|
|
 |
CustomerSat Announces the Launch of SalesConnect™
Automated Solution Accelerates the Sales Cycle and Drives Sales Effectiveness
Reprinted from the October 1997 issue of Marketing Research
Review
Editor's note:
Jimn Slevin is manager of Field Quality Engineering
at Advanced Micro Devices ( www.amd.com
), a leading supplier of integrated circuits based in
Sunnyvale, CA. He may be reached at jim.slevin@amd.com.
John Chisholm is president
of CustomerSat.com (www.CustomerSat.com),
a Menlo Park, CA-based customer satisfaction measurement and
market research firm specializing in the Internet. He may
be reached at jchisholm@CustomerSat.com
.
Advanced Micro Devices and CustomerSat.com recently conducted
what was, to the best of our knowledge, the first annual,
worldwide customer satisfaction survey by a Fortune 500-class
company whose primary medium was the Internet. AMD is a global
supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked
computer and communications markets. AMD produces processors,
flash memories, programmable logic devices, and products for
communications and networking applications. Founded in 1969
and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD had revenues of $2
billion in 1996 (NYSE: AMD).
CustomerSat.com specializes in measuring customer satisfaction
and conducting market research using e-mail, the Worldwide
Web, and combinations of the two media. Members of CustomerSat.com
have achieved numerous "firsts" in Internet surveying, including
the first automated collection, reading, and tabulation of
survey responses by e-mail, the first real-time calculation
and display of cross-tabs on the Web, and the first positive
identification of respondents to Web surveys.
Prior to 1997, AMD had for many years conducted its annual
customer satisfaction, loyalty, and value survey of over 200
of its largest customers through face-to-face and phone interviews
and postal and fax questionnaires. In search of a more effective
and streamlined approach for its 1997 survey, and to make
providing feedback more convenient for its customers, the
company turned to CustomerSat.com, whose principals had conducted
hundreds of Internet surveys since 1993.
Why the Internet?
The Internet offers many advantages for customer satisfaction
measurement (CSM). Survey results are typically available
in a few weeks, with early results available in days or even
hours÷a fraction of the time required for postal or
phone surveys. Customers can complete questionnaires whenever
they choose, even in the middle of the night, from wherever
they choose. No scheduled phone interviews or face-to-face
appointments are required. Keyboard, mouse, and computer screen
make answering surveys easier than handwriting responses,
especially open-ended ones, and faster than being read a questionnaire
over the phone. All of these factors contribute to the high
response rates and respondent satisfaction that characterize
Internet-based CSM. Additionally, human interviewer influences
that can bias responses are eliminated. Finally, Internet
survey deployment, response tabulation, and capturing verbatim
open-ended responses are a fraction of the cost of conventional
interviews.
Customer Access to the Internet
So there was good reason for AMD to consider the Internet.
The key question was how many of AMD's customers would be
able to respond to an Internet survey. Before all else, Internet-based
CSM requires that the customers who have access to the Internet
are representative of all of a business' customers. According
to Steven A. Runfeldt, CustomerSat.com vice president of research,
the number of industry segments for which this requirement
is met is significant and growing rapidly. In software, computers,
networking, technical publishing, semiconductors, and graduate
education, using the Internet for CSM and other survey research
either already is, or is rapidly becoming, feasible. For Internet-based
businesses and services, such as securities trading, information
retrieval, on-line gaming/entertainment, and other online
services, customer access to the Internet is implicit. For
internal customer surveys, where many or all of an organization's
employees share a corporate e-mail system, an Intranet survey
is practical even if workers have no access to the external
Internet. But Internet-based CSM is still several years away
from being practical for most mainstream, non-computer-oriented
consumer products and services, notes Runfeldt.
Because AMD's customers are almost exclusively involved in
the manufacture of electronic equipment, we believed that
most of them would have ready access to the Internet. Consultation
with AMD's field sales organization confirmed that a list
of e-mail addresses for most of AMD's largest customers could
be assembled from various corporate databases. E-mail addresses
for other customers, if required, would have to be collected
by phone or fax.
E-mail or Web?
The next major question was whether to conduct the worldwide
survey using e-mail or the Web. Each approach has advantages
and limitations. E-mail surveys use pure text ("ASCII") to
represent questionnaires, and can be received and responded
to by anyone with an Internet address, whether or not they
have access to the Web. They are also easy to complete. Respondents
simply edit the messages, typing in characters at designated
places to answer either closed-ended or open-ended questions,
and click on "reply". Respondents do not even have to be connected
to the Internet while completing the survey: they may download
the message into a laptop and complete the survey off-line,
on a plane, commuter train, or elsewhere.
