About the Webinar: Ryma’s April 7th webinar will be presented at noon ET by Esther Rmah and Kathryn Korostoff. Regardless of whether your planning your first market research questionnaire or your 10,000th, this webinar is for you if you ever see yourself considering a customer survey again.

The 10 steps for a stress-free customer survey process will contain bits of information that is a result of decades of practice. Esther and Kathryn will be discussing a simple process to write a successful survey, and basic tips when using an online survey tool to ensure data reliability.

About the Presenters: Kathryn Korostoff is a market research professional with a special interest in how organizations acquire, manage, and apply market research. Over the past 20 years, she has personally directed more than 600 primary market research projects and published over 100 bylined articles in trade magazines. Currently, Kathryn spends her time assisting companies as they create market research departments, develop market research strategies, or otherwise optimize their use of market research. Prior to Research Rockstar, Kathryn completed the transition of Sage Research–an agency that she founded and led for 13 years– to its new parent company.

She is the author of “How to Hire & Manage Market Research Agencies“,

Esther LaVielle is currently an Account Manager at QuestionPro and Survey Analytics, which was started in 2002 in Seattle and is now one of the fastest growing private companies in the US. Prior to her adventure at QuestionPro she spent 3 years as a Qualitative Project Manager at the Gilmore Research Group.

Just to make sure that we are talking about the same thing.  Buyers remorse refers to the emotional response in the consumer after a purchase is made.  The higher the price and the higher the involvement in a purchase, the higher the potential for buyers remorse.

Yet, most businesses like to look the other way and pretend that this doesn’t happen or doesn’t have that much of an impact on their business — let alone measure it.  But don’t be fooled.  Buyers remorse is real and if you don’t track it, it will come back to bite you.

Where to Start Looking

The most obvious place to start is with your customer lists.  Run a report that gives you a list of your customers and sales by customer over the last five years.  Now compare one year to the next and look for which customers are no longer on your list or which customers have stopped purchasing one product or another.  Look for people that only made one purchase or look for people who have been loyal customers and then dropped off.

This is a golden opportunity to start digging into what their experience was and why they chose not to purchase again.  Depending on the size of this list of departed customers, you may choose to call them directly (I recommend that) or if it’s a large list, you can create a feedback survey and send them an invitation to tell you what happened.

What Buyers Remorse Looks Like in the Car Business

Remember, the higher the price and the higher the emotional involvement, the higher the potential for buyers remorse.  In the car business, buyers remorse can take the form of being disappointed in the actual purchasing event or worse, it can become a growing disappointment as customers actually LIVE with the consequences of their purchase.  For example, 17% of the people who purchased new cars during the “cash for clunkers” program now say that they regret their purchase.  Mostly because of having a car payment that they didn’t have before as well as increased insurance costs.  About 6% to 8% of car buyers feel some level of regret within a month of their purchase.

There is a Goldmine of Opportunity in This Data

While it can be appealing to not ask questions and take the money and run.  There is profitable gold in mining what causes buyers remorse in your customers.  It doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive.  You only need to care enough to put some triggers and elements in place to grab that feedback.

• If your product or service is sold face-to-face, train your sales people to help customers make a decision that they can live with.  Provide a guarantee or a risk-free option that makes it easy for them to make the purchase AND to come back and return it if they are unsatisfied or have second thoughts.
• Actually talk about regrets and second thoughts while customers are thinking about the purchase.  If they’ve had the conversation, they will be less likely to have regrets later.
• Grab their e-mail and send them a survey within 24 hours.
• Create a space on your web site (on every page) where visitors can easily give you their thoughts while they are having an experience.

Buyers remorse is a given.  So don’t look the other way.  Use this potential for customer regret as an opportunity to help them make a decision they are happy with.  After the sale is done, stay in touch with them and give them lots of ways to reach out to you.  This opportunity to reverse their decision will actually solidify their choice of purchase and have them come back for more.

What have been your experiences with buyers remorse and how have you solved them?

I’ve pulled together some of the new and trending ways that customers provide information and organizations collect it.

