Articles, thoughts and news.

Recently, our research team undertook an initiative to better understand where and how customer feedback analysis and social technology should connect.

Social Technology

The idea that generating positive word-of-mouth is essential to business success is not new. Most people agree that generating recommendations is an important component to building brand loyalty. What is relatively new is how technology enables customers to connect with a brand and share their experiences more widely. As the use of social technology increases, brands have an opportunity to engage with customers in new ways.

Email Capture

With the increase in customer experience surveys on the web, capturing customer email addresses is an easy way for brands to initiate more contact with customers. Of the SMG client brands that conduct web surveys, the majority ask customers for their email addresses, with an impressive compliance rate.

Links to Social Networks

Widely-used social networking platforms such as Facebook, ...

It may be tempting to combine IVR (Interactive Voice Response) and Web (Internet) survey data because not only can your company provide greater access to your survey, but offering both methods might result in a larger sample size than either method alone.

However, consistent differences in respondent characteristics and scores have been found to exist between IVR and Web surveys. Combining data may appear to be a reasonable compromise, but implications exist from making unit comparisons, tracking performance over time, generalizing findings, and survey length. In this paper we will discuss survey mode differences and the implications of combining methodologies.

SMG does not recommend combining data from these two methodologies because of resulting differences in scores. But if a company believes it is imperative to combine the two methods, SMG provides two options. One is a simple combination of the data with a "recalibration" of unit level scores and a ...