What to Look For in A Social Listening Tool? 

1. Sentiment Analysis
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Multi-Platform Coverage
4. Keyword and Hashtag Tracking
5. Analytics and Reporting
6. Content Creation and Scheduling
7. CRM Integration

A social listening tool lets you tap into online conversations around your business. You can think of it as your eyes and ears on social media with the information it provides. From brand mentions to product discussions, you gain insight into customer sentiment to help make informed decisions.

The right social media listening tool will help you analyze customer behavior and competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Key features to look for include:

Sentiment Analysis

Identifying and monitoring the sentiment behind social media activity helps understand customer satisfaction. A good social listening tool leverages sentiment analysis to categorize your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. This classification of public opinion gives you insight into your brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis also helps with effective customer service. For example, if you’re a pet food retailer, this analysis can highlight complaints about food quality. You can filter out all the negative mentions, allowing you to respond to them right away. This is crucial since responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%.

Therefore, sentiment analysis helps you understand your customers better to improve your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

You can’t have an edge over your competitors without identifying and analyzing them. What are their most popular offerings? What is the current public opinion around them? Is there an opportunity for you to differentiate or capitalize? A robust social listening tool should help you answer these questions.

Analyzing your competitors’ social media activity helps you keep up and move ahead. It enables you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also find strategic opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you learn that your pet food competitor is receiving online criticism for late product deliveries, you can use that to your advantage. You can leverage social media campaigns and reviews to highlight how you never compromise on delivery times. This will help you emerge as a viable alternative to your competitors.

Multi-Platform Coverage

Online conversations happen across multiple platforms. From long threads on X (formerly Twitter) to an Instagram influencer’s comments, online interactions are multi-platform. As a result, social listening tools must cover multiple social media platforms to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.

Keyword and Hashtag Tracking

Keywords and hashtags enable you to track mentions of your brand and offerings on social media. They help cut through the noise and hone in on relevant conversations in your niche. 

Searching #petfood or #petcare on Instagram, for example, will help you uncover trending topics if your business is in that space. It can also help discover recurring complaints about products in your niche, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Analytics and Reporting

Effective social listening tools should offer analytics and reporting features that transform raw data into actionable insights. Analytics can show engagement trends and campaign performance. It also provides insight into how sentiment shifts over time so that brands can inform strategy.

Reporting tools allow you to present these insights to stakeholders in a clear manner. This guides businesses toward strategic decisions based on measurable data.

CRM Integration

Integrating social listening data with customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you build rich customer profiles. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage social media activity to identify its most valuable customers. These customers engage heavily with the brand’s social media content and recommend it to their networks. On the flip side, identifying disgruntled customers can help you focus on retaining them.

Best Social Listening Tool for Improving Customer Experience

A good social listening tool can help you make the most of your social media presence. Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market to help you enhance your social media management efforts.

Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza is your one-stop shop for tracking relevant conversations around your brand and analyzing them for informed decisions. It enables you to stay ahead of potential issues and proactively manage customer experiences.

With sentiment analysis and keyword tracking, Pearl-Plaza helps you improve customer experience through a rich understanding of user personas. It helps you learn which features resonate the most or where you might need improvements. 

The software’s advanced monitoring tools also give you an edge by providing competitor insights that you can leverage. For example, if a competitor experiences a data breach, your CX and marketing teams can reinforce your brand’s commitment to security. This helps you appear as a trusted alternative to prospects.

Speaking of prospects, Pearl-Plaza’s ability to track industry-relevant mentions is valuable for lead generation. Unlike other platforms, its XI Spotlight Tool lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook. This regular, real-time data analysis gives you the most accurate decision-making insights.

Social Listening Tools for Brand Awareness

1. Hootsuite
2. Meltwater
3. Sprout Social
4. Brandwatch
5. Mentionlytics
6. AgoraPulse
7. Keyhole
8. Brand24
9. Buffer
10. YouScan
11. Digimind
12. BuzzSumo
13. TweetDeck

Hootsuite features social listening tools that use keywords and hashtags to track brand mentions. Its dashboard provides a centralized platform where you can easily monitor and respond to relevant social media activity. 

Key features include Streams and Insights, which support keyword monitoring and competitor analysis. Brands using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage its integration with Pearl-Plaza to cultivate a positive online reputation,

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is social listening software designed to help businesses manage their online presence. It aggregates data from various sources, like social media, blogs, and forums. As a result, brands can monitor public sentiment and benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, historical data tracking, and influencer identification. Real-time alerts help businesses respond quickly to important events or potential crises. Additionally, Meltwater’s reporting tools help stakeholders visualize social media engagement.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a flexible tool that offers a wide range of features for social listening, analytics, and customer care. The platform allows users to track customer conversations on specific topics by creating custom queries. This makes it easier to stay informed about brand-related discussions.

A standout feature is the trend-identifying tool, which generates a word cloud to highlight frequently used terms in online conversations. This offers a quick snapshot of prominent topics to guide brands toward informed decisions.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch leverages social listening to gather relevant online interactions in one place. It pulls brand mentions from over 100 million sources to help businesses analyze historical and real-time conversations. 

Key features include a digital library for storing visual content and Focus Panels for digging deeper into demographics and behavior. It also offers multilingual support, which is ideal for businesses operating in multiple countries.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics leverages AI to provide real-time tracking of brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social media platforms. Its robust reporting helps users make informed decisions for proactive engagement strategies. The tool also includes sentiment analysis in over 100 languages and competitor analysis to help brands keep up.

6. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse centralizes all social media conversations to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. Its Professional plan offers advanced brand monitoring, analytics reporting, and publishing capabilities across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It also helps with content organization by letting you label key posts and customer feedback for easy access.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Its Team plan provides in-depth TikTok analytics, including competitor insights and data-driven recommendations. These recommendations cover optimal hashtags, video effects, and posting times for engagement. Keyhole’s tool is valuable for managing brand interactions on TikTok, where viral content can make a huge impact.

8. Brand24

Brand24’s tools measure brand awareness and reach, tracking conversations from 25 million online sources to provide insights into consumer sentiment. This information helps you identify what resonates with customers and any potential risks to your reputation.

9. Buffer

Buffer’s platform includes scheduling and publishing features for effective campaign planning. It integrates well with social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Additionally, Buffer’s analytics tools help monitor team performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior. However, the analytical and reporting features are available only on paid plans.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that leverages AI-powered image recognition to offer visual insights into consumer profiles. The platform’s capabilities allow for an in-depth understanding of brand sentiment and upcoming trends. This helps you tailor marketing strategies effectively. It also detects potential reputation threats in real-time to enable proactive management.

11. Digimind

Digimind provides competitive intelligence by turning social and online data into actionable insights. Its brand reputation dashboard helps in planning and analyzing marketing strategies effectively. As a result of its extensive data collection features, Digimind is a good fit for professionals who are well-versed in data analytics.

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for content discovery and research. It helps users track trending topics and popular content across social media. With its monitoring features, brands can set up alerts for specific businesses, topics, and keywords to stay in the loop.

13. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking tweets around specific topics or breaking news. It also allows users to filter tweets from curated lists, which helps with monitoring relevant X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Its specific nature makes it ideal for individuals seeking a free method of narrowing down relevant X conversations. However, businesses might find it too limited for their purposes.

How Do Social Listening Tools Work?

Social listening tools provide access to online conversations around your business. These conversations could include comments, video reviews, or threads. Any piece of content mentioning your brand or product can offer key insights to you.

The software achieves this by searching for specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags on social media platforms. This results in a vast amount of data that is then analyzed for patterns, sentiment, and engagement metrics. 

Centralizing these insights in a dashboard allows brands to assess public opinion in real time. This method of feedback collection informs marketing strategies by identifying emerging trends and discussions. 

How to Use Social Listening Tools

You can leverage social listening tools to enhance brand reputation and deliver positive experiences. Popular applications of this technology include:

• Brand Awareness: You learn how often and where your brand is mentioned to understand its reach and popularity. This information helps you optimize your marketing efforts to ensure you hit the right notes with the right people.
• Customer Experience: The ability to track feedback and customer sentiment enables prompt issue resolution. As a result, you can enhance customer loyalty by adopting a proactive approach to customer service.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitor mentions to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also identify opportunities for positioning yourself as a better alternative, which helps generate leads.
• Product Development: Identify product-related feedback to gain insights into what customers want or areas needing improvement. It also helps identify popular feature requests that you might not have noticed through traditional feedback collection.
• Crisis Management: Negative reviews spread like wildfire on the Internet. With a social listening tool, you can detect potential issues early and respond right away to minimize the negative impact.

How to Create A Social Listening Strategy

1. Identify your goals
2. Select relevant keywords
3. Benchmark social media performance
4. Analyze data
5. Take action 

The right social listening strategy for your business depends on your goals and needs. The following steps provide a general blueprint for tracking and acting on online sentiment.

Identify Your Goals

Start by identifying your main goals. For example, if you want to improve customer service, you would want to track keywords related to service quality or product satisfaction. For competitor analysis, focus on tracking mentions of competitors’ products or issues.

Select Relevant Keywords

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential to choose the right ones to collect relevant data. Keywords can include your brand name, products, or industry terms. For competitor analysis, it would be helpful to search terms related to the competitor and their service.

Benchmark Social Media Performance

Once you have established your goals and keywords, you can start making the most of your social media presence. Establish benchmarks to gauge the success of your social listening efforts. Common metrics include sentiment scores, the volume of brand mentions, and the share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors. 

Analyze Data

Consistent analysis is key to spotting trends and improving key metrics. If certain features are frequently mentioned, look for patterns in sentiment to understand if you need to make changes. A social listening platform like Pearl-Plaza’s XI Spotlight Tool can help by analyzing large volumes of data to unearth actionable insights for you.

Take Action 

Finally, with the insights in place, you can start taking the right actions to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if your analysis reveals a preference for certain features or products, it would be smart to prioritize them for now. Follow up with customers after implementing the changes to create a feedback loop for consistently excellent service.

What Can Social Listening Enable CX Leaders and Marketing Managers to Do?

Social listening empowers CX leaders and marketing managers to process customer sentiment for business gains. By monitoring real-time conversations, they can quickly identify and address customer concerns. This provides valuable data for enhancing the overall customer experience.

Social listening also enables them to track brand mentions. Did a social media influencer recently mention their brand? What are people saying about their products? Is there an opportunity to collaborate with popular individuals for brand promotion? Social listening answers these questions by highlighting trends and content that resonates so you can adjust strategies accordingly.

