MarketTools Blog

Last month, MarketTools released an EFM Marketplace Report that revealed, among other things, that 94% of companies are not yet using social media for customer feedback. I wasn’t surprised to see this, and I also wouldn’t have been surprised to see a report that said 94% of firms are talking about using social media to collect feedback but didn’t yet have an implementation strategy outlined.  (Something that we touched on in a previous post – Social Media Strategy: Change the Conversation.)

While there’s no doubt that companies need to include social media feedback to get the entire picture, it’s important not to lose sight of the channels that are already working and won’t go away any time soon. While there’s no doubt that companies need to include social media feedback to get the entire picture, it’s important not to lose sight of the channels that are already working and won’t go away any time soon.

The study we conducted for our Marketplace Report found that the most common ways companies gather customer feedback are:
-    Email/online surveys: 51%
-    Formal phone surveys: 28%
-    Informal phone calls: 28%
More information about the study

What’s great about these channels is that by actively soliciting customer feedback, you get to ask about what YOU want to know, not just hear about the sometimes extreme outlying circumstances that warrant a social media post. A well designed customer survey can benefit sales, product development, support and other departments, and provide the information you need to take strategic action in the following areas:

1)    Investment Planning: well-designed surveys help you identify key drivers of customer satisfaction and loyalty, so you know where to focus your efforts and your resources for maximum impact. Customer survey data can also help justify investments based on hard facts – helping to make a clear case for product improvements, packaging changes or service quality improvements. Or not… sometimes organizations find that the things they think they need to invest in to improve customer satisfaction aren’t really that important to customers, which helps save significant time and money.

2)    Service Recovery: with proper action management and alert capabilities, you can follow up with customers just minutes after they submit their survey and save at-risk relationships. Showing people that you not only take the time to listen to their feedback but actually ACT on it goes a long way towards creating loyalty and competitive advantage.

3)    Agent Performance Management: surveys give you a reality check on agent performance, allowing you to identify and reward top performers as well as opportunities for coaching and improvement.

4)    Opportunity Identification: people often forget that surveys can be a great source of lead generation and PR. Many customers we work with have found that surveys can serve as a reminder of the company’s offerings, and the act of taking a survey engages customers to think about how else they can work together. Surveys are also often used to identify happy customers that have a great story to tell – providing an excellent source of referrals and marketing content.

While I believe social media is more likely to “break through” this year as a standard feedback channel, formalized survey programs aren’t going anywhere – the key is to balance the solicited feedback with the unsolicited for a complete picture of customer wants, needs and expectations.