¿De qué hablan los clientes en los foros y chats?

Actualmente estamos enfrascados en la redacción de un artículo sobre Marketing 2.0., intentando descubrir puntos de encuentro entre el ámbito del marketing y todo el movimeinto 2.0. Los últimos números de las revistas Marketing y Ventas y Investigación y Marketing (AEDEMO) abordan dicho tema por lo que parece que algo se mueve.

En el último número de Marketing y Ventas recogen los resultados de un estudio llevado a cabo por la BI Norwegian School, liderado por el profesor W. Andreassen sobre los usos que los clientes dan a los foros y los chats.

Recojo literalmente: "Según este profesional las emprresas que usan activamente a sus clientes para generar ideas frescas, reducen el dessarrollo y el lanzamiento de nuevos productos de manera significabntiva, aumentando al mismo tiempo, la probabilidad de éxito. Asimismo pueden corregir cualquier defecto del producto rápidamente gracias a este contacto con el cliente. Es decir, en cierta manera es este úiltimo quien dirige la innovación".

Los temas de conversación de los clientes en foros y chats se pueden dividir en 4 grandes grupos: relaciones entre los clientes, experiencias de usuarios, petición de información y comentarios sobre nuevos productos. En concreto los clientes conversan sobre:

- Calidad del servicio de atención al cliente
- Calidad del distribuidor del producto
- Accesibilidad del distribuidor
- Prácticas de negocio de las empresas
- Calidad del producto
- Relación calidad-precio
- Experiencia con funciones especiales del producto
- Experiencias subjetivas
- Maneras de usar un producto o servicio
- Cuestiones técnicas
- Petición de información adicional
- Experiencia de un tipo particular de producto
- Opiniones de nuevos productos
- Expectación ante el lanzamiento de un nuevo producto
- Lista de productos que desearían en un futuro

“Las conversaciones que tienen entre sí los clientes serán una guía esencial para aquellas empresas que quieran estar orientadas al mercado”, puntualiza Andreassen. Dicho queda.

Y yo me pregunto: ¿También los clientes industriales conversan entre sí?.

Customer Relationship Management in Virtual Communities

Last week we were informed that Basque Governement´s Industry Department, has approved a research proposal we made in the Saiotek program. This project is about launching a Industrial Marketing Institute, where collect all the knowledge generated about the topic. The project has two main objectives, 1) generate the knowledge, by means of a research and 2) create and develop a community, where people can share knowledge.

Speaking with David, who is researching about on-line communities, we concluded that it is a great opportunity to materialize the work we are doing separately. Related with this topic I have found a paper from MSI about Customer Relationship Management in virtual communities. In this study, professor Constance Elise Porter (Notre Dame University) and professor Naveen Donthu (Georgia State University) explore how companies can use virtual communities to build relationships with consumers.

First of all they define virtual community as "an aggregation of individuals or business partners who interact based on a shared interest, where the interaction is at least partially suported and/or mediated by technology and guided by certain protocols and norms". From here on, they propose a model where TRUST is the central concept. The authors hypothesize that customer perceptions about the companie`s efforts to provide quality content, to foster members embeddedness and to encourage interactions in the virtual community will foster favorable beliefs and trust the company. The resultant trust will motivate customers (relational outcomes),

- To share personal information with the company
- To cooperate on new product development
- To be more loyal

The main findings of this interesting research are:

1. There is a positive association between trust and customer behaviour, that is, customer willingness to share personal information with the virtual community sponsor, willingness to cooperate in new product development or customer loyalty.

2. Fostering member`s embeddedness has greater impact on customer beliefs than providing access to quality content. From 90´s "the content is the king" to "the embeddedness is the emperor".

3. Fostering customer`s embeddedness has favorable and unfavorable effects. Communitie`s members can see sponsor`s efforts as opportunistic even though has no significant effect on trust.

4. The mere facilitation of interaction does not produce favorable consumer beliefs about the company.

5. The study underline the importance of using new techhnologies to manage relationships with customers rather than simply generate transactions.

6. Web interventions engender customer trust. Even though managers tend to think that using a community can be seen by customers as a way to manipulate them, this is not completely true. Consumers tend to tolerate certain degree of opportunism in commercial relationships.

7. But companies must be very careful about the information provided to community members, too much emphasize on favorable information about the company can result on lower trust in the company.

And I wonder, are these findings valid to industrial customer-based communities?