With insights from social listening, CX leaders can benchmark against competitors. They have access to relevant data that helps refine products and create targeted campaigns. As a result, they are better able to create campaigns that resonate with their audience and encourage stronger customer engagement.

Can Social Listening Help You Find Leads?

Yes, absolutely! Social listening can be an impactful lead-generation tool if you use the right software and techniques.

Monitoring keywords relevant to your products, services, or industry helps you identify user profiles that would be a good fit for your business. For example, if a user mentions in a post that they’re looking for software similar to yours, your team has an opportunity to reach out. By offering recommendations or support, you can position yourself as a business they can trust.

Social listening also lets you track competitor mentions. This analysis gives you a chance to attract customers who may be dissatisfied with other brands. Creating content around a specific feature in your software that a user can’t find anywhere else will boost your likelihood of converting them.

You can implement this strategic approach with a social listening platform like Pearl-Plaza. Unlike other tools, Pearl-Plaza’s XI Spotlight lets you control how frequently you pull data and analyzes it for you. It performs the analytical heavy lifting so that you can focus on effective actions for acquiring more customers.

How to Measure Social Listening

• Mentions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Engagement Metrics
• Share of Voice
• Geographic Insights
• Trend Analysis
• Business Metrics

You can measure the effectiveness of social listening efforts by tracking various metrics that reflect audience interaction and sentiment. Key metrics to track include:

Mentions

Track how often your brand, product, or related industry topics are mentioned on social media. This metric helps assess brand awareness and reach. Pearl-Plaza’s social listening tools can streamline this process by monitoring relevant keywords and terms.

Sentiment Analysis

Analyze the tone of these mentions to understand how audiences feel about your brand. You can categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This information is key for brand reputation management efforts as it highlights the dominant public feeling towards you.

Engagement Metrics

Monitor the number of likes, shares, and comments to assess engagement levels with your brand. Likes reflect the lowest level of engagement and suggest overall approval of your content. Comments provide more context and highlight individuals taking a deeper interest in your brand. It also helps identify specific demographics that interact the most with your brand.

Share of Voice

Measure your brand’s presence relative to competitors. This metric helps you understand your position in the market and how often you’re mentioned compared to others. 

By tracking engagement metrics, Pearl-Plaza’s competitive analysis tools can highlight if your target audience engages with you more than your competition. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in your marketing campaigns.

Geographic Insights

Identify regional variations in brand perception. Measuring this metric provides insight into location-specific strategies and regional customer sentiment. For example, it helps you focus on regions exhibiting greater overall dissatisfaction.

Trend Analysis

Analyze shifts in customer sentiment or recurring themes over time. This metric helps you spot emerging trends and anticipate changing customer preferences. 

For example, if a relevant issue becomes a hot topic of discussion online, you can leverage it to generate interest in your brand. Pearl-Plaza’s social media monitoring tools help you stay on top of trends by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Business Metrics

Assess the business impact of social listening efforts. Tracking metrics like customer growth, regional sales, and conversion rate helps you confirm the value of your social media strategy. It also highlights room for improvement, enabling you to tweak processes and adapt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Social listening provides real-time data on your brand, customers, and competitors. It’s a powerful tool for gaining industry insights to consistently improve your business. If you are curious to learn more, here are answers to some of the most common questions:

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking relevant keywords, topics, and conversations across your social media channels. It helps you monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to determine public opinion around your business. You can leverage this technique to keep tabs on customer behavior, analyze competitors, and generate leads.

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is a reactive strategy that looks at comments and conversations directly related to your brand. It provides an opportunity to respond to feedback on your specific business or product to retain and satisfy customers.

Social listening is a proactive approach that takes monitoring a step further. It tracks all the conversations relevant to your industry, including those around your competitors, to understand customer sentiment and expectations. It helps you keep up with potential issues and trends to provide better overall customer experiences.

For example, monitoring tells you that a customer is complaining about your product quality on a Facebook post. Listening tells you why this particular complaint is popular nowadays and how you can address it better than your competition.

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Social media listening increases customer advocacy by showing customers that you care. It provides a proactive approach to resolving issues and fulfilling expectations. For example, listening enables you to add trendy features or address potential issues before they arise. 

These actions enhance satisfaction and convert customers into loyal advocates for your brand. You can monitor their advocacy by tracking the volume of mentions you get from them on social media channels.

Learn More About Pearl-Plaza’s Social Listening Tool

Social media listening enables you to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It unlocks opportunities for improvement and moving ahead of your competition. With Pearl-Plaza’s social listening tool, you can track every piece of relevant content online to stay on top of trends, potential risks, and customer preferences. Take a product tour today to see if it’s the right fit for your brand monitoring needs!

What is Churn Prediction?

Churn prediction detects which customers are likely to discontinue business with you. This churn could occur as a canceled subscription or product abandonment. There are several types of churn you can predict, including:

• Customer churn is the most familiar type of churn. Customer churn focuses on the specific decline in the number of customers instead of revenue alone.
• Revenue churn represents the loss of revenue due to customers downgrading their plans or leaving the business altogether.
• Active churn is when customers cancel their service and communicate their decision to the business.
• Passive churn occurs when customers don’t explicitly cancel their service. However, they haven’t attempted to renew it either. For example, a subscription that ends without renewal or communication from the subscriber.
• Voluntary churn is when customers actively decide to stop using a service or product. This decision can be due to dissatisfaction, finding a better alternative, or changing requirements.
• Involuntary churn occurs against the customer’s will. It’s usually a result of payment issues, like credit card expirations or insufficient funds. It doesn’t represent a problem with customer satisfaction, but it indicates that you could improve your payment processor or methods.

Why is Customer Churn Prediction Important?

Predicting churn in any form is key to customer retention and satisfaction. It is important for businesses because:

• It helps retain customers. Acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining current ones. Proactively monitoring customer health can help businesses cut churn by over 34% for at-risk clients.
• It informs effective marketing strategy. Churn prediction helps you tailor your marketing efforts to re-engage customers at risk of leaving. For example, you can send gift cards to at-risk customers after their next purchase.
• It enhances customer satisfaction. Modelling churn helps you understand why customers want to leave. It provides rich insight into specific pain points. This will help you better understand and serve customers.
• It supports long-term growth. Lowering the churn rate contributes to a stronger, more loyal customer base. This creates a foundation for sustainable growth, enabling you to fulfill key business goals.
• It provides a competitive advantage. With insights into customer behavior, you can act faster and smarter than competitors. With effective customer experience management, you can re-engage customers who might otherwise be lost to your competition.

A good example of the importance of reducing customer churn comes from nib New Zealand. With 1.3 million customers across the Tasman, the health insurance provider became profitable by focusing on churn prediction. Through its partnership with Pearl-Plaza, nib rolled out a closed-loop feedback process to improve the customer experience. Pearl-Plaza’s churn propensity modeling was crucial to identifying and retaining customers showing signs of dissatisfaction. As a result, nib improved its NPS and reduced churn by 6% within six months of rolling out the program.

How to Predict Customer Churn?

To predict customer churn, you need to know how to model it. A data scientist can achieve this by building a machine learning prediction model trained on a dataset. This dataset includes the target variable you want to predict (customer churn) and features that describe customer profiles.

Here are the key steps for using data analysis to predict churn:

1. Collect and Prepare Data
2. Select and Train a Model
3. Analyze Predictive Patterns
4. Take Proactive Action

Collect and Prepare Data

Consider diverse data sources that capture customer interactions and behaviors. This can include CRM data, social media, call center logs, service requests, and chat messages. 

Pulling unstructured data from different sources helps you build a comprehensive dataset covering every touchpoint in the customer journey.

The next step is to clean and preprocess the data to ensure consistency. This includes removing duplicate entries and standardizing formats. For example, different sources may record customer names in different formats. Standardizing the format will help ensure clarity.

Identifying the most relevant features for churn prediction helps improve model accuracy. For example, someone’s name isn’t a good indicator of whether they will churn. However, their transaction frequency or last purchase date are stronger indicators. Including these features would help you prepare high-quality data for reliable predictions.

Select and Train a Model

Select a machine learning model that best fits your data and business goals. Logistic regression algorithms are ideal as they can predict a binary outcome (churn or not) based on volumes of historical data.

The next step is to feed the labeled data to the model to train it. During the training phase, the model detects patterns in customer activity to understand why churn happens. For example, low engagement or transaction frequency will likely be true for most churn cases.

Training is an iterative process. Evaluate the model’s performance on test data to see how well it predicts churn. A data scientist might also tweak the model or choose additional features to improve predictive power.

The last step is to validate the model with new data to ensure it generalizes well. This will help confirm the model’s ability to forecast new churn cases accurately.

Analyze Predictive Patterns

A trained model can reveal predictive patterns leading to customer churn. For example, a drop in purchase frequency, low engagement with customer support, or consistently negative feedback indicates churn likelihood.

Begin by analyzing key indicators within your model’s output. Look at variables like purchase recency, CSAT (customer satisfaction score), and interaction frequency. This will help identify common attributes among churned customers. Identifying these patterns helps you understand the specific reasons customers might leave.

A good practice is to break down these patterns by customer segments. For example, younger customers might churn due to a lack of personalization. High-value customers might leave because of pricing concerns. Categorizing insights by customer segments helps create targeted retention strategies for each demographic.

Take Proactive Action

This step involves acting on the churn predictions to engage at-risk customers before it’s too late.

Proactive actions can include personalized outreach addressing specific concerns. For example, you can send them special offers or product recommendations to reignite their interest. High-value customers might benefit from loyalty rewards or exclusive access to new features. These steps will help make customers feel valued and appreciated.

If certain offers or messages reduce churn, incorporate these strategies into a long-term retention plan. Acting on churn predictions highlights your commitment to customer satisfaction. The resulting customer loyalty is key to stronger relationships and business growth.

What Are the Challenges of Predicting Customer Churn?

1. Inaccurate Model Predictions 
2. Identifying the Right Features
3. Collecting High-Quality Data
4. Data Integration
5. Changing Customer Behaviors
6. Transforming Insights into Action

Predicting customer churn is valuable for customer retention. However, it can be tricky to navigate. Some common challenges businesses face include:

Inaccurate Model Predictions

Accurate model predictions require careful data analysis and calibration. Without proper testing and validation, a model is likely to produce inaccurate predictions. For example, if it overfits the training data, it won’t be able to make accurate predictions on new data. Regular testing and refinement are time-consuming but crucial for improving model accuracy.