1. Tracking Social Media Conversations.  Focus groups used to be the only way to get that special “voice and body language” of the customer without all the cost and logistics involved.  Social media applications provide a virtual “room” where the conversation is all about your company or product.  There are firms that specialize in this specialized kind of market research.
2. Real time reviews. The growth of sites like YELP have emboldened customers to tell the world about what they love and what they don’t love about their latest customer experiences.  Organizations should take the opportunity to  have their own space or presence online where customers can connect directly with employees and give their feedback.  Respond to customer feedback and build your brand.
3. Customers will want multiple levels and platforms for feedback.  In addition to your regular online surveys, be sure to provide a space where customers can offer their ideas.  IdeaScale is a great way to get customers involved in the product improvement and development process.  Customers who are involved in contributing their ideas are loyal customers and enthusiastic referrers.
4. Sharing information across company departments. There are vendors and technologies that now allow you to track customer feedback across sources such as e-mails, call centers, blogs and comments online.  Check out ResponseTek, for example.  They provide an entire suite of services that will help you route important customer feedback to the appropriate department manager BEFORE they’ve left you for a competitor.
5. Customer feedback is everyone’s job. An overarching trend is to have employees from across the organization carry social media accounts and interact with customers as they “chat” about your company, product or service.  Instead of having all the feedback run through one department, companies will find it necessary to create an infrastructure that allows the information to be collected, processed, reported and acted upon by key managers in each department.
6. Moving away from score-keeping to experience improvement. Companies are spending less time obsessing about tracking scores and the movement of the scores on surveys and caring more about the open-ended responses that customers provide.  In other words, a score of 7 out of 10 doesn’t tell you what to do to improve an experience.  But 100 requests for 24/7 online customer support via chat is feedback you can do something about.

As you can tell by the six trends I’ve outlined here, there is an overarching shift away from surveys that happen in intervals of quarters or months to on-going conversations with customers in order to quickly and effectively improve the experience.

I had such an experience recently when I chatted with Marc Gingras, founder and CEO of Tungle.com (the new meeting scheduling tool).  After discovering Tungle (via word of mouth), I was so excited about this calendar tool that I wrote about it in my blog.  About a day after the post went up, I got a personal e-mail from Marc thanking me for the post.  After another month or so, Marc scheduled a phone conference with me to chat about the tool.  He asked me what I liked, and what I wished that it would do.  Not only that, but he encouraged me to tell my friends who also used the tool to send any ideas directly to him.  Before you say that this is impractical, understand that Tungle has multiple channels of feedback collection and they have incorporated personal conversations as part of this feedback.

How to Take Advantage of These Trends

1. Create a “customer experience” champion in your organization. Companies are starting to create departments and people who basically serve as the depository of real-time customer feedback.  They receive all the feedback and notify the appropriate managers immediately.  They are given the freedom to take care of customer problems and improve the experience.
2. Start monitoring social media chatter. Encourage employees to open corporate social media accounts.  Create account names that mention your company name.  For example @NPRscottsimon is the Twitter ID for Weekend Edition host Scott Simon on National Public Radio.
3. Use IdeaScale to gather product improvement information.  Focus groups can be expensive and IdeaScale is a wonderful and cost-effective tool to engage customers in voicing their needs and wants.
4. Open up your blog articles for comments. Use the feedback you’ve already received from customers to create blog articles that educate and inform your customers about the improvement programs you have going on.  Invite them to provide their input and respond to that input.

What trends have you noticed and what do you recommend as a way to take advantage of these trends?

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer. She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers. Her blog is Strategy Stew.   You can reach her directly at Ivana@thirdforce.net.

Some of the most practical tips we can immediately carry out are the following:

1- In the process of doing a segmentation research it is important to set your own objectives and continually revisit your objectives to ensure you are staying on budget during the entire project.

2- You must also spend time to decide if it is demographic based or research based research. For example: A mock trial would need to reflect the demographics of the county to which it is held, whereas, a smart phone study may want to target current smart phone users who can offer a lot of feedback on a features and benefits research study.

