Using Social Media Analytics to Amplify the Voice of the Customer

How brands can use social media analytics to improve customer care

Social media has become the customer service line of the 21st century

In the bad old days, brands used to control the communication channels between them and their customers. If a customer had an issue with, or question about, one of your products, they could easily call a central help line.

But those days are long gone. Today, customers can still pick up the phone and speak to a customer care agent, but they can also simply tweet their question at the particular brand. Or comment on its Facebook page. Or pose a question in a relevant forum.

It may not seem like it, but this is great news for brands. Customers are more empowered than ever, and they’re not shy about reaching out directly to brands with questions, comments or suggestions.

This type of direct customer input is exactly what brands want — many spend millions in focus groups or market research for this very service — because it allows them to capture a much larger portion of their customers’ feedback.

But, of course, there’s a problem. More unowned channels for customers to engage brands with means a more complex customer care operation. Brands can no longer simply station a squadron of care agents by the phone to answer incoming inquiries in order. Instead, they must sift through dozens of social media platforms and other online channels and triage the incoming inquiries themselves.

If that sounds like a difficult task, it is. Luckily, new technologies — like advanced AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools — are helping brands surface and classify incoming customer inquiries at massive scale.

Let’s look at the evolving customer care landscape and explain how brands can leverage social media analytics to help them:

• Route customer inquiries from social to the appropriate department
• Identify sales and marketing opportunities
• Understand the most common customer issues

Route customer inquiries from social to the appropriate department

Social media isn’t a replacement for your call centre or support email, but when you add it to the mix, it is a way to ensure that your customers’ questions or issues are getting resolved as quickly as possible.

The challenge for many customers is that although they know they have a problem or a question, they don’t necessarily know where to go in your company to ask the question.

This challenge is especially true for global organizations with multiple product lines and levels of support, but it can be equally troublesome for mid-sized organizations. What customers do, instead, is go to social media and send you a tweet or a post and expect you to respond. Quickly.

You could have dozens or hundreds of customers taking this approach to get their questions answered. A social media team dedicated to customer care may not be able to handle all the inquiries coming in manually. With a global organization, you may also not have people watching your social care accounts 24/7, or in all languages.

To help ensure you can handle customer inquiries as quickly as possible, you can leverage technologies like machine learning to automatically identify relevant customer care inquiries and route them to the right team. You will need to set up routing rules that look at keywords or phrases, but also sentiment.

It’s important to understand which queries need faster response than others. For example, is a customer expressing highly negative emotions that requires a fast response? Is the problem related to a product defect that you need to help resolve quickly? Or is it a more general question looking for sales support or product information?

You can also look at inquiries from the same customer across social channels. If a customer is unhappy about something, they may reach out to more than one of your channels, such as Facebook and Twitter. You need a way to recognize the customer across channels and combine those requests into a single inquiry.

In many cases, organizations have specific social accounts created for customer care. But it’s important to understand that customers don’t always know about these customer care accounts and will reach out to your brand social accounts directly. They may also ask questions or make complaints outside your social channels altogether. And in many instances, they may not make a specific inquiry or even mention your brand by name.

As part of your social listening, you should monitor for keywords or phrases and sentiment about your brand and products across all social media channels that suggest a problem needs to be resolved and respond to the customer appropriately.

A good example is a customer who complains about a product problem to your brand’s Twitter account. You need a way to route this complaint to the right product team immediately so they can reach out to the customer and help resolve the problem.

The key is to identify the issues that need the most immediate attention and triage those inquiries to accelerate response time.

Dealing with inquiries or problems is just one way to leverage social media. Listening to what’s being said on your social channels also opens the door to sales and marketing opportunities.

Identify sales and marketing opportunities

Regular listening on social media can help you identify customers who may need your products or services. You can monitor for keywords that relate to your features your product offers or listen for questions or problems people are having that your product can resolve.

You can also monitor competitors’ social accounts listening for issues their customers are having or questions they are asking and create new marketing campaigns that speak to these customer inquiries. Hearing customers complain about the quality of the winter leggings from a competitor could point out a new market for your latest winter leggings, for example.

Social listening can also open the door to cross-selling and upselling opportunities for existing customers. Listen to how they are talking about your products and how they are using them to identify a fit for an additional product or an upgrade to an existing product that will work better based on their usage.

From supporting customer inquiries to identifying opportunities for sales and marketing, there are many ways brands can leverage social media data. But there’s also another way you can use social media in your voice of the customer programs — understanding their most common issues.

Understand the most common customer issues

Not every customer problem is unique. In many cases, multiple customers are having the same issues with your product. If dozens or hundreds of customers are complaining about a problem with your product, it could be a sign of a defect that your product team needs to know about immediately. It could also point to misuse of your product that you can quickly resolve by creating and delivering new content.

Analyzing issues in bulk allows you to see the patterns within your most common customer care issues. So, for example, if dozens of customers are complaining that their car slips out of gear when they are driving, you know there may be a major problem with that car’s transmission.

