Keeping existing customers happy and growing with them is acknowledged as a wiser option than trying to gain new customers. Customer satisfaction studies gain importance in this context as you make an attempt to understand customer’s views, what excites them, what annoys them and what can trigger to expand their relationship with you and so on. Typically, customer satisfaction  studies are conducted at the overall company level. There was an earlier blog on the benefits of a CSAT.

However, there are several more areas where customer feedback can be valuable and here are a few examples -

a. When you want to test market an idea  for a new product/solution/service – organize a dry run among your existing customer base

b. Detailed Feedback on specific processes/offerings

c. Validation of your brand positioning and suggestions from customers based on their experience

d. Mystery shopping – this is relevant for customer-service oriented companies (Banks, call centers/BPO companies) where a neutral party can  pose as a potential customer and give feedback on their experience with a particular department

This is not an exhaustive list but was meant to drive home the relevance of customer feedback. It will be great to hear your experience too.

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A question in a linkedin forum prompted this post. According to Bill Gates, you have more to learn from your unhappy customers. At Prayag, we did an analysis of key accounts during our planning session sometime back, and one thing we concluded was that understanding customer expectations thoroughly as well as mapping the customer decision process ( for signoffs and feedback) is an important determinant of satisfaction. When I say this, I am of course assuming that we have the capabilities at some level to deliver to the client brief.

But, sometimes we do not do enough diligence to get a sense of the expectations in detail. In one instance, we did not do sufficient homework on the decision process, and experienced a lot of delays from the customer. We had adhered to the time lines only to be told by the customer that they expected more and “better” options. At that point obviously, they did not give us credit for adhering to time lines.

Likewise, there are times when a client has higher expectations on one aspect of our capability- and that leads to a mismatch.

So, it is true that unhappy customers do teach you more on how to improve. With happy customers, you are in a state of do not rock the boat and seldom do you experiment.

I thought it was a great insight and it would be great to get your views on this.

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When I read the newspaper headline - Facebook Grapples With Privacy Issues – I must admit that my first reaction was, “ho-hum; so what’s new?”  But it looks as if these issues have turned serious for Facebook, with the FTC entering the picture.  And it seems that Facebook is also taking this more seriously than it has reacted to earlier criticisms, with reports of senior executives hunkering down in the company’s Silicon Valley headquarters, debating on how to address the backlash to two of its recently launched features – which again exposed far too much of its member information to the world, both intentionally and not.

While I am an ardent social media evangelist, with respect to Facebook’s rather cavalier attitude to privacy  I must admit that I am not on its side.  Maybe it is a generational thing, but as a parent whose offspring has the same ‘bindaas’ attitude towards privacy, I find that I am quite horrified at the things my son writes on his Facebook page.  He in turn, doesn’t seem to understand what the fuss is all about, so our arguments end only when I pull rank as a parent!  As in my home, Facebook and its critics are on either side of a deepening chasm of understanding, where neither party can seem to understand the other’s viewpoint.  

So whose philosophy do you champion – Facebook’s or the privacy advocates’ ?

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Kodak’s CMO, Jeff Hayzlett,  has managed to attract considerable attention to his company through his extensive use of various social media tools like Twitter, Facebook etc.  The company was once a colossus in the photography industry, but missed the digital revolution boat and was left floundering.  According to Hayzlett, the company has now reinvented itself as a B2B company and stays in touch with its customers via its social media strategy, Convergence Ripcurl. It has attracted a lot of attention through its consumer contest to name its HD video camera, and its blog “a Thousand Words” has won awards. One point I found interesting was that it has a ‘Chief Listening Officer’ to  review all social media comments – shows that it is serious about listening to the market.

The brand strategy is paying off:  Kodak has reduced its product-to-market cycle to five months, and 13 of their products rank #1, #2, or #3 in their respective categories, half of which didn’t exist two years ago. One product was launched solely using Twitter at a $70 higher price point and there’s a waiting list to purchase. (Brand Strategy – Reinventing Kodak, Nicolette Beard). 

However, share prices are still falling, so it will be interesting to see if the new marketing strategy will help the company in the long run.

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Every year I look forward to the pranks that Google will play on April Fool’s day, but to me, this year’s was a bit a damp squib.  Mainly because I wasn’t up-to-date on the fact that the city of Topeka, KS, was pitching to be the host for Google’s fibre-optic network and had unofficially changed their name to Google for the whole of March.  And anyway, since Google changes its logo seemingly every day to celebrate events both significant and obscure,  it didn’t have that much of an impact.   

This joke is supposed to be the best so far, but I wonder how many non-Americans  got the reference. Obviously, the bar gets higher each year, but to me this year’s was just ‘meh.’  I liked some early ones much better – the MentalPlex was great, and so was the TiSP. 

There was another one on YouTube which I missed ( recasting some videos into ‘text’  mode – http://youtube-global.blogspot.com/2010/03/textp-saves-youtube-bandwidth-money.html)  and which a lot of people thought was for real, judging by the angry complaints that followed.  The more reactions your joke gets, the more successful it is, don’t you think?

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In the last few months, we have witnessed a rather interesting trend at Prayag. No less than three of our customers have approached us to bid jointly for work for their customers. The reason they invited us is that the work is typically in the area of market research or branding.  What is more, in one of the instances where we actually did the work, our customer pitched it as a joint project. From our point of view this is obviously exciting. But more importantly, this signals a new trend where partnerships are being stitched together primarily based on complementary capabilities rather than scale and size. Second, it also appears that our customer’s customers are beginning to build relationships of trust. Why else would they turn to our customers ( who are typically tech companies) and suggest that they help them do work in  areas beyond their core capabilities?

It would be really interesting to check if this is a trend that others are also seeing. I welcome comments and sharing of similar experiences.

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