Forrester Blogs » Category: Customer Satisfaction

Market Insights Needs To Collaborate Better With Customer Experience

Posted by Richard Evensen on the Market Insights Professionals Blog on October 25, 2011

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Richard Evensen

Recently, I had a discussion with my colleague Andrew McInnes about the role market insights (MI) can play for customer experience departments, and why so many customer experience (CX) teams are doing research themselves instead of collaborating with their MI counterparts. In this talk we came up with the term “shadow MI.”

Shadow MI: research commissioned or executed OUTSIDE of the MI department. It applies to all research done by a person or group inside the company without the approval or involvement of market insights.

Shadow MI is not good for the company or MI stakeholders. Key risks in shadow MI include:

  • Fragmented knowledge. Distributed research and insights can undermine the organization’s knowledgebase and understanding of customers, competitors, and markets.
  • Bad business decisions. Improper research techniques (sampling, surveys, fielding, analysis) can lead to the wrong conclusions and the wrong decisions.
  • Subpar solutions. Lack of robust data cross-analysis and comparison can result in blind spots and missing aspects of an optimal solution.
  • Higher costs. Individually negotiated purchases can undermine scale-related discounts.
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Can You Hear Us? Where Are You?

Posted by Richard Evensen on the Market Insights Professionals Blog on June 27, 2011

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Richard Evensen

So, I just got back from Forrester’s Customer Experience Forum in New York. This year, it was at the Marriott Marquis, right in the heart of Times Square. Now, if you’re like me and have lived in a rural (ok, backwoods) town for the past 10 years, Times Square can be pretty overwhelming. You feel like you’re wading through a sea of people with every step. You hear more languages and see more diverse cultures in a block than in an around-the-world trip. And the neon and pictures and street-hawkers and . . . and . . . and. It’s total information overload.

Even worse, I had arranged to meet clients in the middle of this chaos. I was lost and running late. The call was short but clear: “Can you hear us? We’re here. Where are you? We need to leave soon.”

For many market insights professionals, my experience in Times Square is a microcosm of reality. Many have been stuck in the back office, already struggling to meet present stakeholders' needs. Suddenly, you're thrust into an overwhelming sea of new data sources with an executive mandate to find the customers and figure out their needs. Worse, if you don’t do this quickly, your customers are going to leave.

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From Market Research To Market Insights

Posted by Richard Evensen on the Market Insights Professionals Blog on February 3, 2011

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Richard Evensen

As this is my first blog post, let me begin with a quick introduction. I’m Richard Evensen, the new senior analyst with the Market Insights (MI) group at Forrester. I’ve been working in market and media research for over 15 years. During this time, I’ve done M&A and joint venture assessments, multi-lingual media analyses, competitive intelligence, customer research, and complex market/financial modeling.

I’m happy to be part of the amazing brain trust at Forrester and will be supporting MI professionals with research and guidance on customer satisfaction (CSAT), competitive intelligence, emerging markets, and research best practices.

Over the past several decades, I’ve experienced significant changes in our profession. For better or worse, we’re nowhere near our steady state. Dimensions that have changed, and will continue to change, are:

  • Breadth. MI professionals cover an increasingly broad portfolio of responsibilities, providing insights across: industries, segments, geographies, product/service lifecycle stages, customers and competitors, and, now, real and virtual worlds. With high growth in emerging and online markets, competition increasing, and customers becoming more connected and savvy, MI professionals need to have very long arms and research reach.
  • Depth. Our industry has moved from providing data to research to insights. Increasingly, MI professionals’ clients want actionable recommendations, which require a strong working knowledge of multiple business areas. As these demands grow, MI professionals need to move up the value chain.
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Facebook Is Social Media Heroin, And That Puts It At Risk -- Or Does It?

Posted by Augie Ray on the Interactive Marketing Professionals Blog on July 20, 2010

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Augie Ray

We humans can have all sorts of addictions.  Some researchers believe that addictions may be positive -- such as to jogging or meditation -- but of course many addictions are negative. 

What about Facebook?  There is no doubt that Facebook is addicting -- according to Nielsen, users spend as much time on Facebook as they do Google, Yahoo, YouTube, Wikipedia and eBay combined. But is this a positive addiction or a negative one?  Is Facebook jogging, or is it heroin?

The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) may give us a clue;  the annual review of brand customer satisfaction put Facebook in the bottom five percent of private sector companies.  The social network is “in the same range as the IRS tax e-filing system, airlines and cable companies.”  ForeSee Results, which worked on the ACSI survey, reported that privacy concerns, frequent changes to the Web site, and commercialization and advertising adversely affect the consumer experience.  (And Facebook is about to get further PR problems in the form of a new David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin movie, “The Social Network,” which has a plot that is said to “unabashedly attack” Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.)

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Customer Satisfaction Is More Than Tracking Numbers

Posted by Reineke Reitsma on the Market Insights Professionals Blog on May 3, 2010

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Reineke Reitsma

For a track session at Forrester's Marketing Forum at the end of April, I dived into the topic of customer satisfaction. For market researchers looking to set up a customer satisfaction (CSAT) study, much guidance is available. However, it also became clear to me why, despite all this advice, many customer satisfaction projects fail.

Most of the information I found -- or the conversations I had, for that matter -- were around the ‘science’ part of CSAT studies: the methodology and set-up. There are many discussions online about questions like which scale to use, which questions to ask (or not), whether a company should focus on relational versus transactional measurement, or if it's better to conduct a customized CSAT project or use an established method like Net Promoter.

However, in my conversations with market researchers, I found that the success of CSAT projects isn't based as much on science -- although a sound and repeatable set-up doesn't hurt -- as much as it is on ‘art.’ The art lies in understanding the company’s business issues; translating these into a well-structured questionnaire; finding the drivers for success; and later, when the results are in, presenting the results in an actionable format.

Any customer satisfaction project that focuses on numbers misses out on the 'art' element of CSAT. Of course, using a standardized methodology helps the company benchmark itself against its competitors. But what does it mean when 80% of your clients are satisfied? The organization will look at this number and want to drive it up, without any understanding of what the impact on the bottom line will be when the percentage of satisfied customers increases from 80% to 82%.

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