By Dennis Barker
Anyone who has ever been involved in organizing a focus group knows it’s not a trivial task, and anyone who has ever had to sign off on the invoice for one knows it’s not a trivial expense. There’s a lot more involved than finding a room with a big table, one-way glass, and platters of cookies.
New outsourced social media services are making it easier to acquire customer feedback by enabling businesses to outsource the entire operation to providers who specialize in quickly and affordably building online versions of traditional focus groups. Known as “crowdsourcing,” this burgeoning area of social media BPO eschews cookie platters and replaces the one-way glass with two-way online interaction.
TechSmith Snags Customer Feedback
When software developer TechSmith wanted user reaction to an upcoming Mac version of its Snagit program, it turned to Get Satisfaction, a company that provides tools to essentially speed-build an online community. People can log-in and share opinions, ask questions, answer other people’s questions, and make suggestions. Get Satisfaction features are “designed to help you participate, moderate, and measure the value of conversations happening inside your community,” says spokesperson Sarah Steele.
During a 10-month beta phase, more than 400,000 people joined the TechSmith community to discuss the new Snagit. That number of responses far exceeds what would have trickled in, mostly via e-mail, during a more traditional beta test.
“We’ve calculated that to capture the scope and diversity of feedback we’ve gathered on Get Satisfaction using our traditional [user experience] research methodology, it would have cost us $300,000- $500,000,” says Sylvania Dye, TechSmith user experience designer.
The Get Satisfaction platform, based on a simple SaaS model, links a customer’s website to its online community, but there’s also an app for accessing the community inside Facebook, and GetSatisfaction also integrates with Salesforce.com, whereby any community activity can be associated with a customer or relevant contact. Customers have included little startups and former startups like Microsoft and P&G.
Watching Customer Preferences
Modify Watches, a designer of customizable timepieces, enlisted crowdsourcing provider Napkin Labs when it wanted to investigate consumer preferences. The company had a Facebook page but wanted closer interaction with customers in order to have a realistic understanding of what they wanted and a better sense of how to market to them, and felt Napkin Labs was a good fit because it offers a service that takes Facebook followers and organizes them into an online form or focus group.
“Our goal is on changing the relationship between companies and their customers,” says Roshan Bhula, Napkin Labs CMO. “We’re trying to help businesses use Facebook fans or customers in more meaningful ways. They have great insights, and they have something more important – they have ideas. We are building apps within Facebook to make that connection stronger.”
Users can set up “labs” with either the Facebook app or (more expensively) on a dedicated website. Labs can be used to ask customers the usual focus-group-type questions: What they like about a product, what they don’t like, what they’d change, what products or services they’d like to see in the future – “whatever the question or topic prompt is,” Bhula says. “As people share ideas, everyone is able to comment, raise issues, ask more questions, and so on.”
Besides its current app, Brainstorm, the company is working on “a suite of apps that will further the interaction between businesses and customers,” Bhula says. “We are a marketing and engagement company but also provide research and consumer insights. Our apps bridge the two. We let you ask people for their ideas. It’s more collaborative, but leads to insights like a focus group does.”
Userlytics offers a service designed to quickly gauge user reactions to online products – such as a shopping site’s new function. “We are essentially providing a new method for quality market research, for usability testing,” says CEO Alejandro Rivas Micoud. “Rather than have people visit a facility or usability lab, you can record people in their homes. . . answering questions, watching a video, interacting with a website. We do that by leveraging their own webcam and recording simultaneously what they see on-screen.”
Userlytics will recruit “a panel of crowdsourced experts” and ask them customer-generated questions, then deliver results “in a day or two,” Rivas says.
Beyond the Hype Lies Promise
Although social media has been going through hype cycles like most other innovations, using the technology to get a better understanding of what customers are saying or thinking seems like a natural application. Of course, the keys to a useful customer-feedback session are getting the right people involved (interested, thoughtful, able to express themselves) and asking the right questions. Professional focus-group companies are experts at that. But those companies also tend to be out of the financial reach of many small businesses and startups, who are looking for alternative ways to engage customers. Some are finding it with this latest wave of virtual focus group providers.
“Real engagement is getting past purely transactional interaction,” Steele says. “Engagement needs to be everywhere: your online community, your website, your newsletters… Customers need multiple ways to give feedback. Companies need to be everywhere that their customers are.”
Bhula sums it up in seven words: “Social media is the new focus group.”