3- Make sure your team spends qualify time brainstorming from beginning to end. Often times brainstorm sessions are done too quickly, are one-sided, or certain sections were not thought through well enough. In the end it would just cost more money and more time to finish your research project.

4- Research what will be the most efficient and cost-effective way to research your “Slam Dunk” audience. This is my favorite word used by Kathryn during the seminar. I’ve always known it as Core Customers, but Slam Dunk sounds much more fun.

Simply put: Effective research + targeted marketing campaign towards Slam Dunk audience = higher revenue.

In a do-it-yourself economy, technology has been the key cost saver for many companies who need to do in-depth research. It can also help avoid common pitfalls found in research studies. QuestionPro survey software tools have aided many clients in preventing poorly written surveys (survey wizard) and strong data analysis tools that are available right away. With Kathryn’s practical tips on segmentation and easy-to-use market research software found on QuestionPro, you are ready your company’s market research goals to a whole new level.

Back before I was ever in the software-for-retailers business, I was simply in the retail business.  I owned and operated a chain of retail stores.

One day I had the idea that it would be great to circulate a weekly memo to everyone in my company.  I’d outline our goals for the week, celebrate victories, observe trends and champion ways to improve. My first one weighed in at 3 pages, and included two charts and a photo.  It looked like an advertisement for desktop publishing software.  I was pretty proud of it.  That is, of course, until I realized that none of my employees could recall anything I’d written.

Following weeks saw the editor’s knife, and after a few months what remained was a weekly one-paragraph memo of fewer than forty or fifty words.  In 16-point type.  Each memo focused on not more than one concept together with some employee attaboys.  People read it, absorbed it and acted on it.  My broader literary abilities would have to lay dormant, pretty much until you came along.

My lesson was that my front-line employees had their own daily routine and priorities, which are intimately connected to the substance of their daily job on the store floor.  Absorbing bigger business concepts and incorporating that information into how they performed their jobs could only happen if I didn’t overload them with too much stuff.  And the point where even very good employees tune-out is a lot lower than most managers realize.

The Problem with Net Promoter. Net Promoter, developed by consultant Frederick Reichheld, is a well thought-out and reliable predictor of sales growth.  You calculate Net Promoter by applying a formula to the result of asking your customers to grade how likely they are to refer your organization to a friend or colleague.

But there’s a problem.  Like version 1.0 of my employee memo, it is too complex to be used as a tool to coach the front lines of your organization.

To illustrate my point, try this two-part test.  First, see if you can remember the formula for calculating Net Promoter off the top of your head.  Over the years I’ve asked this question of a wide variety of people, and almost nobody can remember how to do it.  It’s so unintuitive as to escape the memory of almost everyone.

Second, try to imagine yourself and your front-line managers explaining that formula to every new hourly emplooyee hired in your company, and including that explanation in every review and staff meeting occurring throughout your organization daily.  It’s a formula for making eyes glaze over.

Let’s Remember Why We Measure. The goal of measuring customer experience isn’t just so you can know where you’re pleasing customers and where you’re not.  It’s to enable your field teams to change their behavior such that the customer experience improves and, presumably, sales go up by virtue of improved retention.  And that change requires enough simplicity that necessary actions are totally clear and can remain front-of-mind during your employees’ work day.

And the truth is that you don’t really sacrifice much by keeping it simple.  It’s not clear to us that the complexity of Net Promoter yields you anything.  When we compare store lists of our clients’ locations stack ranked by Net Promoter with, for example, a simple average grade on Recommend to a Friend those lists are remarkably similar.

Keeping it Simple. Though we generally ask the Recommend to a Friend question first, we always follow it with not more than a handful of the most actionable questions relating to the success of our client’s business.  And we always present the results to customer-facing employees in the simplest, clearest way possible.  (Usually a simple 30-day average grade.)  Employees waste no bandwidth trying to interpret what are clear, easy results.

Net Promoter might well have an application in your organization at the executive level.  But when it comes to driving up performance where your customer-facing employees are concerned, we’d encourage you to employ a much simpler measure.   Your employees will thank you.

