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The Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt of Business Decisions

Decision making is the process of sufficiently reducing uncertainty and doubt about alternatives to allow a reasonable choice to be made from among them.  Do you take measures or have programs in place to reduce uncertainty in your business decisions?  How confident are you that the decisions you’re making and the priorities you’re setting in your business are serving the needs wants and desires of the customers you’re serving?   

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Every day in business, people are making decisions and setting priorities. Whether you're in sales determining how to cross-sell and upsell to your installed base, in product management determining what features you should incorporate into your next product rev, in marketing determining what message you should send to your market, or in event planning determining what you should do with your next event, missing the mark can be costly.  Bad decisions can result in wasting vital resources by focusing on the wrong things, losing time or footing in a market, or even negatively impacting customer retention and acquisition.  And if you're in a high volume business where you serve millions of customers, a 1% improvement to the bottom line is a huge win.  Conversely, a 1% mistake is a huge hit.

The biggest contributing factors to making uninformed decisions are two things—cost and time pressures.   Budgets and schedules typically don’t allow organizations to do much of anything that involves collecting intelligence from their own customer base to ensure that the decisions they are making for products, services and messaging are in alignment with their customer’s wants, needs, and desires.  If you're in a product facing role or in some way charged with product responsibility, I'm sure you can relate to what I'm saying. Decisions are typically made in a box (conference room), with little to no customer feedback and/or involvement, and by gut-- the gut of the person in charge.   Teams are rarely rewarded by how ‘right’ their product is for the market, but rather how close they come to making the scheduled release date.  Sadly we get what we deserve—unhappy and many times confused customers who cost the company money by draining customer service resources and by spreading negative word-of-mouth throughout the market.  And the company’s response is typically to spend more of its' valuable time and resources (they don't have to spare) to fix the mistakes in some sort of a Machiavellian fire-drill.  ‘Now’ they know what the customer wants-- because customer service tells them-- in hindsight.  Sound familiar?  Isn’t it amazing how companies have plenty of time and money to fix something after-the-fact, but never enough time and money to do it right in the first place?  

Personally, I prefer to hedge risk—to reduce uncertainty by knowing what my customers actually want and what is most important to them, 'before' I commit the resources.  I’ve lived it—I’ve been there.  I’ve felt the joy of great decisions and the pain and cost associated with bad decisions—and I’ve felt the fear, uncertainty, and doubt when not being armed with enough information to make a confident, informed decision.  But I've always hated when put in the position to ‘hope for the best, but plan for the worst.'

beRelevant was designed by people who have lived the problem-- people who understand the problem.  With this platform you can quickly and effectively address a large audience via email or in social networks, invite them into a dynamic, collaborative survey to answer a few simple questions, and then capture and simultaneously prioritize the full range of that audience's comments, opinions, needs, and wants-- a list of prioritized insights in the very own words of the participants. In a matter of a few days you can walk away with information, directly from your customers-- information that can be used to make decisions with a greater degree of confidence.

Tap the Real Power of Crowds

In computer architectures, massive parallel processing (MPP) is a familiar term that refers to a computer system with hundreds or even thousands of independent arithmetic units or even entire microprocessors that run in parallel. According to physicist Ranjit Pati of Michigan Tech, “Modern computers are quite fast, capable of executing trillions of instructions a second, but they can’t match the intelligent performance of our brain. Our neurons only fire about a thousand times per second. But I can see you, recognize you, talk with you, and hear someone walking by in the hallway almost instantaneously, a Herculean task for even the fastest computer.” 

According to Pati, nothing (yet) can replace the power of the human brain.  But what if you could create a massive parallel processing array of people?  What if you could devise a way to use technology to facilitate and tap the power of crowds in a way that would capture and prioritize the full range of comments, opinions, and needs/wants of that audience from a single, short interaction?  This is the basis of beRelevant. 

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beRelevant was designed to tap the power of large (hundreds or thousands) crowds and extract on-topic knowledge from a dynamic survey that intelligently re-distributes people’s input from participant to participant such that every idea, comment, and insight generated gets equal airtime and consideration.  In as little as 2-3 days you can be handed the collective verbatim priorities of a crowd.  

If you want to make informed, relevant decisions-- if you want your product, brand, events, membership, operational processes, and anything else to absolutely soar-- give beRelevant a spin. 

What Exactly is beRelevant?

Whether your audience is customers, employees, managers, distributors, stakeholders, members, or any other group, you need to know what they think, what they feel, what they’re saying, and how you can make decisions to stay in touch and in tune with their needs and wants.

Why?  Because relevance is what it's all about.  The more relevant your products, services, and events are to your target audience, the more your target audience will consume your products and tell others about them.  The more relevant your messaging is for your target audience, the more it will resonate with them.  beRelevant gives you the ability to ask a large group of people a question, and hear what they are saying, how many people are saying it, and how important it is to them. beRelevant gives you the ability to understand that group's prioritized responses from the question(s) you ask.

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beRelevant is a SaaS-model customer-sourcing platform based on beRelevant’s patent-pending qual-to-quant dynamic survey method (something we call conversations)-- and the only solution in the market that gathers and simultaneously prioritizes open-ended comments.  This gives companies, groups, and organizations the ability to hear the verbatim collective priorities of large audiences. 

