Deborah Eastman, Chief Marketing Officer, Satmetrix

Closed Loop processes and customer experience

Are your employees acting on customer feedback?

Here is an excellent article from ComputerWorld demonstrating the power of a closed loop process from our client, Cypress Semiconductor.

Picking Winners & Losers

Integrated Advertising and Web Strategies

On Friday night I was relaxing from a long week and with nothing more important to do, I turned on the TV. My typical TV viewing is to watch shows I have recorded on my DVR or On Demand (Mad Men is a personal favorite), but this time I was stuck watching commercials. So I decided to use it as a research project.

One of the first commercials was from MasterCard with an interesting call to action to visit priceless.com. Well, how could I resist this opportunity to observe how MasterCard has integrated their advertising and web activities?

It’s an interesting site.  You can submit consumer generated content by entering your own priceless experience.  But something strange happened early in my visit; the site instantly presented me with a survey to offer my input on the user experience at priceless.com.  Well, I hadn’t been there long enough to comment, but I thought I’d go for a ride.  What I found was disappointing; it was a long survey with questions that were not relevant to my experience on the site. 

I think MasterCard is on the right path, but there is definite room for improvement.  Here are a few observations from a visitor sincerely interested in their approach:

1. Don’t start asking questions until you engage me.  Find a way to draw me in with interesting content and after I’ve been there for a while, or return, engage me in a dialog, not a one way survey.
2. The 0 – 10 scale is backwards relative to best practices that put 10 on the right side and 0 on the left. Ok, that’s being picky, but expected as a Net Promoter practitioner.
3. Don’t ask questions you can answer yourself.  The questionnaire asked where I came from (direct, search or referral), can’t your web data tell you that?  Even better, let me put in my name and zip code and look me up, act like you know me!
4. Create compelling content that makes me want to engage.  For example, a travel section on current travel offers for MasterCard customers.  Make me want to be a MasterCard customer and move up the loyalty ladder by seeing what I’m missing.
5. The site was interesting for entering and viewing priceless picks.  This demonstrates it’s a campaign, not a community.  Use this opportunity to build a relationship with your customers and/or prospective customers, not just an extension of your ad campaign.

After my visit to priceless.com, I visited many of the other advertiser’s sites; no one had quite integrated their website with their ad campaigns yet. The key here is YET, these guys are spending enough money, sooner or later they will see the opportunity for using ad dollars to engage customers in communities that build loyalty and increase word of mouth.

Have you seen someone that’s done it right?

Olympic Advertising: A Missed Opportunity for Customer Engagement

As I watched the Olympics this season (along with millions of others), it struck me how the advertisers missed such a great opportunity to engage in a dialog with their customers vs. broadcast to them. 

The thought came after seeing the J&J ad with the call to action to visit www.baby.com.  As an advocate for customer communities, I immediately pulled out my laptop to see what they offered.  By the URL I assumed it was a community for new parents.  What I found was a set of web pages with interesting information on the development of babies from pregnancy to the early years and an opportunity to learn more about J&J products.  Good start, but let’s take it to the next level. 

But, what if the visitors could engage in a dialog with you and other parents in a more interactive fashion?  The brand could build relationships that would increase brand affinity to the J&J brands.  Parents could engage in designing new products or testing your marketing message to better understand what is relevant to your audience.  Based on the interaction, what if you could communicate back to them in their own words and optimize the impact of your marketing messages.  Don’t you think this would increase brand affinity, marketing effectiveness and word of mouth.

I love this article from Pete Blackshaw titled Marketers Love Conversation, Unless the Consumer Starts It. He points out how few companies offer the consumer a place to have a dialog. Continuing on my thoughts around the Olympic advertisers, I did some research of my own. None of these million dollar advertisers used this as an opportunity to engage in a dialog.   ATT, Johnson & Johnson, Leapfrog, VW, Acuvue, or Geico.

Hello brand marketers, it’s time to engage in a dialog. Here’s a youtube clip that tells the story best, ironically called "the break-up".  Do you want to “break-up” with your consumers or work on the relationship?

Customer affinity and engagement

My team found this clip on YouTube that does a great job of illustrating the challenges marketing faces as customers tune out to listening to your message and seek a more interactive relationship.

Net Promoter is Top of Mind with CMOs

I am just returning from the Red Herring CMO conference in San Diego and thought I’d share some of the stories I brought back.

Attendees Discuss Customer Loyalty Strategies as a Key Driver of Revenue Growth at Net Promoter Conference

I am just returning from our U.S. Net Promoter Conference and our inaugural Net Promoter Certification in Miami.  What an amazing collection of professionals applying Net Promoter to their business.  I met people from all industries and at varying stages of implementation of Net Promoter.

For anyone that attended it is clear that Net Promoter is a new approach to building customer loyalty and driving growth.  It comes at a time when focusing on the customer experience is critical to organizational success.  Laura Brooks shared some statistics showing 80% – 90% of consumers trust word of mouth more than another other source and that social media is creating increase in referral rates. Never before has it been so important to understand loyalty in the context of promoters and detractors of your brand. InfoWorld, Lena West, also has live video with Laura and others on the InfoWorld Social Networking 360 blog.

While the research community is debating the relative merits of Net Promoter vs. traditional loyalty indices, business leaders are moving on.  They are finding the power of integrating Net Promoter to their business at all levels, across all functions.  You will find many of these stories at the conference blog.

