Voice of Vovici

Survey Alerts (Trigger Emails) Improve Satisfaction

Once upon a time, surveys were conducted quarterly or annually, and the results were used to understand the overall satisfaction level of customers in aggregate.  Online surveys have transformed this process in many ways, two of which are of special interest here:  first, web surveys are often conducted continuously rather than periodically, and second, surveys can now be used to intervene on the behalf of individual respondents.  Measuring satisfaction in aggregate is no longer sufficient, when you can intervene to improve that satisfaction on a respondent-by-respondent basis.

Since at least 2003, our survey software has enabled authors to set up email alerts or triggers based on answers to individual questions.  Indeed, it is an important part of enterprise feedback.  Here are some representative examples of the types of alerts that our users have set up:

Reactive

• Help-desk ticket satisfaction – For a follow-on survey to employees who contacted the IT help desk, if the employee indicates that the issue is not resolved, send an escalation email to a help-desk manager.
• General dissatisfaction – In a satisfaction survey, if the respondent provides a low rating, skip to a choose-all-that-apply question that asks them for the reasons for their dissatisfaction.  Follow that up with an essay question asking for more detail.  Based on the reasons chosen, look up the appropriate department (e.g., service department, billing department) to email the alert to.
• Hotel-stay satisfaction – For a web survey taken from the settop box in the hotel room, ask for satisfaction with room service, housekeeping and the front desk, and immediately email the  affected department in case of dissatisfaction.
• Major-account satisfaction – For every customer-satisfaction survey completed, as it is completed, send a copy of the results to the sales manager of the account for their review.

Proactive

• Customer-service satisfaction – The customer is satisfied and their past ticket is closed, but they have a follow-on question.  Ask them if they need additional assistance, and send an email alert to the service department if they do.
• Literature fulfillment – Allow the respondent to select from a list of additional information on the topics of the survey, and send them an email with links to that information.

With email alerts, surveys don’t have to be just for measuring satisfaction: they can be for improving it as well.

What other ways have you used survey alert emails?

Virtuous Circle of Online Community

The virtuous circle of online communities makes for a powerful engine for increasing awareness of your brand. Stages:

• More Site Visitors – The more people who visit your community’s web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community.
• More Members – The more members of your community, the more people there are posting ideas and topics.
• More Ideas & Topics – The more ideas and topics in your community, the more comments that are generated, with typically many comments per discussion thread or--in a research community--per idea.
• More Comments - The more comments, the more pages there are to the web site. (Think of those discussion threads that take multiple pages because of all the comments.)
• More Pages – The more pages there are to the community’s web site, the more content there is to be linked to and indexed, leading to higher search engine rank.
• Higher Search Engine Rank – The higher the search engine rank of your community web site, the more site visitors your site will attract.
• More Site Visitors – The more people who visit your community’s web site, the more people there are who will become members of the community...

Once a public online community is spun up, the centripetal force of community activity will lead to ever greater community activity, in a virtuous circle.  Online communities are the perpetual motion machines of marketing!

Ideal Size of an Online Community

Last week, a prospect who was interested in our online community software asked me what the best size of an online community was.  I wanted to reply “150.2 members,” but I realized it was a joke only a few of my friends would get.   

The 150 is Dunbar’s number, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point. Robin Dunbar, a British evolutionary biologist, looked at the tribe size of non-human primates and estimated that humans could maintain stable social relationships with approximately 150 people.  This number has been twisted to many uses beyond its original purpose.  Some have used it to argue that 150 is the ideal size of an online community, but I don’t believe that primate tribes, which are organized by instinct and for survival, are applicable to online communities, even if some members act like monkeys sometimes!

So that’s the reference to 150.  As to the 0.2… 

Years ago, on a romantic walk on Humarock Beach with my then girlfriend (now my wife), the subject strayed to children.  I asked her how many children she wanted to have.  Her answer:  “2.2.  Somebody has to have the average.”

This was a rare geeky quip from my wife, who is anything but a geek. So, 150.2 members is not the ideal community size.  What is?  Well, my actual answer to the prospect was something like, “There is no ideal number, no one-size-fits-all.  It depends on the purposes of your community.”

Some community software vendors advocate only small communities.  Others advocate only large communities.  Sometimes this argument can take on the aspect of religious zealotry. 

If community size is a religion, Vovici is agnostic.  Here are some of the advantages to a large community (400+ members):

• More members generate more discussion, making the site more compelling.
• The larger the community, the larger the segments, enabling targeted research of key demographics.
• Large communities become self-sustaining, needing very little outside direction or content seeding.

