© 2009 Quirk’s Marketing Research Review (www.quirks.com). Reprinted with permission from the January 2009 issue.This document is for Web posting and electronic distribution only. Any editing or alteration is a violation of copyright.

o n l i n e / s a t i s f a c t i o n r e s e a r c h

Editor’s note: Vivek Bhaskaran is the founder and CEO of Seattle-based Survey Analytics. He can be reached at vivek.bhaskaran@surveyanalytics.com. To view this article online, enter article ID 20090104 at quirks.com.

ere’s a simple exercise for every marketer who values customersatisfaction: Create a simple 10-question survey. Ask nine randomquestions and make sure to include an open-ended commentquestion at the end. Send it out to all of your customers every six months.Then, don’t do anything with the data.You might just double your customer retention rates.Don’t believe this could be true? It’s already been proven. The act of sending a simple survey to customers, regardless of what the outcome is orwhat is done with the data, can enhance customers’ opinions of your firm.Why? The game-changing notion of participation. Participation makesus believers and serves to establish an emotional bond. In this example,which was an actual market research experiment conducted by PaulDholakia and Vicki Morwitz for

Harvard Business Review

, just sending asurvey and asking for customer feedback had a positive impact on retentionrates.Why? Because end-users felt that the company was listening to them.They felt the company cared about their opinions and demonstrated thisby asking them for feedback. Generally speaking, if we as consumers areinvolved in an endeavor, the rules of the game change - we grow moreforgiving and become emotionally attached to the cause. The hierarchal,top-down relationship between companies and their customers evolves andbecomes something new: a partnership, one in which customers are givena mechanism to contribute their ideas and, most importantly of all, a sensethat their ideas are actually being heard.While the concept of customersatisfaction will always be a businesspriority and a determining metric foreventual success in the market, anymarketer worth his or her salt will tellyou that it’s typically assigned an arbi-trary value. For marketers who havededicated themselves to truly engagingwith their customers and fundamentallychanging the company/customer com-munications paradigm, a new modelis required. This is what it means tomove beyond customer satisfaction.

One key question

If you step back and really think about the concept of customer satisfaction,you’ll come to understand that it comes down to one key question: Are customers deriving value from my product or service? The very term “cus-tomer service” has become something of a catch-all that seeks to answer awide range of questions, from “How likely will a customer be to purchase

Thanks for asking

By Vivek Bhaskaran

Feedback portalscan engendercustomer goodwill,satisfaction

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unstructured feedback (long the baneof researchers, who were typically seek-ing to build composite scores based onnumerical assignments). Feedback canthen be organized using categories andother prevailing taxonomy schemesso that information is automaticallyorganized into relevant buckets of knowledge.Finally, and perhaps most impor-tant of all, the community itself isempowered to rate the relative meritof each idea, and then in a Digg-likeway, vote the best ideas to the top (ina truly democratic fashion, any idea canbe voted to the top or buried on thebottom). In pure market research terms,real-time feedback portals represent afusion of qualitative research (open-ended comments) with quantitativeweighting (voting model superim-posed). This is when the magic starts tohappen and why the real-time customerfeedback portal might become the mostimportant tool in your bag of tricks.ment weapons that can be used tochange the traditional communicationsparadigm. And with every passing day,new services like Twitter are furtherchanging the nature of the communica-tions game.While the utility of blogs, wikis,forums and surveys is well-known, real-time feedback portals remain relativelyuncharted territory for most marketers.Unlike these other communicationvehicles, feedback portals are designedexplicitly to solicit opinion and engageusers in a peer-to-peer manner. Theengagement model is not just aboutconnecting with your customers. Think of every individual in your communityas a spoke in the communications hub.It is just as important to connect themto each other as it is to connect them toyour business.By building a community of usersaround your product or service -around the very concept of feedback,suggestions and new ideas - an interac-tive venue is provided that encouragesagain?” to “Will this customer tell allof their friends about my product orservice?”As a marketing metric, customerservice can be somewhat illusory. Whileit’s commonly understood and univer-sally desired, it is also highly arbitrary.We chase after high customer satisfac-tion rates not because it’s cool to tout97 percent-satisfied rates in press releasesor say to the world that your custom-ers are happy. Rather, it’s a legitimatereflection that your customers areindeed deriving value from your prod-uct or service and are satisfied with theoverall process.However, the concept of customersatisfaction is emblematic of a passiveand tired communications model - onethat still has an obvious utility but rep-resents only the first half of the newmarketing calculus. This is where theconcept of customer engagement comesinto play. Customer engagement cap-tures a critical dimension of the valuechain by measuring the extent to whichcustomers are involved with your busi-ness: Do they agree to sit down withyou when you want to talk to them?Do they feel the need to give you feed-back when things don’t go the rightway? Do they suggest ideas and toolsfor you to use to improve a facet of your business (in the same way a friendor colleague might)?Customer engagement - not justcustomer satisfaction - is the brass ringthat marketers must strive for whenestablishing their business objectives.Indeed, customer engagement willprove to be directly proportional toa company’s growth potential. Thecustomers who become engaged inyour business are essentially the early-adopters and evangelizers. They are thesource of any successful word-of-mouthcampaign, and if you succeed in makingthem feel as though they are part of the very fabric of your business theywill quickly become one of your mostimportant strategic assets.

A complete arsenal

A broad array of tools and technologiesare now shifting the way companies interact with their customer base. Fromblogs and wikis to user forums andsurveys, marketers now have at theirdisposal a complete arsenal of engage-

Integral facet

hether it’s a major brand such as Starbucks or Dell or a grassrootspolitical organization, real-time feedback portals are fast becomingan integral facet of the customer feedback loop. Here are some currentexamples that showcase the breadth of these systems:Choice Hotels (http://choicehotels.ideascale.com) - In the first 24hours following the sending of the initial invitations to ChoiceHotels’internal audience of owner/operators, more than 60 ideas were postedand more than 400 users signed up to either post, comment or vote onideas.MyStarbucksIdea (www.mystarbucksidea.com) - When HowardSchultz took back the reins of Starbucks in January 2008, a real-timefeedback portal was the centerpiece of the coffee giant’s initiative tobring the wisdom of crowds to its brand-reinvigoration efforts. Since itslaunch, some of the most popular ideas such as free Wi-Fi and punchcards have been rolled out across its broad network of stores.Ubuntu Brainstorm (http://brainstorm.ubuntu.com) - Ubuntu is one ofthe most popular flavors of the Linux operating system on the market. Asan open-source operating system, it is not surprising that its developmentteam was one of the first to implement a collaborative feedback portal tosolicit new ideas and engage the Ubuntu community in its further devel-opment.AskTheSpeaker (www.askthespeaker.org) - Operated by Netroots, aprogressive site for political activists, Ask The Speaker invites citizens topose their questions and offer up their ideas and suggestions to Speakerof the House Nancy Pelosi. Other forward-thinking political operationsand candidates are also experimenting with feedback portals as a way toforge community with their constituents.