Using real-time Voice of Customer for real-time customer engagement.
In the last 8 weeks I’ve attended a dozen or so webinars presented by software vendors and their clients. ‘Death by webinar power-point?’ Not really.
One of the things I love about my profession is that I’m constantly learning—as a perpetual student of business strategies, behaviors, processes, technologies, organizational practices and use of key performance indicators and metrics that correlate to business results.
What I have learned is that very few of these technology organizations ‘walk the walk’ in utilizing voice of the customer feedback even when it is handed to them on a silver platter. On nearly every webinar, I asked one or two simple questions hoping for a real answer from the presenter.
Now everyone knows that producers of webinars have prepared ‘seed questions’ in hand in case no one asks a question during the Q&A. Moreover, vendors typically have certain questions they want asked so that they have some input or control over the presenter’s messaging. To my surprise, several of these presenters asked and answered ‘seed questions’ ONLY. This was very apparent from the way Q&A questions were phrased. (We recommend using no more than 5 seed questions to our sell-side clients)
However, ignoring questions asked by attendees sends the message “We don’t really care what you are interested in. We are only interested in pushing out our messages, i.e. what WE think YOU should want to know.” By the way, our research consistently shows that pull marketing campaigns result in higher ROI than push campaigns.
My assessment: Companies who ignore informational requests during a webinar are missing a truly unique opportunity to further educate and engage customers…and isn’t that why the webinar was produced in the first place?
—Leslie Ament, SVP Hypatia Research Group