Customers raise their voices

It can take a while to ferret out useful customer feedback from user-generated content in Web 2.0 settings like online forums, blogs and social networks. But it can be worth the time and effort when that feedback can be transformed into strategies that make customers happy. Just ask Ms. Ferret—Kristen Onasch, to those in the know.

Onasch moderates The Ferret Store’s online customer forum at pet supplies e-retailer Drs. Foster and Smith. She is in charge of providing information, engaging customers, monitoring content, and compiling customer insights and feedback on a daily basis. The e-retailer’s management depends on her to keep them informed on whatever ferrets’ adoptive parents have to say.

Drs. Foster and Smith, which plans to add dog and cat forums, acquired The Ferret Store in February and made a public transition beginning May 1. When the news hit, worried customers of the 10-year-old ferret emporium inundated the online forum with questions and requests. “I spent a lot of time in those initial weeks assuaging fears,” Onasch says.

While poring through customer content, Onasch immediately got to work making sure management heard customers’ voices. “People started listing products they use on a daily basis, wanting to make sure Drs. Foster and Smith carried them,” she recalls. “At the end of each day, I compiled their comments and suggestions and sent them to management, which then looked into bringing products onboard. We have since fulfilled a number of the product requests, including Critter Litter, a ferret supplement called Nupro and Fuzzy’s Foamy Fries, an edible chew toy. It really helps having the forum.”

With Web 2.0 user-generated content, e-retailers have a new way of gaining insights into what customers want and don’t want, what they like and don’t like. Customers provide the answers without retailers having to ask a single question.

The fastest growing media on the Internet is that created by consumers, not by institutions or corporations, says Max Kalehoff, vice president of marketing at Nielsen BuzzMetrics, a research firm that specializes in measuring consumer sentiment and desires in user-generated web content. “It’s one thing to have answers from a survey panel of 1,000 people. It’s another thing entirely when you are looking at 3 million people to identify brands and experiences.”

And millions is the word. Consumers are mad about Web 2.0 venues. In June 2007, blogs received 63.1 million unique U.S. visitors and social networks received 115.1 million unique U.S. visitors, according to comScore Networks Inc., a research firm specializing in consumer behavior.

But to successfully gauge customer sentiment, e-retailers still must ask questions. And some are finding culling Web 2.0 content complements the fundamental customer feedback electronic tool, e-mail surveys that guide consumers to an e-commerce site web page that lists questions and typically offers space for additional input. Hand in hand, the two methods can give merchants a full picture of what customers are looking for. Further, e-retailers can toss into the mix feedback—solicited and unsolicited—gained by customer call center staff.

E-retailers must use these methods to gather and delve into all possible information and learn to uncover and track trends before they pick up steam, says Rob Harles, senior vice president of marketing solutions at comScore. “E-retailers must anticipate customer desires,” he says. “Read the chatter online and find the key influencers; then you can build a plan ahead of time.”

The right skills

That’s what Drs. Foster and Smith is trying to do. Like the transition of ownership of The Ferret Store, the recall earlier this year of tainted pet food that originated in China triggered a flood of input via the online forum and customer e-mails and calls. The company took the bad news and turned it into an opportunity to engage customers and gain their input.

An opportunity

“Our foods did not have wheat gluten, so there was not a problem for us. But there were many questions and comments,” says Gordon Magee, Internet marketing and analysis manager at Drs. Foster and Smith, which relies on its online forum and e-mail surveys for opinions. “The web site and our forum provided us an opportunity to respond to customer concerns and feedback so they could get information right away. We posted information on our site and sent e-mails and even made phone calls to customers. The response was excellent; our customers were very positive toward the company and thanked us for contacting them.”

Identifying the right people to monitor online forums and other social sites is critical to ensuring important feedback makes its way from the web to management, Magee adds.

“Staff who monitors Web 2.0 information must be able to do more than simply identify a crabby customer,” he says. “They need to know how your company handles customers and be able to match that philosophy in their own personality and in how they communicate in a forum. They must know how to communicate in writing in a very effective way. And they need some marketing savvy so they can convey the company’s marketing messages. For instance, for us, we’re not just about selling product, we want to educate our customers, we want to be known as the pet care experts.”

Garnering feedback from Web 2.0 venues is so important to executives at Abebooks Inc. that they have designated one employee to monitor the merchant’s online forums full time and another to scan other forums, blogs and social networks part time.

“Today you have exponentially more information with Web 2.0, on top of things like e-mail surveys that collect feedback in a matter of hours. You have to deal with information overload,” says Boris Wertz, COO at Abebooks. “So we place responsibility for collecting customer feedback in people we trust to differentiate important information from unimportant information. They then channel up the important information. This is the key to the whole thing.”

Scanning content

The customer service staff member responsible for monitoring the e-retailer’s booksellers and book buyers forums scans content on an hourly basis, checking for happy and unhappy customers pointing out positive experiences or web site problems. If the monitor spots a problem, the staffer sends the information to customer service, management and marketing teams, which decide how and when to act.

The public relations staff member responsible for monitoring forums, blogs and social networks not affiliated with Abebooks scans content on a weekly basis, using tools like Google and blog search engine Technorati to hunt for mentions of Abebooks. As with feedback in the in-house forums, the staffer compiles such mentions and sends them to the same teams for action.

