Thanks for visiting. Will you please rate your reading experience?

Wait, this one is even better…

We’d like your feedback.

Thank you for visiting my website. You have been randomly selected to participate in a customer satisfaction survey to let me know how I can improve your website experience.

The survey is designed to measure your entire site experience and will appear at the end of your visit.

This survey is conducted by me.

Ridiculous, isn’t it? Yet that’s what we as marketers constantly do in our efforts to gain brand recognition in a world increasingly led by social media. We poke our customers to give us better ways of serving them. Something’s wrong with this picture.

The promise of social media for marketers is the customer information it makes available.

The challenge of social media for marketers is how to use that information to create better brand experiences for the customer.

But even with social media tools, getting this information isn’t always easy. So, simple customer survey tools, like Survey Monkey, are crutches many marketing managers rely on to manage this complex task.

Why Should You Care What Customers Think?

The idea is that if you ask a customer directly what they like or want in their experience with a particular brand, the company can better meet their needs (i.e. sell them more stuff, more often).

Certainly, a high degree of customer satisfaction directly correlates to a company’s financial success on both micro– and macro-economic levels. The link between customer satisfaction, sales, and ultimately loyalty is powerful, because data often links customer satisfaction ahead of sales by approximately a week.

But slow down, cowboy. Don’t start crafting your survey questions quite yet for that big boost in sales next week…

How Can We Better Serve You?

The problem with simply asking a customer a few questions about what they liked about their brand experience  is that it doesn’t work.

One of the most eloquent examples of what customers really think when they’re taking your survey is at Laraine Herring’s blog, where she writes:

Am I satisfied with my teeth cleaning experience? Well, what were my expectations of that teeth cleaning experience? Were they reasonable or were they what I wanted rather than what I might have needed? Why can’t it be enough just to have my teeth cleaned? If the dentist stabs me in the gum with a sharp tool, I promise I’ll say something. Otherwise, just please clean my teeth. Were the heavens supposed to crack open? Should I have expected a Hallelujah chorus when she put the bite wings in for the X-rays? Did they serve me wine and cheese? Please. It’s the dentist.

How did I like my recent car’s tune-up experience? Well, actually, I would have preferred if you’d have used Bay 3 for the work as my car really is sensitive to north-facing windows. I also think the tool boxes should have been in red instead of that sad metal color, and I would have really liked it if my mechanic looked like Johnny Depp. What can I tell you about tuning up a car? Nothing. Because I. Don’t. Know. How. To. Tune. Up. A. Car. If the mechanic slashed my tires, poured oil in the gas tank, and drained and forgot to refill the radiator, I promise I’ll say something.

And, I would be remiss if I didn’t include this beauty from noozhawk.com:

Z: You can’t buy any goods or services anymore without being asked, “How did we do? Are we good enough for you?”

She: It’s very needy. It’s like that boyfriend who’s way too concerned with how he kisses. “Am I kissing you too hard? Should I peck more? What do you want me to do?”

Z: I’ll tell you what I want you to do. I want you to man-up, corporate America. I want you to own your products and your services.

She: Seriously. The entire world is not your focus group

Customers have complex motivations, and simple customer survey tools, used to excess, fail to address these needs. Routine customer surveys often damage more than they benefit a brand.

So how do marketers get more customers in this experience economy without conducting surveys?

Your focus must be on understanding and delighting the customer, which can’t happen just by putting together a survey. Most of the customer surveys I see are really focused on the needs of the business, even though they’re packaged as focusing on the needs of the customer. The customer taking the survey intuitively knows they’re not likely to see a complete change in the product service if  they don’t have any strong feelings about it one way or the other.  Surveys become like white noise.

Surveys are really putting customers in unnatural circumstances, all the while being asked to share deep feelings about a brand. It’s certainly not the best way to get the truth of how customers really feel.

How To Understand Your Customer

The social web’s transparency and powerful tools allows you, as marketers, to gain a deep level of intimacy with your customers. Web analytics allow you to track and measure many of the dimensions of a brand’s relationship with their customer that simple surveys can’t touch. There are millions of searches daily using the words and phrases related to your business. Now you can use web search engines, as well as social searches (of which Facebook analytics is excellent).

You extract the ultimate value from these searches when you seek to understand the intent behind the search. You may have all of the demographics and survey results on your market, but can you extract ‘why’ they buy from you with that data? Not likely.

To really understand your customers, you need more than a customer survey, you need to understand their behavior. For instance, if you’ve purchased Vespa Scooter accessories, you’re likely to purchase some again. If you’ve gotten Botox, you’ll probably do it again (and that, in itself says volumes about you — from a marketing aspect, that is). Getting behavioral data from customers takes some time, but is relatively much easier to gather given the social monitoring and listening tools available.

Bottom line, don’t annoy your customers with surveys. Do the work of segmenting customers. Understand your customer’s lifestyle choices and personality preferences with psychographics data. Glean the behavioral choices I wrote about in the previous paragraph from the psychographics data.

And most importantly, be sensitive to this depth of aggregate customer information you have, by showing empathy and compassionate understanding in your campaigns. This empathy creates a memorable customer experience — much stronger than answers to a simple survey after they’ve purchased your product. When customers experience the empathy in your interaction with them via a campaign or on your website, they will make their satisfaction known. Without a survey to prod them along.

Related articles

• Monitoring Relationship Status (ducttapemarketing.com)
• The folly of getting customer feedback through automated surveys (thecustomerblog.co.uk)

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Twitter is yet another example of where brands have to accept a loss of control. In this case, it is not about putting the brand in the hands of the market but in the hands of the people for whom the brand is their livelihood. A certain amount of letting go is a necessity. We will undoubtedly see a few missteps in C-tweets, and we’ll learn and move on. Ultimately, the medium may change but basics of branding still apply — both for the brands themselves and for their executive stewards: Be true, be relevant, be transparent, respect your brand and your customers, don’t make a promise you can’t keep.

Check out the rest of the blog post about C-Level Tweeting at AdAge.

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Last week, Yahoo released a real-time Twitter monitoring tool called Sideline. I’ve been playing around with it for a few days, and though it’s no Radian6 monitoring tool, it does have some neat features your company may find useful.

Trending Topics on Twitter

Want to know what the cool kids on Twitter are tweeting about today? Check out Sideline’s Trending Topics screen. This is great for monitoring topic trending related to a conference, new product release, or any other much-talked-about situation that affects your brand name.

Engage Customers Better

You can also create and group custom queries by topics of interest. This allows you to create as many search groups as you’d like. Theres also a Favorites button, and you can reply directly from the Sideline interface to any tweet in your group.

Customer Attitudes Matter

My favorite feature on Sideline is the Advanced Search Builder. It allows you to build a Twitter Search based on Words, People, even Attitudes. Smart companies pay attention not only to mentions of their brand on Twitter, but how people feel about it. A huge credibility free-fall is when a company auto-follows any mention of their brand without taking the time to see if the tweet is bashing the product or praising it. Granted, for some companies, it’s a LOT of work to weed through mentions to ascertain the attitude of the person toward the brand — but this Sideline feature makes this very important job a little easier.

One more note about Sideline: It’s an open-source tool, so have your developers take a look at it.  It’s an Adobe Air app aimed at users looking for info from the Twitter public sideline. Definitely a tool worth taking a look at.

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