So, you’ve decided to begin a new market research project.  You’ve got your email database that you’ll send the questions to and you’ve opened up your market research provider’s survey builder to create the survey.  You may have done it dozens of times before; that is, begun a research project knowing that what you’ll get back is a group of conclusions about your group and segments of your group, which may be by any combination of demographic criteria.

When you’re done with the research and analysis, you’ll have a team meeting, report on the results and maybe test a few changes in your marketing or sales plan.  Sorry, that’s not good enough.

Here’s a test to see if you’re getting your money’s worth:

1. Does your research platform automatically append every response to the respondent’s email in your database?
2. Can you convert zips to cities, states, regions, or countries with one click?
3. Does it enable you to ask and analyze responses to open-ended questions, without limit?
4. Can you see all the language that was used by respondents to open-ended questions by simply clicking on a word?
5. Can you convert words into phrases and segment your database based on emotions, frustrations or perceptions?
6. Can you convert word clouds into bar charts with one click?
   
7. Can you create a lexicon of common words or phrases that your database uses?
8. Can you send your questions out to any number of people, 10,000, 100,000, 1 million without an upcharge?
9. Can you ask the same database some questions tomorrow and then ask a different set of questions next month without an additional charge?
10. Can you create and analyze segments based on any combination of closed- or open-ended responses?
11. Can you save segments and know that they’ll automatically build as you add new people to your database?
12. Can you create a segment to ask clarifying questions or send them an email tailored to their frustrations, needs or opinions, all within the same platform?

If your answer is “no” to any of the above, you’re not getting your money’s worth. Take a look at Oomiji because this platform was built to do all of the above.  Oomiji is an end-to-end solution that enables you to build your customer database, query them with research, which can be closed- or open-ended, segment them by any criteria and respond to them any way you want.  One Oomiji client made this observation, “If database acquisition, market research, CRM and email marketing had a baby, its name would be Oomiji.”

In its full application, Oomiji is a customer engagement tool because it enables you to learn what your customers are thinking, acknowledge their comments and then respond to them based on what they’ve told you.  If you think about it, that’s just how we build relationships when talking to each other 1:1.  It makes sense and while you’re at it, you get a pretty amazing research tool that gives you more than your money’s worth.

You can learn more about Oomiji at oomiji.com or watch an intro video here.

Tags: Analysis, Append Data, Corporate Myopia, CRM, Customer engagement, Customers, Database, Demographics, email marketing, end-to-end solution, lexicon, market research, Marketing, Oomiji, Open-ended questions, Outcomes, Respondents, segment, segmentation

There are many reasons companies lose customers but, in the end, they all come down to a lack of customer engagement or advocacy. When engagement drops to a point where customers begin saying this company makes their lives difficult rather than easy, it’s only a matter of time until they go elsewhere. The difficult part for managers hoping to stop the flow is that customer loss is usually a trickle and rarely a cascade. It can be difficult to detect and harder to understand the problem or how to fix it. This is particularly true for consumer facing B2C businesses.  B2B companies usually have client managers whose job is to stay on top of things, but the same rules apply and results can take place.

It’s true that general inertia can keep dissatisfied customers patronizing companies they dislike for a long time. It can often seem too difficult or time-consuming to change your service supplier. The hurdles presented in front of change require time to find a new supplier and leave your old one. But inertia only forestalls the loss. It never prevents it because neglect feeds upon itself to a point where customers can feel forced to look elsewhere.

Here are a couple of personal examples: one large one preceded our supplier change and one small that validated it. In this case, the industry is banking and companies, such as banks, that are pressured by both small margins and ample regulation are particularly vulnerable.

For many years, my wife and I banked at HSBC. When we made the decision to go to HSBC, we were somewhat concerned about whether we would get lost in such a large company. It’s the 25^th largest bank in the world. But they had a branch only a few blocks away from our home and offices around the world, which could accommodate much of my work, which is outside the U.S.

