Using Mobile Phones to Capture Customer Experiences

How well do you know your customers?

We're guessing not as well as you would like to ... and not as well as you'll need to in the future.

Understanding customers has never been more important as empowered, fickle consumers take less notice of your marketing campaigns, listening instead to the experience of other customers, online and offline, and doing their own research. Surveys are useful for obtaining quick feedback from a large number of customers but may lack the depth we need. Ethnographic programs such as Procter & Gamble's "Living It," which sends managers to live with a family for a time, can be invaluable, but they are not always practical, the effects are difficult to quantify, and the act of observing customers in such close proximity influences them significantly.

So what can you do?

Imagine you could live in the pocket of your customers as they use and talk about your products and services. While you can't get that close to your customer, their mobile phones can. What if you could appropriate the phone to provide real-time updates on the customer's behaviors, perceptions, and emotions? This is just what companies — from Coca-Cola to LG Electronics and Unilever — are doing by using a real-time experience tracking approach.

With this approach, you recruit a consumer panel that will send a text message whenever they come across your company or its competitors. The brief, structured text messages capture what kind of touchpoint it is, how the consumer feels in response to the company touchpoint, and what they think about the brand as a result of this encounter. (A touchpoint includes every way that a customer comes into contact with your company's product, service or brand., including your channels, your communications, your service points and product usage — and even encounters a company doesn't control, including hearing about your brand from a colleague or seeing it in a friend's home.)

Add these encounters up across a week and across a whole sample, and you can assess experience share and experience effectiveness. ("Experience share" is a brand's share of all touchpoints in its category, and "experience effectiveness" is the quality of a brand's touchpoints, as measured by emotional response and perceptual response, measured in real-time.)

From our analysis of over 230,000 customer touchpoints collected by market research agency Mesh Planning, we've reached two broad conclusions about the lessons for all companies.

First, it's important to track your customer's brand experience in real time. To get closer to your customers, you would ideally walk along with them, seeing what your customers see, listening to the conversations they have, watching who they take notice of online and observing how they use your brand. This observation would happen in real time so you could record when your customers "touch" your products, services or communications and their immediate responses to these experiences. Present your customer with a survey question which asks about their emotional response to a brand encounter that occurred two months ago and they've probably long forgotten. However, by capturing this emotional impact in real time, it is possible to understand how your brand is affecting your customers. By collating the series of encounters your customers have with your brand over a period time, you can better understand the relative impact of brand touchpoints and how they lead to purchase. You can work out what aspects of your operations you should be spending on.

Second, it is vital to capture all touchpoints, including those that you don't control.
The consumer panel sends texts for all touchpoints. This is not onerous — it requires a time investment of 20 seconds for the customer after each time they see your brand in a TV ad, in a newspaper article, online, etc. The wide scope of experiences tracked is important and revealing. Customer experiences with service touchpoints have traditionally been evaluated via satisfaction surveys. But we also need to understand our customers' responses to those activities we don't control, such as word of mouth or observing other customers, which often occur without any visibility to us. Customer-initiated encounters — such as going into a store or having a conversation — are often more frequent than posters, mailings, radio, and many other supplier-driven touchpoints.

Without this breadth as well as granularity of information, we don't know whether to allocate resource to improving call centers, retail channels, advertising campaigns or new product innovation. Managers might have traditionally spent money on outbound media, without clearly understanding its relative impact on the customer compared to all the other aspects of their brand experience. If these encounters aren't right then no amount of spending on outbound communications is going to do the trick.

For instance, one major cellphone network provider had such poor word-of-mouth that its disgruntled customers talked about it all the time. As a result, among its prospects, conversation was the single most common touchpoint. Any amount of ad spending was going to be wasted until the customer service problems were fixed.

Time was when customers learned about our products and services through what we told them. No more. Rather, we need to listen to customers in real time. Customers touch the brand more often than we think. By better understanding the magic moments that our customers have with our brands, we can identify the most profitable opportunities to improve our customer interaction.

Emma Macdonald is a senior research fellow and Hugh Wilson is a professor of strategic marketing at Cranfield School of Management in the U.K.. Umut Konus is assistant professor of new product development at Eindhoven University of Technology in the Netherlands.