Are Customer Satisfaction Surveys Relevant in a Social Media World?
Sam Lowder
Commercial Site Selection, Real Estate Investment Analysis, Retail Research Analyst, Competitive Market Analysis, Strategic Planning
One of the questions we sometimes hear from companies that are considering launching a survey program is this:
“Do I really need to do demographic surveys with my customers? Can’t I just use social media to gauge how they feel about my product or service?”
While we understand the logic, and there’s no doubt that social media cannot be ignored, there are many limitations to relying solely on social media as a research tool. Here are a few things to consider:
Customers are most likely to share their best and worst experiences.
In our experience, consumers are most likely to share their best experiences (with friends, family and in reviews) and their worst experiences (with the same audiences). Fewer people, however, share the details of their fair or mediocre experiences. It’s more likely that these consumers will say nothing at all. This silence from an important section of your customer base can skew your perception of the customer experience, and may cause you to make poor decisions based on your gut feel vs. the facts.
Social media doesn’t measure trends.
Unlike a well-designed customer satisfaction survey program, social media does not collect valuable data that you can use to track trends and patterns among your audience. You may hear candidly from your customers about their experiences, and there is certainly value in that. But you are less likely to receive detailed, measurable information that you can use to identify trends and make fact-based decisions about your business.
There is much more to data analytics than measuring customer satisfaction.
Social media is a great way to get a feel for your reputation and learn what your customers are saying about you—and an even better way for them to communicate with you directly. However, customers posting about their satisfaction/dissatisfaction and overall experience is only so helpful. Facebook and Yelp do not capture other information that’s important to evaluate when making marketing and operational decisions. You need to understand your customers’ behaviors, demographics, buying trends, lifestyles, and much more.
Social media is not the same as market research.
The fact is that market research is much more in-depth. A quality market research program can help you gather intelligent feedback about your customers. Through predictive modeling, business intelligence, and high-powered analytics, you can gain detailed insight into your business and develop effective strategies to expand or improve it.
Social media is a valuable tool and one you should absolutely utilize to communicate with your customers. Social media can help you get to know your target customers and prospective customers, find new customers, get quick feedback, and much more. Valuable? Yes! But is it a replacement to a carefully built survey program? Definitely not.
Surveys are a key component of an effective market research plan, but how do you get started? How do you design a survey/customer satisfaction survey? And how do you do it right?