The bank immediately provided financing for our home in New York and a vacation home in Maine. The branch personnel were always accommodating and all was good for a period of several years. Then, HSBC began to make changes and from an outside view, it seemed they were outsourcing many of their in-house services to cut costs. Service bureaus began to answer phone calls or deal with problems, many of which were not connected to each other. There was no single view of the customer. Decisions moved further away from the branch to be centralized by policy makers who were guided by lawyers. The bank would probably blame government regulation but part of succeeding in business is maintaining excellent customer relations regardless of what is thrown at you from the outside. The old saying, “Don’t make your problems into your customer’s problems” always holds true.

One day about five years ago, the local mortgage officer, always accommodating, called to say that we could refinance our mortgages at lower rates and reduce our monthly payments – a good example of trying to make things easier for the customer. There was some documentation, he said, but that it would be easy because he would shepherd it through. So we filled out the application, paid the documentation fees, authorized appraisals, credit reports and income checks. Then, came the bad news. We had been declined. It made no sense to our local mortgage officer. We had never missed a payment, had near perfect credit scores and growing businesses. Additionally, the bank had all our personal and business accounts, personal and business loans and investments. They owned us.

But then he said, “Let me see if I can get my managers to overrule the underwriter.” That sounded odd to me and it turned out that the bank had farmed out its underwriting to a third-party firm that specializes in credit analysis, or more correctly, they had computers that specialized in credit analysis. He called his boss and I called his bosses boss, all to no avail. I spoke to the underwriter who told me that we didn’t fit their formulas because we owned small businesses that couldn’t be counted on to continue to grow. I reminded her that the bank already had our loans so it wasn’t as if turning us down was going to do anything. She said, “I wouldn’t have approved you last time either.”

To make a long story short, we finally got the refinanced loans approved but only because we refused to let it die and kept pushing the decision up to the highest levels we could find in New York. It was painful and not only took much of our time to make our case but also that of our local loan officer, so in the end the bank’s cost to make the loan was higher and it also took time away from us to devote to other areas, maybe like making more money to satisfy the underwriter.

(Now, I should add that we’re not financial slouches and I’m not looking for sympathy. Remember, customer alienation is the point and there are millions of small business people just like us all across the country.)

For us, the experience was the coup de grace in our relationship with HSBC. We decided that we would leave them at the first opportune time. Several years later, we did after rearranging some of our finances. The irony was that as soon as we did, HSBC desperately wanted us to stay. But all of the equity that their local branch personnel had built by being so accommodating had melted away and we had crossed the line from engagement to alienation.

That’s the big example that caused them to lose us as customers and while I’m using my own examples, I’ve heard similar stories among many of our friends who also are small business people. (Years earlier when I had that conversation with the underwriter, I asked her if she would have been happier if I was a manager at Chrysler corporation making several hundred thousand dollars a year. “Of course,” she replied. And I then said, “But Chrysler went bankrupt and I might have lost my job.” The conversation simply went downhill from there.)

So, we’re now at a point where we’ve changed banks but still are unwinding things with HSBC. They still have the mortgage on our home in Maine and a checking account from which they are automatically receiving the monthly payment. However, we noticed that they’re continuing to send the monthly bill to our old address, so we called to have them change the address. Simple enough.

They wouldn’t do it unless I wrote them a letter to inform them. “But you’ve verified that I am who I say I am with six questions I answered correctly. Why won’t you take the information over the phone, or online? Why are you forcing me to sit down and write you a letter?”

The reply came from a supervisor as the first customer service person agreed with me and gave up in frustration. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We can only do what HSBC management tells us to do.”

I thought about his wording for a moment. (It pays to have had a mother who was an English teacher.) “Excuse me, you said “HSBC management”. Aren’t you HSBC management?”

“Technically, no. I’m with a third-party service bureau that has to follow the procedures given to us by HSBC. I agree with you but there is nothing I can do. You have to write a letter,” he said with an air of resignation and defeat.

So, I thanked him and ended the call and thought again about the axiom, “Don’t make your problems into your customer’s problems.” It was validation for our decision to leave and find a new bank.

