Monitoring CGM: Wotnews, Vanno and GetSatisfaction

Of all the things that go into the equation to create an organisation’s reputation, what is the one factor that has the highest impact, lowest cost, most lasting impression?

Customer service.

While companies spend significant sums on advertising to tell us how fabulous their products are, or throw money at the community cause du jour and bleat about it at every opportunity, savvy customers buy on so much more than company generated information. If it is a big purchase, they read everything they can, including customer service ratings, the online complaints boards and owner forums to see what current customers are saying. Because how a company treats it current customers is indicative of how they will in the future.

When calling Telstra or Optus in recent years (I am an unhappy customer of both), I have taken to punching 1 – the new sales option – rather option 3 for existing customers. The reason being someone actually takes the call in sales, whereas as an existing customer, you could be on hold for 20 minutes or more. I cancelled Austar for this reason alone three years ago.

It always interests me to see companies notice slowing sales and try to kick start that by creating a new ad campaign or a new marketing program, or new community engagement program. But they fail to upgrade after sales service levels, or beef up customer support call centres, or fail to resolve customer complaints, putting all the attention on getting new customers rather than keeping and leveraging the ones they already have; in some cases creating enemies within.
More often than not, the marketing ploys to obtain new customers include special offers or discounts unavailable to existing customers.

The reports of new customers gained might make impressive reading, but it is meaningless if at the same time the company is bleeding customers out the back door. With the lock-in contracts touted by the phone companies, they might report growth when in fact their customers are counting the days until the contract ends so they can move to another provider. Or maybe the providers know the state of their service, and hence the lock-in customer contracts…

The bottom line is that there is no business without customers.

If you have an existing base of loyal customers, you can survey their needs and create more products to cross-sell and up-sell – giving you greater yield per customer, higher sales overall, and deeper more sustainable customer relationships. Of course, you could create more products at any time, but if you don’t have a sound customer service relationship, you are unlikely to get the new sales from your existing customers. These are truly basic, painfully obvious observations. So why do so few companies get it right?

According to The Balanced Scorecard Institute, a strategy and training consultancy:

These are leading indicators: if customers are not satisfied, they will eventually find other suppliers that will meet their needs. Poor performance from this perspective is thus a leading indicator of future decline, even though the current financial picture may look good.

SureVista Solutions, a Michigan-based market research firm that has been conducting customer satisfaction research for more than 12 years notes that:

The economy has transformed. Your customers have transformed. The question: Has your business transformed to meet the needs of customers in the New Economic Era? The new economy is called “The Experience Economy”! In the Experience Economy you must be customer focused. Customers today demand value and good experiences. Fail to meet their perceptions of value and watch them leave negatively impacting revenues and adding to the cost of customer acquisition. The best firms develop their operating model around the activities that drive satisfaction to produce highly satisfied customers. Highly satisfied customers repeat often and refer others, which drives profitability.

Source: SureVista Solutions

Marketing 101 teaches the cost ratios of customer acquisition, the value of word-of-mouth advertising, and the true dollar-value of a customer life – and a customer for life. Many phone companies, airlines and car companies seem to have skipped those classes in recent years.

Rather than diminishing as our communications channels evolved away from face-to-face conversation to technological exchanges, third-party referrals are now more important than ever. (See also The Word-of-Mouth Factor.)

Several services have developed in the online economy to expand upon and expedite the sharing of information and referrals among customers. That information is accessed globally delivering higher impact, further, faster. Ignore the social commentary at your peril.

For companies to stay on top of what customers are really feeling and saying about their brands, they have to listen and engage on customer terms. Here are three invaluable ways to do just that.

1. For media monitoring that includes major news outlets, important blogs, stock exchange announcements and Twitter streams, you cannot go past www.wotnews.com (for US, UK and Australian markets – type .com.au for the Australian version). Covering the headline stories from around the world and with a fully configurable email alert system, Wotnews is proving to be more accurate and timely than traditional media monitoring services. There is a free news monitoring service for individuals and small businesses, but the real prize is at the business end in the Wotnews News Server. Taking the information from all the sources listed it features sentiment analysis and news clustering.

2. www.getsatisfaction.com enables people to build customer support communities, whereby they can help each other with queries and where companies can connect with customers in a meaningful way. Many a company has been dragged into participating on Getsatisfaction by individual employees who have taken the initiative to engage with customers directly. Led by a “complaint” theme, it enables companies to strategically use complaints to build a better business. Because the entire system is public, viewers can see how quickly companies respond, how they respond, and the result for the customer. It is transparent, immediate and I believe effective in demonstrating the power of response. Response matters!

3. And then there is www.vanno.com. Vanno ranks more than 6000 companies on 25 aspects of reputation, inviting visitors to show whether they agree or disagree with stories listed. Reputation factors include customer satisfaction, employee satisfaction, community involvement, environment, and social responsibility. Anyone can submit a story (shameless plug: read about the power of Consumer Generated Media (CGM) in Reputation at Risk) and give the company (public or private entity) a thumbs up or down with regard to those reputation factors. Others then vote on the story – agree or disagree.

Yes, you might find a few anti-business firebrands thumping their chests about the evil corporation, but you will also find proud and loyal employees promoting or defending their patch, and even happy customers. The participant can then create their own reports of company rankings, view the detail of specific companies, and more importantly the company in question, see the stories that are impacting a corporation’s reputation in real time. It is perhaps one of the more interesting public reputation rankings I’ve seen yet.

It also offers company intelligence to business subscribers with rankings updated daily for every company in the database. The image below shows AIG. Note the purple line indicates how it is performing in community involvement, the red line is employee satisfaction, and the ochre line is customer satisfaction. The black line is the company’s overall reputation ranking, with the white circles indicating stories. As a subscriber, you can mouse over the circles and see which stories are having impact.

As a tool for measuring current public sentiment it is invaluable. See the live demo here:
http://vanno.com/company_intelligence/demo

Consumer Generated Media is empowering people to stand up to corporate negligence, bullying, and malfeasance. But it is also enabling companies to get immediate and genuine feedback from customers and other stakeholders, creating opportunities to connect, engage and impress in ways not possible until recently. How active is your company in this space?

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Tags: consumer generated media (CGM), corporate behaviour, corporate communications, customer service, response matters, social media

Category: Internet as Media, Reputation Management