 10.  Interestingly, the bottom half of the BGG scale (ratings of 1-5) accounts for barely a fifth of the ratings (22%).  Only the distributions of ratings are dramatically different.  The averages are not far apart; Netflix movies have an average rating of 3.6, while BGG board games have an average rating of 3.5 on a 5-point scale (average of 6.7 on a 10-point scale).  [Note: BGG permits users to enter fractional ratings; those ratings are not included in this analysis.]

A 1-10 scale, by providing finer shades of gradation at the low and high ends of the scale, might have increased the predictive validity of Cinematch.  Since Netflix believes a 10% improvement in Cinematch “would certainly be worth well in excess of $1 million”, the choice of the wrong ratings scale is costing Netflix millions in potential sales.