Social Media Listening | Key to customer experience management

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We are living in a connected world and dissemination of information is faster than ever before. Customer experience, be it good or bad, are often shared publicly over social media specially over Twitter and Facebook. I believe, as humans though, we have the tendency to share negative experience more often than good ones. A customized CRM application with social listening feature can become an answer to handle this business case.
Social Listening within CRM

Source – Author’s own creation

According to a chart published by Search Engine Watch, 72% of the customers expect a response within an hour for the complaint they raise on Twitter.

72% of the customers expect response within an hour for the complaint they raise on Twitter

Let us look at few examples on how, a few brands are handling their social handles efficiently. Again, the idea of this post is to learn from their experience. In no way, this reflects the past or present service levels for any of these organizations.


Business Case # 1- All Popular Airlines

Airlines twitter handles are among the busiest that I have seen. If you look at the handles of popular airlines like United, British Airways, Frontier and others, you will see that they receive so many feedback from the passengers. Below are screenshots from Twitter for some of these.
Emirates Twitter handle

Source – Twitter handle of Emirates

United Replies and Post

Source – Twitter handle of United Airlines

In 2015, British Airways faced a lot of heat when they misplaced baggage of one of the legends in cricket history, Sachin Tendulkar. Here is the full story.

 

Business Case # 2- E Commerce and online market places

A similar experience can be seen for online marketplaces like Amazon, Walmart and others. The nature of feedback however differs. In this industry segment it is more specific and could related order, late shipment or cancellations and refund status.

 

Business Case # 3- Telecom and Utilities

When it comes to organizations like Verizon, Duke Energy, NexEra Energy and others, there is a fundamental difference. The issues are low in volume but high in urgency. A power outage or failure in communication are far more urgent than feedback in the above segments.


Learning thus far

The following points summarize what we have seen so far.

    a. Time is of essence here – A quick reply by the representatives ensure that the emotions can be controlled and situation can be diffused efficiently.

     

    b. It is better to let the customers know how that they can reach out to customer help desk and start a conversation offline . These are often tracked and dealt by other team members in the organization.
    In the picture below, see how United gives the link to post any customer feedback.

     

    United Airlines helpline link

    Source – Twitter handle of United Airlines.

     

    c. Smart representatives must initiate a personal conversation in a polite manner so that the issue can be resolved without it turning ugly in a public domain.

 


How a CRM can help

It is difficult for anyone to manually monitor each and every tweet or Facebook page comment and respond to the same in a short time. This is specially true for larger brands which may have thousands of messages coming in every day.

By having a team in place, you can overcome the challenge as far as bandwidth is concerned. However, in order to respond in a personalized and timely manner, you must have a CRM application which can represent data in an intuitive manner. Here are some top features for such an application.

    A. Efficient Integration
    Every new feedback must be created as a new case within CRM. This must be as real time as possible so that support team members can have more time to think and respond to each of these messages.

     

    B. Automatic Assignment
    The case registered must be automatically assigned and appear in queue of one of the team members. Usually, a round robin algorithm can be applied for the same.

     

    C. Neat Dashboard
    There must be a neat representation of data so that the users can respond as soon as possible and see their metrics on how they are performing.

     

    D. Escalation Mechanism
    There must be a mechanism to escalate the case assignment if for some reason it was not handled by the support team member in a timely fashion.

     

    E. Integrated reply with suggested options
    The support users must be able to reply from within the CRM application, without having to leave the application even once. Pre-configured reply options must be available to ensure a quick and polite reply.

     


Summary and Conclusion

According to the PEW Research Center 71% of all internet users are active on Facebook. The same figure in case of Twitter is 23%. These numbers are increasing every year. Also companies are vying for increased internet presence. This necessitate that they monitor their social media and respond to them in a timely manner to maintain their online reputation.

Shailendu Verma
Shailendu works in the areas of defining customer strategy and enterprise application integration. He loves working on helping company innovate their business processes and improving their performance by use of software solutions. He has worked on various industry segments and loves writing on topics such as CRM, eCommerce, ERP and automation. Few other things he loves are catching up on technology updates and playing soccer with his 10 year old son.

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