Identifying the Right Features

Selecting the right features is important for building an effective churn prediction model. Irrelevant features can add noise to the dataset and confuse the model. Similarly, overlooking impactful features makes it difficult to understand the true drivers of churn. Data scientists often need to experiment with different features to identify the ones most relevant to churn.

Collecting High-Quality Data

Data quality is a key component in churn prediction. Incomplete or low-quality data can skew results and lead to unreliable predictions. 

Data Integration

One of the biggest challenges is integrating large volumes of customer data from various sources. A CX platform like Pearl-Plaza can help by collecting and connecting every piece of valuable data in one place. This effective integration helps build cohesive, model-ready datasets for churn prediction. 

Changing Customer Behaviors

Customer needs and behaviors evolve. As a result, attributes responsible for churn last year might not necessarily be relevant today. Businesses must regularly update their models based on customer behavior analysis to reflect changing customer expectations. The continuous monitoring and adjustment require considerable time and effort.

Transforming Insights into Action

Once you identify at-risk customers, you must act on the predictive insights to re-engage customers. This might include personalized offers, targeted communication, or enhanced customer support. Creating these strategies and making them effective can be challenging.

What Are the Benefits of Predicting Customer Churn?

Predicting customer churn is a worthy investment despite the challenges. Businesses can expect to realize the following benefits:

• It reduces customer acquisition costs. Acquiring new customers is difficult and costly. Identifying at-risk customers early enables businesses to re-engage them with tailored incentives. As a result, you spend less on acquiring new clients to help your business thrive.
• It improves customer relationships. Predictive insights highlight what matters to your customers. This information helps you refine retention strategies to keep clients on board. For example, offering proactive customer support or loyalty rewards helps retain customers by showing them you care.
• It provides stronger customer insights. Patterns in churn data provide insight into customer satisfaction. It helps you understand different customer segments better. These insights help improve messaging and engagement efforts for both retention and acquisition. 
• It enables business growth and stability. Repeat customers spend 67% more than new clients. As a result, retaining more customers helps maintain a stable revenue stream. This contributes to consistent business growth and innovation.
• It provides a competitive advantage. At-risk customers are considering alternative businesses. Churn prediction improves your chances of retaining them and maintaining your competitive edge. It also informs strategies that better meet customer needs, reducing their chances of choosing competitors.

Calculate your business’s ROI using Pearl-Plaza’s VoC tools.

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How to Choose Churn Prediction Software?

The right churn prediction software does the predictive heavy lifting so that you can focus on improving customer relationships. Key features to look for include:

Data Integration

Building a comprehensive dataset involves pulling customer data from diverse sources. These sources can include CRM systems, customer feedback questionnaires, and social media. The right software should be adept at integrating every single data point for effective model training.

Pearl-Plaza simplifies this process by connecting customer signals from each relevant source into a single place for analysis. The accuracy and reliability of its data integration help produce complete datasets.

Advanced Text Analytics

Your churn prediction platform should be able to analyze customer feedback. This helps uncover customer sentiment and identify churn indicators.

Customizable Alerts

Look for tools that enable you to set alerts for at-risk customers. These customer experience automation features make it easier to respond to customers quickly, improving your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

The right tool should offer competitor insights to help you understand churn in the market context. For example, do customers have a better alternative in mind? If so, what can you offer them to sway them away from the competition?

Actionable Reporting

A good platform helps you visualize predictive insights. Dashboards and competitive reports make it easier for teams to understand and respond to churn patterns.

With Pearl-Plaza’s reporting capabilities, you can easily build customizable reports and share them across your organization. It enables you to prioritize features that will improve your chances of engaging at-risk customers.

How Pearl-Plaza Can Help with Churn Prediction and Reduce Customer Churn

Churn prediction is key to improving relationships, reducing acquisition costs, and increasing profits. Pearl-Plaza offers a comprehensive approach to churn prediction that enables businesses to take proactive steps for customer retention. It processes volumes of unstructured data with the help of machine learning and text analysis to accurately identify churn drivers. Take a look at our text analytics solutions today and see how they can help reduce churn rates!

What is Social Media Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is the practice of actively tracking, analyzing, and responding to online mentions of a brand, product, or topic across social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Social media monitoring is part of comprehensive social media management. 

When an organization is tuned in to social media conversations, it gives them insights that influence everything from customer service protocols to marketing strategies and product updates. 

Social Media Monitoring vs Social Listening

• Social media monitoring is reactive to certain mentions, reviews, or posts made by customers. Social media monitoring is the base that social listening is built on. 
• Social listening is a proactive strategy that uses social media data to uncover customer insights and make broader business decisions. 

While often used together in conversation, social media monitoring differs greatly from social listening. Both involve tracking online conversations, however, social media monitoring focuses on immediate action and responding in real-time, making it useful for handling customer inquiries or managing problems as they happen. 

Conversely, social listening identifies larger trends and themes through audience analysis, competitive intelligence, and customer sentiment tracking. This helps organizations understand the bigger picture behind consumer behavior and market performance. 

Why Is Social Media Monitoring Important

Social media monitoring is important because 88% of consumers expect a response from an organization on social media within two business days. Furthermore, 76% of consumers are frustrated when they do not get personalized communication from a business. By leveraging tools to monitor social media, you can improve your response time with customers and offer them a more personalized experience. 

Benefits of Social Media Monitoring

When brands consistently track and analyze social media mentions, they can use those findings to assist their brand reputation management efforts, improve the customer experience, and capitalize on market insights. Here are some other key benefits of social media monitoring:

• Enhanced brand awareness
• Improved customer engagement
• Effective crisis management
• Competitive Analysis
• Informed Market Research

Enhanced Brand Awareness

Social media monitoring allows brands to gauge their visibility across channels and understand how their audience perceives them. By tracking your brand mentions specifically, you can assess the reach and tone of conversations you are part of. This helps you stay connected with how consumers view your brand. This level of awareness ensures that your brand can strategically build and maintain a positive image. In fact, 83% of marketers say their social media monitoring efforts have increased their brand exposure. 

Improved Customer Engagement

Properly responding to customer questions, complaints, or compliments can significantly impact customer loyalty. Social media monitoring enables your organization to identify and engage with your audience at crucial moments, such as when a customer leaves a bad review after a negative shopping experience. A quick response time shows that your brand is attentive and responsive and builds stronger customer relationships. 

Effective Crisis Management

Social media monitoring can be the difference between a quickly resolved emergency and a crisis that destroys your brand image. With social media monitoring tools, your organization can identify emerging problems and spikes in mentions, such as a viral post of a customer detailing poor customer service they experienced with your brand. When you can identify these issues early, you can address them before they escalate. 

Social media monitoring also makes it easy to communicate with your entire customer base in a crisis. A pre-planned crisis management strategy can make crisis management easier through social media monitoring tools.

Competitive Analysis

Social media monitoring tools do not only monitor mentions of your organization. They can also monitor chosen keywords such as product names, industry buzzwords, or names of your competitors. By monitoring industry-related conversations, you gain insight into competitors’ strategies, market gaps, and your current brand equity. This information is invaluable for helping your brand stand out in the market. 

Informed Market Research

As mentioned earlier, social media monitoring is the foundation of social listening. That means that social media monitoring can be the filtering system for what is explored more in-depth with social listening. By tracking which topics are being mentioned frequently, you can identify this as a trend that can be further explored with social listening tools. 

Who Should Use Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring can be useful to any CX teams or similar groups within your organization that rely on customer sentiment, engagement, and overall brand presence. For these teams, social media monitoring can improve strategies and influence business objectives. Here is a closer look at who can benefit from using social media monitoring:

1. Marketing and Brand Managers
2. Customer Service Teams
3. PR Professionals
4. Sales Teams
5. Product Development Teams

1. Marketing and Brand Managers

Marketing teams can use social media monitoring tools to understand the reach, sentiment, and engagement around campaigns and brand mentions. Using this insight, they can change their messaging, identify successful content, and maintain brand consistency across social platforms. 

2. Customer Service Teams

Social media is now in the top five most preferred channels for customer service. Customer service teams that monitor social media channels can promptly address inquiries, resolve issues, and manage complaints. 

3. Public Relations (PR) Professionals

PR teams must maintain a positive public image and handle any issues before they develop into a crisis. Social media monitoring helps them stay attuned to public opinion and track the success of PR campaigns. By catching negative mentions early, PR teams can proactively address concerns, manage rumors, and prevent reputation damage.

4. Sales Teams

Social media monitoring can help sales teams identify leads and better understand customer needs and preferences. Monitoring industry trends and tracking potential customers’ pain points can give sales teams an edge in personalizing pitches and addressing the most relevant concerns. This data-driven approach can improve the quality of their outreach and boost conversion rates.

5. Product Development Teams

Social media is a valuable source of customer feedback. Users frequently share experiences, pain points, and feature requests. Product teams can analyze this feedback to improve products, add new features, or create new offerings that align with customer needs. Social media monitoring provides real-world insights that complement other sources of product data.

Key Metrics for Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring is more than scanning through unstructured data. There are quantifiable metrics that can help you track the status and progress of your social media monitoring efforts. Here are some essential metrics to focus on: 

• Brand Mentions
• Customer Sentiment
• Share of Voice
• Engagement Metrics
• Topic and Keyword Trends

Brand Mentions

In order to understand your brand visibility and relevance, it is crucial to monitor the number and context of brand mentions. Tracking when, where, and how often people mention your brand gives insight into your reach and presence across social platforms. By analyzing both direct and indirect mentions (variations of your brand name or common misspellings), you can be sure that you are capturing the full scope of brand-related conversations. 

Customer Sentiment 

Customer sentiment analysis measures the emotional tone behind social media mentions. This metric provides insight into how people feel about your brand and whether the sentiment changes over time. 

Engagement Metrics

Engagement metrics, including likes, comments, shares, and retweets, reveal how actively users interact with your content. Tracking engagement metrics on posts mentioning your brand helps you identify which content types and topics resonate most with your audience. 

Topic and Keyword Trends

Staying on top of relevant topics, keywords, and hashtags in your industry helps you tap into conversations that matter most to your audience. By monitoring trending topics, you can align your content with current interests, join popular discussions, and ensure your messaging remains relevant. 

