Now that you have been inundated with all of the arguments surrounding the power of social media as part of your customer service and sales strategy, how do you ensure that you are executing your strategy properly? More importantly, how can you leverage social media to get the most value for your organization? The easiest way to optimize your presence online is to deploy social media monitoring. Not only can you use this platform to maximize your strategy, you can also improve the experience for all of your customers.
Capturing the Negative Customer Experience with Social Media Monitoring
How often do you know if a customer has a negative interaction with your company, products or services? Do you receive a direct call so you can provide a rapid solution? Most likely, as research shows, you don’t hear directly from the customer. Instead, the customer takes his or her business elsewhere, and tells others about their feelings regarding your brand. Increasingly, dissatisfied customers are taking their complaints to social media platforms. Part of the attraction is the ability to draw like-minded individuals. Not only can your brand be poorly represented by an unhappy – and possibly former – customer, he or she also has the opportunity to invite others to join in the rant. Without social media monitoring in place, you won’t know this is happening.
Social Media Monitoring with a Positive Spin
With your social media monitoring tools in place, you not only have the opportunity to know when bad experiences are being aired on such platforms, you can also address them and offer a solution. While you may not always be able to re-capture a lost customer, your efforts to provide a satisfactory experience could stop the negative communication. At the same time, these customers may be providing valuable information that can help you to improve your product or service. Even if the social media sharing regarding your brand isn’t necessarily negative, there will be key indicators provided in the information that can lead to improvements in your products, a fix to your software platform, an improved response time to service calls, and so much more. Your social media CRM dashboards and other tools can help you capture what is being said and do something with that information.
Recognizing Opportunities with Social Media Monitoring
What could you do with information posted about your company that would read something like, “I just love product X, but I wish it had this feature”? If a number of your customers are expressing a desire for advanced features or potential add-on products, you can use that information to develop better or additional products that provide new revenue opportunities for your company. This kind of information is difficult to get your hands on through traditional means – but social media monitoring can capture it with very little effort on your part. You can also monitor what customers want out of your competitors products, giving you the opportunity to develop that product first.
Social media monitoring gives you valuable information that you can turn into business intelligence. This intelligence can then be used to improve your offerings, address customer demands, increase revenue and deliver a better customer service experience.