Serious question: is the customer survey dead?  Outside of linear data collection, I argue that there’s more insight to be gained from what customers say about you to others than what they say about you to you.

Collecting survey data is like counting the number of followers a business has on Facebook or Twitter. You’ll add more numbers to your pile of data but have you really learned anything?

As a basis for strategic planning, surveys are notoriously fallible because they can be easily skewed to dictate an outcome; surveys rarely include context or external situational factors that more accurately indicate the customer’s opinion and attitude.

To even attempt to glean some insights from customer surveys, marketers must consider the data collection method, visual layout,  respondent effort requested, question wording, question order, format, structure, behaviors to be measured, etc. Even with all that information, one must accept a margin of error based on the sample size, accuracy of data input, etc.

Influencing the Conversation

Marketers are waking up to the fact that they don’t control the online brand dialogue, which creates (or re-creates) the brand’s public perception and persona, so they’re forced to sway the conversation instead of controlling it. Influencing the overall message – or the voice of specific people within the conversation – requires more insight than that which surveys provide.

To have an impact on brand dialogue or brand sentiment among a business’ audience, marketers must use text analytics to understand the undertone of conversations and what’s truly driving them. Surveys may provide indications of current trends but that same data also prevents analysts from reading the trend currents.

Further, proper use of text analytics in social conversation monitoring provides better direction on how a business brand may insert itself into the online dialogue. Without real-time sentiment analysis, brand missteps are too common an occurrence as witnessed in the recent Starbucks Twitter debacle. Public relations firms and PR professionals using analytics tools must take a more active role in the marketing process by inserting the audience’s intent and sentiment into pre-campaign planning.

Conversation Analytics in Sales & Marketing

PR and marketing teams must begin to lean heavily on tools such as Mantis’ PulseAnalytics™ to build more convertible lead funnels.  Visualizing what is driving the sentiment and tone of conversations among prospects will enable businesses to better nurture those prospects in the sales funnel and increase sales conversion ratios. Further, the growing popularity of the Social CRM practice and software requires more than the collection of prospects’ social profiles; Social CRM methodologies must include textual and contextual analysis of the conversations among those being monitored to become an actionable sales and marketing tactic.

For marketing and customer-service professionals, segmenting and analyzing the conversations of existing customers provides true insights into the real customer experience and customer intent. Surveys may report the share of wallet received from a customer or their stated intent to re-purchase in the future; however, those results cannot be relied upon as accurate indications of a customer’s future action.  Sentiment analysis is a more accurate indication of a customer’s true satisfaction and loyalty.

Happy customers are not automatically brand advocates; loyal customers are not brand advocates by default. Customer advocates have an emotional connection created by their overall experiences with the brand, the product and the employees they’ve engaged with. Surveys may help identify those customer sub-sets but text analysis of their online conversations will aid marketing and customer-service teams to more effectively drive them from “satisfied customer” to “brand advocate”.

Be it for customer acquisition or customer development strategies, surveys have become dinosaurs in the marketing world.  Text analysis, not customer surveying should now be the standard operating procedure for customer insight, market research and product development,

Do you agree? Is the survey as a marketing analysis tool dead? Join the debate in the comments below.

Sam Fiorella
Feed Your Community, Not Your Ego