Okay, time for a little rant!

As a market researcher, I believe in and have seen demonstrated empirically over and over the power of market research in providing critical input to management issues. And I have participated in the development and deployment of customer satisfaction research and analysis for a number of years now.

But sometimes market research is misused as a proxy for common sense.

How’s that, Dr. Bob, you ask?

Well, over the weekend, I had reason to call the insurer of my cell phone to file a claim. My beloved Droid simply died.

I had been to the insurer’s website, filed a claim, only to be told that I was not covered.

I then looked at my cell carrier’s bills to make certain that, yes indeed, I was paying a monthly fee for insurance coverage with said insurance carrier. I was.

So I called the cell service provider. Yes, they assured me, I was covered and helpfully gave me the toll-free number to call.

I did.

And I waited, on hold. I don’t know how long. Now, sitting on hold is annoying enough, especially when the information provided on the website (I was not covered) was patently false.

Then………………..the zinger.

On hold, I am treated to the repetition of two messages, every 30 seconds (you have the time and awareness to measure such items while you’re on hold).

Message number one: Don’t want to wait on hold? Visit our website for prompt and fast service.

Okay, what’s wrong with this picture? Well, I’m calling because of a problem with the website. As Homer would say, “Do’oh!

Message number two: We are experiencing a heavy call volume. We value your time and thank you for your patience.

Customer service management, here’s a news flash. Telling customers waiting on hold that you value their time while you are patently demonstrating to them with every passing message, repeated ad nauseum, you do NOT value their time, royally pisses off customers.

You are increasing customer dissatisfaction with every passing minute. Then you have the hutzpa to tell me how much concern you have that you are wasting my time.

At least have the decency to be honest: play a clip from a very old Saturday Night Live commercial that spoofed AT&T ads before the bohemoth had any competition: “We don’t care; We don’t have to.”

How do you think I responded to their customer satisfaction survey I encountered at the end of my call? Gee, I wonder.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

P.S. Actually, the customer satisfaction survey only asked about the agent’s performance once I reached them. Yet another demonstration of totally missing the mark. And how many agents are receiving bad marks because customers are really upset about sitting on hold interminably but have no way to register or vent their anger except by giving the agent a poor mark? Hmmmmmmmmm……………………………………..

Amid all the clatter declaring market research dead is a growing perception that phone calls, and requisite phone surveys, are going the way of tape back-up drives and floppy disks.

Not so fast, says the Economist newspaper, in a January 1 article titled “Hanging Up.”

Mobile web and text messaging may be growing rapidly, especially among the young, but voice calls persist, and indeed, the number of minutes spent on phone calls per month has grown by almost one-third between 2004 and 2009.

Teenagers in America clearly love text messaging, as the rapid growth in text messages per month attests. While American youth has gleefully adopted th

e pc as their own, they are also spending more and more time with television. Perhaps, as the Economist notes, “an old form of communication may stage a comeback in a different form. Skype, the internet phone service, is growing rapidly. In the first half of 2010 users racked up 95 billion minutes in voice and video calls.”

It seems clear, at least for the immediate future, that phone calls, and phone surveys, are alive and well. True, market researchers will have to adapt to multi-modal methodologies and the issues currently being addressed about random sampling and representativeness.

Remember the old truism that high-tech necessitates high-touch? Phone surveys with live interviewers might just fit the bill well into the future.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

In an article titled “The Persuasive Pull of Procrastination”, Steve Martin (no, not the comedian) discusses the link between consumer action and incentives.

Researchers Suzanne Shu of UCLA and Ayelet Gneezy of UC San Diego conducted a study of short and longer term-dated gift certificates. Study participants received either a gift certificate with a three week expiration or with a two month expiration.

While about one-third of those who received the three week certificate redeemed, only six percent of those with the two month time horizon did so.

The researchers discovered the wisdom of the old adage: watch what I do, not what I say.

Prior to conducting the test, the researchers had surveyed a comparable group of respondents about their likelihood to redeem and why. Respondents who were asked about the longer term certificate felt more positive toward the offer and reported a higher likelihood to redeem than those who were asked about the shorter term offer.

(The offer, by the way, was for $6 in coffee and cakes at a local upscale bakery.)

So, while consumers prefer a long term frame, they are much more likely to act with a shorter time frame.

