The approaches used for mapping customer needs, expectations and their experiences have been undergoing transformation.
Social listening is the new mantra for understanding customers and their buying behaviour patterns. Social media has become a livewire platform for conversations and sharing of ideas and experiences. Hence social listening is the new art of listening to the customers with the objective of knowing who the customers are and profiling them accurately.
Never before have researchers and product managers have had access to such an expansive set of data about their own customers leading to innumerable possibilities of shaping their strategies. What began as a pleasant note of music has become a cacophony of sounds lately with businesses being besieged with large amounts of data and thus challenged to derive the right insights. Hence organisations are recognising the need to build a sound social listening strategy that would enable them to identify the right strands of customer conversations to follow, analyse and act upon.
Product managers have always analysed what people had to say about their brands and carried out research from time to time before or after brands are launched. Social listening is different from such marketing research and analysis as it pertains to actively listening to customers and markets real time and carrying out actions also real time. It is not just about listening to the masses who have similar views but being able to follow and listen to the lone voices who have differing views and using such views to change track in the product trajectories. With active social listening, businesses can make their product strategies sharper by monitoring the feedbacks and gathering useful insights at each stage, thus saving huge amounts of time and money. Until recently, a page dedicated on Facebook or an alert on Twitter would have been considered adequate to pull in the ideas and feedbacks of customers.
However, over the years, the attention has shifted to listening actively to voices interpreting their intent, emotions and sentiments including predicting their likely reactions in the future. To make this happen, it is important to invest in the right technology and the right people who have the right social listening skills and those who know how to make smart use of the data. With the open and social media, it is now an acknowledged fact that no one can control what people want to say. Hence it is upto businesses to ignore the voices and insights possible to accessed or have a strategy in place to listen, engage and influence.
The starting point for social listening is that there have to be adequate awareness of the product/brand and engagement of the people with the product/brand. To start generating the responses and making voices louder and insightful, placing the right content on a continual basis and creating the ?buzz? is an art which businesses have to develop tactfully. Whether to push content or making the content sticky and attracting the intended audience to the content and what channels to be used are some of the key areas that would require attention.
Content creation and extension should lead to building and maintaining ongoing relationships that would be tracked under social listening. Content that is developed should not only attract the intended audience but it should be such that they like to share such content with their networks and that is how the multiplier effect of relationships will be realised. It is also therefore important to watch how people react and respond with suitable actions and adds to the overall customer experience with the product/brand. The challenge lies in making sense out of what is being shared one to one or one to many which is mostly in unstructured format. Hence converting key phrases from such conversations into structured databases and deciphering insights from the m?lange of data and multifarious formats will be the key to making social listening strategy successful.
It is not only people to people communications supported by technology that creates a case for social listening. Machines embedded with digital technology are also capable of sending valuable information and insights from the field and customer locations straight into the core of the organisation, functions and teams that can act upon such information in a timely fashion. Such standalone machine delivered information or that is further curated and presented to the communities to respond to can throw up amazing insights on prevention of problems or predicting future scenarios as well as present ideas for new product development.
In order to make social listening truly impactful, it is important to construct the end to end strategy addressing aspects such as who will listen, what will we do with what is being picked up, who will act upon them, how will we monitor the actions being put in place and measure the effectiveness of such actions. There are special software platforms available for supporting social listening for businesses and these can also be customised. While making the choice of platform, in addition to listening, analysis and reporting, it should provide for dashboards, in-depth analytics and automated actions backed by business logic built around a robust workflow. Workflow is central to social listening strategy as it seamlessly moves actions from one post to the other enabling timely action, gathering and sharing insights with those concerned at each stage.
It should also be remembered that while social listening is often connected with customer service, product management and marketing, it can also be immensely beneficial to HR function to be able to understand their employees? aspirations and expectations better as well as to map the brand equity with the ex-employees and potential employees and decide on the appropriate communication strategy. Investor communication and strategy is another area which can benefit greatly with effective social listening. Social listening should not be treated as one more discipline that the business needs to address. It has to be intrinsically linked with the business requirements and cover the key stakeholders in its immediate and extended ecosystem with the objective of facilitating speedy solutions to meet their expectations driving business outcomes.
The writer is CEO, Global Talent Track, a corporate training
solutions company