Crowdsourcing for Customer Satisfaction

Your business is already established. You have a solid following, and a successful product. You’re ready to grow, but unsure of the direction. It’s time to let the crowd step in. Utilizing crowdsourcing is an inexpensive yet effective way of guiding growth. It is also an excellent way to bolster customer relations. Asking for your customers’ input shows that you value their opinion, and following through shows your commitment.

Who knows your brand better than your customers? Through crowdsourcing, you can establish a forum for the crowd to directly share their thoughts on your product with you. Creating this forum gives you the chance to guide the conversation, and keep it relevant. Social media and customer support lines can only provide the information that customers choose to share with you. Through crowdsourcing you can put forward the questions that you want answered. Your crowd can provide you with ideas for new products, bring to light problems with current products, and weigh in on potential products before you sink your resources into production. When you put out products that customers have already pre-approved, or even specially requested, it serves as a reward for the crowd’s efforts. This shows them just how in-tune you are to innovation, crowdsourcing, and the happiness of your customers.

Participating in the process through crowdsourcing improves customer satisfaction. Showing customers that you value their opinions will make them more dedicated to your brand. When customers see the results of the crowdsourced conversation come to life, they’ll be more eager to share their input in the future. Use your crowdsourcing campaign as a way to educate the public about your brand. Even impossible idea suggestions can be an opportunity for transparency, and strengthening your relationship with customers. Not only will this make them more likely to add more to the discussion within your crowdsourcing community, but out in the real world, too. And when they spread the word about your brand, they’ll do so as educated, satisfied participants.

• More on the importance of Customer Service.

Importance of Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is a marketing term that measures how products or services supplied by a company meet or surpass a customer’s expectation.

Customer satisfaction is important because it provides marketers and business owners with a metric that they can use to manage and improve their businesses.

In a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing managers, 71 percent responded that they found a customer satisfaction metric very useful in managing and monitoring their businesses.

Here are the top six reasons why customer satisfaction is so important:

• It’s a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty
• It’s a point of differentiation
• It reduces customer churn
• It increases customer lifetime value
• It reduces negative word of mouth
• It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones

1. It’s a leading indicator of consumer repurchase intentions and loyalty

Customer satisfaction is the best indicator of how likely a customer will make a purchase in the future. Asking customers to rate their satisfaction on a scale of 1-10 is a good way to see if they will become repeat customers or even advocates.

Any customers that give you a rating of 7 and above, can be considered satisfied, and you can safely expect them to come back and make repeat purchases. Customers who give you a rating of 9 or 10 are your potential customer advocates who you can leverage to become evangelists for your company.

Scores of 6 and below are warning signs that a customer is unhappy and at risk of leaving. These customers need to be put on a customer watch list and followed up so you can determine why their satisfaction is low.

See how satisfaction provides so much insight into your customers?

That’s why it’s one of the leading metrics businesses use to measure consumer repurchase and customer loyalty.

2. It’s a point of differentiation

In a competitive marketplace where businesses compete for customers; customer satisfaction is seen as a key differentiator. Businesses who succeed in these cut-throat environments are the ones that make customer satisfaction a key element of their business strategy.

Picture two businesses that offer the exact same product. What will make you choose one over the other?

If you had a recommendation for one business would that sway your opinion? Probably. So how does that recommendation originally start? More than likely it’s on the back of a good customer experience. Companies who offer amazing customer experiences create environments where satisfaction is high and customer advocates are plenty.

This is an example of where customer satisfaction goes full circle. Not only can customer satisfaction help you keep a finger on the pulse of your existing customers, it can also act as a point of differentiation for new customers.

3. It reduces customer churn

An satisfaction report found that price is not the main reason for customer churn; it is actually due to the overall poor quality of customer service.

Customer satisfaction is the metric you can use to reduce customer churn. By measuring and tracking customer satisfaction you can put new processes in place to increase the overall quality of your customer service.

