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Dina Mehta
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Skype Skimping on Asking the Right Questions?

July 6, 2005 02:15 PM

Topics: SkypeIn | SkypeOut | counterpoints | skype | statistics

Skype has an online survey up. It's all about habits and practices - but there seems to have been little thinking on and stretch in terms of options, scales, wants and wishlists. It's not well designed, poorly structured, with many gaps in areas covered, and no real behavioural information being collected. A wasted opportunity!

20050705SkypeQuestionaireIntro.png Just because online surveys are simple doesn't mean they shouldn't be well thought out. It's also more dangerous to have information that is incomplete or poorly collected than to have no information at all. Unfortunately many organisations fall into this trap. There is down and dirty research -- this is not it.

Breaking down the survey to understand the gaps further, there are problems in several areas :

1. Areas of Coverage :

* No demographic profiling - age, gender, income, etc - to contextualise responses

* Inadequate coverage of Skype's offerings - what about conference calling, chat and multi-chat, Skype on PDA's, Skype API, forums - areas of satisfaction and problems with them? For instance, how many have made a conference call with SkypeOut - one problem could be tackling DTMF tones

* No behavioural information of depth and value like buddy lists, minutes and hours spent on each feature, how many failed calls, what percentage is acceptable, what percentage local vs international calls, whether Skype is set to a call-centric or chat-centric mode, etc

* No developer products included : video chat, presence servers, outlook import, other plugins. These form a vital part of the total offering from a customer's point of view, and make the Skype experience richer - it would have been interesting to study awareness, usage and motivations for them.

* No feature comparisons with other products competing in the same space from a user's perspective - IM, other VOIP offerings, even landlines and cell phones - resulting in answers in a vacuum without benchmarks and best-in-class standards that always make responses so much more reliable and meaningful, particularly when satisfaction is involved. For instance, would you say your Skype billing experience is better than or worse than your current cellular provider? Landline carrier? Amazon? Other? NA? What's your best billing experience online?

* Very little space offered for opportunities to improve

* Even less on what Skype really means to users today and how is it changing the way they communicate, impact on their communication behaviour and habits.

* Branding and positioning issues - how is Skype positioned in the customer's mind? What associations, what image, what relationship, strength of stickiness and loyalty? I know Skype is beginning to think of brand - and that's a great step. I also hope that they remember the brand is not just what the company communicates, but as it rests in user's minds and hearts and leaves it imprints. I'd have loved to see some brand-related questions here.

2. Questionnaire design and structure:

* Options and choices (dropdown boxes) provided seem inadequate in most areas. The connection speed options are not customer friendly. Reasons for using don't include - for business, for travel, for connecting with family abroad etc. Another instance:

Why did you start using Skype Voicemail? (check all that apply)

Thought it was cool

Wanted to save money

Wanted to call people abroad

Other

These options make little sense in the context of voicemail - none of the potential reasons for using Voicemail are listed in the options. It seems like these questions have been dumped blindly from the earlier SkypeOut section.

* Areas for improvement in all sections are left as an open-ended space; some amount of stimulus for thought might have been provided for generating more meaningful suggestions. For instance, for Voicemail, there are so many possiblities - from saving copies to sending group messages or not having to listen to your message for the 5th time when sending.

* Scale used for satisfaction - the 3-point scale : very satisfied-satisfied-not satisfied again doesn't really offer up much - first, there aren't enough gradations to really determine satisfaction to make it a good customer service scale and second, satisfaction must always be measured against perceived benchmarks, without which it can be meaningless.

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» Skype Survey from Conversations with Dina
Cross-posted at SkypeJournal : Skype Skimping on Asking the Right Questions? Skype has an online survey up. [Read More]

Tracked on July 6, 2005 10:04 PM

Comments

Posted by: Carlos N Velez at July 6, 2005 4:36 PM

I agree. I thought the survey was shallow and plain silly.

Posted by: Paul Jardine at July 6, 2005 8:55 PM

Unbelieveably crap survey. Who are these people they are employing to do this.
I bet they could get the best people in the business for less than market rate and the ones they have hired came up with this!?
Christ knows what they are doing over there in Skype-land but they are definitely neglecting their public-facing areas. It's like amateur hour.
Why did you buy SkypeIn? 1. Thought it was cool! 2. Wanted to save money 3. Wanted to call people abroad
4. Other
I'll ignore 1, 2 - How does SkypeIn save ME money? 3. SkypeIn, hell-o, are you stupid!?
4 - finally an option I can choose.
I challenge anyone at Skype to tell us what benefits they expected from this survey. Will anyone admit they requested and approved it?

Posted by: Stuart Henshall at July 6, 2005 9:39 PM

Paul,
Thanks you have made my day! Sometimes it is very frustrating being on the outside hoping the inside will do the right thing. I thought it appropriate to make sure they really do get the best expertise. Letting stuff like this go out to customers sends completely the wrong message. They are just lucky they aren't working for me. Research is part of my job.
Cheers
Stuart

Posted by: Jaanus Kase at July 7, 2005 9:31 AM

Dina, all, thanks for bringing this to our attention. The facts are:

1) yes, this was/is a survey sent out by Skype.
2) yes, parts of the survey were horrible.
3) the people who sent this out got a painful kick from me and it's been updated.

These surveys are just one way of many we collect info about the users - it's important for us to know who our customers are, what, how and why they do. Customer surveys, blogs like SkypeJournal and Dina's and many other channels each add their own part.

Posted by: Stuart Henshall at July 7, 2005 9:49 AM

Jaanus,
I trust you appreciate that we are not trying to create pain for Skype. We are demonstrating that outside Skype there are many of us that have the expertise and the insights already.

When I took this survey and Dina and I reviewed it together. Perhaps you can tell us who to talk to at Skype.

It won't come as a surprise to you, we already have the research capability and the conceptual frameworks to take customer and brand research into the next dimension. Market Research is a strategic weapon. Skype's growth requires the team to master it and get the best people involved.

Thanks for being open. I appreciate it.

Stuart

Posted by: dina mehta at July 7, 2005 10:00 AM

Jaanus - good to know that others like Paul and Carlos and even part of the Skype team felt the same too :). Especially given the face of competition for Skype today, it just seemed so amateurish to me, to launch into a customer survey of this kind. Will look for the changes :)

Posted by: Paul Jardine at July 7, 2005 7:07 PM

As Stuart and Dina say, it is more dangerous to have bad information than no information at all, which is my major objection to the survey.
If Skype want to know something about their users then a survey is a reasonable option, but you need to have an idea of what it is that you want to know, and the overall question(s) should be simple. E.g. based on my market segmentation what is the proportion falling into each category, or based on my strategic product roadmap, which of the themes are most important to my users. The answers to those simple questions would allow product management to prioritise features based on the new segments they want to aim for and the things they most want.
For an online survey, the cost is small so keep it very simple and aim to have the answers to only a few questions.

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