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The Voice of the Interactive Customer

Posted on | April 8, 2008 | No Comments

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by Dr. Mary Lou Roberts

Marketers know the importance of understanding their customers—listening to the “voice of the customer.” It’s even more crucial in the era of always-on communications and customer-generated content to be constantly in tune with what’s being said about brands wherever and whenever customers congregate.

The term “voice of the customer” was originally associated with marketing research. Even today, when issues of customer understanding come up, the response is all too often that marketing research is needed. That overlooks the fact that there may be quicker, cheaper and perhaps even more perceptive ways to produce marketing insight. Marketing research may be needed to probe attitudinal issues, but research is most productive after marketers have ascertained what customers are saying and doing.

I’ve written about Dell’s IdeaStorm; directly soliciting ideas is one approach. Andrea Learned recently wrote about consumer advisory boards and Chrysler’s new initiative . That’s another tried-and-true marketing technique migrating to the Internet.

An article in Media Post highlighted a different type of opportunity for tuning in to what’s being said about your brand in cyberspace. The example was Diageo brands, which found that young consumers need help understanding how to buy scotch. That’s a perennial problem they face with each new generation of potential scotch drinkers, but the Internet gives them a whole new way to approach it. So it’s not really new news, but it is an actionable finding.

The article described a new service that monitors social media—networks, blogs, Twitter – pretty much any network it seems—to produce these types of insights. Networked Insights will also help build a community around your brand if you need that. They don’t say how they do member recruitment, but recruiting and probably offering incentives is no more biasing than recruiting for focus groups (probably no less either).

Point is, we need to listen to our customers and setting up some sort of ongoing, focused dialog with them is the best way to do it. We should guard against bias or any observable skewing of the results. However, I’d rather take the positive approach and point out that customers like to be asked and seem to really want to be helpful. So listen to them in their preferred settings and take action—in their media and on their terms. Over time, a “created” community may just become a real one!

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