About the Author:  Max Israel is the founder of Customerville, a Customer Satisfaction Measurement Solution for Multi-unit Operators that can help you create happier customers and drive sales.

If you’re only segmenting using the “basics” of geography or product type, then you might be missing out on opportunities and profits that come from powerful segmentation strategies.

Learn How to Segment Your Markets in a Few Easy Steps

Join Research Rockstar, Katheryn Korostoff as she hosts a FREE webinar for QuestionPro on January 20, 2010 from 11am to 12pm PST.

Katheryn will share her tips for do-it-yourself segmentation with big research budget results.  At the end of the seminar, you’ll find yourself well on the way to your very own power segmentation model.

REGISTER NOW for:

Segmentation Tools 101: Become a Rockstar at Segmentation Analysis
Wednesday, January 20, 2010  11:00AM – 12:00PM PST

In this article, I’m going to outline some of the wonderful methods I’ve used with clients over the last year and where I can, I will also share some of the programs that we implemented as a result and what those results were.

Reassess Your Strengths and Brand Promise

Companies are a lot like people and go through life stages.  Not only that, but economic environments and technologies change and this causes your organization to change in ways you may not have noticed.  It’s a good idea to have a branding and positioning expert come in (someone from the outside who doesn’t really know your company) and interview your employees, management and associates over a few days.  Their objective should be to get a general feeling for the personality of your company.

Customers have personalities and literally take on the human idiosyncrasies like detail orientation, sociability, extroversion, introversion, and so on.   That stands to reason since companies are made up of people and are led by people with preferences for certain ways of doing business.  These personality traits attract a certain type of customer who sees value in that.  But what often happens, is that we are all too close to things and lose sight of what that special sauce is that our company has that attracts out ideal customers.  This is why an internal brand assessment is such a good idea.

I recently conducted an internal brand assessment with a new client.  While they were clearly aware of their natural tendency to please the customer and do whatever it takes to make them happy.  They weren’t quite sure how to differentiate themselves in that area.  We are currently in the process of documenting all the things they do “naturally” and are testing these “services” against what’s important to the customers and what value that has.

You can do the same thing.  Simply create a list of attributes and use the “Importance/Satisfaction” question type to test which of these attributes has the most value to your customers.  This will show you exactly which attributes to feature and focus on and how to price appropriately.  You can take this one step further and ask your customers what other providers they use and have them rate their satisfaction with that provider across those same attributes.  This will uncover those two or three attributes where your organization is strongest.  Sell to that competitive strength and you will know why they should choose you.

Use Social Media Like  a Focus Group

Focus groups can get expensive.  But you actually have a focus group of customers chatting about all kinds of things — even your product online.

Use www.search.twitter.com to search on key words to your business and start following the people who are chatting about your industry or your company.  Search on your company name or products and services that you offer and see what real-time words your customers and users are using.

Use IdeaScale as a way to gather new product and service opportunities that come straight from your customers’ experiences.  There is a wonderful widget that you can cut and paste onto your own web site and then watch the user ideas come pouring in.  I’ve used IdeaScale as a way to build involvement and even generate PR by keeping customers informed of new features and products that have been developed from their ideas.

If you haven’t started a Facebook Fan Page for your company – do it NOW.  Connect that facebook fan page to your web site and be sure to ask your customers to join your fan page.  Make sure that you post links from your web site and your blog to the fan page to inform customers about new things going on in your company.  Another wonderful way to use this tool is to generate excitement.   Just look at what IKEA did to get customers involved and the word out.

Get Started TODAY

Don’t let another day go by without getting your customers involved in your business and getting feedback that’s honest, true and FREE.

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer. She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers. Her blog is Strategy Stew.   You can reach her directly at Ivana@thirdforce.net.

But I had never had a personal experience with their customer feedback system until recently.  I love trying out new products because you just never know when you’ll run into something that’s a real time-saver.  That is why I snatched up the Bounce Dryer Bar when I saw the $1.00 off coupon in my local paper.

It was a little pricey, but I figured that not having to purchase dryer sheets and liquid softener was a good trade-off.

