Twitter-Triggered Surveys
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Sep 22, 2009
One of the many ways that people use Twitter is to share their good and bad experiences with specific brands. As an example, we analyzed 150 recent tweets about McDonald's and identified four complaints:
While feedback is great, even negative feedback, a tweet-being limited to 140 characters-doesn't provide actionable context. No doubt a McDonald's executive reading these tweets would have some additional questions for customers about their in-store experience:
- Where was the McDonald's that this happened to you?
- When did this happen?
- Did you alert a McDonald's employee at the restaurant to the situation?
- Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
In fact, this is a great opportunity for a transactional survey. A McDonald's social media representative could tweet a reply to each person, along the lines of this invented example: "@VenessaLeal, so sorry to hear about your ice coffee. We'd love additional feedback, to serve you better next time. http://bit.ly/..."
This provides a way to transform unstructured feedback into structured feedback, which would be more manageable. Such a transactional survey would provide McDonald's the additional information they need to take action: they would be able to route the feedback to the appropriate store, where management could remind McDonald's employees of the best practices that would resolve the identified issue. McDonald's could incorporate this feedback flow into their other ongoing research initiatives (e.g., mystery shopping and customer satisfaction studies) to identify ongoing opportunities for improving training and service.
I wouldn't trust automation to identify which tweets are negative feedback, since sentiment analysis is too inaccurate. I think for now a human needs to read the tweets and respond; someone in your marketing and customer-service departments should be reading tweets that mention your brands already. Nor would I extrapolate from the results of such surveys; they are not representative of the wider customer base that you serve, the vast majority of whom are not on Twitter.
As of this writing (September 22, 2009), the @McDonalds Twitter account has issued just 1 tweet: "We'll be joining you very soon. Stay tuned." It will be interesting to see in what ways McDonald's uses its Twitter presence, especially for collecting and managing feedback.
If you are aware of any organizations that use Twitter to initiate transactional surveys, please share in the comments section below. Thanks!