Customer research trends for 2010

Trendwatching isn’t just for designers and marketing and design professionals. Market researchers want to know what’s hot in the world of measuring customer experience as much as everyone else!

I’ve pulled together some of the new and trending ways that customers provide information and organizations collect it.

1. Tracking Social Media Conversations. Focus groups used to be the only way to get that special “voice and body language” of the customer without all the cost and logistics involved. Social media applications provide a virtual “room” where the conversation is all about your company or product. There are firms that specialize in this specialized kind of market research.
2. Real time reviews. The growth of sites like YELP have emboldened customers to tell the world about what they love and what they don’t love about their latest customer experiences. Organizations should take the opportunity to have their own space or presence online where customers can connect directly with employees and give their feedback. Respond to customer feedback and build your brand.
3. Customers will want multiple levels and platforms for feedback. In addition to your regular online surveys, be sure to provide a space where customers can offer their ideas. IdeaScale is a great way to get customers involved in the product improvement and development process. Customers who are involved in contributing their ideas are loyal customers and enthusiastic referrers.
4. Sharing information across company departments. There are vendors and technologies that now allow you to track customer feedback across sources such as e-mails, call centers, blogs and comments online. Check out ResponseTek, for example. They provide an entire suite of services that will help you route important customer feedback to the appropriate department manager BEFORE they’ve left you for a competitor.
5. Customer feedback is everyone’s job. An overarching trend is to have employees from across the organization carry social media accounts and interact with customers as they “chat” about your company, product or service. Instead of having all the feedback run through one department, companies will find it necessary to create an infrastructure that allows the information to be collected, processed, reported and acted upon by key managers in each department.
6. Moving away from score-keeping to experience improvement.Companies are spending less time obsessing about tracking scores and the movement of the scores on surveys and caring more about the open-ended responses that customers provide. In other words, a score of 7 out of 10 doesn’t tell you what to do to improve an experience. But 100 requests for 24/7 online customer support via chat is feedback you can do something about