Of course, I couldn’t wait to get the thing in the dryer and give it a try.  I read the directions, which were pretty clear and quickly go the plastic base adhered in the dryer.

The next thing I needed to do was get the actual softener bar into the plastic base.

This proved a little more difficult.  The softener bar insert lies on top of a blue base which snaps inside the plastic base.  In theory, this is a good design;  when the softener depletes itself, you unsnap it from the plastic base and replace it with a new one.  I can see that you’d want to make it unsnap relatively easily.

Well, as it turned out — all it took was the tumbling of the dryer and clothes hitting the dryer bar to unhinge the softener bar from the plastic base.  At first I didn’t know what happened – I only heard this racket in the dryer and when I saw that it had come loose from the base , I wasn’t surprised.  It snapped it really easily, so it made sense that the constant tumbling of towels and clothes could easily displace the bar from the base.  So, this is what my dryer bar looks like now:

I kept the bar inside the dryer and just let it tumble around in there — separate from the base.  it made noise, but the benefit of not using dryer sheets was still there.

I decided to send this feedback to Proctor and Gamble.  I looked on the back of the package and found that they had an entire site dedicated to this product.  That might not surprise you being that it’s P&G and they have thousands of brands to manage.  But that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t ask yourself if having a complete website for a specific product or brand isn’t a good idea.  I think it is.

The first thing you’ll notice on the site is the GIANT feedback button.  This is a great idea, since it’s a new product and a new concept.  The next thing that happens is a likable scientist and mom gives us a little intro to the product and volunteers to help us use it.  It’s a short clip and does the trick.  There are also extra instructions on the menu to the left.

I got on the site and clicked on the “contact us” button to send them an e-mail.  This is where I explained specifically what happened.  Not long after that, I received a letter from the Bounce team along with a coupon for another Bounce Bar.

I didn’t see the point in that since I had a bad experience the first time — so I did nothing.

But just yesterday, I received THIS:

A sturdy box with a new Bounce Bar and a letter that said this:

Dear Ivana,

On behalf of the entire Bounce team, I am sorry you had a disappointing experience with our latest product, the Bounce Dryer Bar.  Our livelihood depends on the trust from consumer like you, so when we let you down, we will do our best to make it right.

We also want to thank you for reaching out to us with your honest feedback.  Your feedback helps us to improve our products, especially on new products like the Bounce Dryer Bar.

In fact, because of feedback from consumers like you, we have done more extensive testing to understand how to improve our product.  Based on this testing, we are making the following changes to the Bounce Dryer Bar:

1. We are increasing the length of the tape on the back of the dryer bar holder.  This change will reduce the chances of the bar holder falling from the dryer drum and reinforces the dryer tabs that keel the Dryer Bar in its holder.
2. We are clarifying the installation instructions.  It’s our job to provide clear, simple instructions, so we are making our instructions on the package easier to follow with clear words and visuals.

We hope you will give us a chance to make it right.  Along with this letter, we have sent you a complimentary Bounce Dryer Bar, with the longer tape on the back of the holder.  On the next page you will find revised installation and replacement instructions that will be added to our package.

Because your honest feedback has helped us shape this product, we want to give you the modified Bounce Dryer Bar before it is widely available.  We value your opinion and would love to hear your thoughts, so please call us at 800-5-BOUNCE oncve you’ve had the chance to try this complimentary product.  Please indicate that Bounce gave you complementary Bounce Dryer Bar with new instructions and longer tape when providing your feedback.

Once again, thank you for your role in transforming the Bounce brand.

Sincerely Bob Stallman, Bounce Brand Manager.

This is an example of a great feedback and brand reputation management at work.

What experiences have you had with brands?  Send us your good ones, bad ones and what lessons we should take away from them.

A healthy customer feedback system engages customers at all times and in a variety of ways.  Your customers are already grading you, after all.  You just need to ask them to share that information with you.  And when that happens the result is that you’re looking at feedback from a nice cross section of your customers.

