Allegiance Blog

At last year’s Allegiance Engage Summit, Billy Beane gave attendees an insightful and entertaining presentation on the importance of analytics. With the movie Moneyball being released this week, it’s a good time to re-visit this blog post and how it applies to VOC. 

What do Billy Beane, the General Manager of the Oakland A’s, and your company’s Voice of the Customer (VOC) initiatives have in common? At the basic level, you both have employees, operational metrics, and outcomes. But there are more similarities. Do these sound familiar?

 1. Traditional key metrics used to measure performance
 2. Undervalued or undiscovered insights that can make a big difference
 3. Analytics to aid decision making and resource allocation
 4. Competitors that have much larger budgets

On the heels of the Allegiance Engage Summit, I re-read Moneyball by Michael Lewis. This time, my copy was autographed by Billy Beane himself. Beane’s inspirational Summit talk reminded us that sports and business have much in common: metrics, analytics, and insights that can provide teams and businesses with unfair advantages.
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As a light snow fell in Park City, Utah, hundreds of Voice of Customer (VOC) professionals and customer intelligence experts gathered for day two of the Allegiance Engage Summit. Attendees enjoyed great speakers and hands-on workshops that focused on how to uncover and apply insights from customer feedback to achieve positive business outcomes. 

Here are some highlights from Tuesday’s speakers: 

Guy Kawasaki, Author and Former Apple Chief Evangelist  

Guy Kawasaki at Engage Summit

• Business should focus on becoming more likeable and trustworthy while engaging customers to win more business.
• Companies should “remove the speed bumps” and make it easier for customers to do business with them.
• Default to Yes – always be thinking “How can I help this person.”
• Keep your message simple and tell a story to get the message across.
• Plant many seeds, engage with many and enchant all the influencers. 

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The amount of customer feedback coming from social media channels is growing rapidly. Companies who don’t capture and analyze this feedback are missing or ignoring a large percentage of the valuable information that could be helpful to their business. Therefore, many businesses are turning to text analytics systems and technologies to automatically process and analyze text in all its forms and transform it to be utilized in identifying trends, early warning signs, product issues, suggestions for improvement, and cries for help from customers.

In applying text analytics to gathering customer feedback from social media, many new challenges must be considered. The number one challenge is that there is so much text out there, yet only a fraction of it is actually relevant to your business.

Even if you use traditional keyword filtering, it is still going to yield inconsistent and inaccurate results. For example, if you were evaluating comments about American Airlines, you would find some people who say, “I flew on American Airlines,” while others say, “I flew on American.” Think of the number of matches you will find if you just use the term “American”!

To manage this challenge, VOC programs using social media need to be able to apply smart filtering techniques and select only the relevant information from the mountain of available data. Text analytics technology based on Natural Language Processing (NLP) can also be utilized in the development of these smart filters, but due to the relatively new emergence of social media, very few are commercially available. With the popularity of social media, many of the leading text analytics and customer feedback technology providers are rapidly developing systems to overcome this challenge.

The power of text analytics will allow companies to quickly and accurately identify actionable issues and then adapt in real time by taking immediate steps that will boost customer retention, differentiate their business and quickly grow revenue.

Many companies are excited about the opportunities that social media marketing can bring to their organizations. They recognize that it provides a relatively inexpensive method of connecting with customers and understanding them in a way that can be acted upon to engender customer loyalty. Therefore, these companies are creating strategies for how best to break through the noise and talk directly to their customers in a new way.

However, one of the keys to being successful in the use of social media marketing is actually not talking at all; rather, it is listening to the existing conversation taking place online. Proactive listening to the customer conversation is critical to the creation of the appropriate social media communication plan.

This process is analogous to attending a cocktail party. Upon entering a room, it would be considered rude for us to walk up to a group of people already conversing and start talking about ourselves. However, that is what many firms are doing in social media. They see it as just another communication channel and, rather than listening to the existing conversation, they start spouting out the same marketing messages they use in other channels – messages that talk AT people, not WITH people. This is not appropriate for social media; social media is about creating a two-way conversation.

Savvy “partygoers” approaches a group of people and don’t say a word. They spend a few minutes listening to what is being discussed in order to get the proper context. Then, after introducing themselves briefly, they may begin to engage in the conversation by sharing their viewpoint or something relevant and interesting to the other participants. Or they may enter the discussion by asking a question related to the topic at hand. Either way, they are engaging others in a meaningful dialogue based on the listening they have already done.

Marketers have not generally had this opportunity to dialogue with their customers before, unless it was face-to-face during a transaction. These non-transactional conversations are the foundation of building stronger customer relationships. The familiarity created by a series of social media conversations tends to build closer relationships than any series of advertisements might hope to accomplish.

What can we learn by listening to customer conversations “in the wilds” of social media? We can learn what they are saying about our products, brand, or company. We can learn what they think about our policies. We can learn what they think about our people – and our customer service. We can learn the words they use to describe us, our competitors, and our industry.