Tools for Social Media Monitoring

Selecting the right social media monitoring tool can streamline the process of tracking brand mentions, analyzing customer behavior, and staying responsive to your audience. Here are some popular tools for social media monitoring: 

1. Pearl-Plaza
2. Sprout Social
3. Mention
4. Brandwatch
5. Agorapulse

1. Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza includes a comprehensive social media management tool through a Hootsuite partnership. This tool includes monitoring, scheduling, and analytics capabilities that allows brands to track keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions across multiple platforms in real time. 

Its analytics dashboard also allows users to gauge engagement, sentiment, and campaign performance. It is an all-in-one solution for businesses that want to manage content and monitoring from a single platform.

2. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is known for its robust analytics and customer engagement tools. It enables brands to monitor mentions and keywords, assess audience sentiment, and manage interactions through a unified inbox. Sprout Social’s reporting features provide valuable insights into brand health, competitive positioning, and audience engagement trends, making it particularly useful for teams focused on data-driven strategies.

3. Mention

Mention offers a straightforward, user-friendly solution for tracking brand mentions, competitor analysis, and sentiment. With Mention, users can set up custom alerts for keywords and topics and receive real-time updates, helping brands stay proactive in responding to mentions and trends. This tool is ideal for small to medium-sized businesses that want efficient monitoring without complex features.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch specializes in social listening and analytics, providing powerful tools for analyzing customer sentiment and market trends. Its AI-powered analytics offer in-depth insights into brand perception and competitor activity. Brandwatch is well-suited for businesses that need advanced data analytics, sentiment analysis, and trend tracking to stay competitive in their industry.

5. Agorapulse

Agorapulse combines social media management with monitoring, allowing brands to track mentions and keywords while scheduling content and engaging with their audience. Its social inbox is ideal for teams that manage multiple accounts, as it centralizes interactions from various platforms. Agorapulse’s analytics reports also help users evaluate engagement and sentiment, making it a practical choice for mid-sized businesses looking for a mix of functionality.

Key Features for Social Media Monitoring Platforms

Social media monitoring tools can vary in functionality based on the use cases for which they are built. However, there are certain core features that every effective social media monitoring tool will have. Here are some of the most popular features to look out for as you choose a social media monitoring tool: 

Real-Time Alerts

Ensure your chosen tool can deliver real-time notifications for brand mentions and tracked keywords. This improves your response time and is especially useful for time-sensitive situations such as handling customer complaints and spotting trending topics. 

Sentiment Analysis

Understanding the tone of social media mentions can help you gauge overall customer sentiment and track how it changes over time. Sentiment analysis provides insights into whether conversations around your brand are positive, negative, or neutral. 

Cross-Platform integration

With social conversations happening on multiple platforms, it is important to have a tool that pulls data from all relevant social networks to capture a comprehensive view of your brand’s digital presence. You want to choose a tool that integrates with all major platforms, such as Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, and LinkedIn, as well as review sites such as Google and Yelp. 

If your team uses other platforms, such as a CRM, marketing automation software, or customer support tool, look for social media monitoring tools that can integrate seamlessly to consolidate data and streamline workflows.

Competitive Analysis

Understanding what’s happening with competitors provides valuable context for your brand’s performance and helps identify gaps or opportunities within your industry. Monitoring competitors’ social media presence, engagement levels, and customer sentiment lets you stay ahead and make more strategic decisions.

Choose tools that allow you to set up competitor tracking with customizable comparisons, share-of-voice analysis, and benchmarking features. Some tools can also analyze competitors’ content to reveal which topics and formats resonate most with their audience. 

Reporting and Analytics

Detailed, customizable reporting and analytics simplify tracking performance over time, measuring campaign success, and sharing insights with key stakeholders. Strong reporting features make it easier to turn social media data into actionable insights that support strategic decision-making.

How to Implement A Social Media Monitoring Strategy

Implementing an effective social media monitoring strategy requires a structured approach to make sure your organization is tracking the right data to make the best decisions. Here are the key steps to setting up a successful social media monitoring strategy: 

1. Define Your Goals
2. Identify Key Metrics
3. Choose the Right Tools
4. Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords
5. Establish a Response Protocol
6. Analyze and Report

Step 1: Define Your Goals

Start by identifying your main objectives. Whether it’s improving customer service, managing brand reputation, tracking competitors, or gauging campaign performance, knowing your goals will help you focus on the most relevant metrics and guide your monitoring efforts effectively.

Step 2: Identify Key Metrics

Based on your goals, choose the key metrics to track, such as brand mentions, sentiment, engagement, or share of voice. You may want to consider choosing social media metrics that can correspond with KPIs in customer experience. Defining the best metrics to track first will help you better track success over time. 

Step 3: Choose the Right Tools

Once you have outlined goals and defined the most important metrics for your team, select a social media monitoring tool that aligns with your needs, team size, and budget. Look for features that will support your specific goals, like real-time alerts, sentiment analysis, competitor tracking, and customizable dashboards.

Step 4: Set Up Alerts and Track Keywords

Configure alerts for brand mentions, industry-related keywords, competitors, and any hashtags relevant to your brand. Real-time alerts help you stay responsive to important developments and engage promptly with customers and followers.

Step 5: Establish a Response Protocol

Create a protocol for responding to different mentions, such as positive feedback, complaints, or potential crises. Define who will respond to each type of interaction, the preferred tone and style, and a timeline for response. Having a clear plan helps teams remain consistent and proactive in customer interactions.

Step 6: Analyze and Report on Insights

Review the data regularly to assess performance, monitor sentiment trends, and identify recurring issues or customer preferences. Share insights with relevant teams, such as marketing, product development, and customer support, to inform decision-making across the organization.

Common Challenges in Social Media Monitoring

While social media monitoring is an extremely important part of efforts to improve customer experience in your organization, it comes with its own set of challenges. Here is a look at some common obstacles and practical solutions to overcome them:

Information Overload

• Problem: Social media platforms generate an overwhelming amount of data daily, and trying to monitor every mention can be exhausting and counterproductive.
• Solution: Focus on the metrics and keywords that align directly with your goals. Set up filters to prioritize mentions based on relevance, sentiment, or source, and consider creating tiered alerts that notify you only of high-priority mentions. Using tools with AI-powered analytics can also help in sorting and analyzing large volumes of data effectively.

Detecting Nuanced Sentiment

• Problem: Automated sentiment analysis often struggles to detect sarcasm, humor, or subtle tones, leading to inaccurate readings of customer sentiment.
• Solution: Consider using monitoring tools with advanced AI capabilities or natural language processing (NLP) to improve sentiment accuracy. For high-stakes conversations, rely on manual review or human oversight to ensure nuanced messages are correctly understood.

Cross-Platform Consistency

• Problem: Different social media platforms vary in user demographics, content style, and engagement norms, making it difficult to maintain consistent monitoring across channels.
• Solution: Use a tool that integrates multiple platforms into one dashboard, making it easier to monitor and compare across channels. Create platform-specific monitoring criteria to adapt to the nuances of each social network, ensuring that your approach is relevant and effective.

Start Social Media Monitoring with Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza’s social media monitoring solution through Hootsuite, paired with an award-winning customer experience platform, gives organizations all the tools they need to create a consistent customer experience that keeps customers coming back. See what Pearl-Plaza can do for you by scheduling a demo today!

What Is Customer Loyalty?

Customer loyalty defines how willing a customer is to repeat business with a company. Positive experiences compel customers to engage with you again. After all, if you’re meeting their needs and expectations, they have little reason not to trust you. Meanwhile, one negative experience can be enough to drive them to your competitors. 

Loyal customers help your business by:

• Purchasing your product or service repeatedly
• Recommending your brand to friends and family
• Boosting your engagement by interacting with you online
• Providing thoughtful customer feedback to help you improve

The Importance of Customer Loyalty

Customer loyalty is crucial to business growth and sustainability. 

Loyal customers tend to spend more over time and refer new clients. They also require less marketing effort to keep them engaged compared to new customers. Since a repeat customer has a 60-70% chance of converting, you’ll have to spend less on other conversion strategies.

Building customer loyalty results in higher retention, increased revenue, and positive word-of-mouth, which helps you stand out in competitive markets. To see how you could maximize your business revenue and ROI with Pearl-Plaza’s voice of the customer (VoC) tools, fill out the ROI calculator below!

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What Are the Different Types of Customer Loyalty?

In general, loyal customers are a by-product of excellent customer service. Positive customer experiences give rise to six distinct types of loyalty.

1. Happy customers
2. Price-loyal
3. Convenience-loyal
4. Loyal-to-freebies
5. Loyal-to-loyalty program
6. Truly loyal

Happy customers have never had reason to complain. They are satisfied with your offerings and customer service. Even though they often engage with you, your competitors can still sway them. For example, by selling the same product at a lower price, your competitor could convince your customer to try them out.

Price-loyal customers love your brand because of your pricing. Since affordability is key for them, they can easily leave if they find lower prices elsewhere. Retaining such a customer might seem simple, but you’ll have to compromise on your pricing model.

Convenience-loyal customers appreciate smooth and simple interactions. If you’re easy to find, contact, and buy from, they’ll become long-term consumers. Pricing isn’t a huge concern for them. So, if a competitor somehow offers an even smoother customer journey, they can be swayed even if it means they’ll have to spend more.

Freebie-loyal customers are drawn to your free offerings. For example, if your cafe offers free WiFi, you’ll attract many of these customers. They might not necessarily buy your coffee or other menu items, though. As a result, these customers don’t really contribute to your revenue streams despite being loyal to you.

Loyalty-program loyal customers appreciate your loyalty rewards more than the products themselves. When choosing between businesses, they focus on which one offers the best deals or discounts. Despite your pricing or convenience, you can retain these customers if you reward them well for their loyalty.

Truly loyal customers love your brand in every sense. They appreciate your offerings, convenience, programs, and customer service. As a result, they interact with you repeatedly and encourage others to do the same.

What Kind of Experiences Are Customers Loyal To?

