Part 2: Adding Value with Consumer Insight
In the December 2007 issue of CRM Magazine, Linnea Johnson discussed transforming the Unilever Consumer Services department from a complaint department to one that offers solutions to the brands. In this second part of the interview, Linnea discusses ways in which Consumer Services has added value with consumer insight, given guidance to research and development, contributed to brand loyalty and followed up on even more advanced opportunities.
CRM: So, once you’ve started offering the brands solutions, what’s next?
LJ: Adding consumer insight and enhancing consumer understanding across the businesses.
Adding value from consumer insight is a lot of what we as an industry need to do. We really are the voice of the consumer, and it’s not enough anymore to simply deliver reports. We really have to glean consumer insight and give our internal clients some recommendations, some suggestions. And this is regardless of industry.
Adding Insight with Surveys
A very easy way to do this is just through surveys.
Short Surveys. If the brand gives us three very short simple questions, we can do the survey right when the consumer is on the call with our representative. But only if it’s reasonable and the questions are very short. If every brand wanted to add three questions, I’d have 10-minute talk times!
Outbound Surveys. Another thing we’ve done is send surveys by postage paid outbound mail asking consumers for their input or feedback. We haven’t had any come in with less than a 40% response rate, which is huge. That’s an abnormally high response rate—as anybody in market research will tell you—but these are consumers who are very involved with the brand and had already taken the time to contact us. So they love the fact that we’re following up with them and asking for more information and feedback.
IVR Surveys. Another possibility, if you have a sophisticated IVR system, is to do surveys right in the IVR. You can actually set up a unique number and tell people, “Hey, we’d love your input on our new media, or our new campaign. Call this unique number, and there will be questions to answer.” Regardless of the method we use, consumers are very good about responding because they understand that we want their feedback to do our jobs better.
Adding Insight with Focus Groups
Another way to add insight is through focus groups. This really takes full advantage of our consumer connections.
Consumer Callbacks. We’ve set up consumer callbacks when some of the brands really wanted to talk to users about their experience. On our UltraClear product, for instance, we were having issues with white marks. The development people wanted to understand why. So they were asking: “If you use it in the morning, how long do you wait before you put your blouse on? How many times do you swipe your underarm?” Well, we were able to set up consumer callbacks so the development people could spend 15-20 minutes asking some of their users all these details questions. That way, they could get a much deeper understanding of how the consumer was using the product and what might be causing the white marks. We did the same thing with freezer burn on our Bertolli Frozen.
CRM: So basically, you’re using your internal database to create opportunities for R&D, and potentially also for marketing.
LJ: Exactly, yes.
Focus Groups with Frontline Reps. In addition to doing consumer callbacks, it’s very good for development people to run focus groups with your frontline reps. Reps are hearing from consumers every single day and know what their issues are. One thing I tell everybody: “If you come here, understand that our reps will tell you exactly the way it is. If you have a chip on your shoulder, don’t do this. If you’re a very sensitive person, don’t do this. Our reps will tell you exactly what they think of your potential new product ideas.”
Focus Group Facilitation. Sometimes a research firm will charge you $25,000 just to find 100 consumers who use your product. Well, we can go back to the focus group facilitation company and say, “Here are 500 names of consumers in the New York and New Jersey areas that use Bertolli. Now, do your screening to get that down to the focus group.” That saves the brand about $25,000.
Adding Guidance to Research and Development
Even beyond adding insight, we've added guidance to research and development.
Wisk Tablets Reformulation. When we first came out with Wisk Tablets Reformulation, which is now a defunct product, we had some issues with the tablets dissolving. So we coordinated in-home tests where the research and development group would give us four or five different new formulas. We would send them to about 50 consumers that we knew used tablets. They would have a week to use the new tablets and send us back a survey. Through that, we were able to help R&D come up with what was the best new formula to address the dissolving issue.
