Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Apr 30, 2008
Eleven years ago everyone in the company provided technical support. While that certainly ensured all of us had an intimate understanding of our customers, it didn't provide the best experience to users of our software. We hired our first dedicated tech support representative, Jeff ("Jay" or "J.") Mine in 1998, and I'm happy to say that he is still with the company today. These days of course we have much more process in support, and Jay is a Tier III representative who provides advanced support. I'm also proud to say that all of our support during U.S. business hours is provided by support representatives in Virginia and Massachusetts.
We are constantly working to improve the support experience. Last year our tech-support reps had to support products for all the companies that have merged into Vovici - Perseus Development, WebSurveyor, Raosoft and Surveyo - as well as new versions of predecessor products that were designed to look and work as a product family. A challenging task! In the past month, under the direction of Rod Morris and Nancy Porte, tech support has cut phone wait times in half and has launched a new customer support portal. I wanted to call it a "supportal" but cooler heads prevailed. Check it out!
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Wed, Apr 30, 2008
The buzz around online communities may have passed an unofficial milestone recently - inclusion in the current rotation of IBM commercials. As metrics go, it is decidedly unscientific, but when "Big Blue" turns its attention to a subject, you can reasonably conclude that it is gaining traction.
Several weekends ago I spent a lot of time enjoying one of my indulgences - watching the Masters telecast for almost every minute it is televised. For those of you who do not watch the Masters, the broadcast has only 4 minutes of commercial interruption an hour, as opposed to the normal 16-20. And the broadcast has only three sponsors, one of which is IBM. As a result, I suspect I saw IBM's entire catalog of current commercials.
On Saturday there was a commercial on the subject of online communities. The general theme of the community ad was simple - turning a social phenomenon into a business tool. It reflects what we see in the market: companies are building communities with varying levels of success and struggling to grasp how these communities can add real value to their business.
I assume that the frequency that a given commercial runs in IBM's rotation would be a relative indicator of where they feel it falls importance-wise. I only saw the community commercial once, while some, such as their "Think Green" themed commercial, I saw 10-15 times over the course of the weekend. Selfishly I hope that the demand for online communities drives the ad into heavy rotation by the time I return to my couch when the U.S. Open is played in the summer.
The tone of the commercial also brought back fond memories of ads that Lotus ran years ago when the Internet was emerging as a business tool called "Work the Web". The ads featured Dennis Leary (yes, that Dennis Leary) berating people about using the Internet for frivolous pursuits instead of money making commerce with such statements as "If you want to surf, move to Maui!" (video). That is right - it was not so long ago that businesses had to be encouraged to take the Internet seriously as a business tool. Communities are moving on a similar arc away from the emphasis on social networking to being a useful tool for business. Must be so - it is now being addressed by an IBM commercial.
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Fri, Apr 25, 2008
Market researchers are becoming increasingly concerned about online panelists who are participating in surveys for personal gain rather than simply to provide feedback. As a result, vendors are offering new solutions. This month alone Peanut Labs won an award for its Optimus data quality technology and MarketTools introduced its TrueSample certification program.
The MarketTools announcement quotes Doug Doyle, director of market research at Microsoft, as saying, "Microsoft has found that trust in external sample quality [emphasis added] is the number-one challenge facing online market research."
This is the huge difference between surveying external lists and internal lists of customers, resellers, employees and other key constituencies. MarketTools states that "TrueSample is a three-part process aimed at ensuring authenticity in survey respondents. It provides objective assurance that survey respondents are real, unique and engaged."
Feedback-focused communities such as those used by our customers already ensure that survey respondents are "real, unique and engaged."
Real: Because feedback-community members are recruited from existing company records of customers, prospects, employees and investors, you can be assured that these are real people with real relationships with your organization.
Unique: Your organization already expends resources to validate that each customer record in your CRM system is unique, and most likely has similar data-scrubbing procedures already in place for other databases of important constituencies. EFM Community can be synchronized with these databases to leverage your existing investment in ensuring unique responses.
Engaged: The fundamental challenge of external sample research is weeding out respondents who are merely answering questions randomly in order to qualify for prizes. Incentives offered to customers and employees are typically tokens of appreciation that are not going to encourage respondents to distort their answers to qualify; these respondents value their relationships with your organization and want to see those relationships improve. The desire to strengthen that relationship provides the ultimate in engagement!
Such concerns about external list quality provide compelling reasons to develop internal communities for many research initiatives.
