For those of us who are deeply involved with online marketing research, it may appear that the proliferation of Voice of the Customer (VoC) programs is exploding these days. However, recent Forrester’s research found that 56% of the executives they surveyed were not aware of any formal VoC program in their companies. One of potential explanations to this discrepancy may be the fact that many companies conduct localized, departmental initiatives that are not visible to the rest of the organization.

Indeed, an amount of online surveys I am bombarded every day is staggering. It seems that people who designed every website I stop by want to know my opinion… even before I had any time to form one. Availability of inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for conducting online surveys is not a good excuse for harassing your site’s visitors to collect “short” and “easy” response to the closed-ended questions structured on a scale of 1 to 5.

There are 3 reasons why an inadequately administered survey is harmful to your business:

• Popup surveys reduce visitor engagement with a site, and therefore promote high bounce rate.

Many people commenting about their site user experience are complaining about the timing of these interruptions and their inability to respond to posed questions at a time they are being posed. Timing the request to allow a customer to experience your product or service would provide more meaningful reaction and responses.

•  Questions that do not align with customer’s experience and perspective do alienate the customers.

The closed-ended questions you pose to your customers may be very important to you and your company. However, if answering them does not provide any value to the responder, why would they want to waste their time? It is much better to provide generous space for comments and reflections of their experience from their perspective, and let them tell you what elements of this experience are important to them. Make it easy for them to say what they want to, not what you want to hear. They are not in the business of validating your assumptions.

• Customer Feedback that does not result in action is a waste of time – yours and your customer’s.

A disconnect between cause and effect explains low participation of voters in a political process. Customers want to help you improve your product or service and will provide you with clues to how to do it, if you “listen”. There are tools available for automated processing of unstructured customer comments and reviews that are called Opinion Mining platforms. Use them to help you discover the insights into their experience. You can get results within 24 hours. Let the customers know that their efforts are not wasted. Communicate back what you have learned from them and what actions you plan to take in an effort to improve their experience.

This online market research, administered by Amplified Analytics, is valid as of August 5, 2011 and is the result of the review of different tablet brands’ segment of the market. It is based on the analysis of customer feedback from 8,241 tablet users who expressed their sentiments on the product.

The chart above depicts the Word of Mouth (WOM) Share for ten of the top tablet brands in terms of customer satisfaction (CSI).

The chart above illustrates shows customer satisfaction with Operating System of their respective Tablet.

The scores were algorithmically produced by the use of Opinion Mining software that conducts an analysis of customer feedback that is published online by the customers themselves; no customer was personally contacted to provide their opinions.  The relative percentages were not based on customer’s answers to biased survey questions. It is not Amplified Analytics’ business to conduct surveys.

It is also important to note that the Apple iPad2 was excluded from the list of tablet brands analyzed because it significantly dominates the market, thus making the comparison of customer satisfaction meaningless. The Apple brand seems to have its own market that is incomparable to others.

The chart below shows a comparison of specific attributes (reliability, portability, display, etc) of leading tablets. These attributes came from the customers when they shared their experience using the brands. The green line athwart denotes the relative importance of each attribute to customers. Check the methodology used in this link: Opinion Mining. Attributes with less than 1% importance were not included in the graph.

From the graph, we can see that Reliability is the most important attribute, with 11.7% of total opinions.

Yet, customers of Samsung Galaxy continue to get disappointed for the second month of measuring it since it was first introduced. Its Customer Support, with an importance rating of 1.76%, exceeds customer expectations by 8% while the Display attribute, with a 7.42% score, is on top of the competition.

You can access this dynamic Customer Intelligence dashboard by clicking on this link and CustomerSay! Verbatim by clicking on a specific bar of this chart. “Attributes” and “Products” selection windows allow for focus on your area of interest.

Social media monitoring quickly becomes a “commodity” with hundreds of companies’ rummaging through fire hose streams of communications published, re-published and re-tweeted every second of a day. Brands want to know what people think about them and are prepared to pay for this knowledge. But why is this so? What is the value of knowing that people communicate a positive sentiment about your brand today?

I would speculate that most companies make this investment without specific strategy or process on hand, and some companies do it to manage the reputation of their brands or in other words, to do PR damage control and risk mitigation. A very few do so to systematically improve their customers’ experience.

Most of Social Media chatter has relatively low value for opinion mining efforts, which need to be given attention if you want to extract actionable knowledge for systematic change.

Furthermore, it is important to understand the differences between the types of communications that use Social Media channels:

• People often refer to Word of Mouth (WOM) in Social Media as a buzz and focus too much on technology at the expense of the appropriate targets, actions and measurements.
• The Voice of the Customer (VOC) is a subset of WOM that can be directly attributed to the customers of your product. It is very similar and as valuable as, if not more valuable than, customer feedback collected by many companies through their “walled garden” channels at a great expense.

The opinion mining operation that is focused on the Voice of the Customer “ore” delivers significantly higher yield compared to the overall Social Media buzz in terms of actionable knowledge. It is possible because it provides a very close correlation to specific products and often describes holistic customer experience with these products. I refer to “holistic customer experience” in the context of the customer’s effort required to achieve a desired outcome. An example of a desirable outcome is a new roof for the house or a quality audio experience while exercising in a gym.

We consider all steps – from the initial purchase research to the selection, purchase, delivery and setup, and to a completed realization of the desired outcome – measure it as a difference between the customer’s expectations and their perception of reality (their actual experience). Examples of VOC “ore” include—in ascending order—customer forums, blogs and customer reviews published online.

Recent Forrester’s research found that 14% of executives surveyed said that their companies don’t solicit customer feedback at all, while 56% of the respondents said—or were not sure if—their companies do not have a formal VOC program. However, the most shocking finding is that nearly one out of every four executives said that they seldom or never use customer feedback to change a business process (source: http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=142811).

The Temkin Group research identified it as the one of Top 10 Customer Experience Incompetencies, as shown in the table on the left.

There is a good reason why so many companies find it difficult to mine Social Media for improving customer experience:  most content generated by customers is unusable by corporate information systems that are built to process structured data.

The following steps have to be taken to address the big challenge of translating seemingly anecdotal evidence into a scalable, corporate process:

1. Aggregation, capture, cleansing and authentication of Voice of Customer data
2. Conversion of this data into structured information
3. Alignment of this information with corporate targets, i.e. conversion of this information into corporate knowledge
4. Integration of that knowledge into existing, repeatable business process.

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