I recommend you put an emphasis on exceeding customer expectations and ‘wowing’ customers at every opportunity. Do that for six months, than measure customer satisfaction again. See whether your new initiatives have had a positive or negative impact on satisfaction.

4. It increases customer lifetime value

A study by found that a ‘totally satisfied customer’ contributes 2.6 times more revenue than a ‘somewhat satisfied customer’. Furthermore, a ‘totally satisfied customer’ contributes 14 times more revenue than a ‘somewhat dissatisfied customer’.

Satisfaction plays a significant role in how much revenue a customer generates for your business.

Successful businesses understand the importance of customer lifetime value (CLV). If you increase CLV, you increase the returns on your marketing dollar.

For example, you might have a cost per acquisition of $500 dollars and a CLV of $750. That’s a 50% ROI from the marketing efforts. Now imagine if CLV was $1,000. That’s a 100% ROI!

Customer lifetime value is a beneficiary of high customer satisfaction and good customer retention. What are you doing to keep customers coming back and spending more?

5. It reduces negative word of mouth

McKinsey found that an unhappy customer tells between 9-15 people about their experience. In fact, 13% of unhappy customers tell over 20 people about their experience.

That’s a lot of negative word of mouth.

How much will that affect your business and its reputation in your industry?

Customer satisfaction is tightly linked to revenue and repeat purchases. What often gets forgotten is how customer satisfaction negatively impacts your business. It’s one thing to lose a customer because they were unhappy. It’s another thing completely to lose 20 customers because of some bad word of mouth.

To eliminate bad word of mouth you need to measure customer satisfaction on an ongoing basis. Tracking changes in satisfaction will help you identify if customers are actually happy with your product or service.

6. It’s cheaper to retain customers than acquire new ones

This is probably the most publicized customer satisfaction statistic out there. It costs six to seven times more to acquire new customers than it does to retain existing customers.

If that stat does not strike accord with you then there’s not much else I can do to demonstrate why customer satisfaction is important.

Customers cost a lot of money to acquire. You and your marketing team spend thousands of dollars getting the attention of prospects, nurturing them into leads and closing them into sales.

Why is it that you then spend little or no money on customer retention?

Imagine if you allocated one sixth of your marketing budget towards customer retention. How do you think that will help you with improving customer satisfaction and retaining customers?

Here are some customer retention strategies to get you thinking:

• Use blogs to educate customers
• Use email to send special promotions
• Use customer satisfaction surveys to listen
• Delight customers by offering personalized experiences

-More on the importance of Customer Service.

EARN MONEY WITHOUT LEAVING YOUR HOME.

The summer stretches out before us, dear readers, and if you’re like me you face the delicate problem of being somewhere between “poor” and “bored”. Like most things, crowdsourcing is the answer. To help ease your summer slump, and get a little extra cash in your pocket, I present the top 5 ways crowdsourcing can keep you busy and (relatively) wealthy this summer. I’ve arranged these in order of difficulty, from easy to hard; the suggestions at the top of the list could be accomplished by nearly anyone, but the further down you go, the more drive you’ll need to succeed.

5. Micro Labor

In a nutshell, virtual sweatshops, minus the sweating because you can work from home doing bite-sized bits of work that can typically be completed in less than a minute for anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars. You won’t get rich doing just a couple, but dedicating a few hours a day to it can provide a significant boost to your pay.

4. Favors

In a nutshell, virtual sweatshops, minus the sweating because you can work from home doing bite-sized bits of work that can typically be completed in less than a minute for anywhere from a few cents to a few dollars. You won’t get rich doing just a couple, but dedicating a few hours a day to it can provide a significant boost to your pay.

Similar to micro labor, except these require a modicum of skill. The idea is that the tasks are less mindless and the pay is a little better, but you may have to work a little harder to find a task that suits you. The idea is to complete tasks that are easy for you, but too much hassle for whoever posted them. Typically, they require passing knowledge in basic skills like writing, web searches, or design. 

