Digital channels now provide so many opportunities for customer feedback and research. Website users have come to expect to be able to submit comments, feedback or a complaint online, and will often actively seek this out.

Additionally more brands are using more innovative techniques to gather research online through forums, research communities and more creative environments.

You should be using your digital channels to:

• glean customer service feedback
• ask for product/service reviews from users
• encourage new product ideas and help steer new product development
• gather customer insight
• enable users to view others comments, thoughts and reviews and ultimately exchange views

Whilst more traditional research techniques and tools still have a major role to play, the advantage of digital research/feedback is that if done effectively it should be always on, allow discussion of issues between others, allow a more thoughtful response and enable users to continue to add thoughts, or feedback, and be more immediate, iterative and actionable.

We believe the format of this research should be innovative, engaging and interesting too. The way in which you ask questions of your customers and enable a response and importantly act on that response says a great deal about you as a brand. It should be an enjoyable experience.

This has all been termed, typically, research 2.0, and is fundamentally about brands beginning to truly converse with their customers.

This is all well and good, but not that many major brands are doing much of this. From a quick trawl of 30 major UK brands, only a handful are even doing the simple stuff of offering an online feedback form, let alone anything more sophisticated. There are some exceptions:

• Lynx (www.lynxeffect.com) recruited a network of boys and got them to text every time they came into contact with the Lynx brand and articulate how they felt about the messages – a much more real, and truly behavioural piece of research.
• Toyota enable users to submit reviews on their website and publish them all – good and bad. What they don’t do is continue that dialogue or allow customers to talk to each other – yet.
• Virgin Trains have an interesting site which encourages users to submit ideas in a more creative environment (www.beinspiredbytime.com). Again, they don’t really talk about what they’ll do with those ideas, but there’s some neat points of view on how to improve many aspects of rail travel, so I hope they are listening.
• www.shoulddothis.com Interesting site which enables users to suggest what someone (potentially a brand) ‘should do’. Users can also search for most popular requests, or look for specific brands or sectors. Brands should keep a watchful eye on this as a useful barometer of customer opinion.
• Daily Mirror - recently launched their Mirror Mouthpiece (www.mirror.eglobalpanel.com) which enables users to respond online to a variety of questions and discussion topics through a mixture of forums, product ratings and polls.
• http://mystarbucksidea.force.com/home/home.jsp A really interesting environment where users can share ideas for Starbucks, view, vote and see how ideas are being taken forward by the organisation.

Brands need to embrace these more innovative research techniques as consumers will come to expect them.

If you have a point of view on this, or would like to discuss this further please feel free to drop Tim an email.