The electronic equivalents of paper surveys, e-mail surveys
also have limitations. The limited intelligence of ASCII text
cannot keep a respondent from, say, choosing both "yes" and
"no" to a question where only one response is meaningful.
Responses cannot be validated until the completed survey has
been e-mailed back and received by the surveyor, which may
be hours after the respondent has completed the survey. Skipping
instructions (e.g., "If no, go to question 34") must appear
explicitly, just as on paper. These factors can reduce the
quality of data from an e-mail survey and can cause post-collection
cleaning of data to be required.
A final limitation of e-mail surveys is that some PC e-mail
software products (such as Lotus cc:Mail) limit the length
of the body of an e-mail message to 20,000 bytes of text,
or anywhere from 30 to 100 questions, depending upon the amount
of text in each question. If some AMD customers were using
one of these e-mail products, they would not be able to receive
and respond to an AMD e-mail survey if it exceeded the 20,000-byte
limit.
Web Surveys
In contrast to e-mail surveys, Web surveys use hypertext
markup language (HTML), the language of the Web, and are posted
on a Web site. Web surveys have several advantages over e-mail
surveys. First, radio buttons, check boxes, and data entry
fields, which are possible in HTML but not in ASCII text,
keep respondents from selecting more than one choice where
only one is meaningful, and from otherwise typing where no
response is intended by the surveyor. Second, skipping can
be performed automatically and implicitly based on a respondent's
answers, rather than having to be spelled out as instructions
to the respondent. Third, responses may be validated as they
are entered. Finally, additional survey elements, such as
graphics, images, animations, and links to other Web pages
may be integrated into or around the survey. These factors
make completing the survey faster and more interesting, and
result in higher quality data.
For survey research to be meaningful, surveyors must be able
to control the pool from which respondents are selected, and
ensure that respondents do not respond multiple times ("stuff
the ballot box"). These requirements are met by e-mail surveys,
whose distribution is controlled by surveyors and which can
be encoded, if desired, to associate returned responses with
their corresponding outbound e-mailings. To accomplish the
same with Web surveys, e-mail invitations are used. E-mail
messages containing the Web address (Uniform Resource Locator
or URL, usually in the form http://www.company.com/etc.
) of the survey page are sent to respondents, who either
click on the URL, or copy and paste it into their Web browser,
to view the survey page. When used with e-mail invitations,
a Web survey is best posted in a hidden location on the Web,
so that non-invited Web surfers are unlikely to find it. CustomerSat.com
technology can also be used to password-encode e-mail invitations
and Web survey URLs. These passwords ensure that only those
invited may view a Web survey and that each respondent can
complete the survey only once.
Web Survey Response Rates
Conversely, a disadvantage of Web surveys relative to e-mail
surveys is lower response rates. This is due to several reasons.
First, in some organizations, either because of technical
constraints or corporate policy, employees have access to
Internet e-mail, but not to the Web. Second, simply getting
to a Web survey requires a respondent to follow several steps:
clicking on, copying and pasting, or typing in a URL, and
waiting for a page to be downloaded from Web server to PC.
These steps, not necessary for e-mail surveys, take time and
confuse some respondents. Third, respondents generally need
to be connected to the Internet while completing a Web survey;
they may not be off-line, as with e-mail surveys. For all
of these reasons, Web surveys tend to experience lower response
rates than e-mail surveys.
According to CustomerSat.com's Runfeldt, the response rate
that a Web survey with e-mail invitations will enjoy will
depend in part on what percent of the respondents have Web-enabled
e-mail clients . A Web-enabled e-mail client is PC e-mail
software that allows a user to click on a URL in an e-mail
message to view that page on the Web. In contrast, a non-Web-enabled
e-mail client requires a respondent manually to copy and paste
the URL from e-mail message to Web browser to view the Web
page. Response rates will be higher for respondents whose
e-mail clients are Web-enabled. All recent releases of e-mail
software from leaders Microsoft, Netscape, and IBM/Lotus,
as well as some 30-40% of the e-mail clients currently installed
worldwide, we estimate, are Web-enabled. These percentages
will rise rapidly in 1998 as users of earlier versions of
e-mail software upgrade to newer releases of their vendors'
e-mail software. As this happens, response rates for Web surveys
will get closer to those for e-mail surveys, notes Runfeldt.
Measuring Response Rate Differences
To measure the difference in response rates between e-mail
and Web surveys, CustomerSat.com recently conducted a test
as part of an attendee satisfaction survey for a leading Internet
technology conference. The survey measured attendee satisfaction
with the conference program, facilities, meals, registration,
city location, and performance relative to other conferences.
