If you receive errors when attempting to view this white paper, please install the latest version of
Adobe Reader.
"Enterprise feedback management (EFM) is a term used to describe a
company's goal of consolidating and managing feedback from all sources."
Source : Mindshare Technologies
Social Media and Customer Experience Feedback
Social Media is also known as :
Social Media Applications,
Social Media Articles,
Social Media Basics,
Social Media Brands,
Social Media Business,
Social Media Communication,
Social Media Community,
Social Media Company,
Social Media Consultants,
Social Media Consulting,
Social Media Content,
Social Media Data,
Social Media Defined,
Social Media Development,
Social Media Directory,
Social Media Experience,
Social Media Experts,
Social Media Help,
Social Media Identity,
Social Media Impact,
Social Media Index,
Social Media Influence,
Social Media Information,
Social Media Issues,
Social Media Links,
Social Media List,
Social Media Management,
Social Media Marketing,
Social Media Network,
Social Media Optimisation,
Social Media pdf,
Social Media Platform,
Social Media Power,
Social Media Presence,
Social Media Program,
Social Media Release,
Social Media Report,
Social Media Research,
Social Media Resources,
Social Media Search,
Social Media Services,
Social Media Share,
Social Media Sites,
Social Media Society.
Social Media Overview
Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and web blogs are just a few Internet services
that make up the new growing digital world called social
media (SM). SM provides participants with a community to create and
maintain relationships and a forum to share their ideas and experiences with the
world. The power of SM networks, like all networks, is multiplied by the number
of participants. Just a few years ago, no one had heard of Facebook. Yet today,
200 million people around the world regularly use this site to communicate with
family and friends, adding an average of over 100,000 users daily.
Many companies have seen the influence these new sites can have on their
organizations for both good and bad. A national pizza chain witnessed the power
a few of their employees could have utilizing social media resources. The
employees made a video of workers cleaning pizza pans with dirty sponges and
doing other unsanitary acts. They posted the video on YouTube, a popular video
sharing site, and within hours thousands had viewed the clip. In the past, this
might have been a minor issue, but because of the reach of social media, the
company’s CEO was compelled to record a message and post it on YouTube in an
attempt to stop brand erosion.
As social media increases in popularity, more individuals are telling those
in their SM networks about their service experiences. Some companies wrongly
assume that SM is merely used by teenagers and young college students. However,
Facebook reports that its fastest growing demographic is age 35 and older.1 A
recent Cone Business study in social media revealed that of the 60% of Americans
using social media, 93% think that a company should have a social media
presence, and 85% felt companies should use social media to interact with
consumers.2
Mindshare advises all companies to ask themselves, "How can we tap into the
power of this new method of communication to improve our business and the
experiences we are providing for our customers?" The answer is to do something.
Get started. Jump into the online social conversation. You can’t sit back and
wait for information to come to you – you’ve got to “give” before you “get.”
Social Media “Need to Knows”
It’s Not All Useful Information
The majority of opinions and ideas shared on social media sites are much less
structured than those of a customer taking a phone or web survey, where feedback
can be quantified, and tied to a specific store, employee, or incident. This
makes the information from most SM sites difficult to report and act on. Most of
the information “floating around out there” is not intended as helpful feedback
to companies, or even specific complaints about service lapses, but rather just
ad hoc conversational commentary. Social media can also be used as a bully
pulpit for gripers, whiners, and even unscrupulous competitors to vent and
spread unsubstantiated and vague claims.
There are many tools available to help search social media for postings
mentioning a specific company. However, simply spreading a net to collect this
information is akin to dredging a stream for fish – while some fish will be
captured, so will a lot of old boots, sticks, hubcaps, and tires. Similarly,
merely collecting unstructured data from the web will provide very little
actionable information that can be used to improve a company’s strategy or
operations. Employing data mining techniques can help at the strategic
level. But still you are left with a dearth of actionable information. The way
to overcome this weakness is to add structure to data flowing in from social
media networks. (See our tactical recommendation on how to do this, below.)
Relationships and Relevance – Not Advertising
Although organizations may be tempted to use SM sites to promote their
products or services, SM communities will not accept them as one of their own if
they use the social media sites to advertise using old-fashioned methods. No one
wants to follow a company that posts about how wonderful it is followed by links
to canned marketing pitches. Social media is all about relationships and
relevance. Companies need to participate by adding valuable, relevant
information to forums and communities, such as: special coupons for SM users,
relevant information concerning products and services, or media that is worth
sharing with their friends. Furthermore, a person in an organization that has
the power to help resolve concerns should respond to a dissatisfied customer in
a genuine manner. Unfortunately, there is not a simple, automated way to
participate in these communities. There needs to be personal human involvement.
While there are various free and paid services that can help a company aggregate
the feedback, this does not eliminate the need for an actual person(s) to
respond to customers and deal with their concerns. These employees need to have
good judgment and strong communication skills.
Mindshare Recommendations
Mindshare is dedicated to helping companies receive feedback from all of
their customers. Below, we present three recommendations that companies can
pursue right now to take advantage of powerful social media networks.
