Listening and Loyalty
Sean O’Driscoll, general manager of community support and MVP for Microsoft, has a helpful blog called Community Group Therapy with a recent post about top takeaways from recent social media workshops he has been giving. Among his points are that “features are not user experiences,” that consensus is just a “nice to have” in terms of cross-functional participation, and that “‘participating in the conversation’ is hollow advice for a large” organization.
I found interesting O’Driscoll’s differentiation between listening systems (feedback + organizational understanding + responsive action + communication about that action back to the feedback giver=listening) versus hearing systems (feedback + responsive action, no communication to original feedback giver).
It immediately reminded me of a recent brand advocacy study by ExpoTV that found “55% of consumers want an ongoing dialogue with brands.” The firm concluded that “the willingness of a company to engage with consumers directly impacts loyalty and can even lead to increased purchase intent. In fact, 89% of respondents would feel more loyal to brands that invited them to participate in a feedback group, and 92% of those who have a positive experience communicating with a brand will recommend purchasing a product from that brand to someone they know.”
Also interesting is that almost 50% of respondents “expressed a desire to share their ideas on new products and services” and to communicate about brand efforts to “improve existing products and share positive experiences.”
Researchers said that news is especially encouraging for smaller, perhaps newer brands or brands entering new areas because consumers were just as keen to communicate with less-familiar brand.
I wondered, not for the first time, if associations are as good at dialoguing with and listening to customers and members as many seem to assume. I’m talking about metrics beyond the speed with which an individual receives a response back from a staffer, beyond the murky satisfaction ratings of members, who rarely are asked to judge feedback quality in specific. Have we set up processes and cultural norms to ensure good listening or just good hearing? And do staffers and leaders understand the importance of that difference to the potential levels of loyalty within our members?
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Comments
Nice post. It's absolutely crucial for associations interested in the potential of social media for reaching their members and potential members to realize that listening (and hearing!) take substantial staff commitment and once you are in, you have to stay in. This is not something an organization can pay lip service to. The tools may be free (to some extent), but the culture change required is time-intensive!
Posted by: Maddie Grant | July 7, 2008 10:17 AM
thanks for the reference and link to the brand advocacy study, some useful nuggets for sure! Regarding associations, I don't know other than my own experiences which generally aren't very favorable of associations on this score, but generally I think that is more a by-product of most associations being volunteer led vs professionally managed - therefore as they scale their intent to listen does not keep up with the demands their volunteers have for other activities.
sean
Posted by: sean | July 7, 2008 9:39 PM
Thanks for referencing the ExpoTV research. We are closely engaging with our community to learn more about their desire to interact with brands. As we learn more we'll be sure to share.
Dave Rubinstein, VP ExpoTV
Posted by: Dave Rubinstein | July 8, 2008 11:13 AM
This is a great point to make. While part of me wants to assert that we associations are very different because we represent a constituency rather than a product line, I have never been sure how well we listen to the cross section of our constituency.
How many individual members feel as if they have 'an ongong dialogue with the brand'? Perhaps more importantly, how many younger entrants to the field and long-timer non-members feel that way?
In surveys we find that a good organization might have 10% engaged in leadership type activity (which is both good, and generally biased given the nature of people who tend to be more likely to respond to surveys) but what about the other 90%?
So often in my past lives (on association staff) I would find that we'd learn the minutiae of our board members' preferences and analyze their utterances like diserning the true preferences of our Founding Fathers, but we're rarely solicit the masses for similar sentiments. It's efficient in the short term but not effective: some of those people we fail to listen to become leaders, and vastly more never try to become leaders because they never get a taste for how it feels to really contribute or be listened to, or because they've just never thought about it.
Also, many individuals hold a single membership and they become 'trained' on how to behave and how to participate by that association's system--that can be unfortunate if that association unwittingly has a system that doesn't encourage or do much with active participation.
Posted by: Kevin Whorton | July 18, 2008 9:09 AM