Approximately 70% of the respondents, who were highly Internet-savvy,
used Web-enabled e-mail clients. CustomerSat.com surveyed
half of the 600 attendees via e-mail, and half via Web surveys
with e-mail invitations. The response rate to the 30-question
survey, without benefit of pre-notification or reminders,
was 24% for the Web survey with e-mail invitations, 30% for
the e-mail survey. We believe the Web survey response rate
would have been lower had not such a high percentage of the
respondents had Web-enabled e-mail clients.
Rules of Thumb
The figure below summarizes rules of thumb to choose between
the two types of Internet surveys. After considering several
of these factors, we decided to make the AMD survey a Web
survey with e-mail invitations. The most important factor
in the decision was the length of the survey ö over ninety
questions ö which would have made an e-mail survey impossible
for some respondents and unwieldy for others.
- Shorter surveys
(< 20,000 bytes)
- Less Internet-savvy respondents
- E-mail-based online services
(e.g. daily news updates)
- Simple skip patterns and edit
checking
|
- Longer surveys
(> 20,000 bytes
- More Internet-savvy respondents
- Web-based businesses and services
(e.g. search engines)
- Complex skip patterns and edit
checking
|
Source: CustomerSat.com
Being sensitive to response rate issues, we decided to offer
respondent incentives. For an Internet survey, the form of
incentive that is simplest to manage is a random drawing for
one or more valued items. That way, only a limited number
of incentives need to be fulfilled, rather than one for every
respondent. We wanted the incentive to be attractive to the
design engineers, purchasing agents, and other professionals
who would be completing the survey, as well as business-oriented.
We decided to award two US Robotics PalmPilot handheld personal
organizers, each a $300 value.
Questionnaire Design
To determine the key performance attributes that the questionnaire
would measure, pre-survey interviews were conducted with a
sample of AMD customers. The survey covered six major AMD
product lines, including microprocessors, non-volatile memory,
networking, communications, and programmable logic products,
and embedded processors. To make answering the questionnaire
easier for respondents, performance attributes were grouped
into five categories:
- Product quality and effectiveness
- Ease of doing business
- Support quality and effectiveness
- Sales quality and effectiveness
- Value and pricing
For marketing purposes, we were interested in what attributes
customers believed were most important as well as
what attributes actually drove their overall satisfaction
and loyalty. So we decided to ask the importance of each attribute
explicitly, as well as derive the importance using factor
and regression analysis, in order to compare the two. Demographic
variables used for cross-tabs included size of customer organization,
primary market, type of customer (manufacturer, distributor,
or reseller), respondent job function, length of time product(s)
has been used, and geographical location.
Because customers were accustomed to conversing about AMD
products and technology in English, we felt comfortable conducting
the survey in English worldwide. CustomerSat.com handled the
HTML programming, Web scripting, and survey deployment. To
assure customers that individual responses would be kept confidential
and that data tabulation would be performed objectively, the
survey was hosted on CustomerSat.com's Web site. Invitations
were sent out, primarily by e-mail, to the customers over
a two-week period from AMD's director of customer quality
systems.
Survey Results in Less than 30 Days
It took less than 30 days to achieve over 200 responses,
our targeted number, to the 95-question survey. Respondents
included vice presidents and directors of AMD customer companies.
During the 30-day period, reminders were sent to respondents
as needed by e-mail and voice mail.
In the invitations to the survey, customers were given the
choice of responding by Web, e-mail, fax, or postal mail.
93% responded via the Web; 7% responded by other means. Most
of those who responded by means other than the Web were outside
of North America, where access to the Web is less widely available.
Others worked for companies that restricted or blocked access
to the Web. To these customers we either faxed a hard copy
of the questionnaire, or e-mailed it as an HTML attachment.
Survey responses were collected, tabulated, and analyzed
by CustomerSat.com. Customers were enthusiastic about the
Web survey. Some of their comments were:
"Survey was easy to fill out."
"This is a good tool for measuring customer satisfaction."
"This is an effective way of providing feedback."
"This Web site is a convenient way to do the survey."
"This is certainly a very efficient method·Good job!"
Several customers commented on the speed with which the Web
survey could be completed. As compared to a face-to-face or
phone interview, which would have required 45-55 minutes of
a customer's time, the Web survey could be completed in 12-15
minutes. One of the survey questions asked whether the customer
would be willing to be contacted for follow-up probing, if
required. Combining the Internet with selective, follow-up
probing by phone ö pinpointed to the respondent and question
ö provides all of the advantages of phone interviews
at a fraction of their cost.
Concluded Bruce Hicks, AMD director of customer quality systems,
"The Web survey process allows us to gather vital data from
customers in much less time and at great savings to both AMD
and our customers. CustomerSat.com made the benefits of the
Internet a reality for us. Over time, more and more of our
customer satisfaction measurement will shift to the Internet."
|
