Moving to a new level

Editor’s note: Joe Cardador is chief research officer at Kansas City, Mo.-based Service Management Group.

The idea that generating positive word-of-mouth is essential to business success is not new. That customer recommendations and referrals are linked with increased profitability has been discussed widely (Heskett, Sasser and Schlesinger, 1997; Reichheld, 2004). Our firm’s own research consistently shows a relationship between the percentage of customers willing to recommend a particular store or restaurant and the sales growth for that location. Whether you believe that recommendations are the most important metric to track or one of several, most people agree that generating recommendations is an important component to building brand loyalty. What is relatively new is how technology is enabling customers to connect with a brand and share their experiences more widely. Harnessing this technology to build loyal customers should be one of the goals of any business interested in sales growth.

This article provides tactical suggestions on how to integrate social technology with customer experience surveys. It assumes that readers are familiar with some of the most popular social technology sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp! Even if you are not entirely convinced of the utility of using social technology to grow your business, the relatively low cost of establishing a social technology presence to build your brand makes it a strategy worth pursuing.

E-mail capture

With the increase in customer experience surveys available on the Web, customer e-mail capture becomes a relatively easy way for brands to initiate future contact. Although e-mail capture alone is not strictly a form of social technology, it can be an initial step in building a relationship between your customers and your brand online. Sixty-five percent of our client brands conducting Web surveys ask customers for their e-mail addresses, with an average compliance rate of about 30 percent.

E-mail capture, like any other form of marketing to survey respondents, should allow respondents to opt-in and should never become the primary purpose of the survey. However, after the survey is complete, it is perfectly acceptable to give customers the option to engage with your brand through e-mail. Customers providing e-mail addresses are giving your brand a gift - the opportunity to learn from them and market to them to grow your business. Don’t abuse this gift by suggesting to customers that providing an e-mail is obligatory unless it is necessary for delivery of the incentive for completing the survey.

How can e-mail be used? There are three primary uses of customer e-mail, each reflecting progressively more engagement with the brand. First, e-mail addresses let brands create custom marketing messages and provide special offers to customers based on their unique characteristics. Second, e-mail addresses can be used to send customers special surveys or elicit special feedback on promotional or customer experience follow-up studies. Third, e-mail addresses can be used to invite survey respondents into a community of customers through loyalty club membership or community panels. Community panelists can engage with one another about the brand in addition to providing product and service feedback to the brand.

These panels should not be established lightly because of the time and resources necessary to maintain them; however, there is evidence that community panels can be an effective way to get feedback on new products and promotions, identify opportunities for service improvements, track customer attitude and usage and increase the number of positive referrals to your brand (Gruen, Osmonbekov and Czaplewski, 2006; Paterson, 2009).

Links to social networks

An online community can be viewed as a social networking platform that the brand sponsors; however, other more widely used platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Yelp! also provide opportunities to gather feedback about your brand and to create a positive brand image among consumers.

First, brands conducting customer experience surveys via the Web should incorporate links after the survey that allow respondents to engage with the brand through the social networking outlets most relevant for that particular brand (Figure 1). The incremental cost to the brand and respondent of including links to social technology sites and a request to engage is minimal. The likelihood to click through to social networking at the conclusion of your customer experience survey will depend largely on how engaged your customers are with these technologies. On average, we have found that when presented with a link, 9.2 percent of customers will click through to a brand’s own homepage, 3.4 percent will click through to Facebook and only 0.6 percent will click through to Twitter. Although small percentages overall, these small effects can add up in terms of positive recommendations and greater engagement with your brand.

Figure 1

For some social networking sites, we can embed social features and content directly on the final page of the survey. This technology enables respondents to engage with your brand, for example becoming a fan on Facebook, directly from the survey without having to click through to a different site. It allows survey takers to see which of their friends or followers are already engaged with your brand, providing an additional incentive for customers to join others like them in supporting your brand.

Social technology survey questions

Questions about social technology usage can be imbedded in customer experience surveys to identify the extent to which a brand’s customer base is using social technology and the likelihood that customers will talk about and recommend a brand.

Some sample survey questions addressing social technology are:

Which of the following social technology sites have you visited in the past 30 days?

Facebook
MySpace
Twitter
Yelp!
Google maps
Urbanspoon (Restaurant only)
Zagat (Restaurant only)
None of the above

Which of the following activities have you completed (at least once) in the past 30 days?

Read a blog
Read a customer review/rating for products or services
Visited someone else’s social networking site
Commented on a blog
Posted a rating or review for products or services
Maintained a profile on a social networking site
None of the above

Additionally, survey questions that identify customers’ likelihood to recommend a brand and respond to recommendations about brands through social technology can be asked.

How likely are you to change your frequency of visit to [brand] based on a positive online review from a good friend?

Highly Likely
Likely
Somewhat Likely
Not Very Likely
Not at All Likely

Combined, these types of questions on your customer experience survey can give you a good indication of both the social technology use of your customers and how likely their positive or negative experience with your brand will be shared widely with others.

Respects them

Social technology is a powerful way to engage customers and get them talking about, and referring, your brand. The invitation for your customers to engage with you using social technology should be done in a way that respects them and respects the spirit of social technology sites. Offering customer incentives to associate with you or recommend you to others in their network is problematic. Paid recommendations are less likely to engender the same kind of commitment to your brand and may be viewed by some potential customers as an intrusion in the shared social networking space. In fact, the federal court recently ruled that Facebook posts can be considered “electronic mail messages” and are therefore governed by the Federal Trade Commission and its tough CAN-SPAM statute. Companies that attempt to generate loyalty on social networks by providing financial incentives to get others to send endorsement communication to members of their network may have to ensure that those messages are compliant with CAN-SPAM or face penalties (Facebook v. MaxBounty, No. CV-10-4712-JF, 2011 WL 1120046 (N.D. Cal. Mar. 28, 2011). Avoid these issues by having customers make recommendations based on great experiences with your brand rather than your sponsorship.

Simple to incorporate

Given the growth of social technology and its potential to engage customers, there are few reasons why brands should not be incorporating elements of social technology into their customer experience surveys. Social technology content, both in terms of links to social networking sites that provide an opportunity to affiliate with and recommend your brand, and survey questions that help identify which of your customers are most likely to engage with your brand online, are relatively simple items to incorporate into your customer experience survey. Any brand focused on improving the customer experience should be leveraging positive customer experiences to grow and maintain the relationship with their customers online.

References

Gruen, T.W., Osmonbekov, T., and Czaplewski, A.J. (2006). “eWOM: The Impact of Customer-To-Customer Online Know-How Exchange on Customer Value and Loyalty.” Journal of Business Research, 59, 4, 449-456.

Heskett, J. L., Sasser, W. E., and Schlesinger, L. A. (1997). The Service Profit Chain: How Leading Companies Link Profit and Growth to Loyalty, Satisfaction, and Value. The Free Press: New York.

Paterson, L. (2009). “Online Customer Communities.” Business Information Review, 26, 1, 44-50.

Reichheld, Fred (2006). The Ultimate Question: Driving Good Profits and True Growth, Harvard Business School Press.