MX Bites / September 27, 2024
It’s no longer news that deep-seated within customer reviews and comments are remarkable insights that could change a business game for life. These insights can only be discovered through active social listening. The beauty of social listening is that it reduces the difficulty of maintaining a proper customer relationship across multiple platforms, in this digital age when the success of most businesses is hinged upon the strength of their customer relationship.
Knowing your customers closely and discovering what they want goes beyond collecting their demographic or personal details. It requires close monitoring of their lifestyle. The best way to achieve this is to closely follow their conversations about your brand and product on social media and analyze the sentiments that accompany each comment. Then take proper action in response to their feedback in order to improve your customer relationship strategies and retain more customers.
Let’s see how this plays out in the body of this article as you read through it.
Social listening and its relationship with customer relationship management
As the name rightly implies, social listening is simply the process of tracking customer conversations across social media platforms, news sites, online forums, or blogs with the sole aim of deriving actionable insights to improve the customer experience. Unlike what many people think, social listening is quite different from social monitoring, which merely involves the act of tracking a particular keyword or special brand mention on social media. Social listening is quite deeper; it involves discovering the reasons behind the social media mentions or feedback, analyzing the sentiments behind each of the comments, and responding to them by taking actionable insights such as resolving conflicts, adjusting product quality or quantity, reviewing competitors’ works, etc.
Customer relationship management deals with the tools, processes, and strategies involved in maintaining relationships with both current and potential customers. Its goal is to improve customer experience, customer retention, and customer satisfaction. When integrated with CRM, social listening amplifies the effectiveness of customer engagement by providing real-time insights into what customers are thinking and feeling and how to respond appropriately to their feedback.
How social listening impacts CRM
There are several ways social listening influences customer relationship management, and a few of them are highlighted below:
-
- Improvement in customer understanding: One of the highest goals of every intentional business is to understand their customers, because it serves as the bedrock for a successful business operation. Humans are indeed complex beings; so are customers. It takes specialized strategies to understand customer behavior and consistently satisfy your customers. Understanding customers is a continuous process, and you can always get better at it. Social listening makes the process easier because it provides an unfiltered perspective of the customer’s opinion about your brand. It also captures the informal, often spontaneous opinions customers share in online discussions. The more you understand your customers, the better your relationship with them grows.
-
- Effective crisis management and control: No matter how perfect your business is, there will definitely be points in your business when you have service failures and dissatisfy your customers. When it happens, there should be an immediate response to recover the failure. Social listening is invaluable in helping you stay informed in discovering and addressing service failure on time before it becomes a fullblown crisis that affects the reputation of your brand.
-
- Tailoring of market strategies to improve revenue: Closely listening to your customers through multiple source channels—where they give undiluted reviews about your brand—will help you understand your customer opinion about product features. This will help you determine the best times to launch new products and how to improve existing ones to meet consumer demand. When customers see that your products are satisfactory, they buy more and refer you to customers who will also enjoy the product. As patronage increases on each product, the overall revenue increases too. In addition, brands can also use social listening to identify new trends and emerging customer needs.
-
- Improves customer retention: One of the goals of customer relationship management is to keep customers satisfied for life. When social listening is properly done and actions are taken in response to it, it increases the overall customer experience. For example, when a company notices frequent complaints about slow delivery or missing packages, they can prioritize working on this defect in service delivery before the issue escalates and leads to customer attrition.
-
- Creating a customer-centric culture: When you base your decision-making on real-time insights gotten from customer feedback, it creates a structure that prioritizes customer needs and preferences. With time, customers begin to feel valued, and in response, they choose to stay loyal to your brand. Companies that make customers feel heard and values also pass this culture to employees who, in turn, go out of their way to make sure customers are always satisfied.
Social listening tips
-
- Have a clear goal: Before you make a decision to listen to customers through social spaces, you should have clearly written goals to direct your efforts, plans, and strategies.
- Use keywords to find data. Social platforms are broad spaces where many people have conversations. To narrow down your finding, use specific keywords that are peculiar to your brand, product features, or services.
-
- Use social listening tools: To get more accurate results in a short time, it’s advisable to use social listening tools. For example, Hoick customer experience software can collect unstructured data (comments and reviews) from different social spaces, analyze the feedback, measure the sentiments in each feedback, and provide insights on how to improve the customer experience. The tools can be integrated into your CRM system to enhance the process.
Conclusion
Social listening is becoming increasingly important in improving customer relationship management today. It provides a platform for understanding both the present and future needs of customers, for attending to their needs promptly, and for improving the customer experiences based on the insights obtained. Giving importance to social listening and integrating it into your customer relationship management will help to improve the customer experience and customer retention.
