Customer Satisfaction and Social Media: Towards an Industry Standard
This posting came out of a conversation I had with Pete Fasano about Satisfaction – a company that helps customers tap the social function of the web to create their own company-specific communities.
Forums and communities do a great job in ranking their top contributors. But Pete and I were intrigued about the possibility of developing an industry standard to rank users’ satisfaction with a company’s total social media efforts. In particular, we were interested in helping customers evaluate social media and giving companies the tools to better gauge their efforts and those of their competition.
Would a ranking system help give companies a competitive advantage? Would it enhance the brand? Would customers care? Presumably, a higher score would reflect well on the brand and influence purchasing decisions. It would reveal a company’s commitment to customer engagement and corporate transparency.
From a marketing perspective, Pete was interested on how a ranking would impact the brand. I was looking at customer engagement. Together we want to get our hands around the relationship between social media and customer satisfaction.
As Brad Berens, chief content officer and editor at large at iMedia and ad:tech, wrote me: “There are a lot of people who are analyzing the impact of social media on brands. Cymphony is one. Nielsen Buzzmetrics is another. But there isn't a common...'engagement' metric. And ultimately there's no strong agreement on even what social media is.”
Another analyst, Forrester’s Charlene Li has devoted a great deal of time to analyzing social media’s impact on brand, content, and return on investment.
For our part, Pete and I aren’t looking at dollars invested versus dollars saved or generated. The search for a ranking is not about measuring presence online -- stories written, comments made, calls deflected, videos downloaded and impressions delivered. It’s about analyzing the user experience and ultimately customer satisfaction
There is no shortage of organizations and academic institutions that analyze customer satisfaction. Two that immediately come to mind are J.D. Power and Associates and the American Customer Service Association. But I am unaware of any organization that has focused on a specific social media customer satisfaction ranking or highlighted social media as part of an overall customer satisfaction rating.
Such a ranking or standard wouldn’t be easy to devise or implement, but, as Professor Claes Fornell, head of ACSI at the University of Michigan believes, it is certainly possible.
One challenge is demographic. Social media is so new and impacts users so differently. John Ragsdale at the Service & Support Professionals Association points to research he has done with Lithium, and asserts, “It is really a question of what customers you are trying to serve.”
That’s a viewpoint shared by Joseph Carrabis Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global a consulting firm focused on improving the customer experience.
“Does a company's social media efforts affect the customer? I think yes, and I think this is so massively dependant on factors such as age, gender, culture, and ethnic origin. To ignore those factors is to demonstrate both a profound misunderstanding of marketing and audience.”
Developing a workable industry standard would have to factor in a full inventory of online activities including but not limited to communities/forums, wikis, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and websites. The methodology would need to address the following categories:
Tools – how accessible, easy to use, effective/useful, adaptable are the tools at a user’s disposal
Participants – how many, how active, customer/employee ratio, demographic diversity
Visibility and Distribution – how aggressively does a company makes its efforts available and easy to find incorporating multiple access points and communications channels
Responsiveness and Diversity – how willing is the company to share opposing or critical points of view; how responsive is the company in addressing participant questions or issues, etc.
To create a workable model, we will need to determine the best way to weight the categories, include experts and individual users, collect data and share results.
Much work needs to be done – ideally through online conversations and input from readers like you – to make sure we are indeed are not confusing satisfaction with vibrancy.
As Nathan Shedroff pointed out to me: “It's pretty difficult to measure quality, of course. One person's quality conversation or interaction is another's banality.”
Nathan is an author and program chair, MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the Arts. He also emphasized that to create a standard would require buy-in (or force-in) from a majority of social networks and communities.
“You would need a business model that was both non-threatening to these sites and not already in bed with one of them.”
To reiterate this industry standard would measure a user’s perspective on a company’s social media practices; it is not a company self-assessment, but certainly a ranking would be useful in shaping the company’s policies and practices.
I want to conclude that this exercise reflects how companies are grappling with how to use and measure social media. Similarly, customers are still trying to make sense of cyberspace. A social media raking will give both sides of the social media conversation a little more clarity.
Let me get back to you.
Technorati Tags: Social Media; Customer Satisfaction; ACSI; J.D. Powers and Associates;
SSPS; Nathan Shedroff; John Ragsdale; Claes Fornell; Joseph Carrabis; Brad Berens;
Save to del.icio.us
Forums and communities do a great job in ranking their top contributors. But Pete and I were intrigued about the possibility of developing an industry standard to rank users’ satisfaction with a company’s total social media efforts. In particular, we were interested in helping customers evaluate social media and giving companies the tools to better gauge their efforts and those of their competition.
From a marketing perspective, Pete was interested on how a ranking would impact the brand. I was looking at customer engagement. Together we want to get our hands around the relationship between social media and customer satisfaction.