Interesting potential consequences for incentivizing survey response.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

So how can companies get real value out of customer satisfaction surveys? Value that demonstrably leads to increased revenue?

The key is to operationalize the results.

Transactional surveys, as we discussed in the prior two posts, can be valuable—IF they are keyed to measure attributes of which performance improvement can be demonstrated to have a positive impact on revenue (or other bottom line financial metrics).

However, transactional surveys are one of the last elements to implement in a customer satisfaction process.

The first is a solid qualitative understanding of the attributes of your products and/or services that drive customer behavior. This can only be accomplished by talking with customers and observing customer behavior.

Once the attributes are developed, a periodic quantitative survey then measures customer perceptions of performance on those attributes by your organization and competitors that customers identify as using or considering.

At this juncture, the results need to be operationalized. Otherwise, all an organization has is a fancy and expensive survey process.

How, exactly, do you drive change that results in bottom line impact?

You need a process that translates the voice of the customer into the voice of business process.

First is a hard examination of internal metrics on customer-critical processes. Is your organization measuring what is important to your customers? Of course, you are measuring what’s important to the business. Equally important is to measure what customers tell you is important to them and what is driving revenue.

Second, voice of the customer attributes must be mapped to business processes.

How do these two points work in practice?

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Sometimes our personal experiences lead to profound insights into developing market research surveys that work.

Such is the case explored in a recent blog post by Theresa Bradley-Banta on her bigfishTopDogs.com site. In an post titled “Don’t Ask Your Customers These Questions!” , Theresa describes a customer service encounter with GoDaddy and their subsequent customer satisfaction questionnaire GoDaddy asked her to complete.

It provides a strong lesson on conducting customer satisfaction research on customers’ terms rather than on management’s needs.

Briefly, Theresa experienced a less than satisfactory encounter with customer service at GoDaddy. Receiving a survey request on her experience almost immediately, Theresa notes the self-serving nature of the questions (both of them!).  And, most saliently, the missed opportunity for GoDaddy to receive some solid feedback on how to improve and the potential damage to their brand by their perhaps unwitting failure to consider the survey process from a customer/respondent perspective.

Many have pointed out, including Theresa, that customer satisfaction surveys serve a dual purpose: to acquire feedback for process improvement and as an additional opportunity to let a customer know they are valued as a customer and their needs are being considered by the surveying company.

Folks, put very simply, doing appropriate customer satisfaction surveying is first and foremost a brand issue.

We suggest that all customer satisfaction surveys be considered from both a perspective of what management needs for process measurement and improvement and of the impression such surveys leave with customers. Such consideration might help you avoid the GoDaddy error and, put more positively, use customer satisfaction surveying more rigorously.

GoDaddy, are you listening?

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Perhaps it is time to consider edging market research reports from passive, a simple neutral reporting of results, to the proactive, reporting with a point of view dictated by and demonstrated by the results.

Moreover, it might also be time to produce reports that are client specific or responsibility specific or both.

Let’s consider these ideas in brief here. Over time I will expand on these two propositions in greater depth.

Transitioning market research reports from passive to proactive

Let me state at the outset that I am not talking about presenting and arguing for the final business decision. That is not the place of market research, which is one information input to business decision-making.

What I am suggesting is to take a gentle point-of-view on the findings. Present a picture, a story, which is interwoven with facts that are linked in a coherent, persuasive manner.

Over the years I have written many market research reports and have read many more. More often than not, the reports are a compendium of all the findings of a particular project. While some emphasis is usually given to the “bigger,” more impacting findings, many reports are weighed down with the results of each and every question asked in the survey, whether or not they lead to an insight.

Thinking through the potential insights of survey results and presenting them in the order of their potential impact on the organization might help the report’s target audience(s) grasp the significance of the findings and encourage them to consider them in decision-making or even to implement the changes that flow out of the findings.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Configure part of the responsibility of market research to offer guidance and assistance to managers who need help with a self-developed survey effort. Consulting on questionnaire development. Helping set adequate controls to ensure that appropriate respondents, and only appropriate respondents, respond. Guiding the choice of surveying method to ensure adequate coverage of the desired population.

In other words, win them over by providing a true consulting role.

I understand that this may be a major shift for market researchers, especially when goals and objectives are still set primarily on the number of completed projects and the like.