  • How do you cross-sell and upsell to your installed base? (Sales)
  • What are the top product features liked/disliked by customers, and  top suggestions for improvement? (Product Management)
  • Who are our biggest influencers? What are the top drivers of positive and negative word of mouth of my company, product or service? (Marketing)
  • How do we make our market messaging resonate with our prospects and customers? (Positioning/Messaging)
  • What are the top ideas that will help in improving operational efficiency, employee satisfaction? (Human Resources)
  • What should we do to make our next event more relevant to the attendees? (Event Management)
  • What do customers (and non-customers) really think about the value of my brand? (Brand Image)
  • How do they see my latest advertising, and what are the high and low points? (Ad Testing)

Some of the key features of the beRelevant platform include:

  • Turns qualitative data into quantitative data, in real time
  • Delivers prioritized verbatims – not interpreted results
  • Engages large audiences
  • Identifies your biggest influencers and what they’re saying, as well as those sub-groups that get “lost in the noise” too often
  • Quickly and cost-effectively reveals audience’s focused insights
  • Gives you the ability to view results at a macro priority level, or drill down to individual high-value relevant comments
  • Can launch much faster than qual or quant exercises
  • Allows follow-up with your audience to engage about important issues
  • Removes bias from real-time reporting of “highlights”

If you want to be successful, you have to beRelevant!

  Interested?  Email us and set up a demo today!

Social Media Monitoring for Market Research -- 6 Warnings

We all understand that market research is an important component of business strategy.  Market research is systematic and rigorous.  It provides us with a hedge against risk when we’re crafting strategy to make those all important customer and market affecting decisions.  But lately (and increasingly so) I’ve been hearing chatter in the market suggesting that market research can be done cheaper, faster and better using Social Media Monitoring.  “Don’t ask, just listen.”  Seriously? Hold the boat!  Stop the train! Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater just yet.  Social media represents another customer data point you need to take into consideration for your research efforts, but heed my 6 warnings before you take the proverbial plunge.
 
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Warning 1:  The Price on the Box Does Not Reflect the Actual Cost
On the data gathering side, social monitoring systems use what are in effect search engines that scour the web, matching search strings you put into the system.  What you receive back is a whole load of off-topic conversations-- unstructured data from a whole bunch of random people.  And from all of those raw unstructured comments, 30% or more of it will be irrelevant data you never asked for.  At the end of the day you still have to invest ‘people-time’ to sort out the data, analyze it and interpret everything.  Market researchers usually don’t have the staff to do the necessary analysis both of overall content and sentiment that’s aggregated by listening platforms.
 
Warning 2:  If You Want Something, You Need To Ask For It
We were all taught in school at a very young age, if you want something, you need to ask for it. Don’t expect anyone to hand you anything.  Does a successful sales person simply sit around waiting for the phone to ring?  Do you really think your insights and strategy are simply going to come and kick you in the derriere?  What part of drive do you not understand?  Just because you now have a way to gain additional insights (by listening on social channels) does not mean that you should abandon the proactive engagement of your customers in market research studies. In order to drive strategy you have to be proactive-- you have to go after it—you have to ASK.  And, by asking the customer you not only show them that you care but you also take the guess work out of planning.
 
Warning 3:  Garbage In, Garbage Out
To get the best results possible from market research it is vital to select a sample of the population that is truly representative of the customer base.  In social media the source of the information is of unknown origin, so how can you trust that the results are in any way truly representative of your customer base?  Questionable or unknown sources generate results without a high degree of certainty or confidence.  In addition, the data being gathered in social media monitoring systems is only as good as the topics or words you are monitoring.  You create the topic and tell the system to go look for it.  It doesn’t mean that the crawlers will find conversations that are necessarily on topic, but rather comments that just happen to have the keyword(s) or phrase(s) you are searching for.  If you don’t know how to look for the right things, your assumptions are highly likely to be based on flawed data.  There’s also the question of just how good the data collectors are.  I use a monitoring tool on a daily basis called Google Alerts.  The principle is the same as social monitoring tools—a search algorithm and corresponding engine.  Put in a keyword and Google will deliver back social media it matches your keyword to.  And almost daily I get one or more stale links—even repeats and clones.  If Google can’t create a reliable simplistic monitoring tool, then just how reliable are these social media monitoring crawlers?   And finally, there’s just a lot of garbage data floating around in social networks—propaganda, spam, advertising, sarcasm, and self-serving regurgitation of other people’s ideas and posts.  The adage hold true… garbage in, garbage out.
 
Warning 4:  Some Voices May be Louder than They Appear
I’m sure by now you already know the 90-9-1 rule (audience- editors-creators).  Dominant voices are a real problem when you’re trying to create strategy.  Moderators go to great lengths in customer focus groups to control or even silence dominant voices in order to not sway opinion or emotion.  Some people are just very passionate and some simply like all the exposure, but regardless dominant voices tend to create more volume. In social media the fear is that louder folks get heard more.  And since you’re only getting the voice of 1% of the people to begin with, I don’t understand how this can possibly give you a representative view of your customer base.
 
