Social Listening: 21st Century Go-To For Customer Satisfaction
By Limo SEO Agent | 7 years ago
Did your transportation business start to grow lately? Maybe that’s because of the refreshed website-design, or efforts of your SEO firm nearby and/or digital marketing agency you recently hired. Anywhich way, congratulations and wishes of luck in any future endeavors are in order! But moreover, while your limo business is blooming, take a moment to step back and ask yourself that one, potentially radical question: Are my customers happy?
What Is the Key to Customer Satisfaction?
Apart from delivering phenomenal customer service, you need to be on the same page with your customers’ needs, expectations and – most importantly – have an open ear for their complaints. How else will you know what needs improving if you don’t listen?
Being an important, almost crucial aspect of every business’ success, social networks have proven to be both blessing and a curse for every business. On one hand, you’ll use social platforms to stay in touch with your customers, keep them updated, gather their impressions and stay included in their daily dynamics related to your product/service. On the other hand, your social platforms may be:
a) A target of competition’s pre-planned negativity and bullying which can majorly decrease your reputation
b) The actual customers’ dissatisfaction voiced up through your platforms, visible to every potential new client coming on board
So, What Do You Do? There Two Ways to Handle This:
1) You resort to the good ol’ denial known as “What’s not out there, didn’t happen”, and you go and hide/delete (read: IGNORE) the negative comments
2) You deal with the negative comments by listening to the problem and doing your best to solve it
Are you are an advocate of solution number 2? Good. Then keep on reading or contact the nearest digital marketing firm and tell you about something called “social listening”. This is a contemporary practice which has taken all the social platforms by a storm which! It actually helps business regain their clients’ trust. In the ever-growing popularity of phones, social networks and direct relationships with the business world, it proves as a useful habit of time and time again.
What Exactly Is Social Listening?
Social listening is the process of tracking and monitoring digital conversations, words or brands in order to understand the customers and what they are saying about an industry online. Once client’s comments, complains and questions are identified and understood, marketing teams rely on social listening to help the brand/service/product repair their reputation and keep thriving. Still, social monitoring and social listening are two different things. While social monitoring is pretty much reduced to just observing comments and @mentions on brand’s social profiles (while, in the process, missing out on a huge group of people discussing your service/brand/product outside of the networks and @mentions), social listening is way more analytical as it’s actually dealing with the core of the problem and finding ways to solving it.
Why Is Social Listening Important?
Social listening is a networking tool that enables marketing teams near me to evaluate feedback from the public and then prioritize it. Depending on the customers’ needs and requirements and their overall business problem, this feedback can be used for a number of purposes – from cutting down prices, creating more appealing offerings, upgrading the brand’s services to creating a new marketing campaign altogether. All information gathered during social listening relate to both content and advertisements as well as product and services.
How to Use Social Listening to Retain Customers and Gain New Ones?
LimoLabs team loves to advise a business in trouble (or just one that wants to stay on top) to have a Social Networks Analyst and Community Manager (with Social Listening knowledge) as part of their expert teams. Why can’t you do it yourself? While you might understand the idea behind it, you may not be as skilled in brainstorming and implementing the solution as people trained for the job are.
How Can Social Listening Help a Struggling Business?
#1: SOLVE PROBLEMS, GENERATE LEADS
In case your business isn’t in jeopardy, and you just want to keep it afloat and provide the best possible service to your clients, one way to do that is to have your Social Listening experts monitor keywords related to people’s frustrations, complains and problems with a competitor’s service/product and advise you against making the same mistakes the competition is making.
To identify “weak links” of your service, they’ll potentially monitor terms like “[competitor’s brand name] won’t” or “[competitor’s brand name] can’t”. Or, if your brand is in trouble, they may adopt the same technique to see what causes dissatisfaction among your customers and then target it. Once you find these triggers, you’ll talk about ways to repair the damage.
#2: IDENTIFY INFLUENCERS AND ADVOCATES
Upon your big product/service launch or update, Social Listening experts will track the influencers in your industry so you could reach out and start building relationships. Rewarding the influencers special offers or giveaways and keeping them engaged with your brand is one of the best marketing moves to make. Apart from the happy customers, influencers are your best shot at building a positive reputation. Once the existing happy customers and influencers spread the world on how great you are, a string of new customers will follow.
#3: FIND TOP TALENT AND GET NEW CUSTOMERS
Your HR and Marketing and SEO teams near and far can benefit from social listening, as well. Finding top talent is frequently a challenge, but “listening in” on conversations in blogs, social groups, forums, and other platforms can help you spot key candidates with amazing skill sets and head-hunt them. Also, in following these interactions your Marketing team can engage with the customers, listen to their expectations, thoughts, impressions and work on repairing/implementing your product.
#4: DISCOVER YOUR COMMUNITY’S HANG-OUT SPOT
Social listening will help you figure out where your current and potential community members voice their opinions the most—Facebook, Twitter, Quora, Blog comments, etc. A Social Listening expert will monitor these conversations, and join in when the time is right. Added, with the realistic picture of the most commonly used platforms, you’ll easily improve your social media marketing.
#5: GET FEEDBACK ON PRODUCTS
Social listening is perfect for identifying possible issues early in your service/product’s lifecycle. You should rely on @mentions that address issues with your service/product in order to repair potential problems head-on. Once a Social Listener identifies the problem, it gets immediately assigned to your firm’s development team for the problem to be fixed.
Keep in mind that customers love transparency (when it comes to location too); on that note, it’s advised your team responds directly to the customer and ensure them the problem will be fixed. Added, if there’s any chance someone could answer from a personal email instead of the company’s, that would be great: that way you’d be showing the human (read: caring) side of your business.
#6: IMPROVE CUSTOMER CARE
To instantly identify both positive and negative feedback, social listening comes in handy. This gives you the opportunity to respond to disappointed customers and show appreciation for positive observations. Further, you can turn negative experiences into positive ones by learning from them. Observe it like this: if people took the time to express their opinion/issue with your product, they’re expecting for you to jump in and save the day (and the product).
Similarly, stay on top of any common auto-correct misspellings of your brand-name and screen your website mentions www[dot]werock[dot]com and werock[dot]com).
While the old-fashioned “ask your client what they want and make it happen” still occasional works, social listening is the modernized version of this method. Social listening is your direct insight into your clients’ needs: by listening in on their conversations you can figure out what they need. Use that to your advantage, and keep listening in!