Report: Capturing Insights from Online Customer Communities

We published a Temkin Group report, Capturing Insights from Online Customer Communities. Here’s the executive summary:

Companies across a range of industries use online customer communities to augment their customer support, marketing, and product innovation efforts. However, when used thoughtfully, these online communities can provide value far beyond their original purpose. Because these communities signify an ongoing relationship between the company and participating customers, customer insights teams will find that these forums contain a treasure trove of insights. As a result of these deeper relationships, online communities offer unique advantages to voice of the customer (VoC) programs, including Always-on Feedback, Broad and Diverse Insights, Continuous Dialogue, Peer-to-Peer Dynamics, and Employee-to-Community Interactivity. These unique advantages can help companies adapt to the five Customer Insight Trends that are changing the face of VoC programs: 1) Deep empathy, not stacks of metrics, 2) Continuous insights, not periodic studies, 3) Customer journeys, not isolated interactions, 4) Useful prescriptions, not past descriptions, and 5) Enterprise intelligence, not customer feedback. To help organizations get the most value from their communities, Temkin Group has highlighted best practices for capturing and using insights from customer communities across these five trends. Companies also must plan for the entire community lifecycle to be successful; this includes Determine Strategy, Structure Community, Recruit Members, Grow and Maintain, and Close Down.

Download report for $195

Online customer communities have some unique attributes that make them a valuable component to voice of the customer programs (one of the 12 figures in the report):

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Report: Temkin Loyalty Index, 2016

We published a Temkin Group report, Temkin Loyalty Index, 2016. This is the second year of this study that examines the loyalty of U.S. consumers to 294 companies across 20 industries. Here’s the executive summary:

The 2016 Temkin Loyalty Index (TLi) evaluates how loyal 10,000 U.S. consumers feel towards 294 companies across 20 industries. To determine companies’ TLi, we asked respondents to rate how likely they are to exhibit five loyalty-related behaviors: repurchasing from the company, recommending the company to others, forgiving the company if it makes a mistake, trusting the company, and trying the company’s new offerings. Our research shows that, of all the companies we looked at, customers feel the most loyal towards Publix, USAA, and H-E-B, and feel the least loyal towards Comcast, Motel 6, and Anthem. At the industry level, we found that supermarkets, hotels, and retailers inspire the highest levels of loyalty, while TV service providers and Internet service providers trigger the lowest levels. Meanwhile, USAA, Mercedes-Benz, and Alabama Power Company enjoy the highest levels of customer loyalty compared with their industry peers, whereas Motel 6, Citibank, and Compaq fall the furthest behind their industry peers. We also compared the results of this year’s Index with those from last year and found that the average TLi declined across all 20 industries. TV service providers declined the most, while banks declined the least. And when we narrowed in on each of the five loyalty behaviors, we found that the Trust component scores dropped most significantly. And while the vast majority of individual companies’ TLi decreased over the past year, both Con Edison of NY and Morgan Stanley Smith Barney saw their scores improve by more than nine points.

Here’s the 2015 Temkin Loyalty Index.

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(Includes report plus dataset in Excel. See sample spreadsheet (.xls))

Temkin Group’s TLi is based on evaluating consumers’ likelihood to do these five things (data for these items are included in the dataset):

• Repurchase from the company
• Recommend the company to others
• Forgive the company if it makes a mistake
• Trust the company
• Try new offerings from the company

Here are the top and bottom rated companies: