Article
Q&A: Rand Nickerson, OpinionLab
The inventor of an iconic web feedback mechanism talks about the future of online retail.
August 10, 2010 by James Bickers — Editor, Networld Alliance
In Internet years, OpinionLab is practically ancient. The voice-of-customer company developed its signature product, the dynamic comment card, in 1999. Today, the iconic image of a rotating plus/minus sign can be found on thousands of retailer websites, receiving more than 8 million clicks every month.
We spoke with OpinionLab CEO Rand Nickerson about the origins of the company, and what he sees in the pipeline for online retail.
James Bickers: Tell me about the history of the company — specifically where the "plus/minus sign" idea originated.
Rand Nickerson:I've been an inventor of measurement technology, for lack of a better word, for about thirty years. Years ago, I worked on people meters, which measure television, single-source data, audience response systems you see on TV and various things like that. I had a lot of experience with collecting information from folks remotely and the user interface that should be involved.
Around 1999 we were learning networks. We moved into UPC when grocery stores started selling UPC data; since that kind of diminished some of the stuff we were doing, we moved into providing learning networks, which involved connecting boxes to folks that worked remotely, testing what they learned and whether they were qualified to sell the products.
We were approached to develop a methodology to measure the success of the Web. At the time, everyone was worried about traffic — how many people were going to your site and where they were going. Everyone wanted to see visitors and see the numbers climb. When it came to actually knowing what people thought when they got to the site, surveys were a really popular way to try and elicit that information. Our experience told us that is not the best solution, for a variety of reasons, so we developed and patented what has become known as the dynamic comment card.
The dynamic comment card is a page-specific methodology that can be accessed from any page on your site. Its purpose is to allow a customer or prospect on your site to engage with you. So, they can talk to you about their experience on the site or really, anything that’s on their mind. And they can share that in their own words from any page on the site. The little symbol we call the "rotating plus/minus" is really a way to access the comment card and has become, from our standpoint, a symbol for providing feedback on the Web.
JB: Eleven years is a very long time on the Internet. How has the product evolved over the years? What’s different about it today?
RN:Well, when we developed the dynamic comment card, it was obvious to us that surveys were not the right methodology. Folks go to a website to complete a specific task. Interrupting them and asking them to complete a 30-question survey is ineffective. It's become acknowledged that surveys are abusive to your customers. It’s probably a good way to do market research on the Web, but not a good way to engage with customers, establish a relationship with them or build goodwill. Customers don’t want to feel that they have to be selected to engage with you about what’s on their minds, they want to be able to do it in any way they want to, in their own words.
Over time, the benefits of the comment card have become more obvious to everyone, so we are enjoying some pretty nice growth. What happens when you put this methodology on your site is that about half the data that you gain relates to that particular touchpoint. So if you put a comment card on website X, half the data received is about that touch point and what the user experience is like. You might get responses like, "I can’t find this," "It is hard to read that," "Can you change that so it makes more sense," "You need descriptions under these things," or simply "It's broken." The other half of the data is customers engaging with you to talk to you about things that are on their minds — pure business intelligence, letting you know what customers think about your company or brand. Previously, customers would have had to write a letter to the president to share that information.
Some of this stuff you only need to hear once, you don’t need a survey with 1,500 people. For example, "There are rats in the dumpster behind your store in St. Louis" — when you hear that comment, someone should get out of their chair and confirm if it is true or not and go do something about it right away. In that instance it is critically important to know. If the comment is unstructured, the comment card it can be used to get the information to the right person in the organization.
So while you have some comments that you only need to hear once, there also are comments where you want to know how many other people think that way. Then, you can either look to see if there’s a pattern in the data you’re receiving, or you can launch market research to find out if it’s a serious problem that needs to be fixed right away. For example, if you change the packaging of your dog food and hear, "I used to buy your dog food based on the breed of dog that was on the package, well now it's different packaging and I don’t know which brand or variety it is, I can't find it in the store anymore, you should at least have a little picture of the dog that used to be on the package to allow me to adapt to the new package," then you can try and find out if a lot of people feel that way. If enough people can’t adapt to the new packaging, you need to fix it right away.
JB: Let me ask about your view of today’s online shopper. Are you seeing any fundamental differences between online shoppers today and online shoppers five years ago — behaviorally or attitudinally?
RN: The obvious difference is that online shoppers feel more empowered and they are looking for empowerment tools. I think usability also is a huge issue as companies move into being mobile and interacting with the customer. The usability challenges on a mobile platform are far greater, so the customer is looking for and expecting a lot more. They are looking to make decisions based on product information that they have gathered.
JB: So moving into an even bigger picture question, as someone who has been involved in the Internet for as long as you have, what do you foresee in the way of big-picture things for retail in the coming years?
RN: We are driven by customer input, and the success of the company depends on customer comments and what they tell us is the next trend or where they think we should go. What we hear from them is a real need for us to move into the brick and mortar space. If you think about where we’ve come from and where we are, we really do a unique job at providing things to customers in the digital world. We have them covered on websites, gadgets and media players.
But as we move further down the road, the big thing missing is in the brick and mortar space, and we really want the same interface. Whether using the spinning plus/minus or another interface, we want our customers to use a consistent means over all those touchpoints. On the back end, we want our management teams to integrate the voice of customer data through the same set of tools and implement it into both the mobile platform and stores.
JB: So that vision for brick and mortar, does it look predominantly like mobile devices or like you bringing new hardware into the environment?
RN:It’s a variety of things. For some of our clients, we are supporting programs in the stores that encourage employees to get ratings from the programs. That means that at the transaction level, employees are capturing ratings of the customer experience. Currently, we’re asking customers to go home and provide feedback through the website. The level of participation really surprised me.
We want to move into being able to capture data for the consumer no matter which retailer they are dealing with, by carrying the comment card on their smart device.
JB: So, last question, to look even further into the future: Do you think the future of online retail is a very few large players, a large number of small niche players or somewhere along that continuum? Where do you see us going?
RN: In both directions. I think that the technologies that are coming onto the scene, whether it’s the iPad, smartphones or other potential transaction-type devices, have the ability to disrupt what we otherwise think we understand. So I think there will be an increasing opportunity for niche players as well as the obvious opportunity for those with the bankrolls and substance to consolidate and roll up into some fairly large players.
