We will continue the trend of discussing social media within the Fizzback Blog this week by having a look at a recently published article in The Independent, “Corporate Britain joins the social network”. The post explores how “companies are becoming more tuned into the potential of social networking” by searching for and responding to customer comments on online social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
While social media analytics is nothing new within the retail sector, the article highlights the fact that the practice is now common place, and something every company should be doing. Research also reinforces the value of adopting this strategy; according to Neilson 90% of internet users trust the opinions of friends online and 70% trust those of strangers posting online.
Another report cited in the article is from Conversocial who looked into the top “liked” retailers on Facebook; they discovered that some of the top retailers in terms of “likes” had the worse customer service in terms of time to respond to comments on their own page. So is having a successful Social Media strategy actually having a negative effect on companies, as detractors are allowed to freely vent in a very public space?
On top of this social media can be an unreliable and sometimes inaccurate tool, allowing customers to vent in the moment, neither giving full nor helpful accounts of the good or bad service they received. I will though not go into details about this, as my previous post on the London Riots tackled this issue.
Yet with all this said, negative posts complaining about (or complementing) the service customers received cannot be left unanswered and companies must have a strategy in place to deal with responding to and recording each relevant comment, wherever they may be online.
What the example above of popular retailers struggling to react to customer comments demonstrates is the difficulty companies’ face in having teams manually trawl through social media sites. The two retailers were struggling to respond to customers on their own Facebook page, let alone other sites such as Twitter and online forums.
Fizzback’s Natural Language Processors (NLP) offers a genuine solution to this problem, gathering all comments relating to a brand, accurately categorising and scoring them into one simple yet insightful dashboard. Particularly negative comments create email alerts, highlighting issues and routing them to the correct team to deal with them effectively. All the gathered feedback is processed in a way that enables the companies to act on what their customers are saying, and drive real performance improvement.
Tom Lynam
For more info on Fizzback visit www.fizzback.com.