Measuring the Customer Experience: Word on the Street

In this brief series I will cover some of the metrics that have qualitatively and quantitatively been used by companies where I have worked. Let's start with the most basic one that many companies have used for many years, but never formally quantified.

Many companies have someone in the marketing department or have hired a service to provide the executives with daily or weekly clippings. Today many executives simply have a Google Alert set up with the name of their company and competitors. The goal of this activity was to get a sense of how often the company or its competitors were showing up in print. The executives rarely read these clippings, but evaluated the clippings based on heft (weight or volume). If the company was in the news then at least the name was in front of people.

The second generation of this exercise became more of an evaluation of the reason that the name was in the news. Some companies simply looked at whether the news was generally positive or negative. If Marketing was dinged for an abundance of negative articles then it was common for them to put a positive spin on almost every clipping. Some companies went so far as to create a scorecard that showed how many positive vs. neutral vs. negative hits belonged to the company and each competitor. However, in the end this really did not result in any action beyond a phone call or email to the head of Marketing.

Special services (news and mention aggregators like http://startpr.com) appeared on the scene a couple of years ago and started to provide even more detailed analytics. They take the process beyond passive receipt of Google Alerts and allow your company to start tracking every conversation that people all over the social web are having about your company. At Silver Hill Financial we became progressive enough to actually reach out to the people having these conversations and addressing service failures head-on. Our Customer Experience Management Team partnered with a couple of people from our PR Team to identify and act on the negative comments and threads. We also found it possible to track down blogs and postings that were using our company name to attract traffic, but who were not actually discussing our company or products. (Almost always those sites were filled with pay-per-click links to adult websites.) We were able to attract positive comments about our service recovery on nearly 70% of the pages where we had been drug through the mud and we were able to get every single bogus blog taken down that had our name posted somewhere in the text.

I am fortunate enough to be in a progressive company that wants to actively manage our online reputation. Whereas I had once been the recipient of the clippings (photocopies of articles about motor oil companies) that were never actioned or discussed, I am now able to leverage a very modern and robust metric that is actionable.