A product launch is an excellent opportunity to connect with customers, gather feedback, and garner support for new features. That's especially true when you have customers who were not pleased with a previous product, as in the case of Microsoft.
The company will launch Windows 7 later this year. Most software firms do beta releases to test the technical aspects of their software, but few try to understand the customer experience. Microsoft, however, is reaching out to its customer base now to answer questions, solve problems, and gauge perception to avoid some of the issues that plagued the reaction to its Vista operating system.
"Anyone who has followed the feedback in the media and on social sites about Windows 7 can see it's overwhelmingly positive," says Stephen Rose, senior community manager at Microsoft. "We've tailored our efforts based on what we learned building Vista and I believe we've listened correctly to what customers were saying."
He attributes much of the positive reception to the work his team has done reaching out to customers on social networks and forums all over the Web. Using TruCast, a community monitoring and engagement tool from Visible Technologies, Microsoft aggregates comments and questions from users on hundreds of different forums. The company's engagement personnel respond to 1,500 posts per week within the sites from which they originate, whether the comment is a technical, guidance, or perception question.
"We post a response that includes a referral to one of our three internal properties: our support forum, our technical help site, Springboard, or our Talking to Windows campaign if it's a perception issue," Rose says. The technical site offers white papers and slideshows to help customers throughout the product lifecycle, and the Talking to Windows site includes interviews with key engineers involved with the design process, as well as customer testimonials.
Unlike other social media outreach programs, Microsoft tracks individuals rather than just how many customers are happy and how many aren't. Rose says his team focuses on people who are "in the gray," or customers who aren't absolutely opposed to Microsoft (in the red) or happy with their products already (in the green).
"For many customers this is the most comfortable channel for them and it's where they spend most of their time," he says. "We want to find people who may not know how to connect with us, so we find them where they live."
To track success, Microsoft measures likelihood to recommend, how many people they've touched, how much traffic they drive to the support tools, and how many questions are being answered. Already more questions have been posted in the Windows 7 forum than in the lifetime of the Vista forum, and Rose's team has answered more than 92 percent of them. The company also reaches out to customers via Twitter, where it has gained 5,000 followers in four languages, and on a blog that reaches 500,000 people monthly. Most impressive, Rose says, is that 26 percent of the company's messages on Twitter are re-tweeted, or shared by customers with their list of followers.
Leading up to the official launch of Windows 7, Microsoft plans to build a community launch portal that will list events run by local IT professionals who will be launching the product locally. The portal will allow customers to share video and photos, which Rose says will allow them to share their excitement. The company will also continue to aggressively monitor social sites to stay on top of customer concerns.
"We don't just answer comments and move on. We go back to the forums to monitor responses and see if the problem was really solved," Rose says. "A lot of people feel we're a faceless company, but social media allows us to engage customers on not only a one-to-many level, but connect on a one-to-one level and really personalize our interactions."