But the process of consistently asking can break down for a variety of reasons.  Turnover at home office, people get busy, something becomes a big priority.  The bottom line is that the means of asking customers for feedback falls short for a while. 

The Complaint Line Effect. The result is what we call the Complaint Line Effect.  Those customers who have a great experience which they’d like to share aren’t reminded to do so.  Customers who have an axe to grind, however, will continue to find your guest satisfaction survey to share their concerns.  As traffic in your feedback channel drops and complainers become a disproportionately large percentage of traffic, your “customer grades” drop.

Here’s an example.  In this case, turnover at this company’s home office created a period of time when their regular means of asking customers to share feedback – website, signage in their restaurants, their email club – fell by the wayside.  Their average grade is calculated on a trailing 30-day period so as the weeks went by and traffic continued to decline it dragged their average customer grade underwater with it.

Why is this important? Most companies take some form of customer feedback seriously, and their managers and corporate leadership are used to seeing these grades in one form or another on a regular basis.

Failing to recognize that satisfaction metrics are dropping because the profile of your feedback traffic has changed can cause morale to take a hit, especially if there are other challenges that your organization is facing.  This can also create wasted time as your team works to address illusory drops in performance.

Worse, if left unattended this situation can create the perception that a higher than usual percentage of complaints is normal.  And that can be poisonous to any culture of service.

About the Author: Max Israel is founder and CEO of Customerville.  Customerville helps companies to measure customer satisfaction and then project actionable information to their front-line teams in real time.  You can read The Customerville Blog here, and Max welcomes your direct comments atmisrael@customerville.com.

The 2009 first Best Business Books were really chosen by the editors (Anita and I) with some input from out community.  In 2009, Anita wanted more reader and expert input into our business book choices. Besides, it was so hard to pick the top books that we wanted more opinions to help us choose.

We decided to use QuestionPro as a way to allow our readers to vote.  I’m going to share some of our insights into this process, what we learned and what kind of feedback we got from the community.

The Picture Layout Challenge

We quickly decided that our survey would be primarily one multiple choice question – where readers could pick up to 5 choices for their favorite books.  Then, I had the bright idea of actually using pictures of the books in the question accompanied by the author’s name as text AND a link to either our book review or to amazon.com where they could read about the book.

It wasn’t hard to do, but it was rather tedious:

1. Find the pictures you want to use and make sure that they are exactly the same pixel size.
2. Determine how many lines of text you’d like to use – and stick to it.  We decided that we could only have 2 lines of text.
3. Upload the pictures using the multimedia button at the top of the edit survey page.
4. Add a multiple choice question where you can choose more than one answer.
5. Now this is where you will need some very basic HTML skills.  I know EXTREMELY little HTML and I was able to do this.

Now the challenge that took at least a couple of hours was figuring out how to make the books line up nice and straight.  The way to do this is to click on “edit question” and then head over to “settings.”  This is where I found these terrific options of laying out the choices in columns:

One thing to keep in mind is that your “answers choices” – in my case, the pictures, are going to be formated and look something like this:

1   4

2   5

3  6

And NOT

1   2   3

4   5   6

This may not seem like a big deal – until you decide that you want to insert more pictures or if some of your text can’t be edited down to 2 lines.  All of these things happened to us and caused for about an hour of tweaking.

Success

Ultimately, the project was a wild success!  Small Business Trends was able to include over 2900 reader votes into its Best Business Books choices.  We also created another survey where experts were able to contribute their votes to the editor’s picks.  Once the first survey was done, we simply copied it and made some tweaks to customize it.

This has to be THE MOST creative way I’ve used QuestionPro so far.  The staff was amazing in helping me work out the kinks and tweak the settings in order to get fantastic results.

As the book editor for Small Business Trends, I want to thank QuestionPro for their support through this project.

About the Author: Ivana Taylor is CEO of Third Force, a strategic firm that helps small businesses get and keep their ideal customer. She’s the co-author of the book “Excel for Marketing Managers” and proprietor of DIYMarketers, a site for in-house marketers. Her blog is Strategy Stew.   You can reach her directly at Ivana@thirdforce.net.