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Wed, Apr 23, 2008
I read this article today that really capture what we are all about at Vovici: http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/08_17/b4081000030457.htm?chan=magazine+channel_what%27s+next
It is great to see how major brands are beginning to take advantage of the change in our society and are utilizing technology and the internet to gather feedback and to do more effective research. Starbucks and Dell could really extend the Ideas portal from salesforce.com by taking advantage of the people that have a propensity to visit their web sites to give feedback and recruit them to join an online community panel. Let me explain further... I witnessed a perfect example of a few opportunities where Starbucks could take advantage of the Vovici platform. I was in my favorite Starbucks this weekend and reloaded my gift card. The employee did a great job to make me aware that I could now go online and load my card and attach the information to my credit card so it would never run out. Now you researchers and marketers out there picture this... had I gone to the web site destination to re-load my card and found a promotion there that said..."join the Starbucks Advisory Panel"... "earn points to give us feedback for new product and services offerings and to generally give us feedback about your experience".
Now continue to imagine... I click on that link and go to another Starbucks branded page that messages... "you are extremely important to us and we need your feedback. As an advisory panel member we would like to invite you to a survey from time to time. We promise that our survey will never be more than 10 minutes, we will show a survey progress bar on every page of the survey so you know where you are in the survey, we will share with you the results and grant you additional points in your Starbucks account." The Vovici Community platform makes this extremely easy to do and provides each panel member with their own portal page to take their surveys and track results. Online Community Panels build loyalty to the brand and give companies a method of gathering feedback and doing research like never before.
Now one more idea for your imagination for today... a few weeks have gone by and Starbucks would have thousands of people identified in the Vovici Community Panel, that have opted in to take surveys. We have asked them a few screening questions like, age, zip code, education and profession and have integrated that survey data to their gift card information via our api's. Now we know who they are, what they drink, what stores they shop at and how often they drink coffee. Imagine what could you do with that type of power We provide the most advanced technology platform for recruiting and managing online community panels and through our services team and partners help our customers recruit panel members to their online community via offline and online methods. To continue with my Starbucks example, they could recruit people from the current "ideas" portal by putting a link there to their Online Advisory Panel powered by Vovici. They could put links on their home page, on signs in their stores, on receipts etc. etc.
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Mon, Apr 14, 2008
Researchers... I said it before... Listen to your customers... Stop surveying using the telephone!
I have had it. In the last week I am getting a call every night at the dinner, just like I did before the Do Not Call Registry was made law. Is this happening to you too? Researchers are as bad as the marketers. On my most recent call, I told the interviewer to "take me off your list" and hung up. Ten seconds later the same man called me again and said that he would not take me off the list. I hung up and he called a third time. He was doing a survey. Yes there are bad apples in every bunch and respectable phone interviewers would never treat me like this, but here is what is happening. The telephone survey industry is attempting to compete with lower cost online survey methods and are hiring cheaper labor and moving offshore. The quality of interviewers is getting worse. They are also forced to make many more calls because all of us on the do not call list, don't want to be called, so their response rates are dropping. Lower response rates, lower cost labor spells trouble for us!
I know this sounds self serving because I am in the business of helping companies gather feedback online, but I am also a very vocal consumer.
Listen up researchers. We need someone to lead the charge to stop telephone research. It is an intrusion on my privacy. I can't lead the fight because people will say it is self serving.
Think about what needs to happen now to complete a survey on the telephone now that more people are only using cell phones and response rates are dropping. It means... more calls. Yes more calls! No wonder so many people are now using their cell phone and do not have a land line. Maybe the phone companies will wise up and offer a way for me to program my land line so only people I know can call me. That's it! Phone companies need to give me this capability or I am gone as a customer.
Posted by Dean Wiltse on Mon, Apr 07, 2008
I just attended and spoke at the ARF conference in New York. It was a truly great meeting and it was personally very invigorating and validating to what we are doing at Vovici.
On the first day we heard presentations about political polling and social trend shifts. The internet and social networks are changing politics in the US dramatically. I was amazed to hear that more people have seen the Obama speech about race on YouTube than have seen his minister's preaching on television news.
In the second day we heard from the four CEO's of the largest research firms, all of whom I have met several times during my years at Greenfield Online. The conversation was mostly about online data quality and the issues faced by the largest MR firms in the world. Very interesting. Once again the prominent topic was the internet.
At lunch on the second day the CEO from Digitas spoke about online marketing and the emergence of social networks and the opportunity for brand marketing and research through internet channels. He gave some more mind boggling statistics;
- In 2009 over 1.5 billion people will be online worldwide
- One third of the worldwide population has high speed internet access
- One half of the world's population will own a cell phone
- The top five sites with the most traffic include three social networks, MySpace, YouTube and Facebook. Google and Yahoo were one and two.
His speech was before my breakout session. I began my session talking about this data and these trends and how they support the opportunity that we bring to business... to build online communities of their customers to gather feedback and to do better research.
A sociological change is happening. People are interacting on the internet by reading blogs, posting reviews and joining forums. Our technology platform takes advantage of these trends to help companies by building community panels of prospects and customers to take surveys and give feedback. My session went well. At the end, senior managers of four major brands approached me, gave me their business card and said, "call me, we want one of those".