Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

My favorite example is Jetblue, who according to the Electric Artist's Tracking Twitter has more than 430,000 followers. The airline has dedicated resources to monitor traffic, provide various corporate updates (delay's, new route announcements, etc.), and to answer simple questions. Here's an example via The Wall Street Journal:

One Twitter user pinged jetBlue at 10:49 a.m. asking, "I am flying on a red-eye flight with my wife tonight. Are you charging for pillows and blankets?" Six minutes later the airline responded saying, "Our Pillow and Blanket kit is $7 and includes CleanRest pillow, fleece & $5 coupon to Bed Bath & Beyond."

You may be saying to yourself, "This is great, but how does this help us get to WOW and lock in loyalty?"

The endgame of any loyalty program should be the creation of advocates--customers who not only repurchase, but who also talk about the experience and refer new customers to the brand. This is the way pathway to growth. Companies can only accomplish this by fixing the gaps in the current experience, thereby reducing negative word of mouth, and by creating extraordinary experiences that meet the expressed (and sometimes unexpressed) needs of their customers.

Operational loyalty programs such as Net Promoter Score provide a framework to make change happen. These programs use simple surveys to gauge loyalty and identify items that drive the scores (like sales experience, pricing, product, customer service). Companies close the loop (with a phone call or a visit) with individual customers to remediate the issue and neutralize negative word of mouth and probe for root causes of bad experiences. They also (ideally), analyze the data and focus resources on solving the issues that have the highest impact on loyalty.

The best programs, such as Intuit's, go a step further by using focus groups, online communities and other means to brainstorm new product/service experiences with promoters (and detractors). Twitter's inherent functionality allows customer-centric companies to add another tool to the mix, at virtually no cost. Now companies can monitor VOC, talk to individuals, and converse with large numbers of customers on a daily basis. They can solicit new ideas, and leverage the rich stream of ideas emanating from their followers to make changes--across the enterprise on a one-to-one basis.

So far, I see companies making small scale improvements on a local basis. Whole Foods is encouraging its retail locations to open Twitter accounts to listen to their local markets. And any given day you will see customer tweets requesting new items, and wondering why their favorite produce is no longer available. Car dealerships are also reaching out in the same fashion.

I'm interested in knowing if any companies have begun to aggregate Twitter data to detect key themes and undertaken change initiatives based on this data. Has your company done so?

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Colin Brogan is founder of Sound Customer Strategy