Customers are loyal to experiences that save their time, make them feel valued, and satisfy their needs. The following aspects contribute to experiences that drive loyalty:

• Consistency: Customers expect reliable service and product quality whenever they interact with your business. A consistent experience builds trust and encourages repeat business.
• Quality: High-quality products and services are crucial to excellent customer experience. When customers see an unwavering commitment to quality, they are more likely to choose you over competitors every single time.
• Loyalty rewards: Offering rewards for repeat purchases incentivizes more loyalty. Discounts or points-based programs make customers feel valued and encourage long-term engagement.
• Nostalgia: Experiences that evoke positive memories can strengthen loyalty. For example, a sneaker brand releasing a new product line paying tribute to an iconic athlete would help it connect with nostalgic sports fans. Familiarity and nostalgia create a sense of connection that can strengthen customer relationships.
• Personalization: Experiences tailored to customer profiles encourage loyalty. This is because they make customers feel understood and appreciated.
• Convenience: Customers are loyal to brands that make it easy to find, purchase, and use their services. Simple and intuitive processes create a frictionless experience that appeals to everyone.
• Customer service: Prompt, friendly, and effective customer support is crucial to retaining customers. It’s normal for issues to arise, but how you resolve them can be the difference between a loyal customer and one who decides to leave!
• Brand values: Customers connect with brands that reflect their own values. Brands that show commitment to sustainability, ethics, or social causes can foster loyalty through shared principles.

What Is the Most Direct Cause of Customer Loyalty?

The most direct cause of customer loyalty is a consistently positive experience.

By providing reliable services and seamless interactions on a regular basis, you can build trust and loyalty over time. Customers have little to no reason to look elsewhere if you’re checking all the boxes for them.

Additionally, businesses that resolve issues in a swift and empathetic way show customers that they care. Responding to customer feedback within 24 to 48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%. Therefore, these actions can encourage loyalty even after a negative experience.

How Do You Build Customer Loyalty?

Building customer loyalty requires time and consistent effort. Use these tips to lay the groundwork for lasting customer loyalty and retention:

1. Simplify everything for your customers.
2. Meet customers where they are.
3. Personalize the experience.
4. Keep evolving to meet changing customer needs.
5. Focus on effective communication.
6. Invest in loyalty programs.
7. Build a deep emotional connection.
8. Build a community around your offerings.
9. Express gratitude.

Simplify Everything For Your Customers.

Customers appreciate ease at every touchpoint of their journey. Simple and convenient experiences encourage repeat business because they require very little customer effort.

For example, you can include a chatbot on your website to offer instant support to customers. Instead of waiting for a human agent, they can find quick answers to some of their pressing questions. This ease of finding support will prevent frustration and encourage repeat interactions.

Meet Customers Where They Are

Another way to offer convenient experiences is to meet customers where they are. For example, if a portion of your customers are avid Instagram users, it makes sense to have an active presence there. This makes it easier for them to discover your products or reach out to you for support.

94% of customers will spend more with businesses that offer their preferred mode of communication to contact customer service. As a result, building an omnichannel customer experience will help you satisfy customers and drive revenue.

Personalize the Experience

With a growing demand for personalized services, it’s important to tailor customer experiences to individual profiles. Personalization makes customers feel understood and valued, which can lead to loyalty over time. This is where collecting and analyzing feedback can be a game-changer for you. There is no better way to understand your customers’ needs than by simply asking them!

Keep Evolving to Meet Changing Customer Needs.

You need to change the way you think about customer loyalty. Instead of treating it as the final destination, you should view it as an ongoing journey. Since customers tend to be loyal to a few different brands at one time, there is no room for complacency.

Keep up with the times by tracking customer sentiment toward you and your competitors. See what trends are going viral and where customer preferences are leaning. If you have multiple locations across the world, it’s crucial that you don’t ignore regional trends.

You can stay relevant by adopting a customer-centric approach and tweaking offerings where necessary.

Focus on Effective Communication

Good communication builds trust and strengthens relationships. Customers who interact with a transparent and honest business are more likely to stay loyal to it.

Be clear, concise, and responsive in all interactions. Address customer concerns promptly and provide regular updates when needed. Make clear announcements in case of a major change, like a product update or change in business hours. This will help you prevent misunderstandings and build trust over time.

Responding is just half of effective communication. Listening to feedback and acting on it is just as crucial. Consistently engaging with your audience resolves issues and strengthens loyalty by making customers feel heard.

Invest in Loyalty Programs

Loyalty programs are a powerful tool for retaining customers. Customers who feel valued are more likely to return and spend more. 

Offer rewards, discounts, or special perks to show appreciation for repeat business. Keep the program simple and easy to use. Exclusive deals or early access to products can also make customers feel special. 

A well-structured loyalty program encourages long-term engagement. This drives continuous business and helps build stronger relationships.

Build A Deep Emotional Connection

Go beyond transactions to connect with customers on a deeper level. Forming an emotional connection is even more important if you want to elevate your marketing efforts. 

For example, if you want to collaborate with a celebrity to promote your brand, your efforts will be more effective if customers are already emotionally invested. Otherwise, it will be difficult to generate significant interest.

Start by establishing trust and transparency. Regularly collect and respond to feedback to show customers you are listening. Follow up with them to create a feedback loop to further show your commitment towards them.

With the help of Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening, you can generate intelligent questions with ease that capture customer preferences and needs. This information enables you to create personalized experiences that appeal to customer emotions. As a result, you will earn emotional buy-in from customers, turning them into loyal advocates.

Build A Community Around Your Offerings.

Create spaces where your customers can connect with each other and your brand. This can happen through social media, forums, or events. Engage regularly by sharing content, hosting discussions, or offering exclusive insights.

Encourage customers to share their experiences and ideas. A community fosters a sense of belonging, making customers feel part of something bigger than themselves.

Express Gratitude

Remember that your business succeeds because of your customers. They have several options to choose from, but they decide to trust you. Show your gratitude to them to reinforce the idea that they are valuable to you.

Include thank-you notes after product purchase or delivery. You can take it one step further by sending special messages during the holidays. These actions add a personal touch, which creates stronger customer relationships.

How Do You Measure Customer Loyalty Analytics?

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS)
2. Customer churn rate
3. Customer retention rate
4. Social media engagement
5. Customer Loyalty Index (CLI)
6. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Loyalty is easy to understand, but how do you quantify it? Some businesses measure loyalty by looking at how many customers they have retained. Other companies monitor social media behavior or churn rate. 

A combination of these metrics can help provide a complete picture of customer loyalty to identify areas for improvement.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures how likely customers are to recommend your brand to others. A high NPS indicates strong loyalty. Meanwhile, a low score suggests room for improvement in encouraging positive feelings towards your business.

Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate shows the percentage of customers who have stopped doing business with you. A low rate suggests that most of your customers trust your brand enough to interact with it again.

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate highlights the percentage of customers who continue doing business with you over time. This is an important metric to track if you want to gauge long-term loyalty.

Social Media Engagement

While it’s not a quantitative measure, your customers’ social media activity can indicate their loyalty towards you. For example, if they engage frequently with your social media profile and leave positive comments, they are likely satisfied with your services. 

Consider using social media management software to track keywords related to your brand. It can also help you identify customers who are advocates for your business.

Customer Loyalty Index (CLI)

Customer Loyalty Index (CLI) measures the strength of customer loyalty towards your business. It combines metrics like NPS, repurchase rates, and upselling to build a comprehensive loyalty score.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures satisfaction with a product, service, or specific interaction. It typically features questions like “How satisfied are you with [product/service/interaction]?”

Satisfied customers are likely to become repeat customers. Therefore, CSAT is a useful metric for measuring overall customer loyalty.

What Should You Look For In Customer Loyalty Software?

Customer loyalty software helps simplify the process of tracking key metrics and making improvements where necessary. Here are the key features to look for when choosing the right platform:

1. Omnichannel Communication

The ability to meet customers where they are is crucial to driving loyalty. It’s a significant part of creating smooth and convenient experiences. From Instagram DMs to emails, customers expect several options to communicate and seek support. The right software should allow you to gather customer data from every possible source in one place.

2. Analytics and Reporting

The software you choose should let you track and analyze key metrics like NPS, churn rate, and engagement levels. This will help you make data-driven decisions to improve the customer experience across all touchpoints.

3. Social Media Management

Social media is a key part of customer engagement. As a result, it’s important to monitor social media activity and leverage it for brand reputation. A good CX software should take care of this by helping you create content and track customer sentiment on various platforms.

Pearl-Plaza’s social media management software helps you tap into the power of social media. From content curation and scheduling to social listening features, the platform makes it possible to create targeted content and drive engagement.

4. Custom Integrations

The right customer loyalty software should also integrate with your existing CRM, POS, and other key systems. Custom integrations enable you to build a unified customer view so that you don’t miss out on anything essential.

5. Automation Tools

Automated workflows are key for closing feedback loops without wasting time. For example, it’s helpful to have automated responses and alerts that enable quick customer service. 

Inspiring Customer Loyalty Quotes to Get Buy-In

Customer loyalty efforts are successful when every member of your team believes in their value. The following quotes can help you motivate your teams to focus on loyalty-driven strategies:

• “Satisfaction is a rating. Loyalty is a brand.” – Shep Hyken

• “The goal as a company is to have customer service that is not just the best, but legendary.” – Sam Walton

• “There is a big difference between a satisfied customer and a loyal customer. Never settle for ‘satisfied’.” – Shep Hyken

• “The purpose of a business is to create a customer who creates customers.” – Shiv Singh

• “Loyal customers, they don’t just come back, they don’t simply recommend you, they insist that their friends do business with you.” – Chip Bell

Increase Customer Loyalty with Pearl-Plaza

Loyal customers bring more revenue by repeating business with you and recommending you to others. Therefore, converting a satisfied customer into a loyal one can make a world of difference for your brand.

With Pearl-Plaza’s customer loyalty platform, you can leverage feedback collection, sentiment analysis, and actionable insights to deliver memorable experiences. Schedule a personalized demo today to see how you can keep customers coming back!

What is a Customer Engagement Platform?

A customer engagement platform is a tool that allows businesses to interact with customers on different platforms, all in one place. Customer engagement platforms consolidate customer data into one location and provide tools to engage customers consistently and personally, regardless of how they interact with your business. This means you never have to leave your customer engagement platform if you respond to a customer via email, SMS, online review, or chatbot. 

What is the Difference Between a Customer Engagement Platform and  Customer Relationship Management (CRM)? 

Debating the differences between customer engagement platforms and CRM systems is natural. When doing so, some key differences need to be considered. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Customer relationship management systems utilize the data of existing customers and focus internally. CRMs are typically used by teams managing the current relationships of clients or accounts. They aim to convert leads to closed deals, identify the most successful business activities, and manage the communication between businesses and current customers. 