Hellmann’s Best Foods. When we change packaging, we don’t always really understand the impact on the consumer. Sometimes when you go from glass to plastic, people perceive a taste difference. Sometimes there are real taste differences. Well, in this case when our sandwich spread went from glass to plastic, we got a lot of feedback. We did consumer callbacks, and because of the feedback we got, R&D went back to having the product in glass. Once they did that, we were able to develop this little announcement that said, “Hey, I’m back. Based on your input, you’ll now find me back in my 16 oz. jar.”
I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter spray. There are always these dispensing issues every time you have a spray. With I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter, the package design people really couldn’t understand why it was hard. They wanted to know if the difficulty was occurring when people first opened it, when they were using it, when it was getting empty. Well, we actually found consumers who would let our package design people come in to their homes to watch them use the product. As a result of that, there are now three different areas that we’re working on to improve our design and really address this dispensing issue.
Building Brand Loyalty
A third area where you really can work with the brands is on brand loyalty.
CRM: Actually it seems that everything you’ve been talking about builds in to brand loyalty.
LJ: It really does. But some of this is about brands cross-selling and corporate loyalty.
Cross-selling. If we have people using Wisk, why not tell them about Snuggle and see if we can get them to use our detergent and our fabric softener? With I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter and WishBone, we have two spray products. So we partnered with marketing. They had this little online spritzey and spraychel campaign called “Sprays in the City”—a little hokey but consumers loved it—and we dovetailed from that to sending all of our Wishbone Spritzer users information about I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter with a coupon and vice-versa. It’s just a nice way to build that cross-usage.
When you replace or discontinue an item, consumers are always very upset. One of the ways you can really soften that blow is to offer them a suggestion of what else they could use—what else we still sell that’s most like what they had been using. So when we phased out Thermasilk & Salon Selectives, we cross-sold everybody into our new Sunsilk line. Same with Lux and Lifebuoy. Those are two bar soaps that we no longer sell in the U.S., so we told Lux users to try Dove and Lifebuoy users to try Lever2000. We’re really trying to keep people in our franchise.
Pre-selling launches. We knew we had a loyal consumer base for our Dove bar soap products, so when we first came out with our Dove anti-perspirant line and our Dove hair line, we could send everybody who was already using Dove bar soap a little “Hey, these new Dove products are coming soon. We want you to be one of the first users. Here’s a coupon. Give us a call back and let us know how you like it.” It was really a nice way of getting people who were already in that Dove franchise to try some of our new Dove launches.
Boutique selling. In one case, we not only helped build brand loyalty but also saved the brand a lot of money. We found out in a meeting that Dove had a lot of premiums left over from old promotions. So they had a small quantity of Dove ropes—small, as in 4,000-5,000. But that was plenty for us to set up a little Dove boutique. So for all the Dove users who called us, we sent a flyer that said “How would you like to buy one of our Dove premiums?” We were able to liquidate all of the old premiums really fast because we were going right to the heart of the Dove user.
E-commerce. When I first took over the business, it amazed me how many consumers who spent the winter in Florida would call us up begging to buy our Cup-a-Soup products. These people were from New York, and Cup-a-Soup is clearly not a big seller in Florida. They were used to having it as a snack every day, and they couldn’t find it in Florida. So they would actually buy it by the case. We went from selling cases of Cup-a-Soup to selling products on the phone, to now having an online link. Our website has an IRI Where-to-Buy link, so if you put in your zip code, it shows you a retail outlet within 50 miles. We knew, for instance, that in certain areas you may not find a particular item within 50 miles. So now we have web stores where you can link up with buy.com or another story to buy products online.
Advanced Opportunities
CRM: How much did the consumer services group have to do with the Dove Real Beauty campaign?
LJ: We worked very closely with the brand and with the agency there. The first message that went out, Evolution, was meant to show young girls that even the people you see in ads aren’t really “real” people. A lot of what you see is Photoshop adulterated. Even though the model was beautiful, they still would stretch her eyes, make her eyes bigger.