There are a lot of good customer insights that can be gathered through social media listening posts. The savvy marketer will partner closely with their Voice of the Customer (VOC) team to pull in these conversations and learn from them, even if they never decide to say a word through a social media channel.

Becky Carroll is the author of the upcoming book The Hidden Power of Your Customers: Four Keys to Growing Your Business Through Existing Customers (Wiley, July 2011) and writes the blog Customers Rock!.

Social media offers customer service professionals a great opportunity to leverage a new channel for customer feedback and enhanced communications. By establishing social media as a shared resource, contact center managers can identify new ways to enhance the quantity, quality and value of electronic communications.

Outlined below are some of the best practices for developing and maintaining an effective social media strategy and program for progressive customer service organizations.

1. Solidify your strategy: Establish a social media strategy and then empower the right departments to both listen and talk, inbound and outbound.

2. Empower Employees: Give power to front line employees to act. The contact center should be able to fully leverage your social media channel – don’t relegate it to another department.

3. Measure and respond: Treat social media feedback data like any other form of feed­back data – measure, track, actively respond and close the loop. Without it, you are just passively listening and missing valuable opportunities to direct your customer’s conversations.

4. Integrate social media: Integrate into feedback processes and your existing management processes.

5. Be ready to sift through some noise and exert some effort to find the gold:

• Don’t be defeated by the noise, filter it out!
• Be prepared to invest in the systems and management processes to properly use this new channel.

 6. Respond as a social media user would expect: Respond quickly – the shelf life of social media information is short. People expect that you’ll get back to them quickly.

7. Take action on the data: Cross sell, up-sell and rescue. People have spoken to you, and they may not be your customer or on your grid. This is the best way to ensure future success and visibility. Getting feedback is one thing, but saving customers and creating measurable revenue is the right thing.

Eric Weight is Director of Text Analytics Products for Allegiance

My wife and I celebrated our wedding anniversary by going to our favorite restaurant. Usually, we have a great experience, but this time everything went wrong. The server was inattentive, the food was cold, the drink glasses went empty, etc. When we returned home, my wife and I were faced with a dilemma: What do you do when you have a bad service experience with a company you love? 

As a subscriber to this restaurant’s Facebook updates, I logged on and thrust my opinion into cyberspace. My wall post clearly illustrated my disappointment. As a loyal, engaged customer, I felt I owed it to the restaurant to provide feedback about my experience. Besides, any responsible business would want to know about the experience of a loyal customer, right?

It has been weeks, and I have heard nothing in response to my feedback.

There is a lesson in this for all businesses. Social media has become the no. 1 online activity, so it’s essential for businesses to pay attention. When a small percentage of customers share their experiences with your company via social media, you have an opportunity to engage or re-engage these customers. To use social media to your advantage, consider the following:

Get involved.  Businesses should be actively monitoring what is being said about their brand on social media sites and across cyberspace. Seek out not only feedback posted directly on your Facebook page or directed at you on Twitter, but research your brand. Find out where your customers are talking and become part of that community. Take the opportunity to engage customers who mention your brand and learn from them. 

Ask for more.  As it becomes more difficult to solicit feedback from customers through common survey methods, follow your customers online and connect with those who are already talking about you. With technology such as Allegiance SocialVoice, you can turn unstructured social media comments into structured data by reaching out to customers with a survey to ask specific questions about their experience or brand perceptions. You’ll find that many of these customers will appreciate your effort to engage them and learn more.

Actively manage feedback.  It’s okay to be reactive to specific social media mentions about your brand. Many times you’ll be able to identify “quick wins” where intervention is warranted to resolve an issue and save a defecting customer. However, it’s also important to allow social media data to paint a bigger picture. With Allegiance SocialVoice, you can pull social media feedback into a single platform and include it in analysis with other data collected across your organization. Here you can report on what type of feedback has come via social media alongside data collected with surveys and other tools. This gives you added insight.

If you’re only using social media sites to promote your brand and obtain additional customers, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity. As customers see your willingness to consider their opinions posted online, loyalty will surely increase. Those companies who act on the wealth of information customers share on social media sites will surely gain an advantage.

After a stint in college in the early 1980’s, I set my sails and went to live in southern Chile. Letters (actual hand-written characters on paper) from home took up to two weeks to reach me. Information came through at a trickle, and communication to my family was slow. I found that “letter writing day” (as it became known) was calculated and well thought out. Every word I penned to paper had meaning.

At that time, news from home was practically non-existent. The first space shuttle launch happened, but I didn’t find out about it until nearly ten days later. I was living on the far end of the earth and on the far edge of information availability.