Warning 5:  Computers Are Not People
In social media monitoring, the intelligence is in the machine—we’re being led to believe that magically some algorithm can all of a sudden accurately pull my sentiment from my words.  Don’t forget that this technology is fairly limited—based on keyword matching, like a search engine.  And once it crawls all of those sites and picks up all of that data, it then supposedly has the ability to analyze themes and influence ranking and sentiment. People think as they do because of innate genetic endowment, shaped in development by contact and culture.  And admittedly the tools for performing this have improved over time.  But let’s face it, no algorithm is ever going to be highly accurate at interpreting things that are innately human (sentiment, influence, desire, preference, emotion, etc.) from random comments in social media.  That process will require people and time.
 
Warning 6:  Let the Games Begin!
How real is the information you’re gathering?  Can you trust it?  Disinformation campaigns have been used throughout time to trick enemies into believing a lie or into not knowing what information is real.  Information is power, but controlling information is more power.  There is one rule that the Internet has made painfully clear:  “If somebody can, somebody will.” Early this year someone posted a video of a commentator on the OneWest Bank transaction with FDIC to acquire assets of IndyMac. The video was so compelling, and distributed so widely, that on Feb. 12 of this year, FDIC was forced to actually issue a press release refuting the “facts” stated in the video and providing its own fact sheet. Now that people are aware that companies are monitoring social channels, it’s just a matter of time before someone uses disinformation on a very large scale that will present an even bigger challenge for data validity.
 
In Summary…
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying Social Media Monitoring isn’t important.  Social Media Monitoring can be a useful addition to your Market Research efforts.  And social media monitoring shines in reactive situations when used as an early warning system.  Customer service can effectively use Social Monitoring to diffuse negative sentiment before it boils over, which might just generate positive sentiment from lurkers and positive word-of-mouth from influencers.  And it’s a great way for marketers and market researches to understand real life reactions from people when companies make a change or release something new into the market. There’s no denying that everything is moving faster, and everyone is demanding far more from less.  And I doubt many will argue when I say that traditional market research needs to and will evolve and incorporate additional approaches and methods to accommodate ever changing markets and demands.  If you honestly believe you can toss out traditional market research for social media monitoring, then I’ve got a bridge I’d like to sell you.  Know the limitations and set your expectations accordingly, and realize that there simply are no silver bullets.

Yikes! Drinking From the Information Firehose

Yesterday we took a look back at the old days when we didn't have enough information to make good business decisions. Now it is not that we don't have enough information. To the contrary, we have so much information coming to us via email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that it overwhelms our ability read it and respond. Since consumers do most of the talking, they now hold much of the control over what others hear about our company. Outbound advertising and promotions still have a place in your marketing mix, but conversations have taken a much larger roll.

Marketing -- A Nostalgic Look Back

The marketing department has changed dramatically over the last 10 years or so. Before the Internet and social media, we never felt like we had enough customer information to make informed decisions. Getting the right information was expensive and time consuming. And it always seems like decisions need to be made right now – not 60 days from now. Small businesses have almost always been closer to their customers and seem to make decisions qualitatively based on that relationship – the cost of traditional market research is out of reach for many of them anyway. However, even very small B2C companies have trouble keeping up an ongoing conversation with their customers. Now it is not that we don't have enough information. To the contrary, we have so much information coming to us via email, Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn that it overwhelms our ability read it and respond. Since consumers do most of the talking, they now hold much of the control over what others hear about our company. Outbound advertising and promotions still have a place in your marketing mix, but conversations have taken a much larger roll. More about that and some solutions tomorrow. BY3ZCBR7U46E

Why Relevance Matters

Relevance is the holy grail for sales and marketing success. Relevance retains existing customers and wins new ones. Relevance is at the very core of your customers’ decision to purchase. Relevance closes the deal. In this day and age, where information flows at the speed of light, buyers are more informed and have more options than ever before. The sheer explosion of social networking and social media has only exacerbated the problem by making information even more pervasive and connecting people in ways never before imagined. As a result, customer retention has become a major challenge. Customer retention is vital to the business because:
  1. On average, it costs 5 times as much to acquire a new customer that it does to keep an existing one.
  2. Customers, who have bought from you before, are much more likely to buy from you again. In fact, 80% of sales generally come from 20% of customers.
Companies with stalled or declining sales are those whose products or services are out of alignment with their customer’s needs, priorities, and preferences. Take for example Tropicana orange juice, who last year decided it was time to change their packaging, without involving their customers in the decision.

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After the dust settled unit sales of Tropicana orange juice dropped 20%, while dollar sales decreased 19%, or roughly $33 million, to $137 million. Tropicana quickly reverted back to their old packaging. Companies finding success in the market today are focused on strengthening customer-to-product relevance by fully understanding the customer’s needs first, and then demonstrating their commitment to the customer by building an offering that meets every aspect of the customer’s needs.  Establishing relevance energizes your influencers, activates positive word of mouth, strengthens loyalty, and increases customer retention and acquisition.