Here are some of the advantages of a small community (fewer than 400 members):

• The fewer members, the easier it is for a community moderator to direct the energies of the community.
• The exclusivity of small communities can make membership in such a community more attractive, with greater perceived value, than membership in an open community or large community.
• Small communities build an intimacy that leads to fuller disclosure and richer insights.  This is especially valuable for health-care related communities, where members discuss quite personal experiences with disease and chronic illness.

Both large and small communities have their value.  And both have their challenges.  The optimal size depends to a large degree on your purposes for building an online community in the first place.  Feel free to e-mail me, jhenning@vovici.com, for recommendations based on your specific goals.

Firmographic – Definition & Template

While I try to avoid industry jargon when I present, I confused some people last week by using the term firmographics.  Turns out it only had 7,000 hits on Google and has been used in just 31 books.  So a definition is in order.

firm'o-graph-ic - adjective - Pertaining to characteristics of an organization, such as employee size, revenue size, industry, number of locations and location of headquarters.

firm'o-graph-ics - noun - The characteristics of an organization, especially when used to segment markets in market research.

The earliest citation I could find was from 1992, from the paper Best Practices in Disk-by-Mail Surveys:  “It is recommended that respondents without access to PCs be asked to respond to primary demographic and firmographic questions, as well as attitudinal questions about the subject being measured to analyze the potential for bias in the non-respondent sample.”

Some other good uses of the term:

• “The models estimate the probability of purchase at the product-brand level. They use training examples drawn from historical transactions and extract explanatory features from transactional data joined with company firmographic data (e.g., revenue and number of employees).” - Analytics-driven solutions for customer targeting and sales-force allocation
• “Like any company that sells to consumers, these business-to-business sellers seek to target their offerings to segments of customers (companies in this case) that meet certain firmographic requirements like industry (e.g. ‘Financial Services’) and company size (e.g. ‘annual revenue between $50M and $500M’).” - Customer Targeting Models Using Actively-Selected Web Content

When analyzing survey results, it is often helpful to be able to segment those results by different firmographic data.  The following are some standard questions that can be used for profiling organizations.  The size breakout for organizations matches that used by the U.S. Census Bureau.

Q. Location Size
Including yourself, how many employees work at this location?

• 1
• 2-4
• 5-9
• 10-19
• 20-99
• 100-499
• 500+
• Don’t know

Q. Organization Size
How many employees work at this organization across all locations?

• 1
• 2-4
• 5-9
• 10-19
• 20-99
• 100-499
• 500+
• Don’t know

Q. Locations
How many locations does this organization have?

• 1
• 2-4
• 5-9
• 10-99
• 100-499
• 500+
• Don’t know

Q. Headquarters
What country is your organization headquartered in?   
____________
What state is your organization headquartered in?
_____________

Q. Industry
What is the principal industry of your organization?
11      Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting    
21     Mining, Quarrying, and Oil and Gas Extraction    
22     Utilities    
23     Construction    
31     Manufacturing    
42     Wholesale Trade    
44     Retail Trade    
48     Transportation and Warehousing    
51     Information    
52     Finance and Insurance    
53     Real Estate and Rental and Leasing
54     Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services
55     Management of Companies and Enterprises
56     Administrative and Support and Waste Management and Remediation Services
61     Educational Services
62     Health Care and Social Assistance
71     Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation
72     Accommodation and Food Services
81     Other Services (except Public Administration)
92     Public Administration

The above Industry question uses top-level sectors from the 2007 North American Industry Classification System (NAICS).  Most organizations tailor the list of choices to their specific business.  If you are integrating your survey data with your CRM system (as you should be!), you should adapt your CRM system’s data definition to use for your standard firmographic questions.

Update: At Esteban Kolsky's suggestion, I added a Firmographics entry to Wikipedia.  Please feel free to contribute to that article to improve it.  Thanks!

Measuring ROI for Online Communities

For the recent Forrester/Vovici webcast, “Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities”, one attendee asked how Return On Investment could be calculated for implementing market-research online communities.

Brad Bortner said that ROI would depend in part on how your organization was currently collecting qualitative data and how much you were spending on that methodology.   In his part of the presentation, he pointed out that online communities were less expensive than focus groups and provided much more data.

Our CEO, Dean Wiltse, pointed out that Vovici offers a complimentary feedback value assessment to serious prospects.  We will conduct a survey across your organization to get a true picture of what the opportunity for implementing next-generation feedback might be; invariably, we find that our prospects and customers are using far more survey tools than they are aware of and have more ongoing research initiatives than their market-research department is keeping track of. 

The assessment is valuable regardless of the platform vendor you end up choosing.  We prepare a cost assessment and presentation to people who are thinking about implementing online community software and enterprise feedback management; this provides an estimated ROI they can use in their planning.  This is an excellent way to determine the financial benefits of implementing research-oriented online communities. 

