I recently wrote a blog post focused on how companies are using social CRM. Everyone seems to be using social customer service to gauge customer sentiment, manage product and service issues, and follow up with customer service complaints. The focus on social media strategies is overwhelming to many organizations but of even more significant is the lack of Social Media Business Intelligence. Why are you monitoring and gathering all of that consumer data if you cannot do anything valuable with it? For any business project don’t you need to prove the value of the effort and investment?
Along with your consumer data gathering, consider text analytics to help you organize unstructured text-based data in your CRM systems (and in social media), survey and emails into a form that can be analyzed to uncover patterns or trends. Do you notice a spike in online customer complaints about the lifespan of one of your new products? What do you do to prove the need for action? Text analytics supports, for example, the need for the manufacturing department to reevaluate the intended use for the product and the Warranty/Finance Department to alter the current product warranty.
Many companies may offer the complaining customers a quick refund or replacement to stop further brand badgering. Dealing with one vocal and hostile customer at a time is not harnessing the power of the customer intelligence available. Digging deeper into the mountains of information with text analytics or text BI uncovers the larger issues and builds a business case for a successful remedy, instead of putting a band-aid on one customer at a time.
As social CRM continues to be a key focus to your leaders, always remember the importance of knowing the ‘why’ behind the data. Be able to quantitatively solve and report customer experience issues or you will continue to have frustrated customers like these:
“I recently purchased product XYZ for my family and I can’t seem to get any support with an issue I am having with it. I’ve contacted your social customer service handle and emailed your customer service department but no one can help me. Not only is the product faulty, you don’t have anyone that can help me.”
“You just sent me a 10% off coupon AFTER I already bought with you. What good is this discount to me now? I’m a fan of yours on Facebook and this discount was never posted. If this was a companywide discount why wasn’t I alerted to it when I called to place my order?”
“I continue to be a satisfied customer but you keep calling me to take a survey that I’ve already filled out TWICE online. I’m not sure where my information has gone but now I feel like I’ve wasted my time on the online survey since you’re obviously not recording it.”
Happy Wednesday!