It’s clear, Net Promoter provides a measurement system everyone can understand and apply to their role in interacting with customers. Unlike traditional customer satisfaction surveys that provide periodic management reports, Net Promoter allows organizations to take action every day at every customer touch point.  Is that customer a promoter or detractor?  What can I do to change their experience and make them a promoter?

In our efforts to continue the innovation of Net Promoter, we have introduced the “NetWorked Promoter”. Those Promoters that are connected, credible and charismatic.  These NetWorked Promoters have a much more significant impact on helping you grow.  Do you know how to identify them?  How to activate their referral behavior?  For more information on this new research, download our new white paper (Net Promoter Economics: The Impact of Word of Mouth).  A&E had a great case study where mobilizing their NetWorked Promoters, what they referred to as Super Advocates, allowed them to launch a WOM campaign that drove increase viewership at a faction of the cost of traditional marketing techniques.  Learn more here.

I continue to remain bullish about the growth and adoption of Net Promoter.  Any one of the 400+ attendees last week felt the power, heard the success of others and learned best practices to help their Net Promoter programs continue to mature.  This has inspired me to write a new white paper capturing some of these best practices so stay tuned for that in the coming month.

While there is so much to share with you, I will leave you with one final thought.  As we look at a potential recession economy, retention and growth of your existing customers will become increasingly critical to your financial success.  The power to get others to refer while marketing budgets come under increased scrutiny is a powerful opportunity to extend your market reach.  However, in order to obtain increased referral rates, you need to deliver a customer experience that creates more Promoters and less Detractors.  That’s what Net Promoter can do for your business.

Word of Mouth Marketing Conference and Net Promoter

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the Word of Mouth Marketing Conference (WOMMA) in Las Vegas.  It was a great opportunity to hear the latest buzz in word of mouth marketing, current research and customer case studies.

Day one was the Research Symposium and I was on the first panel, “The Net Promoter Debate” along with Tim Keiningham of IPSOS, Matt McGlinn of BzzAgent, and Suhail Kahn of IBM.  We had a healthy conversation on the merits of deploying Net Promoter and heard Tim's concerns about the research which is well documented in the blogs.  Overall, the audience seemed to support the value that Net Promoter offers in driving front line behavior by focusing on recommend behavior.  There will be a podcast available shortly and I plan to write a follow-up post with some of the points debated.

The next two days were packed with many case studies of companies applying word of mouth to the marketing mix.  Two main stage presentations that stood out include the highly successful launch of Halo game where the marketing team used a combination of mainstream media and word of mouth marketing techniques to drive first week sales greater than the last Harry Potter book.  While they clearly exceeded all their goals for sales and pull through sales of the Xbox, what would be interesting is to understand how much their investment in mainstream media increased the word of mouth buzz. They clearly executed a well orchestrated marketing mix!

The other was from Dell.  We all know the story of Dell Hell and Jeff Jarvis.  What was most impressive about this presentation was how far Dell has come in listening to customers and communicating back.  Two key investments in improving their customer relationships include their blog, direct2dell and ideastorm.  Both are a clear demonstration of their commitment to improving customer experience and building a customer centric culture.

Overall, there were three key themes I walked away with.

1. Net Promoter was prominent in many of the breakout sessions.  Adoption is strong and its link to Word of Mouth (WOM) is obvious.  Knowing who will recommend and who will not has a clear connection to positive and negative word of mouth that can affect your brand.  The word of mouth marketing trends will only continue to fuel the adoption of Net Promoter as companies see the value of Promoters and the risk of Detractors.

2. Know who has influence is the next frontier.  As we evolve the use of Net Promoter the need to extend a brand’s ability to evaluate the impact of Promoters and Detractors on their market is critical.  Do they have influence?  How big is their sphere of influence?  Are they credible?  These are areas word of mouth marketing and Satmetrix will continue to innovate on.

3. Communities are hot.  There was a community type presentation at almost every breakout.  Clearly companies are adopting online communities as a way to listen to customers and learn about ways to improve their products and services.  Many of these are a broader application of the traditional focus group activity, with customers coming in and out of communities at points in time to participate in specific “projects.”

Satmetrix believes in all of the above and the good news is our customers are seeing value from these principles.  As the leader in Net Promoter program development it was a natural extension to add customer communities to our portfolio.  Together fostering Promoters and communities provides a powerful platform for companies to build a richer customer relationship that grows loyalty and recommend behavior for future growth.  We see communities as going beyond the research value they provide, to become a marketing asset that can be used to build more meaningful customer relationships.  Not cycling people in and out as projects define, but engaging them continuously in areas of the business that they care about and finding ways to communicate with them in a relevant manner that drives loyalty is key. More on our community offerings and how to build a marketing asset is coming in a subsequent posting. 

Welcome to the inaugural blog for Satmetrix.com

Welcome to the inaugural blog for Satmetrix.com. I’m Deborah, the Chief Marketing Officer, and I am excited to start the conversation with you about what’s happening at Satmetrix and trends in our market. I look forward to your comments.

Satmetrix recently announced the acquisition of Informative, which enables companies like LEGO and Intuit to build interactive communities to further its customer loyalty programs. It’s an exciting time for the company and for the market. There is no doubt that Net Promoter score (NPS) and operational loyalty programs are creating a disruptive force in our industry.  Satmetrix and Informative clients are seeing positive results. Our clients are opting for Net Promoter over traditional loyalty measures as it is easy to understand and actionable, enabling them to change from a more passive customer measurement program to an active organization-wide loyalty improvement program. By successfully integrating NPS across the business, they get information into the hands of the employees on the frontline to change relationships one customer at a time, and engage in a dialog that enables customer centric innovation.