Fizzback gathers and interprets hundreds of thousands of messages each month from consumers across a broad number of industries including retail, telecommunications & media, transport and financial services. Patterns in consumer attitudes are forming constantly. In September, the Customer Engagement Report explored the effect of gender on the customer experience and in December, the factors examined were time and channel. This report investigates how sentiment and topic vary by age and UK region.
Age Variations
Fizzback, whose service generates rich customer engagement data across a number of sectors, investigated how age affects the sentiment of the views expressed by consumers. The first finding of note was that sentiment tends to take a significant dip between the ages of 28 and 41, with average sentiment expressed almost 3% lower for those in the 28-34 age category. Either side of this group (i.e., 14-27 and 42+) shows a steady increase in sentiment towards the extremes. In fact, the happiest UK consumers are over 70 years of age, encouraging in its own right and testament to the inclusiveness of the Fizzback service.
Source: Fizzback data n=30,000
Interesting too are variations in the topics that consumers choose to highlight as being important to them during their in-store and customer service experiences. The first striking trend is the increase in importance of staff friendliness & attitude with age. In all age groups, the combination of staff knowledge & expertise and staff friendliness & attitude makes up over 40% of topics referred to within freeform Fizzback messages, showing the huge impact employees have on the customer experience. This steadily rises to a staggering 70% for those over 70 years of age. Truly actionable information, especially when combined with other dimensions that Fizzback processes such as customer value, products purchased and gender. The results are consistent with a study conducted by Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago, who points to a U-shaped happiness curve that is lowest around the 30-40 year point, and increases significantly with age.
Source: Fizzback data n=30,000
The second clear trend is that product related factors, such as product features decrease in importance with increasing age, suggesting that the desire to have the latest, feature-rich product reduces as consumers get older.
Regional Variations
Fizzback tracks regional variations in sentiment across all clients via the Fizzback Mood Map™. Interesting trends are evident, with Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland showing more positive sentiment to their suppliers than any part of England! The South-East (including London) fared the worst, followed by the Midlands, the North-West and the South Coast.
The Mood Map™ provides clients with a real-time snap shot of the state of the business. However the actionable insights require drilling into the underlying root causes. For instance, in the South East overall sentiment is 2.5% down on the national average. Why? It turns out that the sentiment is brought down by an over-representation of 21-27 year olds, who report a higher expectation of product performance, and therefore a corresponding lower impression of product features & price – 9% lower than the average.
Gathering large volumes of attitudinal insight including topic, location and sentiment is a key area of benefit for Fizzback’s clients. When combined with both behavioural and demographic information, a very rich picture can be painted, informing decisions on the optimal marketing mix and employee training. The impact of such decisions can be tracked due to the ‘always on’, real-time nature of the Fizzback process, allowing for further fine tuning and ultimately building to sustainable competitive advantage.
To learn more about these and other findings, please click here.
Quick links:
December Customer Engagement Report: Time and channel
September Customer Engagement Report: Battle of the sexes
June Customer Engagement Report: Impact on KPIs