As Brad Berens, chief content officer and editor at large at iMedia and ad:tech, wrote me: “There are a lot of people who are analyzing the impact of social media on brands. Cymphony is one. Nielsen Buzzmetrics is another. But there isn't a common...'engagement' metric. And ultimately there's no strong agreement on even what social media is.”
Another analyst, Forrester’s Charlene Li has devoted a great deal of time to analyzing social media’s impact on brand, content, and return on investment.
For our part, Pete and I aren’t looking at dollars invested versus dollars saved or generated. The search for a ranking is not about measuring presence online -- stories written, comments made, calls deflected, videos downloaded and impressions delivered. It’s about analyzing the user experience and ultimately customer satisfaction
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
There is no shortage of organizations and academic institutions that analyze customer satisfaction. Two that immediately come to mind are J.D. Power and Associates and the American Customer Service Association. But I am unaware of any organization that has focused on a specific social media customer satisfaction ranking or highlighted social media as part of an overall customer satisfaction rating.
Such a ranking or standard wouldn’t be easy to devise or implement, but, as Professor Claes Fornell, head of ACSI at the University of Michigan believes, it is certainly possible.
One challenge is demographic. Social media is so new and impacts users so differently. John Ragsdale at the Service & Support Professionals Association points to research he has done with Lithium, and asserts, “It is really a question of what customers you are trying to serve.”
That’s a viewpoint shared by Joseph Carrabis Founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global a consulting firm focused on improving the customer experience.
“Does a company's social media efforts affect the customer? I think yes, and I think this is so massively dependant on factors such as age, gender, culture, and ethnic origin. To ignore those factors is to demonstrate both a profound misunderstanding of marketing and audience.”
A Social Media Industry Standard Checklist
Developing a workable industry standard would have to factor in a full inventory of online activities including but not limited to communities/forums, wikis, blogs, podcasts, vlogs, and websites. The methodology would need to address the following categories:
Tools – how accessible, easy to use, effective/useful, adaptable are the tools at a user’s disposal
Participants – how many, how active, customer/employee ratio, demographic diversity
Visibility and Distribution – how aggressively does a company makes its efforts available and easy to find incorporating multiple access points and communications channels
Responsiveness and Diversity – how willing is the company to share opposing or critical points of view; how responsive is the company in addressing participant questions or issues, etc.
To create a workable model, we will need to determine the best way to weight the categories, include experts and individual users, collect data and share results.
Much work needs to be done – ideally through online conversations and input from readers like you – to make sure we are indeed are not confusing satisfaction with vibrancy.
As Nathan Shedroff pointed out to me: “It's pretty difficult to measure quality, of course. One person's quality conversation or interaction is another's banality.”
Nathan is an author and program chair, MBA in Design Strategy at the California College of the Arts. He also emphasized that to create a standard would require buy-in (or force-in) from a majority of social networks and communities.
“You would need a business model that was both non-threatening to these sites and not already in bed with one of them.”
To reiterate this industry standard would measure a user’s perspective on a company’s social media practices; it is not a company self-assessment, but certainly a ranking would be useful in shaping the company’s policies and practices.
I want to conclude that this exercise reflects how companies are grappling with how to use and measure social media. Similarly, customers are still trying to make sense of cyberspace. A social media raking will give both sides of the social media conversation a little more clarity.
Let me get back to you.
Technorati Tags: Social Media; Customer Satisfaction; ACSI; J.D. Powers and Associates;
SSPS; Nathan Shedroff; John Ragsdale; Claes Fornell; Joseph Carrabis; Brad Berens;
Save to del.icio.us
A ranking system for simply ‘social media’ would presuppose that the brand lends itself to engagement, and that the consumer wants to engage. For instance, to measure only social-media it would probably be better to rank across categories and brands that elicit engagement from their consumers at similar levels such as maybe NFL, Google, Apple. Or on the other hand – Walgreens, Clorox, or Tums. I’m not even sure you could look across a category without introducing factors related to the brand – for instance, it would be difficult to rate Apple vs. eMachines without incorporating a major dose of consumer preference driven by engagability (which evidently is not a word since spell check underlined it).
So in my mind, the most effective way to look at the rating system would be as an internal number to measure directionally rather than measuring against others. Moreover, using it this way would allow managers to ask themselves, ‘how do I go from a 2 to a 3’, rather than- ‘why am I not as good as Apple’.
-Seth
(Comment this)
markets=conversations
social media =communities to create, consume and connect
As Dan indicates, we believe there is an intersecting measurement between analytics, brand equity, social media enablement and engagement and other factors to reach a measure of brand social media customer satisfaction. It is the potential to measure the health of the brand and consumer relationship that is most interesting via the emergence of this focus. (Comment this)
First, thanks for mentioning NextStage. I think we're doing some interesting research on social media (what kinds of bloggers influence what kinds of people and how accurately CGC reflects a company's internal health are two topics that come to mind). Let me know if there's something I can contribute to the discussion and I'll be happy to do so. - Joseph (Comment this)