Replying to the Voice of the Customer: A Twitter Experiment
Posted by Jeffrey Henning on Tue, Nov 03, 2009
Six weeks ago, as an experiment, I set up a new Twitter account (my main Twitter account is @jhenning) to tweet my personal experiences with products, services and establishments. Since about a third of my tweets would be about local establishments, I sought out and followed about 100 other Twitter users near me; about 20 followed me back.
That done, I then tried to make at least one comment each business day. Each tweet reflected an authentic experience: some were positive comments, some negative, some mixed. I wrote about 30 local, regional and national brands.
My expectation was to do an analysis of brand response by scale of brand and by type of tweet (positive, negative, mixed). Unfortunately, only one brand - a regional brand - ever replied to me. So this makes for a rather boring statistical analysis!
The results shocked me - I rarely tweet about personal brand experiences from @jhenning but the one time I did, the retailer responded to me right away. I had expected a fifth to a third of the brands to respond to me and had hypothesized that regional brands would have the greatest participation rate, as they are big enough to monitor social media and small enough to be early adopters of new technology.
So, if your organization is out there listening on Twitter, it is time to speak up as well. The inaugural survey of the Global Web Index (a syndicated research offering from TrendStream) reported that 22% of its 16,000 panelists said that their perception of a brand is improved if the organization responds to comments in online communities and forums. Sometimes listening to the voice of the customer isn't enough, sometimes acting on the voice of the customer isn't enough: sometimes you have to reply to the voice of the customer.
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