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. 

Jeremiah Owyang, Social Technology Expert 

• The customer of the future is armed with information and empowered to share their brand experiences with others.
• Market research must expand to include socialgraphics, which is the understanding of how customers use social technologies.
• Registration forms are dying as customers move to social signups using their Facebook account.
• Businesses need to apply social strategies to each phase of the customer experience. 

Attendees also heard from experts about Voice of Employee (VOE) and employee engagement topics, including how to connect employee engagement to customer loyalty and business outcomes as well as employee survey and feedback topics. Leaders in data analytics, Voice of Customer and employee program start up, market research, demographic studies and social business also presented practical case studies and shared thought leadership.

Be sure to search #VOC on Twitter to see the variety of comments from attendees. Join us for next year’s event, renamed VOCFusion, which will be held at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas in 2012.

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.

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!.

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

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.

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.

Allegiance conducted blind focus groups and interviews with top VOC practitioners for two years to identify their greatest challenges. Based on their input, today we are launching Engage7, the first Voice of the Customer (VOC) platform that integrates social media and mobile/SMS feedback management, text analytics, ad-hoc and transactional surveys and powerful reporting into a fully automated VOC offering.

Rather than using traditional market research for customer insights, businesses can now use Allegiance Engage7 to directly collect and control real-time customer feedback data from multiple sources, including transactional and relationship surveys, multi-channel feedback (e-mail, phone, Twitter, Web) and unstructured customer comments.

Engage7:

• Integrates feedback into a single, integrated platform
• Provides a full view of multi-channel customer feedback in real time 
• Gathers and analyzes feedback from multiple sources — social media, Mobile/SMS, e-mail, phone, Web — together with research survey responses from ad-hoc and transactional surveys and unstructured customer comments
• Includes advanced text analytics based on natural language processing to automatically read open-ended comments and freeform text

Companies benefit by:

• Eliminating multiple feedback monitoring tools, saving time and money
• Accessing real-time and continuous data so they can rescue or up-sell more easily
• Automatically turning freeform comments into quantitative data that can be acted upon
• Selectively identifying Tweets about a transaction or purchase so they can improve the customer experience in real time
• Taking action to boost customer retention, differentiate their business and grow revenues faster

Customers are increasingly in control of the conversation, and companies need to be able to respond quickly to retain customers. Engage7 will accelerate the way companies attain critical customer insights and make business decisions.

A Case Study:  Will the customer feedback found in social media really help drive revenues?

In 2009, Domino’s Pizza had a problem.  Pizza deliveries were down 6% compared to 2008 and although they ranked first in convenience and price, they finished dead last in Brand Key’s consumer taste preference test.[i] Consumers complained about their 50-year-old recipe with comments like their crust tasted like cardboard and their sauce tasted like ketchup.  Ironically social media made their problems worse when an infamous video hit YouTube of Domino’s employees doing disgusting things with the pizza ingredients. Changing their core product was risky.  The only other major brand to change their core product in recent memory was Coca-Cola – a change which had to be undone due to a consumer revolt.

Domino’s embraced social media including YouTube[ii], Facebook, Twitter (hash tag #newpizza) other venues to solicit feedback about their new formula.  They even invited their biggest food blogger antagonists to give public feedback about the change in formula.  The feedback was made famous with a series of TV commercials where the negative feedback was read to company employees and executives.

The results?  In March 2010, they reported that US sales actually grew by 1.4% while overseas sales grew 3.9%, representing $23.6 million in profits.  Earlier in March their stocks shot up 5%[iii].

Times have changed. Social media contains customer feedback that you cannot solicit in surveys. We’re not suggesting you do away with your surveys. But consider the following:

Consumers spend nearly as much time watching TV as they do on the Internet.  And what are they doing online?  Increasingly, they are researching purchase decisions (97% of consumers[iv]).  The vast majority of consumers now trust product reviews over corporate marketing.  And there are a lot of reviews to choose from.  73% of consumers post product or brand reviews on sites like Amazon.com, Facebook, or Twitter and 52% of consumers blogged about a brand’s product or service[v].  Compare this to the number of your customers who actually take time to fill out your surveys.  Research shows that on average, only 4% of your dissatisfied customers will take the time to fill out a survey.

Social media allows you to influence the customer experience.  How important is this?  65%[vi] of consumers had a digital experience that changed their opinion about a brand.  Of that, 97% of consumers reported their online experience influenced their purchase decision and 96% were likely to recommend the brand to their friends[vii].  Building on this, 64% of consumers report making a first purchase from a brand because of a digital experience[viii]

Technology has changed your customer.  Your customer is about to change your company. The CMO Council reports that 58% of marketing executives say that the Internet and social networks have changed customer expectations for their brand[ix].

Capturing the feedback found in social media is no longer a luxury.  It’s a competitive advantage.

25% of companies are already using Twitter for customer feedback and 27% of companies are using Twitter for customer service[x].   Econsultancy reports that 86% of companies are spending more on social media in 2010 than in 2009[xi].   By the end of 2010, virtually all chief marketing officers plan to incorporate a broader range of customer content sources including customer reviews (59% increase) and Twitter (407% increase) to influence product decisions[xii].

As demonstrated with the Domino’s example above, social media is entering the realms of legitimate ROI.  The CMO Club reports that 81% of chief marketing officers expect to link up to 10% of their annual revenues to their social media investments in 2010[xiii].

Allowing your employees to leverage social media will not destroy productivity. Consider the following:

Research shows that 89% of US and global employers say they have NOT been negatively affected by allowing access to social media at work[xiv].

Conclusion: Social media is now part of the customer feedback and market research worlds and the feedback found therein is important for creating a sustainable competitive advantage.  You are more likely to find defecting customers in social media than with a survey – thereby giving your company a greater chance to rescue and up-sell / cross-sell that customer.   There is now sufficient evidence to show that adding the feedback found in social media to your existing feedback / market research programs can directly link to company revenues.

[ii] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH5R56jILag

[iii] NYDailyNews.com.  New Domino’s pizza recipe doubles quarterly profits. http://www.nydailynews.com/money/2010/03/03/2010-03-03_a_recipe_for_success.html

[iv] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.

[v] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.

[vi] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.

[vii] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.

[viii] http://feed.razorfish.com/downloads/Razorfish_FEED09_Webinar.pdf.

[ix] http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/companies-ignore-customer-feedback-fail-to-track-wom-7789/cmo-council-satmetrix-customer-voice-ways-measure-analyze-experiences-january-2009jpg/

[x] Marketing Charts:  http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/86-of-companies-plan-social-media-budget-bumps-11248/

[xi] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/86-of-companies-plan-social-media-budget-bumps-11248/

[xii] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/cmos-seek-better-metrics-for-social-media-revenue-linkage-11311/

[xiii] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/cmos-seek-better-metrics-for-social-media-revenue-linkage-11311/

[xiv] http://www.marketingcharts.com/interactive/small-businesses-use-social-media-to-pursue-customers-12010/