Recommendation 1: “Structure the Unstructured” (Gather, respond, & add
structure)
Casting a net to measure the social “buzz” about your company sounds
important and inviting. But simply collecting unstructured comments from social
media sites will leave you with a bunch of public postings, but very little
actionable information. (E.g. Where did the issue happen? Which employee(s)
performed poorly? When did this happen? What product was affected?)
You need to be able to:
- Gather feedback from unstructured SM sources,
- Respond quickly and personally, and then
- Give the author an easy way to provide you with additional, structured
information.
You should watch for raw posts and comments that mention your products,
services, company, and staff members. Catching customer complaints early allows
you to respond quickly, further engendering customer loyalty. Many free
applications make it easy for you to access live SM information, including
Google Alerts, Icerocket.com, Twitter Search, Twist, Ping.fm, Tweetgrid, etc.
Your account manager can make it easy for you to access live SM information
right from your Mindshare Success Center page by conveniently adding in, (1) a
current “buzz” chart (showing the current level of online discussions about your
company), (2) a live Twitter feed (a scrolling bar showing current
“tweets” about your company in real time), (3) a social media search bar
(pre-screening all online social media sites for postings about your company),
and (4) a “blog listener” (a tool consolidating all blogs mentioning your
company).
Even with these gathering tools, you will still need to dedicate at least
part of an employee’s time to filtering and responding to comments, and to
managing your social media presence. A complaint is an opportunity to
demonstrate your dedication to customer service and willingness to listen and
respond to customers’ concerns. A posted complaint may also draw out comments
from other people with the same concern, which provides an opportunity to reach
out to an entire group. Responding promptly to customer concerns may lead them
to subsequently post positive comments about how quickly you replied, and how
well you resolved their problems.
When you respond to SM feedback, we suggest you provide a way for the author
to easily give you additional structured information. This is best accomplished
by simply including a link in your response that directs the author to a
Mindshare mini-survey.
Getting anonymous social media authors to take a mini-survey (1-2 minutes)
will provide your company with actionable and reportable feedback, rather than
the unstructured feedback that is typical of today’s social media communication.
(By the way, don’t use the term “survey” in your reply. Instead, ask the author,
“Would you please provide some additional information, so we can better meet
your needs?”) Work with your Mindshare account manager to create a SM
mini-survey. You can use this survey to gain more structured information about
the customer’s issue, such as the location, who was involved, the type of
problem, when the problem occurred, and any additional comments to aid in
addressing the issue. The data provided from this mini-survey can be easily
integrated with your existing Mindshare feedback surveys and presented to your
local managers through Mindshare’s integrated enterprise
feedback management (EFM) reporting.
This strategy transforms unstructured comments into structured feedback and
actionable information, and delivers it up and down your organizational
structure through your existing Mindshare reporting hierarchy. It also provides
your company with a chance to catch a negative experience while the audience is
still small.
Recommendation 2: Establish a Presence
(2a): (Contribute to the community)
In order to participate in social media you will need to establish a formal
presence for your company in the global social network. This is easily done by
setting up company accounts with key SM websites.
We recommend that you start by creating a Facebook fan site and a Twitter
account for your company. (Your Mindshare account manager can assist you in
getting started with these, and later can help you evaluate which of the many
other specialized sites would be most appropriate for you.)
As you become more established in the SM world, people will know where to
turn to give you feedback and it will be easier to respond to issues – both good
and bad. We strongly suggest that you do not use SM as a place to advertise your
wares, or for triage management. Become an authentic member of the community by
providing helpful tips, announcing promotions, and giving valuable information
about new products. The benefit of this approach is that your brand will become
a trusted resource in the social media community and your customers will be more
likely to come to your SM pages to leave feedback. Your company’s investment in
a formal social media presence will demonstrate your organization’s desire to
solicit both positive and negative feedback from your customers, and to keep
pace with their changing needs.
(2b): (“Fertilize” third-party fan sites about your company.)
In addition to establishing your company’s own social media presence (fan
sites), you might also consider a strategy of “fertilizing” third-party fan
sites about your company and “seeding” others through marketing incentives. Some
organizations are having great marketing success by distributing
promotions/coupons, etc. directly to the fan-site administrators, and through
these fan sites to end-user customers (e.g. “secret” promotions, available only
on specific fan sites). Others are rewarding fan-site administrators for
expanding their customer reach further (e.g. gift certificates presented to the
fan site that adds the most new friends)
Beyond improving your marketing efforts, you can also use these third-party
fan sites to direct customers toward providing you with structured feedback. The
best way to do this is to encourage each third-party site administrator to place
a link on their site directing customers to click through and take a mini-survey
from Mindshare. By directing fans toward a mini-survey, you can grow the amount
of actionable customer feedback you collect (that can be used to drive
improvements in your company), rather than the unstructured information that is
often swirling around on SM networks.
Recommendation 3: Word-of-Mouth Advertising (Make more FANS)
If you are currently gathering customer service feedback, we suggest that you
maximize the value of your highly satisfied customers by providing them with SM
links at the end of your customer satisfaction survey. These links will give
them an easy way to share (on various social media sites) the positive
experiences they had with your company. This helps you to empower people to
become advocates of your brand. The easier it is for them to speak out, the more
likely they will.
