The Argument for Ignoring Consumer Complaints

Do Investors Like it When Companies Use Chatbots?

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We consumers are fickle. We expect the products to be perfect, and customer service to be fast and precise. Problem is, people are sometimes neither of those last two. So little surprise that many brands have turned to chatbots to supplement, or — in some cases — to completely replace their human customer service team.

• Take AFLAC‚ which famously has a duck as a mascot. A couple of years ago, it introduced DuckChat, an AI bot on Facebook messenger that would help enroll customers.

• Or Bank of America, that made a chatbot named Erica, and set her to work in its mobile app, helping customers with basic banking tasks.

• There's Levi's Virtual Stylist, a bot inside Facebook Messenger

• There's even LubeChat — which, no, not what you're thinking — this was actually a B2B chatbot from Shell, which helped share product information for customers of its industrial lubricants.

And while a lot of research has gone into how consumers react to chatbot conversations, there hasn't been a lot of study into how the bots make people feel about the company itself... people like investors in the company.

That's what Darima Fotheringham set out to discover. She is co-author of an academic study called "The effect of implementing chatbot customer service on stock returns" which was published recently in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.

I spoke with her yesterday about her research:

Tod: So you measured how investors reacted when it Company announced that they'd start using chatbots. What did you find?

Dr. Fotheringham: We saw a positive bump in stock option price on the day of the [AI chatbot] announcement — investors did see the value that the chatbots could provide to customers and responded with their purchasing power.

Tod: Was there any difference between b2c brands and b2b brands?

Dr. Fotheringham: We found that this positive bump was especially significant for b2b companies. As we know, b2b companies are often lagging behind and digital customer experience compared to b2c companies. So these chatbots did provide a really good bump for b2b companies, showing that investors saw the opportunity of potential opportunity of increasing customer experience for b2b customers. And we saw that reflected positively in the stock price of these companies.

Tod: But there was an exception, though, in your research — when those chatbots and b2b brands became more human. In other words, they were anthropomorphized and you found the more human a bot was, the less investors liked its use in b2b brands specifically, did that surprise you?

Dr. Fotheringham: If you think about the differences between b2b and b2c customers, b2b customers are busy people. They really prioritize functionality, effectiveness, and efficiencies over all these bells and whistles of adding this anthropomorphic features, or adding names and sprinkling some personality features in. I knows some companies were even hiring a comics to write jokes for for their chatbots. But for b2b customers, all they're interested in is the efficiencies.

Tod: Did you study the market reaction to how chat bots were rolled out? I'm thinking like companies that just started the bots up on day one, versus those that may have started with a small beta pool of customers.

Dr. Fotheringham: Yes. And what we found was that a soft launch, a beta launch with a segment of customers, was much more positively received by investors. So investors really valued and more measured approach to implementing such novel technology.

LinkedIn Changing Feed Algorithm 

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Want to engage with your LinkedIn audience? Do NOT post a poll. LinkedIn members have apparently had enough! 

The professional network announced it is changing its feed algorithm to provide users with a more personalized and content-relevant experience.

To start, the algorithm update will reduce the reach of engagement-baiting posts, which it refers to as "low-quality content". 

As a result, any content that "asks or encourages" users to engage with content such as likes or reactions will be downgraded. LinkedIn says "this content can be misleading and frustrating" and that instead, it will be focusing on promoting "reliable, credible and authentic content."

This also includes downgrading polls. LinkedIn says it's “heard feedback that there are too many polls in the feed,” and as a result, it will only be showing polls that are “helpful and relevant.” 

Next, the algorithm will show more targeted activity from your own network.

Finally, the update is striking down political content by giving its users the option to opt out of that content.  

The platform is testing a new feature where posts will have an "I don't want to see this" option.

Image: LinkedIn

TikTok’s New Tab

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In an update that is ALMOST as annoying as when Instagram replaced its 'Notifications' tab with the 'Shopping' tab, TikTok is testing replacing its 'Discover' with a new 'Friends' tab. 

