Thursday 15 October 2009

Create your own customer metrics easily

online survey softwareThanks to the computer age information has become so abundant that managers are having a hard time staying up to date and in focus on how the daily business is doing. That’s where metrics come into the picture. They provide a quick and reliable acid test to help us know where we are going and how fast we are getting there.

Deciding on which metrics to use, however, can be tricky. Textbook examples might prove a bit too theoretical. At the same time metrics based on gut feeling might be unreliable. A good approach is to set up customer metrics with the help of the customers themselves. In the following we discuss a very efficient way to create metrics that are both reliable and valid.


Coming up with your metrics

Say you want to have people rate their “customer experience” when they visited your store. Surely you couldn’t ask people to do so on a scale from 1 to 5, since it’s hard for people to understand the question and people would consider lots of different things when giving the rating. Needless to say it will result in low validity (the question isn’t measuring what it’s supposed to) and low reliability (the results will vary depending on who gives the answer). If you wanted to make a scale question with separate components (such as store cleanliness, customer service, product range, etc), which ones would you choose out of potentially millions of things?

Instead you should start out with a pilot survey intended to (now we’re using fancy research jargon) operationalize the concept. In plain terms it means that you try to find out which the things are that contribute to and make up the experience of visiting your shop. Once that’s clear, you can create a metric that’s measuring what it’s supposed to.


Setting up and fine-tuning the concept

Now you want to find out which things affect customer experience positively and negatively. The best thing to do this is to run a pilot study with two open-ended questions:

“When visiting our shop, what things did you find positive?”
“When visiting our shop, what things did you find negative?”

Do the pilot study and have people pour their hearts out. Run both questions on text mining software (such as that of Webropol) and find the biggest topics from both questions. There you have it – those are the things you should have your customers rate!

Say you get 10 things that are talked about a lot. Then you make a scale question where people are asked to rate these ten things. The sum of these will be the “customer experience” you were looking for in the first place. Then you can do the actual survey with this scale question.


Wait! There’s more than just the metric!

Once you’ve completed your pilot study you have actually got a lot of interesting information besides the metric. What you just did is that you:

a) Found out which things your customer experience is made up of
b) Found out which things add to or subtract from the experience (remember, you asked positive and negative things separately in the pilot study!)
c) Quantified your experience concept, i.e. you now have a numerical tool to use. This allows for studying customer experience trends over time, compare different customer segments, stores visited etc.
d) You have quantified the sub-components (e.g. product range) that contribute to the experience. You can also study these over time or between segments, stores etc.


For more information on text analytics and text mining, please contact us! Don't forget to visit our website!

Friday 2 October 2009

Facebook in a business context: Case KSBKids

We are delighted to announce our first guest writer on the Webropol blog: Malene Hansen Stanley from KSB Kids. Her contribution is based on her acclaimed presentation at the social media seminar arranged by the National Business 2 Business Centre at the University of Warwick in June 2009.



Social Media and Facebook
by Malene Hansen Stanley, KSBKids

We are all in different places in our “online” journey; some struggle with basic websites, some of us are confused by the vast options available and some have been swept away with social media fever. I, like many others are still not 100% sure how social media can add to the bottom line, but I do think the opportunities are undeniable.

For www.KSBKids.com we have focused on Facebook. We sell children’s clothes and our prime target market is mothers. Many of whom have Facebook accounts.

Facebook has more than 300 million registered members; it grows at a rate of 250,000 new members a day and is among the 4th most trafficked websites. The fastest growing segment of users is the +25 years, professionals, in the workforce, - known to be loyal and repeat customers. Some argue that FB holds the key to this segment! Additionally, 53% of FB users have kids.


The KSBKids approach
We use FB to build our online profile, strengthen our “digital footprint” and to create brand awareness. In the long term social media can positively affect a company’s brand, which strengthens a behaviour that ultimately leads to sales. Our objectives for using FB include;

  • Increase sales
  • Drive visitors to our website, fan page and blog
  • Get found by people searching for our product
  • Connect and engage with current and potential customers
  • Create a community around our business
  • Use FB to promote other content that we create, e.g. blog
  • Keep customers informed
  • Conduct market research e.g. polls

How to build your social media approach
Before deciding where to focus resources, you should identify meaningful communities, forums, etc. It is essential that you know where your customers spend time online, “fish where the fish are”. Don’t succumb to the temptation to “be hip” …. “I MUST be on Facebook” unless you have a strategic business rationale to accompany it! Consider aspects such as:

  • How it will FB affect your bottom line?
  • Do you offer a product that is relevant to its users?
  • Do you target your most active purchasers?
  • Can you positively influence WOM?
  • How can you create viral brand awareness?
  • Will it provide valuable market research/feedback that will result in more sales?

I always stress the importance of having a vision and a plan, but I do believe when using FB for business you have to adopt a trial and error approach. Have a strategy, but don’t wait until you have the perfect plan. Be transparent, honest and open with customers. They will appreciate it, but it does run counter to what we have been taught for decades … it defies our traditional idea of being professional.

As you create your vision and craft your message - listen to your community. Gather and digest customer ideas and comments, incorporate their intuitions into your thinking. This should not be a hardship duty, - your customers are your greatest ally!

You have to find your unique voice that sets your company apart and this can be a great challenge. Creating a FB fan page is simple, but getting it to work well takes time, dedication and planning. Don’t expect to create a page and then have a huge following instantaneously. Build good content, make it easy to share, promote it and over-time the community will grow. The more content you create and the more you engage with fans, the more people you will be able to reach.

Be visible, commit, stay active and come from a place of content, - not a place of marketing. Be prepared that social media is slow and steady - it is frustrating! However, avoiding experimenting with the social web is a greater risk than experimenting with it and failing!


Malene Hansen Stanley
www.ksbkids.com
info@ksbkids.com

The writer is the entrepreneur and a mother of two and owns KSB Kids. You can learn more about KSBKids on Facebook and Twitter.

Thursday 1 October 2009

Knowing your customers - why is it important?

Knowing your customers, why they buy from you and why they don’t is a tool Webropol works very well for! On this topic Webropol UK Country manager Mukesh Bassi was interviewed recently for web radio station BWA Radio. Click here to listen to the podcast at www.bwaradio.co.uk .

The 10-minute interview is on Programme Five, 18 minutes in to the program. Enjoy! (We also recommend the Business School dean after Mukesh who discusses the relation between profitability and customer service)


BWA Radio Programme 5 / September 24th 2009


Hosted by Peter Roper, contributors include:



Download the entire programme as a podcast