Is it worth the potential time, energy and effort to turn in this direction? Becoming in essence a boutique market research house inside the corporation or organization?

If the quality of some of the surveys I have seen both online and by email invitation are any indication, the answer surely is yes. Some are barely adequate; others are abysmal and embarrassing. I have to assume that they are being generated completely underneath the management radar. Mostly the offense is shoddy writing, unclear and sophomoric. And ratings scales that are obviously tilted. These are basics that would never (well, almost never) make it past the brand or communications police, let alone market research groups, at most companies.

Market researchers might be gritting their teeth about this trend, but assuming a mandate to help the well-meaning but misguided DIYers might yield benefits. First and foremost, brand image will be better protected. Moreover, helping DIYers might lead to new internal clients. Certainly, too, it would provide an opportunity to provide a far superior market research study and thus higher quality information for managerial decision-making.

Fighting the DIY trend appears hopeless; rather, market researchers might consider how they can make their knowledge and skills more readily and easily available for the DIYers of corporate America.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

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• DIY Research: Has Self-Service Killed Traditional Market Research? (questionpro.com)

This is not just happening in the larger DIY world. More and more surveys are appearing with major brand sponsorship that have obviously been nowhere near a professional market researcher. Managers can simply conceive of the need for a survey, order it done by an underling with some PC or HTML skills, and voila, a survey appears.

All is not well, however, in DIY land. A surprising number of these grassroots surveys are obviously amateur efforts, full of poorly-worded, confusing questions, questions that are really two or three questions combined so the respondent does not understand what is really being asked, unbalanced ratings scales, nonsensical answer categories and overall general weirdness.

What to do?

In the old days, if anyone in the corporation did venture out on their own to do market research, the senior leader in our silo would confab with the senior leader of the offending silo and orders would be issued to cease and desist. Or not. But everything had to go silo to silo.

Now, surveys can be fielded in real-time, over and done in a matter of hours or days. Oops! Well, we already did it. As the saying goes, better to beg forgiveness

than to ask permission.

Fighting this trend feels a little like playing Sisyphus.

Perhaps a different approach might be more productive.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Back in the dark ages, before the Internet, before text messaging or instant messaging, before pop-up surveys, surveys on store receipts or automated surveys following a contact with a call center, market researchers would gather at conventions to bemoan how it seemed that every manager, every client, heck, everyone in their company fancied themselves as market researchers.

Managers and clients would re-write questionnaires. Some insisted on using pejorative questions, gilding the lily to garner what they perceived to be favorable responses from customers; other insisted that questions had to conform to the rules of written English, regardless of how ridiculous this sounded when posed over the phone. Everyone, it seemed, knew how to do it better than the market researchers charged with actually doing it.

In spite of this, almost all market research conducted in those times went through the market research department or group. For one main reason: market research required the hiring and management of a market research consulting firm at the very least to design and execute the study and data collection and reporting.

And the market research department or group was the liaisons to these companies.

Have things changed?

Yes, they have, at least in the respects above. Market Research has gained academic prominence and the professionalization of the industry has led to market research being viewed as a discipline rather than merely a set of tasks.

Ironically, in other aspects, market researchers face even more daunting challenges now. While managers and clients often wanted to (and did) interfere in the research process, in today’s business world, basically anyone can generate an email survey, or put up a survey online, and collect whatever “data” they desire.

More to follow.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob

Recently a fellow LinkedIn member posed set of questions in a market research forum about what criteria might be used to select market research suppliers. Having responded to these questions there, I have revised and refined nine criteria that could be used to choose quantitative market research firms.

First, full disclosure: My business is as a market research supplier. I conduct both qualitative and quantitative market research studies for my clients. No doubt, the criteria that follow are influenced significantly by having been a supplier for some fifteen years.

I also have almost fifteen years’ experience as a purchaser of market research services, in positions of both market research management and product management for my employers, mostly notably one of largest telecommunications firms in the country. So I have much experience dealing with market research vendors from a client perspective.

In these positions, I developed several criteria and areas of inquiry for selecting market researchers for quantitative projects. (As a manager for a very large company, you might imagine how many solicitations for business I received.) Several of these criteria I learned to employ based on years in the school of hard experience.

All the criteria will be discussed in the next few posts.

Comments welcome.

Dr. Bob