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.

Last week we focused at customers’ perception of Operating System for tablets they purchased. These metrics are extracted from 1,352 customer generated content pieces published on-line  on or before June 15th, 2011 using Opinion Miner software.

The difference between customer expectations and their experience is measured from 0 to 2, where 1 represent a point of experience matches expectations and can be interpreted as 1=100% satisfaction.

The importance indicates a percentage of opinions about this Attribute weighted against the sum of all opinions expressed about the analized set of products. Considering the ratio of customer reviews published on-line against the number of units sold, any Attribute that carries importance over 1% may be experienced by tens of thousands of customers.

— CustomerSpeak! —

Android customers are also quite happy with their purchasing decisions depending on the version supplied with their tablet, while iOS do not have anything specific to say on the subject.

I am honored to present this webinar sponsored by Grandview Product Management community on June 22nd, 2011.

There is a heated debate in a Product Management community about the Role of Market Research in creation of innovative products and I have mused on this subject earlier on this blog.

Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.”  The “customer driven innovation” camp proponents are swearing by Customer Feedback and Voice of Customer based methodologies. However there is no clear evidence that either site consistently out-innovate their opponents.

During this webinar we will explore and analyze traditional methods of product definition process, their limitations and their applications that often lead to incremental improvements as oppose to true innovation. We will talk about

• What separate a successful product from INNOVATIVE product
• What are differences between a Product Manager and a Star Product Manager , and
• How the knowledge of the market helps to close the gaps between the two.

Please click on this link to register

The Playbook introduction caused a lot of controversy well before it was actually released with speculations about its battery life problems wildly spread all over internet. The decision to go with its proprietary operating system was also met with a lot of criticism in social media. However since the Playbook started shipping and customers had a chance to form their own opinion, the results of their opinions analysis did not produce a crystal clear picture yet.  One thing seems to emerge though – it is a lot better product than most people have expected.  This writing is based on the analysis of 886 customer reviews of their experience with these tablets.

Below is a screenshot of the dashboard with a subset of attributes that are most important to customers (statistically determined). The bars represent measurements of the difference between customer expectations and there experience with each attribute.

It appears that Battery life issue was either blown out of proportions by pre-release speculations, or miraculously corrected by RIM engineers before the product started shipping, as the Playbook customers report that it exceeded their expectations by 21%.

QNX operating system appears to be a big hit with the customers as it exceeded their expectations by 35% and scored at much higher customer perception levels than iOS and Android.

What is surprising that overall general satisfaction score from the Playbook customers is quite low in spite the fact the most of the important attribute’s scores are positive.  When I clicked on the general satisfaction bar of the Playbook, the negative opinion snippets (customer insight) was focused around the lack of content and applications for the device.

In the last few weeks I have encountered this meme on Tweeter, LinkedIn group discussions and numerous product management camp presentations. In my opinion at the core of this debate are a fuzzy definition of the term “innovation” (that is often confused with “invention”) and poor understanding of market research methodologies that are often limited to survey and forum applications.

Since I don’t know a source of really authoritative, undisputable and complete definition of the term “innovation” I would like to propose that most innovations usually are new applications of previously invented technologies and/or processes. Truly innovative products usually find new ways to use existing inventions to improve experience of people. The confusion arises when practitioners focus on improving products rather than experience with the product, because that is where a difference between “innovation” and incremental “improvement” lives.

Product managers, who subscribe to a “thought leadership” (as oppose to “customer participation”) model, love to quote Henry Ford who supposedly said – “If I asked my customers what they want, they simply would have said a faster horse.” There is no debate that a motorized carriage was an amazing invention, which by the way was not created by Ford – he innovated scalable assembly line manufacturing, among other processes. However his quote only implies that survey and/or forum market research methodologies are not suitable for validation of truly innovative products in conceptual stage of development. He couldn’t help but notice all the horse manure on the streets and inefficiencies of small cargo shipping associated with horse carriages. The art of “noticing” how customers experience products, currently available to them, is called ethnographic research and there is no innovation possible without some degree of it.

During the last SVPCamp 2011, I was really tickled to see a presentation by Tony Ulwyck of Strategyn, called “Silence the Voice of the Customer (VOC) and Create Breakthrough Products”. My first reaction to the subject line of the presentation was extremely negative as I, like possibly many others, did not pay close enough attention to terminology he used. In fact VoC is defined by most practitioners as company stimulated customer feedback about your existing products, which is one of the best sources of inspiration for incremental product improvements. Considering this, Tony’s subject line is very valid and surely catches people’s attention. Since VoC collection mechanisms are designed around company’s desire to collect and process the content in the most efficient way, they often do not encourage free and easy sharing of customer experiences, and the ways and reasons customers use the products. That is the primary reason why VoC does not offer much opportunity for discovery of “Aha” insights that lead to innovation. However the quest of an enterprise for efficiency often leads to missed opportunities to innovate as freely flowing stories about how the customers use the products and what jobs they “hired” these products to do, contain insights that can be discovered only by much more expensive ethnographic research. Online Word of Mouth (WoM) opinion mining technologies hold a promise of help this discovery to become timely, scalable and economical process.