TikTok has confirmed that the test is being expanded to more users. Apart from having to adjust to a new user interface, how will this change affect brands? 

The Friends tab highlights:

• Posts from followers that you follow back

• Accounts that you follow, and 

• Other suggestions

This could mean that users will see less of your brand's content. 

Besides potentially reducing reach, the 'Discover' tab was also a helpful tool for brands to learn what was trending on the app.

Cameo Fameo Let Go 

Image: Cameo

Cameo, the platform that allows fans to buy personalized videos from celebrities, laid off roughly one-quarter of its staff roughly 24 hours after Snapchat announced the Snap x Cameo Advertiser Program at its NewFronts presentation.

The platform's CEO confirmed the layoffs in a tweet. Quoting the CEO:

TechCrunch reports the layoffs affected all teams within the company including:

• Senior vice president of marketing 

• Chief product officer 

• Chief technology officer, and more

Quoting the CEO again:

Advertise at the Pump

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Here’s a potential ad buy you probably don’t have in your marketing budget: Gas pumps.

During its NewFronts presentation, retail digital display company GSTV claimed a reach of 105 million people across the U.S., mainly through advertisements at gas stations, Adweek reports. 

That's 4 out of 10 adults in the country, and the average consumer pumps gas three times a month. The company equates this to each customer spending 15 minutes per month viewing its display.

If you're worried about brand safety and your ad showing up alongside unsettling gas prices, a recent partnership with insights company Affinity Solutions found that it is 50% more effective than digital video for campaigns like consumer packaged goods.

A partnership with Live Nation Entertainment was also displayed at Shell gas stations with a spotlight video of a music artist. According to the artist, within two months, Spotify listenership nearly tripled.

The Argument for Ignoring Complaint Tweets

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Social media have brought brands some great things — increased awareness, sales, and a direct communication channel with their customers. But that latter benefit is sometimes a curse. Because when things go wrong, customers are happy to use that channel to complain — sometimes fiercely.

The going wisdom has been for brands under fire to respond — to reply to comments and reviews, thanking the customer for feedback, explaining policy rationale, or sometimes apologizing.

But is that the right approach? Are we then publicizing a problem that other customers may not have even known about?

That's what Ali Golmohammadi set out to study. He is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He and his colleagues recently published a study called "Complaint Publicization in Social Media.”

I spoke with him earlier this week, and he mentioned that he decided to study this after seeing someone complain on Twitter about a brand that sold picture-hanging adhesive tabs.

Dr. Golmohammadi: When the brand responded to that complaint, the complaint — along with the firm's response — moved to the Twitter page of the brand and it was co-located with a tweet that promoted their product.

On Twitter when you post a tweet, let's say you complain about the brand, all your followers would be exposed to that complaint tweet — for an average person it could be less than 1000 individuals. But as soon as the brand responds to that complaint, the complaint, along with the brand's response, would be posted with and appear on the Twitter handle of the brand.

For large brands, that could be public exposure visibility to more than millions of potential audience.

We call this phenomena “firm induced complaint publicity.” Basically, by responding to the complaint it increases the visibility of the complaint.

Our full conversation went into detail on exactly HOW to reply to negative feedback specifically on Twitter... whether you should use a separate twitter account for your brand to handle customer feedback... and much more.

That full interview is coming tomorrow exclusively to the Premium Feed. You can sign up by going to TodayInDigital.com/premiumfeed — there’s also a link in the episode notes. Sign up today to get 50% off your first month. That’s TodayInDigital.com/premiumfeed.

Elon Can’t Be Trusted?

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Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of Twitter is currently under review by the FTC, following concerns about the acquisition's impact on free speech. 

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will decide in the next month whether it will pursue an in-depth antitrust investigation, Bloomberg reports.  

This would delay the closing by months, and could trigger even more uncertainty in Twitter's ad businesses. 

The FTC declined to comment on the matter. Musk hasn't responded to requests for comment, and he hasn't tweeted about it... yet.