Customer Feedback Archives

3 Ways to Use Social Media To Gauge Your Customer Feedback Program

Customer feedback programs can be an incredibly useful tool to help businesses maintain a strong customer experience. But, if it’s not used properly, then you’re not getting the information you need & you may not realize that.

In the past, gauging the effectiveness of a customer feedback program was more difficult; can you be sure you’re asking the right questions, getting feedback on what’s important to shoppers? It was a lot of trial & error, and looking for trends in open ended responses.

Now, social media is here, and there are some easy ways to make this more manageable.

If you are not monitoring social media, and by this I mean social media that is outside of your company run social sites, you probably should as soon as possible.

Why?

Well, for starters, you’re missing an entire conversation about your brand, products, and services. But, also important is the fact that there’s an entire segment of uncensored, unstructured feedback that is waiting out there that you can use to your benefit. You can take this data as use it as another piece of the customer feedback program and you can also use it to gauge the success of your traditional feedback survey. Are you asking the right questions? Are the scores you receive relevant and reflective of general customer satisfaction across the board? These are all questions that can be answered.
Below are three tips on how to use social media data to your advantage as it relates to your feedback program:

Use social media as a supplementary feedback channel. The more data you can get, the better. Using social media conversations is inexpensive and provides a wide range of feedback. What’s great about it is the fact that it’s people talking to other people rather than responding to a feedback survey. Why is this great? Simply put, people tend to be more open with their thoughts when talking with friends vs directly to the company. Additionally, if people are responding to a feedback survey, they are focused on providing feedback specific to the questions you’re asking. In social media, it’s more of a free range of thought, so you’re likely to get feedback about aspects of the experience that are not captured on a feedback survey.

You can monitor social media in a few different ways; one is to make use of the monitoring features in your marketing platform. These days, most have an incoming monitoring component. Another option is to make use of a social media management service – this is a more high level approach, but one that can give you deeper content collection along with a variety of analytical reports to make sense of the conversations that are happening online.

Compare unstructured feedback sentiment to your current program. Sentiment can be tricky in social media, as most programs are still using a basic sentiment analysis. As more and more turn to natural language processing, sentiment values will be more accurate. However, even with a basic sentiment analysis, manual analysis can be done. This is a benefit of using a social media management service – sentiment is manually set to ensure that the results are accurate.

Take a look at your positive/neutral/negative ratio of comments in social media and compare to your feedback program results. Are they similar? If not, you may want to look at what you’re asking for feedback about. If, for example, your feedback scores are high/positive while social media shows more negative commentary, take a look at why that may be happening – are you not asking the right questions (ie social conversations show dissatisfaction with a particular aspect of your ordering process yet you don’t ask questions on your feedback survey about this), or are results of your feedback program not as accurate based on who you’re sending the survey to? Or, are people being incentivized a certain way, maybe for providing good feedback, so what they’re providing in terms of feedback is more positive than it might be if they were not incentivized? If the results vary between feedback and social media, some reflection may be needed.

Find out if you’re asking the right questions & getting the right feedback to be successful. Similar to the point above, use social media data to find out what pains your customers; are they expressing dissatisfaction in an area that you’re not asking about in a feedback survey?

One example may be a restaurant. In monitoring social media, they may find that customers are saying the wait times in the drive thru are too long, but your feedback survey isn’t asking customers about their wait. This may be a good opportunity to incorporate a relevant question and collect some data from customers at the point of sale to see if there in fact may be a bigger issue at stake.

By looking for themes within your social monitoring program, you can find out what customers really like (and dislike) and enhance your feedback survey to capture the most relevant data possible.

Both traditional feedback and social media monitoring are valuable channels for customer communication and satisfaction monitoring, and using both to complement each other will not only help your brand grow and strengthen its customer experience, but it will also provide you with ways to really listen to your customers and show that you are invested in them.

How to Calculate NPS

Net Promoter Score (NPS) can be a helpful snapshot of satisfaction and to learn more about consumers who are detractors, promoters, and passives. If you are collecting NPS data from multiple sources, you may be wondering how to calculate this score manually.

If you’re not familiar, NPS is a score that measures satisfaction. It’s based on one question you may see often on customer feedback surveys, asked on phone interviews, or even see on mystery shopping reports.

The question is quite simple: “On a scale of 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend this company’s product or service to a friend or colleague?”

There are two data points to look at – the actual score given and the NPS score.

The actual scores, of course, range from 0 to 10, with 10 being the most satisfied. This is a helpful data point to look at for determining which customers, or how many customers, are detractors, promoters, or passive. This is how each category is defined:

Detractors are those giving ratings 6 and below. They are not particularly thrilled by the product or the service. They, with all likelihood, won’t purchase again from the company, could potentially damage the company’s reputation through negative word of mouth.

