Monday, June 29, 2009

Defining a Service Quality Strategy - Closing Gap 1

To understand customer expectations you have to talk to your past, present and future customers. If your company can afford it, this means doing a market survey or hiring a market research team, but if you’re a startup or a small business, this may be cost prohibitive. So what can you do on your own to try to get a realistic picture of what your customers want? There are a number of online tools and sites that can help get an accurate picture so you can build a service quality strategy. Here's what you should try to determine:
  1. How do your customers want to communicate?
  2. Where do they want to communicate?
  3. How do you capture what they are saying?
  4. What do you do with the results?
How do your customers want to communicate
Depending on the kind of service you provide you'll need to understand how your customers use technology in order to determine how to reach them.

Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff, in the book Groundswell, outline a process for identifying the technology preferences for your customers. Technographics LadderThe context for the book is to help you develop the right web content and tools to satisfy your customers technology use to keep them on your site however you can use this profile to help determinee how and where to communicate with your customers. The methodology focuses on technology behaviors; it represents the range of technology uses on a ladder, which they call a Social Technnographics Ladder.

Customers range from Inactives, which do not participate in most online technologies (Geoffrey Moore's Laggards) to Creators, which are highly active, creating web content, publishing blogs and multimedia content for general consumption (think Moore's Technology Enthusiasts). Understanding where your customer base fits within the ladder will help you determine how to reach them. General technographic data for different demographics is provided on their site. You'll want to refine this generic profile to your specific market.


It should be noted that there is overlap within the categories so the totals will exceed 100%.

Where do they want to communicate and how do you capture what they are saying?
Once you have defined the technology profile of your customer base, you can then create a targeted communication plan. Here are some ideas for the different profiles.

Spectators
The vast majority of your customers will likely be Spectators who are readers of information. This group views blogs and web sites, but is less likely to leave comments or start discussions. So how can you communicate with them? You could try to do surveys and ratings. Surveying via a questionnaire may be an effective channel. iPerceptions 4Q is a set of 4 basic questions you can ask your readers: Why are you here? Was the visit successful? If not then why not? Did you have a good site experience at least? These 4 questions answer the basic questions like what was the customer's primary purpose for coming to your site, what was their task completion rate, if they didn't find what they wanted, you've given them the chance to explain why not, and finally you have a customer satisfaction score for the overall web experience. Other tools and other companies with similar offerings provide more in-depth and targeted questioning. Here is a non-exhaustive list of sites to consider:Another interesting site is GetSatisfaction. This is more of a comprehensive customer support site, connecting your customers and employees together to answer questions and comments. This site also supports a feedback mechanism. The beauty of this site is that it is a SaaS so you can integrate the customer interaction right into your own site.

Joiners
Communicating with Joiners is a lot harder than any other group. The reason for this is that most communities that Joiners join are private and search does not reach into these communities. To connect with joiners on social networking sites you'll have to create accounts on sites like My Space, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Joining these sites is easy; getting enough brand awareness to have a conversation with your customers is a bit harder.

Alternatively you can create a private community to connect with joiners, but again, this can take time to build up a following. Ning is an interesting site that allows you to create an online social website. Other sites include:There are some emerging search capabilities within the social networking sites. Microsoft has an agreement with Facebook but I haven't seen this yet. You can also hire third parties to manually search social sites for you. Again, it is useful to know what your customers are saying, but it is much harder to engage them in this space in conversation.

Collectors
Communication with collectors tends to be one way; you can see what they have marked for sharing or what they have tagged or subscribed to.

Social news services like Reddit, Buzzup and Digg are sites where users post links to sites, news, blogs, etc, that they like. A post acts like a vote and the more votes an article gets, the more importance is assigned to it. These sites have search capabilities and often, as in the case of Digg, you can create an RSS feed from the search results. This allows you to create a feed on your keywords or your company name. Articles on Digg can be commented on and users can even rate the comments. Digg has a reply capability so you can also reply directly to your customers.Social tagging sites like delicious allow you to create bookmarks to sites. The more bookmarks, the more popular the site is thought to be. Bookmarked have tags and the tags give you an indication of how people categorize the bookmark. Bookmarks can also have descriptions which again may reveal what customers are thinking. You can create feeds from search results in delicious so you can also track updates by tag or company name.

Critics
Critics like to react to online material through comments and discussions. To better support comments on your site, you could use a commenting service like Disqus. The focus of this tool is to better support discussions. It provides a better commenting mechanism than most blog or websites via nested comments and user profiles, and it provides consolidation for commentors, allowing them to see all their comments, across many sites, in one consolidated place. Enhancing the user experience will allow you to capture more comments and ultimately get more feedback. An emerging technology that looks promising is Wave. Wave allows you to create web base discussions that supports multiple discussion forums. A conversation that begins on a blog can also have discussion entries from LinkedIn or Facebook. Wave supports a single version of the discussion thread so no matter where the comments are added, you'll see one continuous thread of discussion.

Not all customers will leave comments. Another technique is to employ a rating system. Something as simple as Thumbs Up or Down to a question will give you basic feedback. As an example, I've connected my blog to Outbrain to allow my readers to provide content rating on each article. Though I'd prefer they left comments, I'd still like to get feedback to see if I'm connecting with the content, so I've formed the question around a rating for the content itself. You could easily provide a rating system for specific questions to gain insights and feedback on customer satisfaction. Similar sites include:Creators
Creators like to create their own content on blogs or websites. Some creators are also influencers and can wield immense online power. Getting noticed by an influencer can mean being written up or interviewed on popular online blogs or featured on web sites. Creators typically drive traffic to or away from your site, so identifying and interacting with creators can be tricky.

There are a number of sites that allow you to search blogs. Many of these tools will show you trending information for blog posts so you can see what is popular and what is not. These sites include:There are also a number of online tools that rank and stack creators. PostRank looks at a blog post and ranks it based on different engagement sources. The more sources of engagement an article has, the higher the ranking. PostRank looks at tracebacks, views, comments, diggs, reddits, bookmarks, tweets, blips and other engagement content. To get an idea for traffic flow or popularity at a site level, you can look at Technorati, BlogPulse and TNS Cymfony.
What do you do with the results
So, armed with a technology profile for your customer base, you've created a communication plan that focuses on where and how to communicate and where and how to monitor your customer's online behaviors and discussions. You've gotten different forms of input, from customer surveys and feedback forms, online comments, tags and blog articles to get an accurate picture of customer expectation and potentially customer perception of your company. So what? What do you do next? You need to define your service quality strategy so that your organization can create the service standards needed to exceed customer expectations.

The service quality strategy is really a balancing act between what you can afford to do, what you can do, what you competition is doing, and what your customers wants you to do. Using the input you've gleaned from your customer interactions, you'll need to determine what are the most important service attributes your customers are looking for. Fishbone diagrams and MECE analysis are good tools to get to route causes, or in this case core desires. You should also gather what information you can about your competition's service successes and failures to see if they have vulnerabilities in service delivery. Your service quality strategy should address your customer expectations and align them with your strengths and weaknesses. It should look for and attack competitor vulnerabilities for service differentiation and it should fit within your organizational capabilities.

Understanding customer expectations is the first step in delivering true quality service. The next step is converting your service quality strategy to quality standards that the organization can execute.

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Posted by Brian S Courtney at 6/29/2009
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