Being a Better Business Through Social Media
Wondering what companies like Dell, Starbucks or Comcast are doing to keep their customers? These companies rely on the strength of their product design and quality of service to delight their customers. Their insight into what a customer finds valuable is what drives their design solutions. It takes a variety of research methods to develop useful customer insight and good design solutions. If good isn’t good enough - if your customers are demanding something great – then you need to adopt a more novel approach to understanding customers. Social media research is emerging as a powerful approach for gaining unique customer insight. Social media research can inform your ecommerce or product design solutions by enabling you to aggregate feedback from customers, learn from their failures and successes, and become inspired by their own ingenuity.
Web activity continues to increase thanks to a 57% growth in broadband penetration where seven of the top ten highest trafficked sites include YouTube, MySpace and Facebook. These seven socially enabled services encourage its participants to share snippets of their life every day. For instance, a social media user – like JamiMiami – could use Twitter to share their experience about a service outage in their area. Comcastcares, the voice of Comcast support on Twitter started by Frank Eliason, reached out immediately to help. His prompt questioning and answering got JamiMiami’s service back up and running followed by a glowing thanks.
Comcast recognizes that many people today want to share their experiences with their services online. Even though this new social media glasnost requires a level of transparency that some companies may not be comfortable with, it is an important strategy for understanding what your customers care about and what you should design.
An Investment in Ongoing Communication
If you want to engage with your customers using social media technology then be prepared to monitor this channel of communication across multiple levels of user participation. It is a long term commitment. Over time Facebook has increased their user base month after month because they’ve been smart about how they leverage their own user data. Facebook feels fresh and engaging because they dynamically update features on a regular basis. By contrast, MySpace loses members month after month. Even though they had a spike in total number of unique visits after a major redesign during June 2008, its downward trend started right where it left off.
The act of making those ongoing improvements is one way that businesses stay connected to their customers. The first way to engage with your customers is easy: Listening.
Aggregating Customer Feedback with RSS and Clustering Insights
This is the easiest approach because it requires very little preparation in advance. In fact, you already hear what your customers are saying based on the products and services they’re using. You are also learning from your friends, family and competitors. You can become a more active listener by taking advantage of one simple piece of technology: RSS. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication and it’s proven useful to businesses that need to track updates to multiple websites on a daily basis. These updates can contain valuable customer insight in the form of press articles, blog posts, or social media discussions. RSS uses a standard format to aggregate information in a single place from a variety of websites. Almost all news sources have an RSS feed for the latest news, announcements and press releases. RSS feeds also syndicate new comments, reviews and posts made by bloggers.
This is how you do it:
- Make a list of all the blogs, newspaper columns, social networks, discussion forums and review sites that contain customer feedback relevant to your business.
Once you’ve identified each source, find the feed link and use a web based feed aggregator to manage them.
a. Google Reader is a popular reader, which you can access from multiple machines (mobile and desktop). This is especially useful if you are always on the go.
b. You can also use Yahoo! Pipes to create an aggregated feed with specific filters that you’re interested in. If JetBlue wanted to learn more about their check out experience, then they can use “check out” as a criteria to filter out the syndicated news.
Caption: Affinity exercise done in a field research study identifying criteria that make a visually delightful desktop communication application
Now you can stop here and just keep up with the latest news, or you can make use of this information by applying a simple technique to make it a little more actionable: affinity or clustering diagrams.
Artefact regularly uses affinity processes to find patterns from a large body of data. The data can be quotes, photos or written observations. The goal is to create groups from similar data points that help decision-makers focus on larger opportunities and the details that lie within. It's also a great way to get the large picture without getting lost in large volumes of information.
Learning From Customer Failures and Successes
After immersing yourself in the conversations happening online, you can engage more directly with your customers. There are two potential benefits:
You have the opportunity to recover from a bad experience with your customer before they tell their friends.
You also have the opportunity to learn why they are having problems with your product or service (or learn why it's turning out so well).
Go to places where you can reach a large number of your customers and help them the moment they ask. Leave comments in blog posts, post a response in discussion forums, or reply to their Twitter entry. Comcastcares again created an opportunity to learn specifically what was happening with their customer’s experience, learned more about why it was happening, and fixes it in a matter of minutes. In the end, Comcast resolved a problem and become more aware of how they can be better.
Being Inspired By the Wisdom of the Crowd
Crowds generate amazing ideas. If you’re looking for product ideas, or fuel for innovation, then look to the community. Dell and Starbucks have created excellent websites that enable people to submit new product ideas. Starbucks uses their system to respond to each submission with information with a comment on the potential of the idea. If the idea shows the promise of becoming a reality, Starbucks will report on how the idea is maturing at the company. Customers are empowered to create, and the company is able to perpetuate the creation of things that customer’s will enjoy. You don’t need to build complicated ideation technology; a blog or discussion forum will do fine.
Blogs enable you to poll your customers, or post requests for ideas to improve your products and services. You can offer incentives, give your product away for free, or simply offer money. If you give your customers the opportunity to participate, you inspire them to engage with your products more and ultimately enhance the experience you are giving them.
Caption: Starbucks MyStarbucksIdea website used to gather and foster new ideas on future products they will sell.
A more passive approach would be to search through Flickr, the photo sharing site, and see if your product comes up in search. You may have a window that allows you to observe exactly what people do with your product. In this case, we see someone operating their Roomba with their toes. One could imagine optimizing the Roomba to have button controls that can be used via feet, instead of having the person kneel over to start it. That’s just one idea.
Never a Silver Bullet
Social media can help inform you on your customer’s experience. However, you shouldn't solely rely on it to make all your decisions. Additional research is always useful, especially when the kinds of insights you currently get aren't deep enough to really call out a specific problem. Try out the different services above as starting points towards a better design process, then take the next step and find out more through a blog, Twitter conversations or a discussion forum. Find the right fit for you and keep it going.
This post is filed under Tools, Tips and Suggestions and has the following keyword tags: e-tailers, social networks, social media, customers.
