Why social Listening is the Key to Understand Your Customers

Social listening helps businesses understand their audiences’ wants, needs, interests, and pain points, as well as the various questions they may have based on the content they read and share.

When social media first became a business communication tool, social media management was focused on posting content from the business to their prospective customers. With companies maintaining social media accounts on multiple platforms, social media managers initially tapped into analytics to help them understand what content they were posting had the biggest impact and reach.

Next, as customers began using social media to voice their complaints, customer support teams began monitoring social media as a way to listen to questions and address problems their customers spoke up about – a concept often termed as social listening.

Now, product management teams are stepping up to social media as well, listening to their customers likes, dislikes and suggestions and implementing them into their design flow. Instead of running focus groups of their prospects, they are tuning in where their customers are already providing feedback – social channels.

From traditional social networks like Twitter and Facebook to review sites, public forums and blogs, social media is the pulse of timely feedback. Of course, social media is just one of many channels that companies should be listening on, but social media is an early indicator, often providing real time insights that can lead to faster action.

Combined with feedback across channels, teams can distill the insights and data they need to succeed with a holistic understanding of their customers.

Social Listening for Customer Support

The customer service department can use social media as an easy, non-disruptive communication channel to route customer questions or issues to the appropriate team and follow the customer support journey from complaint to resolution.

Today, customers don’t want “suggestion box” customer service where they drop in a note card and never hear back. Customers expect a fast (if not immediate) response when they reach out. Every consumer can tell you about countless time they spent on hold waiting to get a resolution to their question or complaint. Those types of interactions create a poor overall experience, even if the end result is positive.

On social media, your customers know that it is not just them sitting silently “on hold” – the whole world is watching. To fulfil the social expectations of your customers, you need a state of the art customer experience management system that allows support teams to be able to see all channels customers are communicating through in real time. If used appropriately, these processes and systems can not only improve your customer relationships, but actually reduce the overall cost of serving your customers.

Speed in response does not just help your customers; it helps your business as well. If you encounter any hectic issues, such as a grounded flight, you can listen to your customers’ concerns in real time and address them before they become fears.

Customer experience management or CEM platforms allow businesses to listen to their customers in an authentic way, on all platforms. It allows them to access the best source of truth and the real voice of the customer. Leveraging AI technology and NLP techniques to interpret results is a lot more consistent than humans. That consistency provides confidence that what a business sees is the same every time.

Social Listening for Product Improvement

Using data from social listening, product teams can understand what customers and prospects need from your business. Once the data is collected, sentiment assessment and meaningful analysis make it useful. Then, these insights can be used across multiple channels of your business, from operations to engineering. Strategic changes could include more than just the products themselves, but strategies like price and marketing tools like product descriptions.

Customers are not using social media to only share negative feedback. On the flip side, customers also use social channels to recommend the products and services they love as well as providing recommendations and suggestions on how to improve their experience.

Social listening tools can help product teams collect and analyze data from multiple social media channels. Teams across the business can understand what customers are saying, how they feel and what they need. All of this information becomes insight when pairing with context about the customers themselves and their relationship with your brand.

Social Listening for Competitive Analysis

It is far too easy to get excited about positive customer reviews or feel discouraged by the complaints without any context. The best way to understand how you are doing is to benchmark your company against its competitors. Beyond market share, social listening can see where you excel  and where you can improve in factors like customer service, retention, and your brand’s overall reputation. Perhaps you have a beloved product, but your third party delivery times are too long — time to change delivery partners.

While the data is helpful, deep analytics don’t just share where you stand amongst your competitors on different factors, but also why. The reasons driving those numbers are significantly more important than the numbers themselves, because understanding why your customers feel the way they do can result in actions to better support their needs.

Social Listening for Marketing
While your customer support team is working to fix negative experiences, the marketing team can focus on capitalizing on positive feedback. In addition to turning customers into advocates, social media monitoring tools can help understand what features are the most important to your customers and what questions they have. These insights can be proactively used in marketing messaging to help speak to customers in their own language, instead of just marketing lingo.

As we saw in last year’s pandemic, customer sentiment can change on a dime. With real time feedback and listening, you can shift your marketing strategies as the situation changes. In order to maintain an agile marketing program, social media insights are invaluable to keep on the pace of evolving priorities and customer needs.

Beyond Words

With today’s technology, you no longer need to read every social media message or interaction to understand the insights relevant to your business. Sentiment is the ability to understand tone and feelings beyond the words that your customers are using. Customers trust reviews from other customers more than they trust “marketing speak” from the brand. By understanding and improving customer sentiment, you aren’t just making one happy customer, you’re gaining several new ones.

Companies serious about customer experience use insights from social media analytics tools to help them make operational changes and guide their business decisions and strategy.

(The author is Fabrice Martin, Chief Product Officer at Clarabridge and the views expressed in this article are his own)