Technology companies must work harder to glean customer feedback from social networking tools or marketing activity, according to research by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU).
The report, Creating value through customer partnerships in high technology, found that only 14 per cent of the 89 executives interviewed said social networking tools or the web were used to gain customer feedback to help improve their business.
The whitepaper suggests that using information from online customer interaction will help companies to retain their most profitable customers in a difficult economic environment.
In addition, executives should help customer-facing departments to distribute information throughout the rest of the company. This will enable them to compete on value, which 64 per cent of interviewees considered to be more important than price.
The EIU interviewed 89 executives for the report, 50 per cent of which were software vendors, 10 per cent were equipment manufacturers and eight per cent worked in semiconductors and components, with the rest working in other tech sectors.
Have your say on this article
Newsletters
Latest stories from Management
Latest videos
You may also like
Management jobs
Technology Patent Wars
Case studies from large organisations across all sectors
... And rich media, and flexible working, and peaks in traffic ...
Upcoming Events
Join us for this Computing web seminar, in which the Head of BI at the Co-operative Group Nick Colebourn will be explaining just how he reigned in the Group’s sprawling database estate and how significant savings were realised and data quality improved as a result.
Date: 31 May 2012
Time: 11:00 AM
Live June 13th 11:00am: Register now. During this web seminar we will be looking at the sorts of incidents that can bring data centres grinding to a halt and what can be done about them.
Date: 13 Jun 2012
Time: 11:00 am
Receive the latest jobs direct to your inbox
Are you being paid what you are worth?