Customer Engagement Platform

Customer engagement platforms, however, are external and focus on the interaction between customers and consumers. They integrate with apps, websites, and social media to provide a consistent customer experience across all channels. These platforms focus on improving customer experience metrics such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

The Importance of Customer Engagement Platforms

Today, 70% of consumers expect a response from a customer service team within the same day. If your brand takes longer than that to respond to customers, you risk damaging your customer experience and brand reputation management efforts. 

Customer engagement platforms are crucial for organizations to maintain and improve customer experience. You can create alerts when a response is needed and respond to customers on different channels while never having to leave your chosen customer engagement platform. 

Benefits of Using a Customer Engagement Platform

Customer engagement platforms can be extremely valuable for organizations focused on delivering a positive customer experience. By providing the tools necessary for effective communication, personalization, and analytics, these platforms enable businesses to build stronger relationships with their customers. Here are some expected benefits of using an omnichannel customer engagement platform: 

More Valuable Customer Interactions

Customer engagement platforms will lead to more productive interactions with your customers. When you can engage with customers across different platforms and see where those customers have contacted you and what they have said, you are more equipped to help them with their inquiries. 

Improved Customer Loyalty

Customer engagement platforms increase customer loyalty by making the customer experience engaging and consistent throughout the whole customer journey. Research shows that loyal customers are 64% more likely to make more frequent purchases from your business than regular customers. 

Higher Customer Retention 

Organizations that are engagement leaders, companies that are trailblazing omnichannel engagement and providing a personalized customer experience, have a higher retention rate than companies that do not have mature customer engagement programs. Engagement leaders have a retention rate of 77%, whereas non-engagement leaders have a retention rate of just 43%. By succeeding in customer engagement, you have a better chance of keeping your customers coming back. 

Competitive Advantage

While most companies claim to be customer-obsessed, a recent study showed that only 15% are actually customer-obsessed, meaning their business is focused on growing by delivering value to their customers. One key factor in becoming a truly customer-obsessed company is using a customer engagement platform. When you reach customer-obsessed status, you set yourself apart from the competition and stand out in the market. 

Higher Profit Margins

Most organizations that prioritize customer engagement reported higher margins than those that do not. An omnichannel strategy plays a crucial role in this success. It ensures that customers can seamlessly transition between different platforms and communication channels during their journey—whether they start by browsing on a mobile app, switch to a desktop, and later engage via social media.

Best Customer Engagement Platforms

Customer engagement platforms are critical in helping businesses build long-lasting relationships with their customers by streamlining communications, enhancing experiences, and providing actionable insights. Here are five of the best customer engagement platforms available:

1. Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza is the best customer engagement platform for organizations looking for the premier solution for their customer experience initiatives. G2 ranks Pearl-Plaza the highest of the available platforms, with a rating of 4.7 out of 5 stars. Pearl-Plaza has also been recognized for having the fastest ROI time, the best support, and the easiest to use. 

Pearl-Plaza excels at offering a platform that connects customer data from every channel into one easily accessible location and offers consulting services from in-house industry experts. Pearl-Plaza’s advanced analytics and AI-powered tools allow businesses to track customer sentiment, identify trends, and personalize interactions across the customer journey. This makes it a top choice for companies looking to improve customer loyalty, satisfaction, and overall experience.

2. Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a customer experience management platform specializing in social media, emails, and messaging apps. These integrations allow users to communicate directly with customers via comments and direct messages. This platform is used primarily by small businesses looking to scale their customer engagement efforts. 

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is a customer service and engagement platform best suited for businesses looking for a highly customizable solution. One of the most notable benefits of Zendesk is that it can be used immediately upon purchase and can be customized for a business at a later date. This solution is ideal for businesses wanting to improve their ticketing systems while maintaining personalized customer interactions. 

4. Hubspot

The Hubspot customer engagement platform is differentiated by its inbound marketing capabilities, which makes it an excellent choice for organizations looking to bring marketing, sales, and customer service under one roof. HubSpot offers robust tools for automating communication, creating personalized email campaigns, and tracking customer interactions throughout the entire lifecycle. It’s user-friendly and scalable, making it suitable for businesses of all sizes.

5. Klayvio

Klayvio is a customer engagement platform that is tailored to e-commerce businesses. It excels in creating personalized, data-driven email and SMS marketing campaigns that boost customer retention and drive conversions. Klaviyo integrates seamlessly with e-commerce platforms like Shopify and BigCommerce, allowing businesses to segment customers based on behavior, purchase history, and more. This solution is ideal for businesses looking to improve their direct-to-consumer engagement efforts with targeted communication. 

Omnichannel Customer Engagement Platform Use Cases

It may be easier to understand the functionality of customer engagement platforms by seeing how they work in real-world scenarios. Here are some examples of omnichannel customer engagement platforms being used to engage with customers proactively: 

1. Retail: Retailers use customer engagement platforms to send personalized promotions, manage customer messages, and improve post-purchase support. These customer engagement strategies lead to increased customer satisfaction and repeat business. 
2. Financial Services: Banks and financial institutions use customer engagement platforms to manage customer support, offer individualized financial advice, and ensure that customer inquiries are handled securely on different channels.
3. Healthcare: Healthcare providers can use digital customer engagement platforms to manage patient feedback, send appointment reminders, and deliver personalized information such as a care plan. 
4. Hospitality: Using a customer engagement platform, hotels and restaurants can streamline reservations, respond to guest messages, and manage personalized offers. 
5. E-commerce: E-commerce companies use customer engagement platforms to manage customer service, send personalized product recommendations, and automate follow-ups after purchases.

Key Features in a Customer Engagement Platform

Not all customer engagement platforms are built the same. Some are more geared towards marketers and sales teams, while others focus on customer support. Regardless of your use case for an omnichannel customer engagement platform, here are some key features to look for: 

Omnichannel Communication

The most important feature of a customer engagement platform is effective omnichannel communication. Customer engagement platforms are built on the premise that you can interact with your customers wherever they are. Omnichannel communication means more than just being present on multiple platforms; it’s about integrating those platforms into one unified interface to build an omnichannel customer experience. This allows businesses to manage all customer interactions from a single dashboard, which can streamline workflows and ensure that no customer inquiry or engagement falls through the cracks.

Customer Segmentation

While some may think that customer engagement platforms are only for communication with individual customers, you also want to be able to communicate with specific segments of your customer base. Advanced segmentation allows businesses to tailor their messaging and engagement strategies based on customer preferences, behavior, or demographics. 

For example, a retail store may realize that they are experiencing high customer churn with consumers ages 18-24. As a result of this, they will want to post a targeted message for those consumers across multiple channels and be ready to answer any comments or questions. 

Analytics and Reporting

Customer engagement analytics can help you analyze metrics such as customer interactions, campaign performance, and engagement levels to refine your engagement strategies and see what you are having the most success with. 

Automation Tools

Automation tools are crucial for quick and proactive customer engagement. Automated responses, workflow triggers, and chatbots help streamline operations and ensure quick customer service.

Integration Capabilities 

Another key factor of a successful customer engagement platform is its ability to integrate with the systems your organization is already using. The platform should integrate with other key business tools, such as CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and sales tools, to provide a unified customer view. 

Digital Customer Engagement Platform Trends

As customer needs and preferences continue to evolve, so too will customer engagement platforms. To stay ahead of the curve, businesses must remain aware of the latest trends shaping these platforms and their capabilities. Adapting to these changes will ensure that customer communication remains effective, personalized, and secure. Here are some key trends in customer engagement platforms to keep in mind as you evaluate current and future partners:

1. AI-Powered Engagement

A majority of organizations already use AI in their customer-focused activities such as chatbots, recommendation engines, and more. Over 70% of marketers agree that AI helps them create more personalized content and customer experiences. As AI technology becomes more sophisticated, we can expect further advancements like natural language processing (NLP) to enable even more meaningful and human-like interactions with customers.

The majority of businesses that currently use AI plan to increase their investment in AI-powered tools in the coming years. As AI continues to evolve, businesses leveraging these capabilities will have a significant edge in terms of efficiency, customer satisfaction, and engagement outcomes.

2. Hyper-Personalization 

Consumers love personalized experiences, and that will not change anytime soon. The majority of consumers agree that they will pay more for personalization. In the future, customer engagement platforms will attempt to capitalize on that by becoming more advanced in their ability to deliver hyper-personalized content, offers, and experiences based on real-time data analysis.

Hyper-personalization goes beyond basic demographic, behavioral, or segmented targeting. It involves using AI and machine learning to predict customer needs, preferences, and behaviors, which allows businesses to deliver timely, context-aware messages and offers at each touchpoint. 

For example, a retail digital customer engagement platform could automatically suggest products based on a customer’s browsing history, location, and purchase behavior, ensuring that each interaction feels personal and relevant.

3. Data Privacy Regulations 

While consumers prefer personalized experiences, they are concerned about the use of their data. Consumers across every generation agree that protecting their data is the most significant driving factor of trust in a business. However, only 48% of consumers feel confident that brands are transparent about their data usage. 

As a result, future successful customer engagement platforms will need to incorporate robust data privacy features. This includes adopting security measures such as encryption and secure storage, as well as providing more transparent privacy settings and data control options for customers. Responsible data handling will be key for the long-term success of any customer engagement platform. 

Choose Pearl-Plaza for Your Customer Engagement Platform

Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience platform has been named a Leader in Gartner, IDC, and Forrester evaluative reports. The XI Platform is best-in-class at connecting data from everywhere to help you get a holistic view of every customer interaction. See what Pearl-Plaza can do for you by scheduling a demo today!

What is Survey Fatigue?

Survey fatigue occurs when participants lose interest in completing a survey or find it exhausting to continue responding. There are two types of fatigue to consider here: survey-taking and survey-response.

Survey-taking fatigue is when customers face an overwhelming number of survey requests from a business. For instance, if they interact with the business once a week but receive feedback requests daily, they are likely to stop participating in future surveys altogether.

Survey-response fatigue, on the other hand, describes a situation in which participants lose interest in a survey midway through. This drop in their willingness to respond could be a result of too many questions or open-ended questions that require a lot of effort to answer.

Regardless of the type of survey fatigue a participant suffers from, the main takeaway is that customers want to expend as little effort as possible. Poorly designed surveys tend to overlook this fact, which results in low response rates and even customer churn.

What Causes Survey Fatigue?

