1. Welcome Ali McCourt to Ant’s Eye View

    Monday, 29 Nov 2010 4 Comments Posted by:

    AliMcCourtAnt’s Eye View keeps on growing! Today, Ali McCourt joins the Silicon Valley anthill where she’ll be a consultant and ant entertainer, working with many of the Valley’s biggest companies on their community and social engagement strategies.

    Ali joins the hill from Intuit’s TurboTax division where she most recently ran TurboTax’s award-winning Inner Circle community. 25,000 members strong, the Inner Circle community is one of TurboTax’s secret ingredients in staying closely connected to customers while building, marketing and supporting tax software. Ali’s efforts on the Inner Circle garnered her, and Intuit, a Forrester Groundswell Award in Company Transformation in 2008. More importantly, Ali implemented over 120 customer driven improvements directly into TurboTax products while she led the community.

    If you run into Ali in and around the Valley, be sure to ask her about playing NCAA Division 1 volleyball at Pepperdine University or about living in Florence, Italy.

    We’re thrilled to welcome Ali to Ant’s Eye View, and we hope you will too. You can find Ali on Twitter at @AliMMc.

  2. Social Media Measurement and the Summer Conference Season Challenge

    Wednesday, 16 Jun 2010 No Comments Posted by:

    Ah, summer. You tempt me with the smells of BBQ, the sounds of kids playing in the pool and the sights of slides in a conference room! With summer conference season in full swing, many of us are leaving the confines of our cubicles and listening to and networking with a variety of thinkers and speakers on the social media trail.

    With all of this thinking and talking, it can be easy to forget about doing. So, here is the summer conference season challenge. What is the one thing you are going to start doing, right now, based on what you learned from a conference you attended?

    Here are a couple of ideas from the Social Media Summit, a Ragan Conference held at Cisco Headquarters:

    • Establish a baseline of traffic coming to your website from social media: This is easier than it sounds. Start by making sure that all relevant social media URLs are classified in your website’s analytics tool. This means not only top level domains but all sub-domains. If you are in a large organization, make sure these URLs are classified not only in the global suite but also in the local suites that your business units use. Fewer than half of attendees during an ROI presentation at the summit said they’d already done this.
    • Ask your customers about how social media does, or does not, impact their purchase process: You typically know the last step your customers took before they purchased, which, if online, is usually search. But, almost no one pops out of bed each day, types in a search query and then makes a purchase. That’s why it’s called a process. So, ask your customers about their process. What influences their purchase process of your product or service? Is it a primary influence, one of many or not at all? Yes, this is self-reported behavior, but the data gives you a lot of insight into how social media plays a role in sales. For reference, no one in the audience had asked their customers this question.

    What’s inspired you recently from a conference you attended that you’ve put into action? What have you learned once you did?

  3. Customer Feedback: How to Value It in Your Organization, Part 2 of a 3-Part Series

    Friday, 11 Jun 2010 2 Comments Posted by:

    “Well, that is just customer feedback and this [insert business policy] makes us [insert revenue number].”

    Sound familiar? As a S.P.I.C.Y. leader in your organization, you’ve worked hard to use customer feedback to break down barriers within your organization, as described in part 1 of this series. But, it is inevitable that you either have heard or will face a customer vs. shareholder debate when it comes to reporting out on customer feedback and the root causes driving it. Price, product and policy issues that drive sales and negative sentiment are particularly tricky to navigate within the context of large organizations.

    What makes these conversations so hard and the barriers between silos so thick is that different measures of success are in play. Customer experience measures, derived from customer feedback, usually come in the form of satisfaction, resolution rates and brand favorability while shareholder measures are, well, all about revenue, expenses and profit. And, the concept of missed revenue as a result of negative sentiment can feel very fuzzy for operations, finance and business unit leaders.

    Having an apples-to-apples discussion between the two camps is critical. At Intuit, we heavily used the Net Promoter methodology which asks a simple question – “how likely are you to recommend this [product, service, etc] to someone else”, and it is often used as a side-by-side measure with revenue. Over the last couple of years, Intuit’s research teams did extremely hard work to connect Net Promoter data to revenue.

    But, Net Promoter data is what people “say” they are going to do. What about what people actually say and actually do? Listening on the social web is the best way to understand this other side to the loyalty coin. Using tools like Radian 6 or Scout Labs, you can listen to what’s being said about your brand, apply sentiment scoring and use your real customers’ voice to show how they are, or are not recommending your products or services.

    In some cases, you have listen yourself in specific channels, like my team at Intuit did within Amazon. My team led the effort to have a 100% reply goal on Amazon reviews on Intuit’s flagship small business product, QuickBooks Pro 2010, and we developed a weekly dashboard, shared at senior staff, that showed key topics, number of reviews, sentiment and change over time.

    What that dashboard didn’t show was impact on sales. By adding in simple questions to several surveys that regularly go out to recent purchasers (and not) of QuickBooks, we were able to determine impact on sales.

    We found that online reviews had a double digit impact on sales – meaning that our customers said that reviews were the main & only source or the main but not only source of purchasing. Between the Net Promoter value work and the online review-to-sales research, our team had the opportunity to really connect customer and shareholder measures. Efforts like this enabled the team to drive closed-loop changes within the product that dramatically decreased negative sentiment.

    Valuing customer feedback is the second key step in breaking down the barriers within an organization. Next up, we’ll tackle responding to customer feedback!