thefunnel

One way to measure social media is through using NPS as a metric. Think about it. Social media is all about customers having conversations about your brand, and the ultimate question is, would they recommend your product, service or brand, or do they fall into the category of talking negatively about you? So if you track the conversations, and develop a way of rating these conversations, you have a metric. The metric is about your brand, the communication channel just happen to be social media. Combine this with some other marketing best practices, such as unhappy customersare each likely to talk about you with 10 other customer, which has a compounding effect on the negative conversations about you. Example. Let’s say your promoters % is 80 and you detractor % is 20, leading to an NPS score of 60%, quite good. However, lets now imaging that all the detractors talk to ten of their friends, therefore amplifying the negative message to 200%, while only two of your promoters talk positively about you leading to a a score of 160%. Suddenly your real NPS score has turned into a negative 40%. Using this math, you need 8 out of 10 of your customers to be a promoter, and a maximum of 1 out of 10 to be a detractor to hit a NPS of 60%. This really shows the power of social media, and the importance of customer satisfaction, and the importance of participating (by at least listening) and helping to create positive conversations. It’s could also be a way to determine what your social media strategy should be. If for example you have a really high NPS score, you need to go all out and capitalize on this. If your NPS score is low, and although you can’t control social media,  you need to consider a different approach.

A while ago I got involved in doing some brand research around customer intimacy. The company I was doing this for had selected this as their strategy (out of three possible ones according to some marketing gurus: customer intimacy, product leadership and operational excellence) and wanted to know how they were doing. The attached document briefly discusses the methodology. In the end, companies can call their strategies whatever they want, but if the brand attributes doesn’t resonate with their customers or a chosen strategy isn’t economically viable something have to change.    Brand Value Drivers in B-2-B

A while ago I finalized a major customer satisfaction research project for a company.

The objective of the research was to identify customer needs and to determine the company’s level of service performance. The main survey was conducted by telephone.

The respondents were asked various questions in the areas of partnership and supplier expectations.

One of the areas explored was to understand the difference between basic and crucial service factors, basic being factors that any supplier would have to offer to be considered, and crucial the ones that will be critical when customers choose their suppliers.

For many respondents, price was a key factor – it is cited as both a basic and a crucial issue – ease of working with a supplier, partnership and honesty were often mentioned as crucial factors.

In summary, one can say that the key basic requirements related to technical expertise and financial stability, whereas the crucial ‘loyalty’ factors relate to the ongoing relationship – honesty, openness, making realistic promises and keeping them, easy of doing business and other aspects of service. In addition both the basic and crucial factors were ranked for overall importance. This combined created an interesting view of customer satisfaction attributes where all the factors were on two different scales. Summary report will be published soon. Stay tuned.