“Silent Customers” – Who Are They and Why are They Silent?

One of our mantras here at IT Central Station is to enable technology users to Be Heard. Most users of enterprise technology are not able to make themselves heard about what they think of the products and services they use. We have taken for granted the freedom to express online our opinions of products we use as consumers–such as hotel reviews on TripAdivsor, book reviews on Amazon, restaurant reviews on Yelp, etc. But for many enterprise technology professionals they cannot make themselves heard about the products they use on a regular basis (e.g. enterprise software, hardware, services). The need to be heard is IT Central’s Station raison d’etre and we’ve always had a hunch that this group of silent users constituted a large and silent majority.

So I was interested to read the results of a new survey by TechValidate on the types of B2B enterprise technology customers and how free they are to talk about the products they use. They found that by far, the largest group is “Silent Satisfied Customers”:

• Silent Satisfied Customers: 90%
• Occasional Named References: 7%
• Frequent Named References: 2.5%
• Super Customer Advocates: 0.5%

Silent Satisfied Customers are “customers who are happy with the product but can’t/won’t participate in named reference activities (can’t get legal approvals, don’t have time etc.).” We created IT Central Station to enable these 90% of silent users to finally be heard. They can post privately and anonymously so their company name and real identity are not revealed. (See what a review looks like.) Reviews take just a couple of minutes to write. Go ahead, write one now and be heard!

The TechValidate survey The B2B Customer Reference Funnel can be seen here.

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Gartner: “Recommendations from Peers is More Important Than….Gartner!”

The headline sounds ironic, but it comes from a presentation given by Gartner entitled “By 2017 the CMO will Spend More on IT Than the CIO.” I thought the topic was interesting so I checked it out.

The presentation was given by Gartner VP Laura McLellan and the premise is that “Marketing is purchasing significant marketing-related technology and services from their own capital and expense budgets – both outside the control of the internal IT organization and in conjunction with them.” Made sense to me.

What I found most fascinating in the presentation is slide 23 of the presentation (see below) which includes the findings of a survey of the most important sources of influence for purchasing marketing technology solutions. Industry analyst firms such as Gartner, Forrester and IDC came in second, followed by agencies and consultants. Coming in next was “online communities”, which include LinkedIn groups, message boards and industry portals that tend to be cluttered with vendors and others trying to promote  themselves or their products.

So what was ranked #1? The #1 most important source for product recommendations is recommendations from peers. No surprises here! We founded IT Central Station to enable technology professionals such as yourself to easily and privately research and share technology product recommendations with your peers. We built our platform to enable you to easily tap into a network of other real users, in a private and secure manner.

The archived webinar is available free of charge here. No Gartner subscription required. If you just want a copy of the slides, send me an email and I’ll be happy to send them to you.

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Harvard Study: User Reviews Reflect Judgments by Professional Experts

Our super-smart head of Product Management sent me a story about the latest new research from Harvard Business School. The research found that “user reviews tended to reflect fairly accurately the judgments made by professional reviewers.” While the study focused on online book reviews, I believe that the findings are relevant also for reviews of enterprise technology products and services.

What’s clear is that there is a revolution happening online with user reviews and IT Central Station is leading that revolution for enterprise IT. Write a review of a product you use and make your voice heard!

Here is an extract from the story:

If you’re trying to decide whether or not to read a book, where are you more likely to find useful answers? In the New York Times or London Book Review, or among the short, amateur reviews on Amazon.com and sites like GoodReads? It may not help to know that one may be as good as the other. A new study from Harvard Business School shows that, when considered as a whole rather than individually, the hundreds of reviews they analyzed tended to reflect fairly accurately the judgments made by professional reviewers.

There are differences, certainly: pro critics are harder on first-time writers and easier on award-winners. That sounds a bit stereotypical of the critic (snobbishness and joining others in acclaim), but it may also just be the result of having read more books.

And the general public is no less biased, if one can be biased in giving one’s opinion: novice reviewers prefer uplifting stories and likable protagonists. So unpleasantly real and flawed characters — award-winning author Cynthia Ozick notes that this list includes Hamlet, King Lear and Middlemarch among others — and bleak circumstances lead to more negative reviews.