It is very hard to sell to people we don’t understand. We turn to market research for help to understand who our best potential customers are.  This quest usually starts with assumptions about common characteristics these people have to be predisposed to our products or services. It is common to assume that certain age and gender groups, or their residence, would make them more interested and capable to spend their money on our offering. Normally we come to these assumptions based on our personal experiences and intuition that we call “common sense”.

I wonder if that “common sense” is the same one that came with very accurate definition of what happen to us when we ASSUME?

I am sure that most people would prefer to KNOW instead of assuming and estimating, but there is no good way to know what does not exist yet. However there is a way of making better assumptions and estimates.

Steve Jobs is often and rightly credited as the genius behind Apple’s great success in assuming what consumers really want, but I wonder if there is a method behind his magic. Just how much sorcery is needed to figure out the requirements for iPod if you take a really close look on what customers, who purchased MP3 players, have experienced? Imagine watching these people figuring out tiny menus trying to find and play a music track they want to hear. Surely the age and gender may influence just how much of inconvenience one can tolerate, but the very fact that these people have made a decision to spend their money for something that is so imperfect, uniquely qualify them as a special market segment that supersede the traditional market segmentation criteria based on demographics.

The special applications tablets and digital e-readers were around for a few years and relatively large number of people and companies spent considerable time and money using these devices. Wouldn’t it make sense to learn from them what could make their investment even more compelling, and as the result attractive to even larger audience?

Consistency of the Apple success in introducing the products customers want suggests scalable methodology and transferable skill. I think the vision of current, successful products of your potential competitors as an early prototype of your future blockbuster is at the foundation of this methodology.  The skill of creative analysis of customer experience with these products provides a detail road map to the future success.

I am sure it is not just my experience, but it seem that nothing kills innovation quicker than the search for consensus.

The human mind treats a new idea the same way the body treats a strange protein; it rejects it. – P. B. Medawar

I absolutely love this video.

We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are – The Talmud

As any business seeks to better understand customer needs and behaviors, it’s no secret that Social Media has opened more doors to CRM opportunities than ever before.  Last week while reading a recent marketing blog, I was amazed to observe that the writer failed to suggest the current trend of social networking as a frontline method for creating a relationship with customers.

Like never before, Social Media is providing a colossal platform allowing us to hear what our customers are saying.   It is quickly becoming one of the best ways to engage a customer and gain valuable insight into their experience with our products as well as those of our competition.  Are you listening?

This explosive technology could permit any business to identify competitive threats or opportunities through information that might not otherwise be detected without listening to thousands of customers.  Historically, formal focus groups were utilized as the most common means of collecting this data in-person from the end user.  Perhaps one could imply that today social media is quickly becoming the new “focus group”.

Consider for a moment that while traditional focus groups draw in customers to discuss their experiences, so are Social Networks providing the same information.  Is there really a significant difference?  The value of a focus group depends largely on quality of questions posed to the participants with all the biases that are incorporated into a question. The main disparity is that social media presents a very public review of a product or company’s benefits and even shortcomings.  However, we must not ignore the exponential numbers of consumers who are vocalizing this valuable data.  It is often more candid than any focus group could provide.

Getting connected with them is just part of the solution.  Connecting & engaging within these social mediums is relatively easy part.  Nevertheless, just like any other ‘marketing” effort, its success is not realized without measurement.  Therefore, the opportunity exists in figuring out what to do with the unstructured data.

Fortunately there is technology available to “interpret” this valuable data. Utilizing a multi-dimensional analysis, we convert various forms of feedback into an actionable plan then we take it one step further.  We are examining customer ratings across the market of nearly 20,000 products.  Many of the companies who have attempted their own translations had to invest very significant amounts of money into text mining implementation projects that allow handling feedback about only their own products.  With more than 2 million reviews, our database can deliver satisfaction scores from real world consumers about your products as well as that of your competition.

Self help author and motivational speaker, Robert Kiyosaki,  was quoted last year as saying ‘I am a bit old to focus on social media now but I spend an average of two hundred thousand dollars monthly through hired employees or consultants on social media, online reputation etc’.  While the use of social media as a marketing tool is still in its early stages, let’s not ignore this novel opportunity to act on customer feedback.

This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for Computer Speakers. As of this date we monitor 136 products in this category and analyzed 10,265 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.

Logitech Z-3 Wood Grained 2.1 Speakers
2010 Piplzchoice Award winner
20.3% above average Customer Satisfaction in its Category
The winners are chosen by their customers

Below is the list of the top runner up products:

Logitech Z-3 Wood Grained 2.1 Speakers wins 2010 Piplzchoice Award

For full list of products in this category and Customer Reviews used for this research, select “Computers & Accessories > Computer Speakers ” Category in Product Reputation Market Intelligence Report.

This week we analyzed Customer Reviews for Point & Shoot 10 MP Digital Cameras. As of this date we monitor 765 products in the Digital Cameras category and analyzed 66,481 reviews written by their customers. However some of these products have not accumulated enough reviews to produce statistically representative and accurate metrics, so we filtered them out of the competition. The second round disqualified any product that failed to meet Customer Expectations with its Functionality, Reliability or Support.