How bad can things get when you alienate customers? I’m not advocating that any bank’s customers leave. That was the right decision for us. It may not be for others. However, I am advocating that companies use every opportunity to determine whether their customers are engaged or alienated and why, and if so, what can they do about it. In our CRM (customer relationship management) system world, customers have become a series of transactions that we evaluate with formulas and predict with algorithms. I would argue that the transactions are consequences of their relationships with the companies and brands they use. This makes it essential for companies to devote more resources to both monitoring and measuring those relationships, and doing what they can to improve them.

The same is true internally. Employees are the brand personified. Months into our banking change, I called to speak to an executive at our old bank who had been helpful. I got her assistant who was working on the problem and said what we wanted to do could be done, but wasn’t easy. “Why isn’t anything at that bank easy?” I asked.

“Tell me about it, “ she replied.  As the lobsterman, who lives down the road from me in Maine likes to comment, “Nuff said.”

I’d love to hear your comments or stories  about successful customer engagement or, conversely,  alienation.

Tags: banks, Corporate Myopia, CRM, Customer alienation, Customer engagement, Customer relations, Customers, HSBC, Outcomes

In the mad dash to build Facebook and LinkedIn communities, something has been missing.  Companies have been campaigning for as many Facebook “likes” as possible but now, they’re asking, “How do we know if our message is getting through?” and “Is there any way to tell whether (1) awareness is being raised; (2) brand loyalty is increasing; and, (3) social media is having an effect on sales?”

They’re good questions to ask and now there is a way to answer them.  With a simple link on your social media page, you can gather comments and get key strategic questions answered by your social media network.  With our DirectLink™ software, you can ask them questions about their understanding of your brand, unmet needs and the information they’d really like to have from you.  They can be open-ended questions that allow people to write as much as they want and then you can apply these three new tools:

1. See what they’re writing in real time – as they write it!

Now, you can actually monitor what your community is saying about you and how they’re answering your questions.  Take a look at the example below for one of our clients that is a wine producer.  The question asked is “Please describe the qualities that you find in our wines that differentiate them from other wines at any given price level.” With one click on the button on the upper right that says “Get Verbatims”, everything written in answer to that question immediately appears.

And if you want to see all of the text responses quantified, you simply close the verbatims screen and bar charts appear showing how all of the answers have been categorized.

In other words, we’re quantifying qualitative information – conversational text – and enabling you to see the actual words behind the data.  It’s like listening in to hundreds of conversations about all the questions you want answered about your brand.

2. See the key words they use while they’re using them.

When considering the key needs among your customers to address, it helps to know their top-of-mind thoughts.  Word clouds can provide a quick look at what any customer group is saying about your brand.  With one click on the “Word Cloud” button, you’ll see your word cloud develop before your eyes.

DirectLink™ automatically throws out the meaningless words such as articles, pronouns and other common words that might improperly skew the response.  Still, there will be words you’ll see in the word cloud that get through the screening process but don’t provide insights.  DirectLink™ enables you to quickly toss out those words.  For answers to the same question as above, “Please describe the qualities that you find in our wines that differentiate them from other wines at any given price level.”, we tossed out seven additional words to get the picture above.  It’s as easy as clicking on the words you don’t want and the word cloud quickly reforms.

With this feature, you see the top-of-mind thoughts your customers have and the descriptive words they use.  Every product or service creates its own lexicon of words that both the trade and consumers use.  Now, you can see what those are and use them to talk to your customers.

3. Segment your customers instantly and respond immediately.

A common reaction to seeing what people say about you is to think “if only I could talk directly to these people about their beliefs.  Then, I could convince them.” Now, you can!

To the same question above, we wondered if the media that follows the wine and spirits industry might have different topics on their minds.  So, we quickly selected only the media respondents, clicked on the Word Cloud button and this picture appeared: 

Whereas the top-of-mind words used by the larger audience were “food, fruit, price, friendly, oak, aging”, the media has prominently added “complex” and “smooth”.  If we were to speak about these wines to a journalist then, we might stress both the complexity and smoothness of the wines as being key factors that make them so good with food.  It’s this type of parsing that can enable you to tailor your response to any particular trade or consumer group based on factors that you define.