3. Contests

If you’ve really got a hand on creativity, and you’re okay with the concept of spec work and non-guaranteed pay, you can clean up with design contests. Businesses everywhere are turning to services to crowdsource logos, marketing art, commercials, and more. If you’re an artistic prodigy, winning even one of these contests can leave you sitting pretty with several thousand dollars. Of course, even if you don’t win, they’re a great opportunity to hone your skills and meet other artists. 

2. Crowdsourced Job Platforms

Maybe all the uncertainty isn’t for you, and you just want a real-ass job? Crowdsourcing’s got you covered there too. There are several sites that provide open-call job applications, or feature matching software to find suitable work. The variety here is both the strength and the weakness of the platform; you’ll have to pore through a great number of job applications, some of them bogus, before you find a good one. But hey, that’s… pretty much like the real world. At least you don’t have to kill trees printing out resumés.

1. Become an Entrepreneur

For the truly driven! The best thing crowdsourcing does is connect people who have needs to the people who can fulfill them. To this end, you have everything you need to start your new business; from finding funding to locating business partners to crowdsourcing your own market research, the ‘Net has your back. If you’ve got a killer idea, and can use a computer, you can start a business. How’s that for a “how I spent my summer” story?

• Read how crowdsourcing can help enrich data here.
• Check out how you can earn money at home here.

DATA MANAGEMENT

Data management is an essential area of responsible research. Before starting a new research project, the principal investigators and the research teams should address issues related to data management. By creating a plan for managing your data at the beginning of the project, you save time and effort later on. Also, you are assured that the data you produce will be preserved in a clear, useable format.

By managing your data you will:

• Meet funding agency requirements
• Protect federal investment in research and development
• Expedite the scientific process; saving time and resources in the long run
• Use or re-use the value, the uniqueness, and the importance of data
• Ensure that research data and records are accurate, complete, authentic and reliable
• Ensure research integrity and replication
• Increase research efficiency
• Enhance data security and minimize the risk of data loss
• Prevent duplication of effort by enabling others to use your data
• Comply with practices conducted in industry and commerce

Research data are an important and expensive output of the scholarly research process, across all disciplines. They are an essential part of the evidence necessary to evaluate research results, and to reconstruct the events and processes leading to them. Their value increases as they are aggregated into collections and as they become more available for re-use to address new and challenging research questions. Without proper organization, this value is greatly diminished.

Read what Data Enrichment can do for you here.

Data

I look at digital data all day and often take for granted how good I’ve got it. When running an analysis on the impact of a marketing campaign or an A/B test, there are hundreds of thousands of data points at my fingertips just waiting for me to extract meaning and take action.

The beauty of digital analytics is that you can actually look at how data is collected in real time.

Think about that for a second: if you’re doing analysis within a data warehouse you may have no idea, or visibility, into where that data is actually coming from or how it is collected. Digital analytics is different – I can actually go to a site, pull up a packet sniffer and watch as information is collected and sent off to tools we use every day like Google Analytics, Adobe’s Marketing Cloud or DoubleClick.

I firmly believe that having a fundamental understanding of how your data is collected will make you a better analyst – one of Cardinal Path’s core beliefs is “To understand data, you must engage in the world” and this is a perfect example of that coming to life. Problem is, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes to make the reports you see in the tools we use every day possible. I’m going to break it all down and hopefully shine a light on how it all works.

A note before we begin, I’m simplifying a lot below. The way Facebook collects data is different from Google Analytics which is different from Adobe but all of these tools are still relying on a similar methodology.

LET’S START WITH THE BROWSER

When you type a URL into your address bar your browser requests that page from a web server. Once the page is returned your browser then begins to execute the code that lives on the page (press crtl+u right now to check this page’s code out). The page’s HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc. all start to interact with each other and before you know it you’re looking at a fully rendered page. As your browser loads a page it is making hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of requests for information from web servers: things like images, fonts, style sheets and videos all need to be loaded onto the screen.

