Marketing feedback comes from many sources other than analytics, surveys and focus groups, but is it valid? Red Door Interactive's Reid Carr weighs in.
As an agency and web development partner for our clients, we occasionally receive emails from an internal source or a prospective customer that could not find what he/she was looking for, did not like the appearance or layout of a page or was disappointed with an online experience.
When coming from a boss or an upset customer requiring immediate response, these emails get their recipients hopping. But they are also often dubious in nature -- usually providing very little background from the sender, yet offering honest, experiential qualitative data nonetheless.
Many marketers subscribe to the belief that if someone bothered to send an irate email, then there must be another hundred customers with the same attitude that didn’t express it. This sentiment is not always the case (though, such emails should still always be investigated). All of us have experienced at one time or another a “squeaky wheel” in grocery store lines or at a checkout counter who made their unique situation known. Just like with these isolated incidents, not everything is an emergency that requires an enormous overhaul.
Some customers just want to be listened to, responded to and treated with some sympathy. Marketers can respond to these situations in a variety of ways; bad online PR can lead to sticky and permanent damage. In the real world, upset customers can go away. In the online world, they can self-publish a negative opinion that can become an indelible internet record.
In addition to a company’s website, several venues exist for customers to complain. Marketers should be aware of these places and visit them occasionally to find valid, unsolicited feedback.
Feedback vehicles: get your two cents here!
Feedback does not always come in the form of a nice, succinct, actionable email. Marketers have to solicit it, encourage it, forage for it. In all cases, it requires labor.
One subscription service that exists solely to provide web customer feedback is BizRate.com. This company provides customers with several interaction points at which to share opinions, positive or negative. The service solicits information, post-sale and post-receipt of product.
BizRate.com is an all-encompassing survey that gets into both the user’s experience on the site as well as areas such as customer service, operations, shipping and product quality. One thing to note, however, is that BizRate.com gathers frequent opinions from people who were successful in navigating and purchasing through a given site. That, in and of itself, brings bias to the data.
The Better Business Bureau provides an online service (BBBOnline.org) that companies can subscribe to in order to track complaints. This is a familiar resource to people because of the BBB’s well-known offline brand.
Marketers often overlook that they can also find feedback simply by searching the web. Prospects and customers post complaints, praises and other actionable information on message boards, personal websites and blogs.
Red Door Interactive has done web searches on behalf of clients and, in one instance, found a group of customers that felt spammed by a particular new client of ours that had just come on. This was definitely actionable data, and we worked diligently to scrub the client’s email lists and reformat their advertising with more conspicuous privacy and opt-out clauses to help clean up their image.
Beyond the external places that aggregate feedback from users, marketers should also be aware of those that come through their virtual front doors.
OpinionLab is a company that provides software that can be installed on a website to gather real-time feedback. This solution complements services like BizRate.com by also providing feedback from non-customers that may have had trouble accessing information on the site.
From their own sites, marketers may receive sporadic comments via the “contact us” pages or from an email address provided for “feedback.” Feedback from these vehicles is usually very free flowing. Some high-traffic sites get these responses so frequently that they use software to filter received email for tone, type and subject to determine priority level (a.k.a. frustration), flag common comments for automatic response and route others to the appropriate department.
Feedback received from internal sources -- especially from someone with eminent domain -- should be handled cautiously. Marketers should treat internal comments much like those from the general site feedback form -- urgently and efficiently, but also skeptically.
Marketers should gather pertinent details from the reporter, being cognizant that the comments may not be representative of the target audience, but may instead have bias toward the individual’s own agenda. If unsure about whether or not criticism is valid, the marketer may flag the person’s feedback as a hypothesis for a traditional A/B test.
Monday: So what do you do with all this feedback?
Reid Carr is president of Red Door Interactive, helping clients -- such as the San Diego Convention Center, SkinMedica, Benetrac and Sharp Systems of America -- to lay out strategies for their online presence and interaction activities. Before founding Red Door Interactive, Carr formed the interactive arm for the San Diego-based PR agency, McQuerterGroup. Prior to that, he was chief operating officer and accounts director at PBJ Digital, a bi-coastal Interactive development and incubator shop in Los Angeles; before then, Carr handled account management in both the Venice and Playa del Rey offices of TBWA/Chiat/Day. He has a BA from the University of Oregon's advertising program.