Improving the Customer Conversation

Social media concepts are pretty mainstream now for anyone paying even remote attention to the Internet. For a small business, Social Media pretty much boils down to improving two-way communication with your market. You want to improve and deepen the relationship with your existing customers, and you want to make it easy for prospective customers to enter into the initial conversation.

I partner with a small but high-powered market research and analytics company based in the Bay Area. The CEO's 25 years of experience, built largely on a Fortune 500 client base, gave him insights into improving the customer conversation years before the Web became mainstream. So it is with great interest that we look to formalize these customer conversations using the techniques available to us on the Web, both for our clients and for ourselves.

At the heart of many of our projects is innovative and exhaustive survey design. For example, we recently helped a global software provider do a survey of several hundred existing power users belonging to the North American user group. These are the folks who have used the product to its fullest extent, and are already formulating great ideas about what should go into the next version. Our client wisely sought our assistance to gather those user ideas through a survey we designed and distributed via email. The email contained a link to our corporate Web server, and over the agreed upon time frame we gathered, quantified, and presented the survey results.

The customer was absolutely delighted, and has already begun thinking of ways to use the same ideas in other areas of the company.