Passives are those giving ratings of 7 or 8. They are somewhat satisfied but could easily switch to a competitor’s offering if given the opportunity. They probably wouldn’t spread any negative word-of-mouth, but are not enthusiastic enough about your products or services to actually promote them.

Promoters are those giving ratings of 9 or 10. They love the company’s products and services. They are the repeat buyers, are the enthusiastic evangelist who recommends the company products and services to other potential buyers.

The second data point is the actual NPS score, which can range from -100 to 100. This is calculated by subtracting the detractors from the promoters – sounds easy, right? But what happens when you are collecting NPS data from multiple sources and end up with a spreadsheet of data? It could take all day to try to calculate manually. There is an easy formula to calculate this in Excel, and it only takes a few minutes.

Once you have your column of NPS data, you’ll want to add a formula to calculate your score.

The formula is: =100*(COUNTIF(BU2:BU27,”>8″) COUNTIF(BU2:BU27,”<7″))/COUNT(BU2:BU27)

In the example above, it assumes that your NPS scores are located in column B, rows 2 through 27. To make this formula work for you, all you need to do is change out BU2 and BU27 to the column and row numbers that contain your data.

Let’s take a look at a quick example of how the formula would change based on your data. If this is what your spreadsheet looks like, with the last column (E) being the data for NPS, which goes from row 2 through row 43:

Then your formula would look like this:

The formula is: =100*(COUNTIF(E2:E43,”>8″)-COUNTIF(E2:E27,”<7″))/COUNT(E2:E27)

All it took was a quick replace of BU with E.

NPS is a great tool to get a quick snapshot of satisfaction levels; it’s no longer a chore to calculate it manually across multiple touch points, so make sure you’re asking that very important question at every opportunity possible!

What Can We Learn From Hillary’s Biggest Campaign Mistake?

This election season, it doesn’t matter which way you voted, or who you most wanted to win – this was hands down the craziest election in some time, and it’s likely you looked like the woman above when the final results were in. As a data geek, I have been fascinated throughout the entire process. Once the election was over, I was eager to see the post election analysis – how could so many get it wrong and the country be so surprised with Trump’s win?

I wanted the dust to settle and look at all the theories before writing this. It took some time for the shock to wear off in the media so they could start looking at what happened. It looks like there is one theory out there that played a big role in Clinton’s loss, and it is a good lesson for marketers.

The initial thought was “How could the polls be so wrong?” Now that we’ve got some time behind us, we’re seeing they really weren’t that wrong. Clinton does lead in the popular vote by quite a significant difference. So, if the polls weren’t that off, what happened exactly?

In listening to a few post election analysis segments, it was interesting to me that one theory rests on simple marketing. Clinton perhaps did not do enough research into what the electorate looks like in terms of economy, demographics, and the like. It is thought that she was following the 2012 model, especially since part of her strategy appeared to be creating a third Obama term. She gauged her campaign based on the data from 2012.

The problem? The electorate in 2016 is not the same electorate. Things have changed, demographics have shifted, and in essence it’s a different “customer” than it was four years ago.

This is where Clinton may have gone wrong; she didn’t get a handle on her true “customer” and therefore, her message was not effective enough to lead to the landslide victory that many were predicting.

As a marketer, this is fascinating and important to remember – your customer of yesterday may not be your customer today, and by making the assumption that things are as they have been, it can be detrimental to your marketing efforts.

What can you, as a marketer, do to ensure you are aware of your ever changing customer and market appropriately?

Continually review data: take a look at your data on a regular basis. Do you see any shifts in trends? Are people spending more or less? Is there a shift to an increase in online vs in store visits? Any changes should be investigated further to learn how your customer base may be changing.

Keep in touch with your customers: feedback programs are not only helpful to gauge satisfaction & loyalty. They can be a key indicator of a shift in your customer base. Continually monitor feedback and make sure you are reaching new customers – don’t solely focus on those who participate in a loyalty program, for example. This may be a segment of your customer base that may be more traditional in how you see your consumer demographics, but there may be a new segment you’re not seeing.

Use social media research: this is another tool that can give great insight into your industry. While many brands will use social media monitoring to keep tabs on their customers, another great use is to expand the social research to your competitors and industry as a whole. See what people are saying about products/services in your industry – are their expectations, pain points, and satisfaction standards changing at all compared to what they once were? If so, you may be targeting the wrong customer base if you’re using “old” marketing.

This was no doubt the most painful loss Clinton has ever experienced; candidates in future elections will study her strategy and learn from it, no doubt. There were also many good lessons for marketers to learn as well. Keeping tabs on customers and realizing that changes will happen over time is one key to ensuring your marketing message stays relevant and effective down the road.

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