Customers experience survey fatigue if at least one of the following is true:

• There are too many surveys to respond to. It’s always worth remembering that while your customers might love interacting with your business, they don’t necessarily love filling out your feedback forms. If you frequently flood their inboxes or notifications with feedback requests, you aren’t likely to elicit the feedback you’re looking for. 
• The survey itself is exhausting to complete. Even if you issue surveys at the right times, you won’t see decent response rates if there are too many questions or if they require too much effort to respond to. In fact, once respondents begin a survey, there is a sharp increase in their drop-off rate for each additional question up to 15 questions!
• There is no apparent impact of completing the survey. If your customers take the time to offer suggestions, but your business fails to respond to them properly or act on their feedback, they are less likely to be enthusiastic about completing surveys in the future. Uncertainty over the impact of their responses was among the top four reasons cited by customers for abandoning their last survey.

The Business Impact of Survey Fatigue

Survey fatigue poses several challenges for businesses, making it difficult to capture valuable customer insights. An overwhelming number of survey requests or questions within each survey results in low response rates or rushed completion. This can negatively impact businesses in three crucial ways:

Survey Bias

Survey bias occurs when only highly satisfied or dissatisfied customers end up completing surveys. Potential respondents who don’t fall into either category have little to no reason to complete complex surveys, which means businesses receive skewed data that misses out on a huge portion of their user base.

For instance, let’s say you have an online banking app and you want to gauge satisfaction levels with a new QR code payments feature. Unfortunately, your survey is too long, causing 55% of respondents to abandon it because of survey fatigue. Since less than half of your users completed the survey, you will have an incomplete picture of customer satisfaction, leading to wasted time and effort.

Increased Customer Churn

If your respondents feel overwhelmed by your surveys, they are likely to become frustrated over time. As a result, even if your product or service is of the highest quality, a poorly designed survey strategy will eventually drive customers away. 

You have to remember that your customers interact with your brand to achieve their own specific goals. Bombarding them with surveys means you are requesting way more time and effort from them than they are willing to put in.

Negative Brand Equity

Moreover, dissatisfied customers who feel like the business is simply collecting feedback for its own sake without acting on it are likely to become less loyal over time. In fact, they might even be compelled to leave negative reviews, which will adversely affect your brand equity and make you appear less trustworthy to prospects.

Negative brand equity gives prospects even more reason to choose your competitors over you, resulting in declining market share and a poor image for your brand.

Survey Fatigue Statistics

The following statistics highlight the prevalence of survey fatigue and why it’s a rising concern for businesses:

1. 74% of customers are only willing to answer five questions or less in a survey. (Enchant)
2. The average response rate for email surveys is roughly 24.8%. (FluidSurveys)
3. The top four reasons given for abandoning a survey are too many questions (23.4%), lack of motivation to answer questions on certain topics (10.8%), uncertainty over the impact of survey responses (8.9%), and questions requiring them to think too carefully (8.2%). (HubSpot)
4. Response rates can fall below 2% when the respondent population is less targeted or when there is little motivation to respond. (PeoplePulse)
5. Increasing the length of a survey from three to four questions can drop the completion rate by 18%. (Enchant)

Examples of Survey Fatigue

It helps to look at a few examples of survey fatigue to understand how it occurs and why it can affect feedback collection. 

The following examples illustrate what happens if a customer gets too many survey requests, complicated surveys, or a lack of follow-up from the business:

1. A customer who purchases supplements from an online store once a month receives feedback surveys every week in her inbox. The surveys typically ask her for her thoughts on the kind of products she would like to see and her satisfaction levels with product delivery. At this frequency, the surveys eventually start feeling repetitive to the customer. While she initially tries to complete them with rushed responses, she ends up feeling exhausted and chooses to ignore future surveys altogether. This negative impact on her ecommerce customer experience may eventually drive her to switch to a competitor for her future shopping.
2. An employee at an IT company is overwhelmed by the sheer number of questions in his quarterly survey. Some of the open-ended questions are phrased poorly, leaving him confused as to his response. Midway through the survey, the fatigue of responding gets to him, and he settles for simple one-word answers to each question just to get it out of the way.
3. A hospital sends comprehensive feedback surveys to patients every time they are discharged. Initially, patients take the time to complete these surveys and offer their honest thoughts. However, the hospital fails to follow up with them properly or take their feedback into account. After seeing no changes in service despite their feedback, the patients stop participating in surveys altogether, as they feel it won’t make a difference.

How to Avoid Survey Fatigue

Surveys remain powerful feedback collection tools to this day, but without focusing on their quality, you run the risk of negatively impacting the customer experience instead of collecting actionable insights. Here are ten best practices to keep in mind to avoid survey fatigue for feedback collection:

1. Send Surveys in Proportion to Your Customer Interactions. 

The frequency with which you send surveys to customers depends on their level of interaction. As a general rule of thumb, see how often your clients interact with your business and multiply that by two. For instance, if your customers interact with your business monthly, it’s optimal to send a survey every two months.

Certain scenarios, like post-purchase, are good opportunities for surveying your customers, even if it happens frequently. In this case, you can still maintain a high response rate with short surveys featuring simple questions or clickable icons.

2. Ask Direct and Concise Questions.

You don’t want your survey questions to confuse your customers. The more they will have to think about their responses, the less likely they are to answer the questions. Therefore, focus on asking short and direct questions with a clear intent behind them.

Creating these types of questions can be time-consuming, which is where you can leverage the power of AI. With Pearl-Plaza’s AI-Powered Conversational Surveys, you can intelligently query and respond to your customers in real-time to gather rich insights.

3. Consider Asking One Question At a Time.

Some of the most difficult-to-answer questions usually ask two different things in one go. For instance, “How easy was it to find customer support, and did they successfully resolve your issue?” is likely to either confuse participants or make them think more deeply than they want to. It’s always better to ask about one aspect of the customer experience at a time to keep respondents engaged.

If you are interested in getting deeper insights from your customers, ask them to rate a product or service and then ask them to elaborate on that rating once they have submitted it.

4. Determine the Average Time It Takes to Complete Your Survey.

Test your surveys on team members to get a general idea of how long it takes to complete them. Ideally, it should take no more than five minutes to respond to all the questions in your survey. A good practice is to mention the expected time of completion at the beginning of your survey so that respondents have a realistic idea of how much effort they will have to put in.

5. Use Consistent Rating Scales. 

Consistency is an important element of good survey design. If you use a certain rating system, such as the Likert five-point scale, for the first question in your survey, make sure you use it for the other questions as well to avoid confusion.

Another thing to keep in mind is maintaining a consistent order in which you present your response options. For instance, if your scale starts with “extremely dissatisfied” and ends with “extremely satisfied,” you should keep that same order for each question. Otherwise, you will end up confusing your respondents and even elicit inaccurate feedback from them.

6. Incorporate Visual Elements to Make Your Surveys Engaging.

Visual elements not only make your survey more engaging for respondents, but they also make you stand out in a crowd of drab surveys! Consider incorporating clickable icons or emojis to make your surveys less boring to complete.

7. Carefully Think About the Order of Questions. 

The order in which you ask questions in your survey should be consistent with the customer journey. For instance, it doesn’t make sense to ask customers about the registration process after querying them on their post-purchase thoughts. A seemingly random ordering of questions comes across as unprofessional and can discourage customers from proceeding with the survey.

With Pearl-Plaza’s XI Platform, you can build surveys from scratch or choose from pre-built templates to match the intent of your survey. This complete control over your survey design ensures that your customers are experiencing the survey in the exact way you anticipated.

8. Ask the Right Questions From the Right People.

It might sound obvious, but you need to ensure that the people receiving your survey can respond to the questions. 

For example, if your product is a Learning Management System (LMS) used by both teachers and students, it’s good practice to have specific surveys for each user persona. If you keep sending surveys to the wrong personas, you are unlikely to receive any responses.

9. Be Clear About Your Reason for Surveying the Customer.

You should clearly communicate your reasons for collecting customer feedback to boost response rates. If a customer is uncertain about why you’re asking them for their thoughts on your website, they won’t have enough motivation to respond. Therefore, when sending survey requests, do highlight why you’re collecting feedback and how it will help the customer.

10. Show Your Customers That You’re Listening to Them.

Customers appreciate knowing that the time and effort they put into providing feedback isn’t going to waste. One of the best ways to convert customers into loyal brand advocates is to show them that their feedback is valuable to you. You can achieve this by creating a feedback loop whereby you respond to your customers with updates and improvements according to their suggestions.

With Pearl-Plaza’s survey solution, you can avoid survey fatigue with a platform that generates three times more actionable insights than competitors and gives you the tools to build your own survey or choose from ADA-compliant survey templates. 

Employee Survey Fatigue

Employee survey fatigue occurs when a company’s staff gets overwhelmed by frequent or lengthy surveys, which results in a lack of enthusiasm to provide feedback over time. To prevent your employees from experiencing something similar, use the following tips for feedback collection:

1. Send surveys after key projects or milestones. Instead of overwhelming employees with frequent survey requests, consider sending surveys after key milestones like the initial onboarding experience or the completion of a project.
2. Keep the surveys short and simple. The easier it is for your employees to respond to the survey questions, the more likely they are to complete it. Focus on specific questions and pose them one at a time within the survey to keep employees engaged.
3. Clearly communicate the purpose and impact. A proven way to elicit high-quality feedback from employees is to explain how their survey responses will help improve their workplace experience.
4. Consider using pulse surveys. If you want to frequently check in with your employees without overwhelming them, pulse surveys can come in handy. These short and frequent surveys feature a few simple questions to help you track employee sentiment on a monthly or quarterly basis.

These tips will help you gain deeper insight into staff expectations and performance without flooding their inboxes with survey requests. 

Patient Survey Fatigue

Patients can experience survey fatigue after receiving too many survey requests during their care journey. If you are a healthcare provider, you can avoid patient survey fatigue with the help of these tips:

1. Limit the number of surveys you send to patients. Send patient feedback surveys at key touchpoints, such as after booking an appointment or post-discharge. By timing your survey requests, you can collect meaningful insights from patients on their journey without overwhelming them.
2. Ask targeted and relevant questions. You can improve your patient response rates by asking questions that focus on crucial aspects of the patient’s journey. For instance, instead of asking the patient about their general thoughts on the hospital, you can ask them to rate the doctor’s communication skills or offer thoughts on the cleanliness of the facility.
3. Design personalized surveys. The more specific a survey is to the patient’s treatment and type of care, the likelier they are to respond and engage. Consider posing questions that touch upon the patient’s condition, diagnosis, and the specific healthcare professional assigned to them.
4. Show patients that their feedback is valuable. Patients are motivated to participate in future surveys when you respond to them and keep them in the loop about any changes made as a result of their feedback.