SmartLogic, which is built into the Mindshare system, allows you to pinpoint
those survey respondents who gave you high ratings on certain questions and/or
said they would recommend your company to their family and friends. At the end
of the survey, these respondents can be shown easy-click icons linking to
various SM sites.
The survey respondent can then choose from the options provided, at which
point Mindshare will enable them to post comments on their social media page, or
"tweet" about their experience, etc. When their friends and family login to the
SM site they will notice the comments and will be able to click a link which
will take them directly to your home page or SM site. We have several clients
currently using this method with great success. This approach connects positive
customer experiences with an audience who knows and trusts the author of the
post. This kind of general word-of-mouth advertising is extremely powerful when
positive experiences are shared. Company image increases as more people are
converted from merely “customers” into “promoters” of your brand.
(Note: Some small programming to your homepage may be necessary to make it
easier to share your site on Facebook. Ask your Mindshare account manager for
details.)
Change, Summary, and Future Development
Change
Social media is a rapidly evolving area of feedback. Just a few years ago,
few had heard of Twitter, and other sites were significantly more popular than
Facebook. The reverse is true today. And today’s top sites may become tomorrow’s
has-beens. Hang on, it’s going to change.
The growth of social media networks creates a very difficult resource
allocation challenge for most organizations. With potentially millions of
customers “holding a microphone,” social media presents a love-hate relationship
for businesses that are trying to collect all the customer feedback they can,
but are unable to handle the crushing load of social media comments about their
company without adding headcount. (I.e. “We want to respond, but we can’t afford
the additional FTEs it would take to answer all of these comments.”)
Like all business problems at an impasse, sooner or later something will have
to give. Our belief is that eventually, those SM authors who desire follow-up
and change will become “trained” to provide companies with feedback in a more
automated and structured way. This is not dissimilar to other marketplace
“trainings” that have occurred – getting money from a wall rather than a bank
teller (ATM), taking food to your table and cleaning up after yourself
(quick-serve restaurants), and pouring your own soda rather than a cashier doing
it (restaurants). Similarly, the current “wide open west” of social media as a
feedback tool will have to acquire more structure. The recommendations presented
in this paper move in that direction.
Summary
Regardless of which channel, method, or approach is the latest fad, the
concept of a growing social community is here to stay. But it’s the strategy,
not the current hot channel or technology, which matters most.
So, what can you do? What should you do?
Mindshare suggests you take action in the three areas outlined above:
- Gather feedback from social media and respond quickly. Engage in the
dialogue. Add links to your response that direct the author to a
mini-survey, whose results will have significantly more structure and can be
integrated with feedback from your other Mindshare surveys.
- (2a) Create a formal presence on the major social media sites and
perhaps a few more specialized or evolving sites.
(2b) Fertilize and seed
third-party fan sites promoting your company.
- For customers who answer one of your “normal” Mindshare surveys with
positive feedback, provide them an “easy one-click” option at the end of the
survey to be re-directed to one of several social media sites where they can
share their positive feelings across the SM network.
As social media continues to evolve, be assured that Mindshare will be
positioned to provide you with the latest recommendations and applications to
help you take advantage of this new method of collecting customer feedback.
Several additional areas of research and development in social media are already
well underway.
Future Development (Coming soon from Mindshare)
- Text analytics engine and data mining tools to better detect and
quantify issues.
- Further social media integration for easier sharing of survey comments
on SM sites.
- More useful “reputation reports” enabling you to view what social media
communities are saying about your company.
Appendix (Other sites to be aware of)
Flickr, YouTube, Windows Live Spaces, Google groups, Yahoo Groups, Ning,
Blogger, Linkedin.com Bebo.com, Yuku.com, Xanga.com, Orkut.com.
This is how we see it.
About Richard D. Hanks, Jon Grover, and Mindshare
Richard D. Hanks is the President of Mindshare
Technologies, a leading provider of real-time, automated customer and
employee feedback solutions. His experience spans multiple industries and
disciplines, including many years as an adjunct professor at Cornell. He is a
frequent teacher/speaker at trade, academic, and professional gatherings, and
the author of “Delivering and Measuring Customer Service.” Jon Grover
is a Product Manager at Mindshare Technologies. He has
pioneered many of Mindshare’s best practices in Enterprise
Feedback Management (EFM), especially in the implementation of
Mindshare’s outbound email offerings and leads the design and development of
Mindshare’s social media strategy.
Mindshare's business monitoring tools help companies improve operational
excellence and minimize customer attrition through personal customer
involvement. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the
customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence
through powerful and incisive enterprise reporting. As a hosted system,
Mindshare is affordable and flexible, with surveys and reports tailored to fit a
company’s individual needs.
For more information please visit: www.mshare.net.
To reach Rich directly,
contact him at rhanks@mshare.net
or (801) 263-2333.
To reach Jon directly,
contact him at
jgrover@mshare.net
or (801) 263-2333.