Are you listening where your customers are talking?

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There’s been a lot of buzz lately about social media monitoring. It seems every minute, someone is calling us about how they can best monitor and respond to Twitter.

But it’s very important to take a look at your listening objectives from a complete perspective.

There are a wide variety of channels which can prove useful to your company. Which channels you utilize can vary according to your company, industry, and objectives. 

You should make sure that your company is aligned on your listening strategies, which often involves bringing together people from marketing and customer service. The sources of customer conversations can include:

  • Social media
  • CRM logs
  • Customer surveys
  • Review sites
  • Internal customer communities or forums


Chances are, there are people within your company who are charged with “listening” to all of these different sources for different reasons. Are your “social media” listening efforts isolated from your “CRM” listening efforts and separate from your “survey” listening? Who is in charge of monitoring your customer communities?

You also should evaluate what information you are seeking from your listening program. Are you interested in automatically routing communications from unhappy customers to the appropriate representative? Does your VP of customer service want to mine for information on service compliments and complaints? Is the PR group trying to measure buzz and reach? Are product managers looking for product feedback and suggestions? Do you need to seek out “at-risk customers” for remediation? Is your sales team looking for “intent to buy” indicators? Are you trying to do competitive benchmarking? And so on.

By focusing on the complete picture, you will be able to more effectively utilize budgets and financial resources to achieve your goals. And you’ll be more likely to get the complete picture you need that will translate into increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, share-of-wallet, and retention.

Republished with author's permission from original post.

Catherine van Zuylen
Catherine serves as Vice President of Product Marketing for Attensity. She brings more than 15 years of experience thriving on the passion and intensity of technology startups and rollups. Prior to Attensity, Catherine was VP of Marketing for the Block Shield family of companies, where she defined and implemented new positioning, product, and branding strategies in support of company restructuring and acquisition of technology assets.

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