Social Listening for Customer Care: 101

Priyanka Tiwari of Interactions introduces us to social listening and how it can improve the customer experience.

What Is Social Listening and Why Should You Care?

We all know the important role social media plays for both B2B and B2C companies. Aside from posting and engaging with followers, social media also allows for a behind-the-scenes look into what your customers are really thinking — if you know where to look for it.

Social listening is exactly what it sounds like: taking the time to listen to your customers on social media. This doesn’t necessarily mean reading posts your account is specifically tagged in, but also actively searching for posts and/or hashtags about your company, your industry or a similar product.

Not only does this give you insight into the sentiment for your brand, but can also be used to identify key pain points for your customers, and industry consumers in general.

Identifying Consumer Pain Points on Social Media

A perfect example of where social listening can help is with frustrated travellers. With the holiday season upon us, travel is at an all-time high and, with that comes countless calls to airlines’ customer service lines.

While representatives do their best to resolve each issue, it’s inevitable that some will be placed on hold for long periods of time and need somewhere to release their frustration… and that place is social media.

Social data has shown that aside from delayed and cancelled flights, the number one complaint travellers call about is to track their luggage or find the status of a missing piece of luggage.

However, most of the time these callers become annoyed being on hold and hang up, leaving airlines to wonder what their intent was in the first place.

By engaging in social listening, airlines would be able to see these complaints and know that missing and tracking luggage is a key reason people reach out to their customer service.

With this insight, they’re given the opportunity to tailor their CX to fit the needs of their customers with self-service options to help them get their issues solved easily and efficiently.

How?

So, how can you begin the practice of social listening? The most straightforward way to do this is to begin with a list of keywords, hashtags, and accounts that are relevant to your company and industry. You can then search social platforms for these things and congregate the posts that are of most use to you.

In a simpler way, you can use third-party platforms to congregate these posts for you automatically, based on the hashtags and keywords you enter.

Priyanka Tiwari

Whether done manually or automatically, knowing consumers’ needs is crucial to being able to provide excellent customer care.

By expanding your knowledge of customer needs beyond what is being said directly to you, your company is able to resolve customers’ issues before they even become issues.

Author: Robyn Coppell