Wertz looks to current employees with proven track records when it comes to appointing Web 2.0 monitors. “A person must be able to structure complex problems and make determinations based on all the information,” he says. “They also must be curious by nature. You can’t just tell someone, ‘Here is a list of blogs you should check.’ A blog that’s important today may not be important tomorrow. So you need an individual with ­curiosity, and who really understands the web and can stay on top of web developments.”

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Recently, one of Abebooks’ Web 2.0 monitors came across a post written by a frequent customer on her personal blog about a bad experience she had had at Abebooks.com. She had purchased some books, but the order was cancelled by the independent bookseller that sells via Abebooks and she did not receive a refund. “We saw her blog post and customer service contacted her and initiated a refund,” Wertz says. “And she was a happy customer again because we approached her and took care of things.”

While the books e-retailer is keen on routine monitoring, it is cautious about overreacting. “If only one person says something about a web site problem, for example, it might be a problem with that person’s computer or software,” Wertz cautions. “But if we see two or three booksellers jumping on that topic, that means something is going on. So it gets escalated and our technical team gets on it immediately. Then we post a note in our forums saying the tech team is on it, or that it has been taken care of.”

A companywide effort

Like Abebooks, Roxio, the consumer division of Sonic Solutions that sells CD- and DVD-burning software and other media technology, makes monitoring of user-­generated web content a routine responsibility, though it assigns the task to staff members throughout the company. It scans its own forums, the Roxio Community Discussion Groups, and casts a wider net.

“We operate discussion groups on our site to ensure we have a method of receiving information from customers in the most unfiltered way. As a company philosophy, we do not intend to impede the liberal discussion in and around our category. We want people to be discussing things in the most honest and straightforward way,” says Yann Connan, vice president of e-business at Roxio. “We also routinely monitor other technology message boards, blogs and enthusiast sites to see how consumers are discussing our product category, and to find out if they are discussing our products.”

At Roxio, staff members throughout the company are responsible for routinely monitoring user-generated content on the web. This includes employees in the retailer’s product management, customer service, engineering and management groups.

While customer feedback from user-generated content is by its nature anecdotal, when pieced together it sheds light on a bigger picture, Connan says. “This kind of feedback helps us formulate hypotheses around products, product categories and the web site, for example,” he explains.

What’s more, Web 2.0-based feedback can be an important guide when e-retailers prepare for formally soliciting input from customers. Not only can retailers bring together information gleaned from both sources to address customer wishes, user-generated content can help executives hone e-mail surveying. “Anecdotal information can lead us in the right direction,” Connan says, “and then help us create the more structured e-mail surveys where we can push for more information.”

A leg up

E-mail surveys have a leg up on other types of surveys—telephone or otherwise—for a variety of reasons. For one thing, e-mail enables e-retailers to gain virtually instant feedback. A merchant can gain a solid understanding of a subject in a very short time, which just isn’t possible any other way, says Magee of Drs. Foster and Smith.

Abebooks typically gets 80% of e-mail survey responses within two hours of transmission. “You can’t get that with other surveying tools,” Wertz says. “Even things like pop-up window surveys are not that fast because they depend on the amount of traffic coming to your site and then getting a significant number of shoppers choosing to take them.”

Plus, a pop-up window survey, unlike an e-mail survey, intrudes on customers’ shopping experiences, Wertz says. And an e-retailer cannot target pop-up surveys, he adds, whereas a merchant can home in on specific customer types and histories via e-mail surveys by selecting customers from its data storehouses that meet certain criteria.

“We survey customers who have opted in to our e-newsletters,” says Wertz, who adds that that list can be further refined by comparing it with data on e-newsletter recipients who have made purchases, whether general or specific to a product. “So we really are asking customers who know us and our products, not a random sample or a list from a company that signs up people interested in gaining rewards for taking surveys.”

Making sense of it all

With customer feedback coming in via e-mail surveys, Web 2.0 venues and call center interactions, e-retailers are finding themselves with a lot more customer feedback than they ever had before. It is challenging to wrap their hands around all the information and make sense of it. To take successful action, e-retailers must find optimal ways to sift through it all.

When Roxio has pulled customer feedback together, it applies various methodologies to parse information and learn what it can. One primary technique is the Kano Method, a 20-year-old information-sorting tool that attempts to gain insights into customers’ perceptions of what is and is not important for a specific product to be successful. For instance, results of a survey that asks questions about numerous features of an existing or planned product are interpreted by marketing and management staff members in a way that determines only the features likely to make a customer make a purchase.

Abebooks sorts through knowledge gained from its online forums as well as unaffiliated blogs and social networks on a case-by-case basis, interacting with customers when necessary to gain fuller understanding. The e-retailer has a more structured approach, though, to comprehending feedback from the more structured e-mail surveys.

“Answers to questions are aggregated in a standard report on a scale from 1 to 10, so we look at the averages to figure out the big trends,” Wertz says. “And we have one staff member go through the comments entered in the open data field and pick out the most important ones, especially detailed feedback on the positives and negatives of our site. Important detailed feedback gets included in the standard report. This report gets sent to the marketing, customer service and senior management teams every week. Condensing this information in an easy-to-follow standard report allows us to fully understand what is going on.”

And when it comes to ­gaining a deep understanding of what customers are saying, Abebooks operates based on a very old maxim, indeed. “We have a simple principle,” Wertz says. “The customer is always right.”

bill@verticalwebmedia.com