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.

I most value my time. Time is rare indeed. It is fleeting. It cannot be preserved and saved for later. You either make the most of the moment you are in or it is lost forever. How can you best measure how you are valued by another person? Measure how much and the quality of their precious time they spend with you.

Allegiance has spent significant time and money writing and speaking about engagement. Engagement is the emotional bond that can (and I propose must) be built between an employee and his/her company, as well as between a company and its customers. We have worked hard to build technologies that can measure this bond. We have worked equally hard helping our customers not only implement these technologies but also to work with their people to improve the processes surrounding the measurement and improvement of engagement.

Lately, we have changed our thinking about engagement. We have begun to understand that engagement isn’t some intangible concept, but like time, it is an equally precious resource. In fact, engagement IS time.

Look at your most valued customers. They are usually most valued because they are engaged with you—and therefore spend their money with you. How do you know they are engaged? It is because they spend their precious time with you, usually in providing feedback about your products and service levels.

Look at your most valued employees. Once again, we value them because they give of their time. These most valued employees often give over-time. They get things done, quickly and timely, and as a result, we profit from them.

May I suggest a few time-based things you can do to increase customers’ and employees’ engagement:

Appreciate their time by word
When a customer or an employee spends time providing feedback, celebrate! Take time to thank them vocally as quickly after they spend time with you as possible. Follow up (with more time) to send them a note of appreciation. The more time and effort you spend on the note the better.

Appreciate by spending your time
Spend some time to evaluate the suggestion and evaluate its potential positive impacts on your business. Further explore how it might impact other less obvious elements of your processes. Then make the changes necessary. And of course, communicate back the results and how much you appreciate those results.

Reward
Share with them some of the rewards of the improvement. This may not always need to be monetary. Customers may appreciate even more the company that spends their time to reward engaged behavior. Perhaps you can reward a customer who improves your bottom line by offering your best consultants’ or executives’ time to analyzing and improving their business.

John Epeneter, VP Product Management, Allegiance

I recently stayed at a hotel in southern Utah. Two days after my stay, I received a survey request from them. I like this particular hotel chain, so I had no problem opening the survey and giving them my feedback. They had a nice little progress bar on the screen so I knew exactly how far into the survey I had gone. After three or four pages of multiple ranking pages, however, I was still only 40% complete. The next page had 15 ranking questions on everything from their toiletries, to the beds, to the TVs, etc. I bailed out of the survey.

There are two issues in how the hotel should have designed their survey:

1.  The hotel knew who I was and from my profile, should already have known whether or not I was a frequent business traveler or a pleasure/family traveler. Knowing that, they should realize that getting frequent survey responses from me would be very valuable to their business, but also knowing that I am a business person with very little time, they should ask, at most, no more than 5 questions. They could have easily asked me 5 questions out of a set of 20 and by doing this randomly across all their business travelers, still have received the feedback they desired. This would especially be true since their abandonment rate would probably drop by a factor of two or three.

2.  Even if the hotel did not know I was a business traveler, they still should have done the same process outlined above because hotel stays are generally a repeated service. This means unlike, for instance, a car purchase, you are likely to repeat business with them more often than once every few years. Common sense says that recipients of surveys who have made higher dollar, more infrequent purchases will be more likely to tolerate a longer survey. If you are a provider of a more frequent service, you want to design a survey that is quick and easy for the recipient to take so that you will get feedback EVERY time you deliver that service.

So, use common sense when surveying. Understand your recipient. Spread the feedback items across the audience, especially when the sample size and frequencies are high. Know your key goals and cut questions that are not absolutely necessary to meet them.

Terence Fugazzi, VP Demand Marketing, Allegiance

There are 3 areas of customer survey which are all essential for the company to know.

Customer Service Survey

The objective here is to provide the company with valuable data from customer feedback. Management could then improve the service of the company to become more competitive in its field. It could also provide the management team with guidelines for strategic planning and decision-making.

Customer Satisfaction Survey

This area concerns the products, services, pricing, and satisfaction with the business relationship. The details in this survey directly give vital feedback from customers regarding their desires, wants and needs. These data are essential for the growth of the company. Here, the behavior of the customers is revealed through the answers they give. With it, management could make adjustments to suit the satisfaction of customers.

Customer Loss Review Results

Being able to win back one customer is like winning back a thousand or more. It is therefore important to know the reasons why the customer has stopped doing business with the company. There is a need to identify the root cause of the problem. If winning back the customer is no longer possible, it is imperative to take corrective measures so as to prevent the future loss of customers.