Now, let’s go a step further because DirectLink™ makes a seamless connection between survey responses and direct marketing.

Among the DirectLink™ features on the control panel, you’ll see that there is another button on the upper right that says “Get Emails”.  Clicking this button immediately downloads an email list of only those people who responded to the question or multiple-questions you selected.  You can send them an email using the words they’ve used in response to your question that is specific to their ideas, perceptions and beliefs.

Who can use these 3 features that come with DirectLink™?

• Brand marketers trying to understand what people think about their products.
• Sales managers who want to improve and tailor their sales pitches.
• CEO’s who want to test a new strategy with their customers.
• HR managers who want to assess employee morale or improve internal services.
• Trade association managers who are seeking ways to raise awareness and open doors for their members.
• Foreign trade development officers who want to better understand what makes their country attractive.
• Tourism departments that want to know what will motivate consumers to visit.
• PR and ad agency account executives who want to know what’s on their client’s customers’ minds so they can address them in marketing communications.
• University and college administrators that want to understand and respond to student or alumni views.
• Non-profit development directors seeking the keys to increased fund raising.
• Political campaign managers who need to understand what voters want.

The list goes on and on.  All of the above have used DirectLink™ in the past and now these new features make it even more effective and faster.  We can make your social media programs more effective and improve the ROI of research or direct marketing programs.  If you’d like to know how DirectLink™ can help you and see an online demo, let us know.

Tags: Assumptions, CALCAT©, Change, Consumers, Corporate Myopia, CRM, Customers, Database, Demographics, DirectLink™, Forward-Looking CRM, Future Performance, futureshift, Marketing, Multi-variable, Multi-variate, Outcomes, Past Performance, Relationships, Social Media, Strategy, Winning

Investment management firms always warn that “past performance does not necessarily predict future results.”  It makes sense.  Just because an investment manager has hit it big in the past doesn’t mean that he or she will know when the next big rise or fall in the market will come.

So why doesn’t that same caveat go with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems?  Companies spend millions of dollars with companies like Oracle, SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft and many others (and what’s a small to medium size company to do when faced with the investment and difficult implementation?).  These systems work off of customer “touchpoints” to make relationships and customer management easier.  A “touchpoint” is any past interaction with a customer whether it is a sale where product purchase and customer demographics are acquired, a complaint, inquiry or field contact (assuming the field rep enters the information properly and accurately).

Have you ever gotten upset that you can’t understand the foreign accented customer center rep when you call to ask a question about your bill?  Some of us don’t care but others find it annoying.  It’s because the company using the CRM system didn’t note that your call should be routed to a U.S. based call center and decided it’s cheaper to have your call go to someone they’re paying only several dollars a day, customer satisfaction be damned.  CRM didn’t help there.

Or do you get annoyed when political campaigns send you two or three fund raising requests a day while never asking about your beliefs?   They use CRM too but the systems don’t gather your opinions and beliefs.  They only note where you live, how you voted last time, whether you gave before and possibly what type of car you drive and magazines you read so they can create a profile they believe is predictive.

How about coming home to find the post office has delivered four L.L.Bean catalogs?  Waste of paper?  Absolutely, but blame their CRM system for the confusion.  Amazon is quite sure that because you bought a book about wine, you’ll absolutely want to purchase a new wine cooler they’re carrying.  You may not have even noticed but their CRM system says you’re a prospect.  Millions of customers, sales, inquiries, complaints equals billions of data points so inaccurate interpretations, solicitations, mail and email deliveries are bound to happen, right?