Brad concluded his answer to the question by pointing out that this is “early days” for online communities for many of the companies he has spoken to.  Many such organizations are not yet thinking of replacing other research modes, but are just experimenting.  Once they see the success of the experiment, then they start moving money from qualitative research to online communities.  As Brad concluded, “If you are running focus groups, the payoff from MROCs is pretty substantial.  You can easily run $100,000 for a series of focus groups for location [facilities], moderation and analysis.  Compare that to the cost of running your own community, which has a huge capacity for running not just one project but many projects over the years, and it pays for itself in one or two traditional projects a year.”  Brad pointed out that for groups that aren’t doing qualitative research, these insights are purely additive, providing new insights, and calculation of the ROI needs to be done differently.

Once the community is implemented, you will discover many other common applications for it, providing an even greater ROI.  I encourage you to view the webinar with Brad and Dean.  To request your own complimentary analysis of ROI, please sign up for our feedback assessment. 

Panel Management Software and Data Integration

Esteban Kolsky, a principal analyst with Evergence, and one of the patron saints of EFM, asked, in the comment section to my post Panel Management 101, “How does the integration work just for panel management? I have integration as critical for EFM - but not directly related to panel management... am I missing something?”

Most panel management software systems have profiles of panelists, where demographic, transactional and attitudinal information is stored for each panelist.  Integrating other data sources with these profiles provides users of survey software a number of key benefits.  Data integration lets you shorten questionnaires by piping in answers to profile questions behind the scenes.  It lets you pipe in questions that you can use for more detailed cross-tabulation and survey analysis.  It also provides you with questions that you can use for “on demand segmentation”, targeting specific groups for special surveys.  And data integration saves your panelists from having to re-enter information your organization already knows about them.

Here are some examples of the type of panel-management integration work that we’ve done.

• CRM Data – Using CRM connectors to synchronize a demographic profile of an empanelled customer with information from their customer-relationship management records.
• Transactional Data – Storing the most recent customer transaction or series of transactions in the profile.  For help-desk surveys, storing the last time the customer contacted technical support, along with details of the type of contact, the resolution, the date of the contact, and so forth.  For course-evaluation surveys, storing the most recent classes attended by the student.  For retail-satisfaction surveys, storing details about the most recent purchase.
• Benchmark Data – Importing records from past surveys for use as historical benchmarks  (especially from phone or paper surveys or other methodologies that predated web surveys).

While enterprise feedback management systems can certainly have other types of integration (we’ve integrated with third-party communities, besides our online community software; we’ve exported survey data back to CRM systems), most data-integration opportunities have actually been around panel management profiles.  I hope that answers your question, Esteban!

And if you find my blog useful, I think you will find Esteban's blog worth reading as well.

Checkboxes vs. Radio Buttons in Web Surveys

A survey from one of our customers was recently lampooned in a popular blog about “curious perversions in Information Technology”.

Clearly, the author of the questionnaire didn’t intend to set the validation for question 8 to limit to one choice, given their instructions to the respondent (“please tick all that apply”).  This was simply an honest mistake on their part.

But why should our survey software even allow the author to limit a choose-all-that-apply question to one choice?  If only one choice is permitted, then the system should use radio buttons or a dropdown box.  Early on, in fact, I wanted to make sure that this wasn’t even an option for questionnaire authors, but our customers pushed back that they wanted this functionality, for two reasons:

1. Some users don’t value the difference between radio buttons (shown in question 9, limited to one choice) and checkboxes, a distinction in user interfaces that dates back to at least 1984.  These users like the visual esthetic of the checkboxes better and choose to use checkboxes on all questions, even those where only one choice is permitted.
2. Some users dislike the fact that you cannot unselect a radio button, and prefer to use checkboxes so that a respondent can uncheck a choice if they decide no choice is applicable.

So, while you can certainly use checkboxes in this way, the best practice should be to use radio buttons when you only want the respondent to select a single choice, and to provide a “Not applicable” or “Does not apply” choice on radio-button questions when you want respondents to be able to “unselect” a choice.

Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities

Last week, Brad Bortner, a principal analyst with Forrester, joined our CEO, Dean Wiltse, to present a complimentary webcast, “Reducing Feedback Cost Using Online Communities”.  Brad presents his analysis of MROCs (Market Research Online Communities) and discusses how online communities can reduce your costs, improve the effectiveness of market research and provide lasting competitive advantage.  Dean discusses how online communities enable deep insight into market drivers, deliver timely information on trends and opportunities specific to customers and prospects, drive innovation and increase revenue.

Here’s an outline of the topics covered:

• The trends driving adoption of online communities
• How to use online communities for market research
• The importance of marrying qualitative and quantitative data
• What makes a good online community
• Benefits of online communities
• Overview of Vovici online community software

You can view the webinar for free.