Pump Up the Feedback

A Virginia company is betting that retailers will want to fire up their Internet marketing aspirations by engaging more robustly with potential customers. Organizations that can create and manage online communities and panels, thus providing a voice to potential customers, will be reaching “people who like to be on the Internet to get more information,” says Dean Wiltse, chairman and CEO of Vovici.

Vovici (pronounced voh-VEE-see) provides a suite of services, including online survey tools and online panel management, analysis and reporting, that is designed to boost the volume of feedback a retailer receives. While engaging potential customers online, retailers can extract data from the relationship and use that information in business decision making.

“Visualize a large room with your customers sitting outside the executive suite, waiting to answer your questions when you want to make important decisions,” Wiltse says. “You really can build that type of asset.”

Engaging consumers follows a strong Internet trend line: social networking. As web traffic has increased, observers say online social interactions have moved beyond the purview of younger demographic groups, and retailers are seeing considerable marketing merit in devices like forums and consumer reviews.

Advisory committee
For retailers, one example would be to build a survey advisory committee that could regularly sample and provide feedback on company advertising, as well as new product lines in advance of rollout. Retailers can analyze and track information from the group quickly, based on geographic location or other segmentation factors.

The retailer can build profiles on the members of the advisory committee panels, integrating responses into transactional data to learn what these potential customers are likely to buy.

Vovici operates its enterprise feedback management tools on a hosted software as a service (SaaS) subscription model. Feedback management coincides with the expectations online users have, which is to be asked for comment through online communities and other venues.

In many cases, incentives or inducements are unnecessary, Wiltse says. “People do like to feel they have influence and that you’re taking their suggestions,” he says. “You do build brand loyalty that way.”

According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, “online communities are a widespread Internet phenomenon that flourishes off of the human need to belong.” More than 84 percent of Internet users have used the medium to contact or get information from a group, according to Pew.

Five-year forecast
Momentum for feedback management in the retail industry is so brisk that Wiltse predicts it will become a “component of every online strategy within every organization that has something to sell” within five years.
Retailers will operate multiple communities based on specialty lines of products to achieve the maximum value and flexibility of the data, he says.

“It is a way to get research faster and less expensively than traditional offline methods. The value of that rich data gives you the ability to not only ask questions and understand the attitudes of buyers, but also to match it to their profile data to understand what they bought.
“Not only do you know what they bought, but why,” Wiltse says.