Tagging a website

Digital data collection is often referred to as tagging. The most common form of tagging comes through the use of JavaScript to collect information about the page or actions taken on the page and then send that to a third party tool that processes that data and make it ready for analysis. As a page loads the JavaScript placed on the page will grab information from the page, the user, their cookies, etc. and package that all together and send it over to a data collection server. This process is called “firing a tag” or “sending a web beacon.”

Data can be collected from multiple sources, the most common places we grab data from are:

• The HTTP headers – for things like browser information, referrer information, etc.
• On page code – often times we collect data from the page itself, things like a friendly name for the page, the section it belongs to on the site, etc.
• Cookies – see below
• When I debug tags on a website I rarely use the network panel though, there’s too much work involved. There are a few great tools that I like to use to help me see these requests quickly – two of my favorites are WASP and ObservePoint.

  COOKIES LET US TRACK ACROSS PAGES

  Cookies are text files that lives within your browser. Often times they contain long alphanumeric strings that represent a visitor ID. The web is often referred to as a “stateless” place – meaning that the server you’re requesting information from doesn’t know anything about you before or after that request is made. What I mean by that is when you request a page to be loaded in your browser the web server will send you all the information to load that page, but it won’t know what you’re doing on that page or even if you’ve navigated away (unless we explicitly tell it so).
  Cookies are the bridge across pages as well as sessions. They allow us to tell a web server that the same browser that requested page A also requested page B. This is useful for keeping you logged into a website, or storing items within a shopping cart. Cookies also allow analytics tools to track what a visitor is doing across pages and sessions. You can view your own cookies in Chrome quite easily, just go here: chrome://settings/cookies and you can see their contents as well as expiration dates and what domains they’ve been set on.

  FIRST VS. THIRD PARTY COOKIES

  As mentioned above, all cookies are just text files that can be written and read by a web server or the code being executed on a website. When a cookie is written to your browser it is assigned a domain that can read the cookie. This is where we get the term first party and third party cookies from.
  A first party cookie is written to the domain that you’re currently on, so in the case of www.cardinalpath.com first party cookies would be written to the domain of cardinalpath.com. A third party cookie is written to a domain different than the one you are currently on.
• The domain of the cookie becomes important because it determines who can read the contents of the cookie. In the case of CNN, any cookies written to the domain of CNN.com are considered to be first party cookies – because the cookie domain matches the domain of the website the user is on. Where as a cookie written to advertising.com is considered a third party cookie because that domain is different from the current site the user is on. Third party cookies are useful to advertisers because their content can be read across domains, meaning whenever advertising.com code is loaded on any other website the user visits that code can read the value of that cookie.
  It’s important to note that cookies cannot be read across domains, meaning code from CNN.com cannot read the values of the advertising.com cookies and the advartising.com cookies can’t read the CNN.com ones.

  PRIVACY BECOMES CRITICAL

  That brings us to probably the most important topic of digital data collection – privacy.  As you can imagine, through the use of JavaScript and cookies a lot of information can be collected about a user as they browse the web. The goal of collecting this data is two fold: first is to make websites easier to use. Through deep analysis we can identify patterns of user behavior on a website to find the pages that work well and those that are giving people trouble. And then we can use this data to optimize those paths/pages to fix their problems.
  The second goal here is to make advertising more effective. Using data to find what works, and does not, in paid search ads, banners, etc. and also using that data to serve more relevant, targeted ads.
  All that said, privacy should be at the center of any data collection strategy. When doing analysis within tools like Google Analytics or Adobe Analytics the data is displayed in aggregate – because we’re looking for patterns over a large set of users and often not concerned about what an individual is doing on the site.
  Additionally, we as an industry must strive to never collect and Personally Identifiable Information (PII). Things like email addresses, Twitter handles, etc. all should never be collected because they have the ability to reveal something personal about what should be an anonymous web user. Tools like Google Analytics have very strict PII policies that can result in the deletion of data and/or the deactivation of an account and trust me when I say this, they will delete your data if they find PII.
• Virtual Internship