Once you know what the common issues are, you can outline a plan to resolve them for all customers going forward, whether that’s a patch to a software program, a recall on a car part, or a series of how-to content articles to use a product the right way.

Brands used to rely on focus groups to identify the most common opinions about their products, advertising and more. But focus groups are expensive, time-consuming and small. The millions of conversations that crop up every day can tell you so much about what your customers need in real-time and at a lower cost.

Considerations when looking to social for customer care

A couple of final points when leveraging social to support customer care programs. Active listening is about more than simply monitoring accounts; it’s about interpreting what is said and demonstrating you understand.

Think carefully about scalability when using social for customer care. The idea is that social customer care is immediate, or as close to it as possible. If you are a global company, you need to consider support across channels and time zones, as well as having the right tools in place to ensure faster response times.

Finally, using social for customer care is as much about sincerity as it is getting answers faster. Technologies such as machine learning and natural language processing help you identify and route customers faster, but don’t forget that sometimes a simple response that shows you are listening is just as important.

Now that we’ve looked at leverage social media to improve customer care, let’s look at how you can use social media data to improve product development.

How social media data is the secret weapon for product development

It’s the world’s largest focus group

When Samsung releases a new phone, how do they decide which new features to include and promote? How does Sam Adams decide which new flavor or beer style to produce? Which new safety features should General Motors trumpet in their upcoming SUV?

These are all incredibly important questions, and all uniquely hard to answer.

Historically, brands have turned to focus groups and surveys to help them better understand consumer preferences about their products, but those methods are increasingly being supplanted by a new and more powerful entrant: social media analytics.

Social media conversations contain invaluable information about consumer preferences on everything from TVs and smartphones to frozen food and clothing. The brands that are able to filter and analyze these conversations can ensure that their products are being created in line with consumer preferences.

Let’s look at how the best brands are using social media data to guide product development by analyzing:

• How consumers feel about your current products
• The most loved features of competitors’ products
• The new features consumers are clamoring for

How consumers feel about your current products

If you are monitoring your brand’s social accounts regularly, you will often hear what your customers think about your products.

Customers have no problem going on Twitter or Facebook and saying how much they love the new Nike Air Max 1/97 Toddler sneakers by Sean Wotherspoon, or what their favorite mascara is from Sephora. Sometimes, especially if it’s something they really love, they will include the brand’s social handle in the tweet or post, but not always.

Of course, the inverse is equally (if not more) true: If a customer is unhappy about a product, they will also go to social media and share their disappointment or frustration.

To get a good understanding of your customer’s favorite products, and those they don’t like so much, search for mentions of the brand and brand products across social channels. Look at your brand’s channels as well as mentions of your brand name (or images of your logo or products), and the names of products you sell across the wider social network.

Taken together, these conversations will give you a much more comprehensive picture of how consumers feel and talk about your brand and products.

But this flood of information is only valuable if you’re able to make sense of it.

Sentiment analysis will help you understand both positive and negative sentiment. Analyze mentions to understand which products and features resonate most with your audiences. If you have more than one audience, make sure to break down your analysis by each audience to give you insight into what each one likes and dislikes.

Your analysis can help you make decisions on what products to keep, what product lines to grow, and what products to consider shutting down.

There may also be times when it’s not the product itself your customers don’t like, but a certain product feature. You need to drill down into the negative sentiment to understand what the exact issues are so you can determine how to resolve them.

It’s not just about your products though. You can also leverage social media insights to find out what your competitors’ customers love about their products.

The most loved features of competitors’ products

The same way you analyzed social media for your brand and products, you can (and should) do the same for your competitors. By analyzing mentions of a competitor’s brand name and product names, you can find out which products and features are the most popular (or the most disliked).

With this insight, you can make decisions on product features that you need to add or remove from your products to be competitive. By understanding what features a competitor’s customers dislike and why, you can also make changes to similar features in your product, so you don’t have the same issues.

But it’s not just about actually adjusting your product to suit consumers’ preferences — sometimes it’s about understanding which aspects to highlight.

If you see, for example, that consumers are always complaining about a competitor’s smartphone’s battery life, that could suggest that creating a campaign around your own product’s battery performance would be an effective way to steal customers from your competitor and differentiate your own product from the larger field.

And, of course, if you are going to analyze social media to understand what customers love about your products, you should also analyze it to understand what features they want but you aren’t yet providing.

The new features consumers are clamoring for

A great example that shows customers asking for new features is in technology. Take Google Home. You can purchase both a regular and a Mickey Mouse version of Google Home. But what if your customers want a Captain America Google Home? They would tell you on social media.

Social media is the place people go to share their views on just about everything. They openly share what they like and don’t like, the things they would love to have and the products they would rather disappear. Brands can aggregate and use this data to make improvements to existing products and drive product roadmaps.