So they first had this as a streaming video on the website. But we quickly went back to the brand and said, “You’ve got to burn these out to DVDs because people in schools want to be able to show them, and they don’t necessarily have the Internet access, but we could send them a DVD or a CD, and they could play it in class." Girl Scout troops were asking for copies. People were asking for posters and other literature. So we really worked with the brand to make sure that what consumers were asking for were then incorporated into the website.
And that gets into the advanced opportunities. If you look in a lot of magazines toward the back of the book, there’s always, “For the first hundred users, we’ll send you samples.” Our brands were passing up a lot of those opportunities because those numbers were too small for our promotion houses to support. Well, for us, 100 fulfilments for samples or literature is very easy. So we’ve been able to actually take more advantage of those magazine freebies because we can do the fulfillment on small offers.
Since we were doing gift baskets anyway for our more serious issues, we started to support some other corporate events, like university relations and investor relations. We would provide them with gift baskets when they needed door prizes or gifts for speakers—or even when they were out recruiting so that the kids could come in and see our products when they came in and interviewed for a job.
And then finally, we have functioned as a full-service agency. That’s how far we’ve gone. Axe had this targeted program, Order of the Serpent, and they wanted a kit mailed from “the desert.” This was targeted at young men. The Order of the Serpent is one of the taglines that they had about two years ago, and it was supposed to be this secret group of people who lived out in the desert who were there to help you build your mystique with the women. So the brand really wanted it to sound like this kit came from this Order of the Serpent, which was in Arizona.
We actually created the box, hand-stamped printing, stuffed it with newspapers from Arizona. They did want us to put desert sand in the box, but the postal office doesn’t like mysterious powder coming out of boxes. Again, a big fulfillment agency wouldn’t want anything to do with this because it was too labor intensive, but for us, that’s what we’re used to doing. We’re used to doing more creative, small-type projects, that the consumers need. So we put this together.
Progression
You don’t start with these types of events and projects first. You get your basics right first. We grew over time with this. That’s the key. But here are the steps:
- You have to make sure that you’re handling your consumers properly, that you have the right systems, that you know how to capture names and addresses, that you know how to code your contacts properly so that if you want to go back to a very specific target audience, it’s easy to pull those names out of your system.
- You want to then build on your internal capabilities and strengths. We knew how to print literature, so why not help the brands by developing some of the literature ourselves—those small postcards, and sending letters back when you know you have an issue.
- When you have that kind of capability, you can truly become partners with marketing, research and development, your quality control group, your legal group, all of those areas. They start to see you more as a partner rather than just a complaint center. It’s critical… critical… to offer ideas, to be proactive and creative, to turn lemons into lemonade. Don’t just deliver bad news. Find ways to offer solutions and understand that not every one of your ideas is going to get taken.
- And then finally, market yourself. Don’t just sit back. Raise your hand at meetings, and say, “Have you considered this?” You know, a lot of times the brands are just so focused on THE brand they run that they don’t realize that perhaps another brand already had a similar issue. And then you can say, “We had this out-of-stock problem with Wishbone, why don’t you consider doing this?” Or we had this problem with Dixie Chicks, next time you do a contract, make sure that you include some of these other things that we really would prefer to have the people we ’re sponsoring not do if they’re going to be our spokespeople.
So it’s really just about getting out there and letting people know how you can add value to their business and executing on it.
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Linnea Johnson is the Director of Consumer Services for Unilever NA. Unilever is one of the leading CPG companies with brands in the nutrition, home and personal care categories. Johnson is responsible for the strategic leadership of two inhouse contact centers in the U.S.A. and Canada. She has a staff of more than 200 in the two centers that handle more than 2.5 million consumer contacts annually. Johnson has worked for Unilever for more than 25 years in Brand Management, Consumer Promotions and Consumer Services. She was a speaker at the SOCAP Annual Conference. Contact: linnea.johnson@unilever.com |