The question seems to be whether you are looking for a recommendation or a professional judgment. You’d turn to your friends and acquaintances to learn about a good sushi restaurant, but most of us will admit that Roger Ebert’s opinion on cinema should be weighted higher than our neighbor’s. And yet if you took the average of a hundred people’s opinions, it would resemble the pro opinion more than you might expect.

Regardless of whether “the democratization of reviewing is synonymous with the decay of reviewing” as author and City University English Professor Morris Dickstein put it to The Daily Beast, there seems still to be room for both word-of-mouth recommendations and tastemakers like review magazines.

The Harvard study, by Loretti I. Dobrescu, Michael Luca, and Alberto Motta, can be read in its entirety here on the Harvard Business School website. The story appeared on the msnbc.com website under the title “Are Amazon reviews usurping the role of professional critics?” It was written by Devin Coldewey, a contributing writer for msnbc.com. His personal website is coldewey.cc.

Will user reviews “democratize” the role that professional consultants and analysts have in recommending enterprise technology? What do you think? Post your comment below or send me an email.

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

Three Surprising Facts about Brand Advocates

In this blog I try to highlight the most interesting research about social networking, communities, and online reviews–which is usually centered around the consumer market–and show how these trends are starting to infiltrate our world of enterprise technology. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, we are in an online review revolution with more and more people writing reviews of products they use as part of their daily routine. This revolution hit first the consumer world and is now hitting the enterprise business-to-business (B2B) world as well.

In this vein, I recently read a report entitled “Three Surprising Facts about Brand Advocates” by a company called Zuberance. Brand advocates are basically happy customers who recommend the product or service to others. The following are the three “surprising” facts:

1. Brand Advocates are even more actіve than prevіously thought. Brand Advocates recommend more brands, products and services more often and in more categories than earlier data suggested.
2. Brand Advocates have even larger socіal networks than prevіous studіes showed. Brand Advocates have hundreds of friends and colleagues in their social networks. Their recommendations reach many more people than earlier estimates suggested.
3. Brand Advocates’ recommendatіons aren’t lіmіted to consumer brands and products. Contrary to popular belief, Brand Advocates recommend both consumer and business products and services. Advocates recommend products that most people consider mundane, like anti-virus software and file transfer services.

This last sentence I think is what’s relevant to our world. Here at IT Central Station, we’re finding people are writing reviews about all different types of enterprise technology products, from the mundane to the cutting edge — IT management software, blade servers, marketing automation software, SaaS, cloud providers, and much more. You don’t have to be a “brand advocate” to write a review on IT Central Station – we have provided a platform for you to be heard, whether its a glowing 5-star review, a critical 1-star review or anything in between. If you haven’t already, browse the latest reviews or write your own review and make your contribution to the community!

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

New Survey: IT Pros – Where Do They Share Feedback?

I came across a great blog post on the Customer Experience Matters blog. It’s an interesting read on how IT pros today express their feedback about vendors. The findings are based on a recent survey of 800 IT professionals.

The survey finds that IT professionals don’t share much either with vendors or with websites. We believe it could very well be because there’s no site that provides them with the privacy and anonymity to express what they really think!

IT Central Station enables IT professionals to research and talk about great (and not so great) enterprise software, hardware and services with other real users while maintaining their privacy.

Here is the full post for your reading pleasure:

IT professionals regularly have good and bad experiences with their tech vendors. But what do they do after those interactions? We asked that question to 800 IT professionals from companies with at least $500 million of annual revenues. Here’s what we found…

As you can see in the graphic:

• IT pros share as many of their their good experiences as they do their bad experiences
• Traditional communications channels dominate the communications
• About one in four or five IT pros share their experiences on Facebook, Twitter
• Less than half of IT pros provide feedback directly to the tech vendor

The bottom line: IT professionals actively discuss their experiences, but not always with vendors

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station

The Online Review Revolution

Someone just sent me a really nice infographic from the folks at Dynamic Marketing about the online review revolution, based on survey data from Google and other sources. The graphic below will show you the importance of online reviews posted by customers and potential customers. Some key findings from the survey:

• Reviews from real users are more influential (84%) than reviews from experts (16%)
• A full 90% of customers use online reviews before buying
• 82% said reviews impact the buying decision

There’s a revolution happening online with user reviews and IT Central Station is leading that revolution for enterprise technology products and services. So go ahead and write a review now to contribute to the community of other technology professionals like you.

—Russell Rothstein, Founder and CEO, IT Central Station