Fear of WOM

We got this client feedback through our partner about Adaptive Questions where respondents can see responses from others.

“I spoke to the client today and they are excited about the prospect of this project. They have only one concern which I could not address… they are worried about the likelihood of negative comments surfacing and being shared within the survey group, and possibly shared outside the group. “

One of our best long-term customers from TurboTax put this in a most elegant way, “You have to expect negative feedback to make any progress. If you filter it out, you are doing a disservice to your company.” 

I usually like to put both positive and negative people in the same Adaptive Question because we can see how they agree and disagree. Think about how valuable it is to see agreement and disagreement between Promoters and Detractors, happy and unhappy customers. Personally, I prefer to allow respondents to say anything they want because…

• Bad ideas, negative ideas, complaints don’t usually get seen by very many people because they don’t usually get a lot of agreement because we word questions to get constructive feedback, not complaints
• Only a small portion of respondents see the negative ideas
• Only a small portion of customers participate
• Your mother told you, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.”

Given the sensitivity of some clients such as this one, there are a couple of fairly easy solutions.

1. Moderate the comments – only allow constructive comments  to be seen. CloudMR has an option to require moderation. Respondents only see the comments you approve. That way we can limit the pool of ideas to positive and constructive improvements. The client will need to give us some guidance which is a part of our process. Downside: If you are not aggressive about approving legitimate ideas during the early part of the fielding process, you could go through all of your sample with just the initial 10 seed ideas.
2. Separate positive and negative respondents into two Adaptive Questions(TM) – It is pretty natural to get a rating such as satisfaction or likely to recommend before the Adaptive Question. Simply use the built-in logic to get improvement suggestions from unhappy respondents and positive sound bites from happy customers. This isolates the negatives to an extent.
3. Combine 1 and 2. Adapative Questions are ideal for getting WOM. The analysis will include both general buckets of ideas and individual comments. If you want to WOM for your promotions or advertising, we will ask respondents to identify themselves for the quotes.

NPS at Functional Level – What’s up with that?

The likely-to-recommend question was designed to work at the brand level – usually a company…

How likely are you to recommend ABC Corporation to your friends, family and colleagues?

It also seems to work well at business unit and product levels if customers recognize those as a brand.

I see companies asking this question at the functional level which makes no sense to me. I saw one recently where the question was asked at the company level, the division level, the business unit level, the product level and at every functional level imaginable.

How likely are you to recommend ABC Corporation’s tech support representative to your friends, family and colleagues? Really? My answer…

Well, it depends. Does my friend own ABC Corporation’s product? If they own the product, do they have a need for technical support? Does my friend have a support contract? Does my friend get to choose the tech support representative when they call ABC support? Since I don’t have the answer to any of these questions, it makes no sense to ask this question at this level, and my answer is likely to be 5 – a detractor. Even better, I might just quit the survey at this point. Why would you ask such a weird question?

If you wonder why your most specific questions don’t make sense when you try to roll them up to an overall company NPS, this is probably why.

The Ultimate WOM question

The loyalty world has an ultimate question, so why shouldn’t word-of-mouth marketing? The key issue for any word-of-mouth program is the message. I think we want to know what message resonates most with members of our target group. Among that group, what would they say to a friend to convince them to try abc company? Something like, “If you were going to recommend abc company to a friend, what would you tell them?”

What do you think is the ultimate word-of-mouth marketing question?

Word of Mouth Messages

It is pretty clear that power has shifted from large marketing organizations to consumers. The McKinsey Quarterly calls it, a “tectonic power shift toward consumers” (David Court, Dave Elzinga, Susan Mulder, and Ole Jørgen Vetvik, “The consumer decision journey,” mckinseyquarterly.com, June 2009). There is a lot of room for conversation around WOM advertising, WOM spread, influencers, and media types. In all of the conversation, one factor seems to be a constant — the message itself is key to a successful word-of-mouth program. In order to be effective, a great word-of-mouth message must…

• Resonate with your target audience — that is, it must…
  • Use the words and phrasing common to members of your target audience
  • Adjust to constantly evolving lingo, abbreviations and acronyms such as lmao, and :o)
• Communicate the idea in the fewest possible number of words that still gets the idea across so that it is…
  • Easy to remember
  • Easy to pass along
• Be specific to various segments of your audience — 20-something lingo just doesn’t work for more mature members of your target audience
• Be appropriate to the communication channel — Facebook fans may require a different message than people looking at your website

So how do you get such a message? Is it a message that can come from inside the four walls of your marketing department? I don’t think so. Certainly some sort of customer input is called for here. Traditional market research is one proven method to get the proper sample and results for your WOM campaign. There are also some new tools that help both researcher and marketer to understand what people are saying such as the many social media monitoring tools available today.

One thing that might help focus the results is a blend of research and social monitoring. This might cut out all of the extraneous information and help marketers focus on the main question, “If you were going to recommend abc company, what would you say?”
The response to this question, along with some segmentation information, can take you a long ways toward the message you need.