Tag Archives: Research

May 25, 2016 · 10:58 am

Ignoring 9 Out Of 10

I realize I’ve spent the first couple of posts this week on the topic of companies being less than responsive to customers. I was chatting about this with someone yesterday and they asked me if I really thought the two cases I cited were the norm.  After all, he said, how can companies really expect this kind of behavior to remain quiet when every person is a publisher?

Sprout Social

Sprout Social

Precisely my point, but since when does common sense prevail?  In fact, companies are getting worse at being responsive.  Maybe it’s just the increase in volume, maybe it’s the ease with which customers can reach out, but the common sense solution of staffing up and training to handle the increased load is nowhere to be found.  Since we believe in fact-based statements here, these facts are from Sprout Social:

90% of people surveyed have used social in some way to communicate directly with a brand. What’s more, social surpasses phone and email as the first place most people turn when they have a problem or issue with a product or service, according to Sprout’s consumer survey. Following this trend, The Sprout Index shows that the number of social messages needing a response from a brand has increased by 18%over the past year. In spite of the high volume of messages that require a response, brands reply to just 11% of people (a number that’s been stuck in neutral since 2015).

11%, meaning brands are ignoring 89% of the messages sent to them as consumers reach out. I guess they’re too busy misusing social media and other responsive channels as megaphones (so 1995) since the research found that brands send promotional messages out 23 times as often as they respond to a customer message. It’s not just social that requires our attention.  August 2015 research from Nice Systems and Boston Consulting Group (BCG) found that internet users in major metro areas worldwide used an average of 5.6 customer service channels.

I can hear you rubbing your temples as the headache comes on.  How will you support your customers in those places when you might be ignoring 9 out of 10 customer interactions now?  Beats me, but the question needs to be answered, and the organizations that do so will be the ones that win.  Make sense?

 

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , , , ,

January 26, 2016 · 11:30 am

Ends And Means

The cynics among you believe that as a brand or as a company behavior matters far less than a low price and a quality product. If you provide a great service or a good product and price it as low as possible, consumers will buy. It doesn’t matter if you pollute the air or pay lousy wages. Consumers just want to know what’s in it for them. The good news, from my perspective, is that you are wrong. Here is the evidence to back it up.

The Havas folks did a study to understand how corporate social responsibility has evolved over the past decade. They looked at how are companies responding to consumer pressures to work toward the common good and what those consumers now expect from their brand partners. Most importantly, the studied how critical these expectations are to their purchase decisions.

As it turns out, consumers are extremely interested in this. Half of mainstream consumers and two-thirds of Prosumers (a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler – a consumer who produces and consumes media – and who doesn’t?) avoid buying from businesses deemed to have a negative social or environmental impact. As the study states: “People still want bargains, of course, but it’s even more essential that products and services offer some sort of enduring value.”

Some other points from the study:

  • When we asked respondents how important it is for a company’s CEO to do certain things, paying workers a fair wage and providing a pleasant work environment received higher scores than earning profits or even being environmentally conscious.
  • People aren’t looking for businesses to act as quasi-governments. On the contrary, around two-thirds of our global sample actually fear the power big corporations already wield. What they want to see are all the world’s players—governments, corporations, NGOs, citizens—working together to tackle problems that no single entity can solve alone.
  • Two-thirds of our global sample agreed that businesses actually bear as much responsibility as governments for driving positive social change, and 62 percent said they’d like their favorite brands to play a bigger role in solving social problems.

The point is that if you believe that your brand or company can let the ends – revenues and profits – justify any means, you’re sadly mistaken.  The study shows that companies that do good are more likely to do well.  Isn’t that the end we’re all after?

Leave a comment

Filed under Helpful Hints

Tagged as , , , , ,

December 9, 2015 · 9:51 am

The Right Question

We’re filling out a survey from our homeowner’s insurance company. I guess they want to make sure that we’ve got ample coverage in case a party gets out of hand and we need to rebuild Rancho Deluxe. One of the questions reads as follows: 

Percentage of the interior walls that are plaster

Hmm. Would that be the percentage based on the number of walls, the percentage plaster represents of square wall footage, or something else? After all, in a rectangular room, if one long wall is plaster, then the right answer may be 25% or it may be 40%. How accurate does this response need to be?

There’s actually an excellent business point contained in that silliness. It’s not enough to ask the right questions. We also need to ask them in the right way so we get the expected, actionable data. In the example above, while my answer isn’t a huge data set, when aggregated into the other data the company is pulling together, the sampling error will be larger than it needs to be since half the respondents can respond using one way to look at the question and half the other.

Obviously, it’s not just a lack of clarity that can affect the outcome and usefulness of your research.  Asking leading questions which are almost certain to elicit a particular response is bad as well (do you do XYZ every day?).  So can asking open-ended questions since there is no guarantee that anyone will focus on the specific area you’re researching.  Then there are the folks who overlap responses (how old are you – 18-21, 21-30 – how does a 21-year-old respond?).  Or ask loaded questions (how long ago did you stop beating your spouse?).

Asking questions is really important but asking badly structured questions is a waste of time. Clear?

Leave a comment

Filed under Consulting, Huh?

Tagged as , , , , ,