Brands can also monitor and listen for trends that highlight opportunities for new products. It could be a new baby toy that helps toddlers learn words or a new salad dressing that tastes like blueberries.

Leverage your secret weapon

When you listen to the voice of the customer through social media, the opportunities to improve and build new products is limitless. Listen to what your customers are saying about your products and your competitors’ products. Listen to what they like and what they don’t like and use that information to inform and drive your product roadmaps.

Not only will you create products your customers will love, but you demonstrate to your customers that you are listening to them, generating loyalty and goodwill.

So far, we’ve looked at how social media can improve customer care and help drive better product development. But there’s another way social media can improve how brands do business and support their customers, and it’s related to how they avoid, or deal with, customer crises.

How to use social media conversations to avoid customer crises

Scandals typically have warning signs, and they appear first on social media

Donald Rumsfeld famously broke information into three buckets: known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns. The last of these, Rumsfeld said, is the most powerful, and causes the most damage, whether that be to individuals, companies or entire countries. If there’s something you don’t know, and you don’t even know you don’t know it, you could be in a lot of trouble.

This is a hard but incredibly important lesson for brands to learn. Whether you’re Dove releasing a new ad campaign or Amazon trying to entice Prime shoppers, you never totally know when things are about to go sideways.

These unknown unknowns threaten to leave brands flat-footed when they encounter a crisis and can have a big impact on brand health, consumer sentiment and even the bottom line.

There’s no silver bullet that will prevent a brand from getting in their own way, but there are tools to help them know as soon as they have tripped over their own feet.

The real-time nature of social media means that consumers can instantly react to new products and campaigns and, better yet, brands can tap into these conversations instantly to better understand how their products and campaigns are being received in the wild.

Let’s examine three ways brands can use social media analytics to avoid customer crises:

• Understand existing triggers.
• Identify flashpoints immediately.
• Find the right fix quickly.

Understand existing triggers

The best way to avoid, or at least minimize, crises is to anticipate them. It’s almost a given that you will encounter a few customers who are not satisfied with your products or the way your support team has handled an issue. Sometimes in your desire to attract attention or be a part of the conversation you may do or say something that your customers don’t like.

There are a few types of brand crisis your brand can face:

• Should have seen it coming: This is a crisis you can prepare for because it’s an issue that may have been brewing over time and there are warning signs you can watch for.
• Blindside: You can’t plan for it, but once you see it, you need to respond quickly and appropriately.
• Unforced error: You’ve made a mistake, and you need to rectify it fast.

Spend time thinking through every possible incident or scenario that could happen. How would you know it’s happening? In all cases, you can monitor social media for signs of trouble.

Indeed, the most successful brands are often able to avoid the last two types of crisis — blindside hit and unforced error — by knowing what to look for. A stitch in time saves nine, as the saying goes, and a customer issue caught early can prevent a much bigger crisis down the road.

But how can brands anticipate the crises that are coming their way? Social media data is a great place to start. Online Consumer conversations can act as the proverbial canary in the coal mine by alerting brands to growing issues before they grow out of control.

Identify keywords to monitor related to scenarios you think could happen. Make a note of any product issues you are experiencing that could lead to customer frustrations and track mentions of that product/issue. You can also track responses to your advertising to ensure it’s hitting its intended mark.

Identify flashpoints immediately

No brand is immune to crisis. The smartest ones plan for them and respond immediately to resolve any issues.

Listen to conversations on social channels and track sentiment over time. Look for increases in negative sentiment against your brand and identified keywords.

If it looks like negative sentiment is increasing, try to identify the topic or theme. It could be an ad you ran that angered some of your customers (like Pepsi’s ad with Kendall Jenner, or Nike’s ad with Colin Kaepernick). Maybe there’s an ongoing issue with your product, and customers are frustrated they aren’t getting the response from support they expect.

You can also monitor current events and trends related to your brand and your market that could impact your business to identify issues or anomalies that indicate potential problems.

Once you have identified a crisis or potential crisis, it’s critical to react immediately. Apple’s iPhone batterygate is a perfect example of what can happen if a brand chooses not to react immediately. Luckily for Apple, it recovered the crisis thanks to a loyal customer base. Other brands may not be so fortunate.

Find the right fix quickly

When it comes to dealing with a crisis, the most important thing is to respond as quickly as possible.

Make sure the right team is notified immediately when you identify a potential crisis. If it’s an issue you thought could happen and you’ve planned appropriately, you already have a good idea how to respond to the crisis to minimize its impact or stop it from becoming a crisis at all.

In many instances, it’s not the issue that causes a crisis, but how you respond to it, so it’s important to plan how you would handle the issue and handle it immediately. A well-defined approach to dealing with crises follows this path: Admit, explain (and tell the truth), apologize, take action (make it right), and follow up.

Be as open and transparent as possible about what’s happening. By accepting ownership and dealing with the problem head-on, you can minimize the impact and demonstrate your commitment to your customers.