Not necessarily.  What if something like “forward-looking CRM” were available and affordable?  Imagine if companies or politicians asked you what your needs and frustrations are and once they knew, could use that information to tailor responses to you and provide better products, services and build their overall customer relationships.  Imagine politicians asking what his or her constituents believe – the massive Town Hall that Ross Perot used to rant about – and adjusting their positions to truly be representative of what voters are telling them.  Sound impossible?

It exists

Futureshift’s DirectLink™ system enables you to ask any group what they believe and why, what their needs are and why, and most importantly, what their frustrations are and why.  You can ask in an open-ended way questions that begin with “why”, “what” and “tell us about” and people write like they’ve never been asked these questions before.  Then, CALCAT™ software takes over and helps tag ideas and beliefs so that qualitative information can be shown quantitatively in bars and graphs just like people are used to.

Below is an example of how DirectLink™ can reveal more about customers.  The topic is wine but it could be any product or service.  The question in the chart below (“What one piece of information could a winery give you that you would find valuable when selecting a wine?”) was answered by 3,119 people and you can see the array of responses.

But now, let’s say you want to know more.  How did people write about some of their answers because you might want to refine the way you give them information.  So let’s say you select the response “Flavor/Tasting notes”.  You can click that response and then one button, called “Get Verbatims”, which instantly shows a screen like below.

Now, you can read how all of the respondents talked about “Flavor/Tasting notes” and you can see the descriptive language they use or even create word clouds so the most common terms stand out and then you’ll know what the customer’s lexicon is so you can know just what language to use to talk back to them.

Now, it gets more interesting because you’ll want to talk back to them in a way that is specifically tailored to their needs.  This group has indicated that they want better flavor and tasting notes from wine marketers.  What if you have something to say to them about this?  Is there a way you can reach them immediately?  Easy!  All you do is click the button at the side that says “Get Emails” and an email list of all the people who are looking for better flavor and tasting notes downloads to your computer, or for that matter, to your mobile device if you’re on the road.  Now, you can email them something specific to their needs.  This ease in immediate implementation makes it both practical and effective for small businesses to target market.

It gets better

Typically, with most products, marketers want to get more specific in regards to addressing consumer or customer beliefs.  They might have three, four or five variables they want to combine together and this can take days to obtain multi-variable analysis, let alone find the people behind those beliefs.  Not any more.  Multi-variable analysis and grabbing the people in that specific multi-variable segment is now instantaneous and automatic.

Above, four variables have been selected:  (1) women; (2) age 50 – 59; (3) want Flavor/Tasting notes; and (4) prefer to get recommendations from the sommelier.  Now, you can look at every question you’ve asked for that group or you can quickly download a list of email addresses for this refined segment so you can send them a message tailored to their needs.  The result is a personalized response tailored to your customer’s needs.  This creates more customer awareness, interest and loyalty because you’ve shown you’ve listened and are responsive, which is the point of CRM to begin with.  Perhaps of more note, however, is how easy it is to operate the system yourself without a bevy of expensive consultants descending to your business and drowning you with minutiae.

Making CRM work better

DirectLink™ can act as a “look-forward CRM” system for small to medium sized companies with databases of several hundred thousand.  Groups can be defined by a series of responses to questions and messaging can be tailored to the language they use, beliefs they hold or frustrations they’re holding.  In this way, marketing can address the current and future needs of consumers and customers and be truly predictive at a cost that makes it more approachable than those big CRM systems.  With larger databases, DirectLink™ information can be appended to databases to make those systems “needs-based” and ultimately more effective.

DirectLink™ and its underlying software platform, CALCAT©, are proprietary products owned by Futureshift, Inc.  DirectLink™ is fully functional for both English and Spanish speaking markets.  For more information Forward-Looking CRM, write strategy@futureshiftnow.com

Tags: CALCAT©, Consumers, Corporate Myopia, CRM, Customers, Database, Demographics, DirectLink™, Forward-Looking CRM, Future Performance, Investment Managers, L.L.Bean, Marketing, Microsoft, Multi-variable, Multi-variate, Oracle, Past Performance, Relationships, Ross Perot, Salesforce, SAP, Touchpoints