Dateline 2010: Chile experienced a horrific earthquake. The resulting Tsunamis inundated the areas around Concepcion (where I had lived). As I watched the news, I immediately began calling on my cell phone, texting my friends, and leaving messages on Facebook in order to check on them. Within a few hours, I found out that my dear friend Pedro had lost his home and his father. Pedro was living in a shelter, and he used a mobile phone to respond to my text and my Facebook post. Soon my Facebook friends, who had seen the exchange between us, were offering support and dollars to help them and others.

Within a day or two, Pedro was rebuilding his house. Yet, thirty years ago, it took me 14 days to find out about the first space shuttle launch.

In those thirty years, the speed of information has increased exponentially. We are at the point now where if you don’t tweet, text, blog or Facebook (yes you can conjugate Facebook as an action verb), it is difficult to keep current. The immediacy of communication allows information to become almost instantaneously available. We want people to know what we think — and we want it now!

Fast Forward to Social Media

As companies begin to embrace social media, many are using a “ready, fire, aim” approach. Companies check social media off their list by creating a Facebook presence, or a Twitter hashtag, but are they doing their due diligence in educating their employees, or better yet, establishing a policy for usage of these social media outlets? 

As you get ready to open your company to the world of social media, here are some basic things to consider:

1. Seek out best practices and ideas from current social media practitioners. Consider Seth Brogan’s The Ethics imperative in Social Media
2. Establish a usage policy for acceptable use and behavior on social media and communicate this policy to all employees.
3. Monitor what people are saying about your company on social media and decide how or if you will respond. This is feedback at the speed of light, so be sure to determine what you intend to do with the data you collect.
4. If you don’t do #3, it won’t take long before employees and customers realize that you are not serious about your social media presence, and they will treat it with ambivalence.
5. Incorporate the data received from your social media outlets into an overall VOC initiative. Allegiance offers SocialVoice to help you get started in this area.

So what have we learned in thirty years?  Information is now instantaneous, but the quality of information can be questionable. If we can incorporate the sentiment and thoughtfulness of letter writing into the instant communication of today, we can leverage social media to build real relationships. After all, elements of social media has helped alleviate the suffering of earthquake victims. We should use the same care and commitment in our tweets, yammers, posts and blogs. People are listening.

Social media is here. Your customers are talking. And they’re talking publicly. Twitter has a large user base and provides a simple application and interface to get you started.

What should you do?

1. Search Twitter for your company’s name, brands, products, or services
2. Search Twitter for your competitor’s company name, brand, products, or services

Why?

We see several trends.

Today’s customers are social networkers and influencers. They are publicly sharing observations and experiences regarding your company’s products and services and those of your competitors. New social web applications such as Twitter allow any customer to amplify a single voice.

Twitter, Facebook, and all social networking services have an inherent interest in growing their user base. Hence, they continuously innovate and build new tools and services to foster easy sign-up, discovery and broadcasting of users’ experiences. For example, at the South By Southwest (SXSW) Conference in Austin, Twitter’s CEO announced @anywhere. This technology enables publishers to embed Twitter and its tools directly into any web page, thereby strengthening and streamlining the social network’s presence, broadcast, discovery and follow process for any reader. Facebook’s Connect feature has similar capabilities.

Twitter recently partnered with Google, Microsoft’s Bing, and Yahoo search engines to have them incorporate Twitter’s search results into those search engines’ organic search results. And this week, Facebook surpassed Google’s search page as the most visited web site in the US. Social media platforms, and hence your customers’ voice, will continue to become more ubiquitous.

Forward thinking managers and business owners are already taking advantage of new conversations enabled by social media. These business owners understand consumers have a bigger microphone, but these astute business leaders also realize that social networking applications provide a new means to respond. At a discussion about the popular and social restaurant review site Yelp.com at SXSW, a restaurant owner said he responds to negative feedback on Yelp the same way he would if the reviewer was still a guest at his restaurant.

How?

Simple. You don’t even need an account. Twitter’s real time search allows anyone to search for any buzz at any time. Go to http://search.twitter.com and type in a phrase of interest. For best results, if your company or brand or product name has more than one word, enclose all the words with double quotes. Try adjusting the search phrase to include specific product names or model numbers. Do the same with your competitor’s products.

You’re likely to find many useful and interesting Tweets, a trend of positive or negative comments, and actionable insights. You may even find customers or prospects who have been reaching out to you directly.

Search is only the first step. From there, develop a process to allow for interaction and engagement. Make plans with your team to engage with authors of negative reviews or complaints about your products. Make social media a two-way street.

After all, if listening is part of your strategy, you’ve got to be ready to act and change. Be authentic, honest, and transparent in your responses. As soon as you show you care, you’ll rescue customers, and you’ll have made your caring engagement public.

Allegiance has several social media related projects in development. The Allegiance platform is all about helping you listen wherever customers and employees are talking. Hence Twitter and social media are natural channels for us to capture. In the meantime, use Twitter.com or a Twitter client such as Seesmic to monitor public experiences and dialog about your company and the competition.