Following these tips will not only help you collect actionable feedback but also enhance your patients’ trust in you. The glowing reviews and testimonials you receive as a result will contribute to your healthcare reputation management efforts, which in turn will help you acquire more patients.

How to Measure Survey Fatigue

The first step to managing survey fatigue is measuring it effectively, which you can do with the following methods:

1. Evaluate post-survey fatigue with a simple question. Ask users to rate their level of fatigue or the ease of completing the survey. Questions like “On a scale of 0-10, how tiring did you find this survey?” or “Did you feel the survey was too long?” allow you to quickly gauge the amount of fatigue experienced by respondents.
2. Track the time it takes to complete your survey. On average, it should take five minutes or less to respond to all the questions in your survey. If a survey takes longer than that to complete, it’s very likely that respondents will experience fatigue at some point, which is a good enough reason to re-design the survey.
3. Test your survey before sending it out to customers. Your staff members can participate in your survey as part of a trial run to see if the questions make sense or if it takes too much effort to complete.

Avoid Survey Fatigue and Improve Response Rates with Pearl-Plaza

Without prioritizing good survey design practices, you risk causing survey fatigue for respondents, making it less likely that they will provide useful insights or even participate altogether. 

With the help of Pearl-Plaza’s survey design tools, including AI-powered conversational surveys, you can boost response rates and gather the valuable feedback you need to improve as a business. Schedule a demo today to see how you can design user-friendly surveys for feedback collection!

What is Social Media Management?

Social media management is the process of creating, managing, and reporting on content posted on various social media platforms. It includes activities that build and maintain your brand reputation such as creating posts, responding to users who engage with your content, and creating a social media strategy that will influence your business’s main metrics. 

Why is Social Media Management Important?

Social media management is important because social media is one of the main ways that consumers interact with your brand. Pearl-Plaza research found that 70% of emerging consumers purchased a new product through a social signal. If you do not prioritize social media management, you could be missing out on a large source of customer acquisition. 

Social media management is also one of the biggest factors in online reputation management. Your organization’s social media profiles are one of the key building blocks of your brand reputation. Managing social media for your organization gives you a direct influence in monitoring and altering the reputation of your brand. 

What Are the Benefits of Social Media Management?

A recent study of social media marketers worldwide found that there were five main benefits of social media marketing and effective social media management. These benefits, ranked in order of agreement are:

• Increased brand awareness
• Increased traffic
• Lead generation
• Customer loyalty
• Revenue growth 

These benefits represent the importance of social media marketing and the need for dedicated social media management. Let’s dive deeper into the benefits of business social media management:

Increased Brand Awareness

Social media and content management can lead to increased brand awareness. 56% of marketers agree that social media has improved their brand exposure in less than 12 months, and 77% agree that social media has improved their brand awareness after one to two years. The biggest sources for increased awareness were TikTok and YouTube. These statistics prove that social media management is vital in increasing the rate at which consumers interact with your brand for the first time. 

Increased Traffic

Effective social media management will do more than build brand awareness, it has the power to bring consumers to you. The majority of marketing leaders agree that business social media management has improved their traffic with the most popular platforms driving that traffic being Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 

Lead Generation

Data shows that the longer you manage your social media, the more likely you are to generate leads via social media. Only 44% of businesses agree that social media generates leads after less than 12 months of social media management, but that number jumps to 66% after three years. To start generating leads from social media, you need to begin implementing social media and content management as soon as possible. 

Customer Loyalty

Through continued business social media management, you will increase your customer loyalty and build a customer base that is actively engaged with your business. The majority of businesses that have been utilizing social media for more than one year agreed that it has improved their customer loyalty. 

Revenue Growth

In the same way, you can realize more leads and more loyal customers through business social media management, you can also attribute revenue growth to your social media management efforts. The majority of business leaders agree that using social media for more than three years has had a positive impact on their revenue. 

How Much Does Social Media Management Cost?

Your social media management budget will vary depending on the industry you are in. For example, the average business will spend 14.9% of their marketing budget on social media. However, industries such as communications and media allocated 23.9% of their budgets to social media, while the banking and finance industry allocated an average of 9.7% of their marketing budgets to social media. This view represents a top-level view of social media as it relates to an entire organization. However, social media management entails other things that require a budget. 

Business social media management requires fees that include, but are not limited to:

• Platform management
• Advertising 
• Social media employee salaries

Social Media Management Platform Pricing

Social media management platforms are often one of the first steps teams take when they are beginning to take social media management seriously. These platforms allow users to manage multiple social media profiles in one place. 

The three highest-rated social media management platforms have an average monthly cost of $479.33 and an average annual cost of $5,752. These prices represent the averages for team pricing options which include multiple access for multiple team members, post-scheduling ability, and reporting capabilities. 

Social Media Advertising Spend

The majority of businesses spend less than $5,000 on social media advertising per month. 24% say they spend between $100 and $1,000. And 28% say they spend between $1,001 and $5,000. 

The average amount spent on advertising per user, also known as cost per acquisition, over the last three years, is $37.74 and is expected to grow to $40.88 by 2027. 

Social Media Employee Salaries

You can’t succeed in business social media management by only having a platform and money set aside for advertising, you need people actively managing those campaigns and platforms. There are two main categories of social media personnel: in-house and outsourced. 

In-House

In-house refers to social media personnel employed by your organization. This may include a Social Media Manager, a Social Media Specialist, or a combination of the two. These employees have an average annual salary of $53,837, or $4,486 per month. 

Outsource

Outsourced social media talent typically refers to a contractor who manages your social media accounts for a set amount of time, or a creator who is paid per post. This does not include agencies that spearhead the social media management process for your organization. 

Choosing the Best Social Media Management Tools for Your Business

While these costs provide a general overview of the cost of social media management, but the final costs are dependent on the plans or packages your organization chooses. Some platforms will charge a monthly subscription fee, while others have a variable fee for the number of accounts, users, or posts. While cost is an important factor, it is not the only factor. It is up to the stakeholders of your organization to determine which solution is best for your business. 

Some customer experience solutions, such as Pearl-Plaza, offer social media management as an add-on to your customer experience management platform. This helps give you a more holistic view of the end-to-end customer experience. For many businesses, this can result in cost savings as it keeps you from purchasing and managing another platform. 

How To Manage Social Media

Social media management may seem complex and intense, but having a plan to refer to ensures that you stay on track and that all your decisions are made with a specific objective in mind. If you are just getting started with social media management or are looking to improve your current processes, here are some steps to make sure that your business social media management is the best it can be: 

Define Your Goals and Objectives

Whether it’s increasing brand awareness, driving website traffic, or boosting sales, your social media management goals should revolve around business objectives. When setting goals, set specific and measurable goals that can be easily tracked. Some examples might include:

• Increase engagement rate by 20% in three months
• Drive 1,000 visitors to our website via social channels in one month
• Generate $25,000 in sales from social media channels over the next six months

Identify the Best Platforms For Your Brand

After setting your goals, you need to choose the best platforms to manage for your organization. Depending on the size of your social media management team, you may only be able to manage a certain number of accounts, so it is important to know which social channels to prioritize. 

To know which channels to prioritize, you need to understand your customers, target audience, and business type so you can align your chosen social media channels with those interests. 

For example, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube are the most popular social media platforms for B2C brands. Conversely, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram are the most popular social media platforms for B2B organizations. 

Create A Social Media Strategy

Once you have decided on your platforms, you’ll want to make a social media strategy to succeed on those platforms. This will include defining content themes, posting frequency, and creating a content calendar. 

You’ll also want to ensure that your social media strategy aligns with your overall customer experience strategy. This is important to create a seamless experience across all touchpoints. By aligning both strategies, you can ensure that the tone, messaging, and responsiveness on social media reflect the same values and quality standards that customers encounter throughout their journey with your brand.

Engage with Audience

It is important to set aside time for audience engagement when conducting social media management. 88% of consumers expect an organization to respond on social media within two business days. 

When engaging with your audience, be prepared. Knowing how to respond a Google reviews, or reviews from similar sites is important to maintain the integrity of your brand and make sure the feedback loop is closed properly. 

Monitor and Analyze 

One of the biggest pillars of success in social media management is tracking performance. Depending on what goals you set at the beginning of your social media management journey, you can track different metrics such as engagement rate, click-through rate, or conversion rate. 

92% of marketers are concerned about the ROI of social media to one extent or the other. This makes it extremely crucial to the success of your business social media management initiatives to be able to track the performance of social and how they relate to customer experience ROI and overall business objectives. 

10 Social Media Management Tips

Creating a social media management strategy is only the beginning of the journey. In order to succeed, you’ll have to navigate the ins-and-outs of social media. Here are some tips that any brand can use to improve the results of their social media management: 

1. Utilize Influencers

Influencer marketing is an increasingly popular and effective tool to implement into your social media strategy. The majority of organizations already leverage influencers in their social media marketing, and 50% of those organizations say they are going to increase their investment in influencer marketing. 

There is no need to worry about wasting budget when it comes to influencer marketing, because micro influencers seem to be the most successful. 62% of influencers that drove a consumer to make a purchase had under 10k followers. 

2. Plan Content in Advance

A well-thought-out content calendar is the backbone of a successful social media strategy. Planning your posts in advance ensures you maintain consistency, avoid last-minute rushes, and cover key holidays, events, or promotional periods.

3. Leverage Social Media Analytics

Successful social media management can be achieved by regularly reviewing your social media analytics. You can use social media management software to take a detailed look at engagement, reach, and other metrics to help you understand what types of content resonate with your audience. You can use this data to refine your content, find optimal times to post and adjust your overall approach. 

4. Stay on Top of Trends

Social media platforms are constantly evolving. What is popular one week will fall flat the next, and a new trend can overtake a platform overnight. In order to stay relevant and fresh, keep an eye on trending hashtags, viral content, and what influencers are posting. 

With social media trends, time is of the essence. To make sure you don’t fall behind, consider creating a separate workflow for these pieces of content that reflects their urgency. These posts should be created quickly and only have to be approved by one or two key stakeholders before posting them the day of or following day. 

5. Run Contests and Giveaways

Over 92% of businesses run social media giveaways, with almost a third of them doing it at least once a month. Running social media contests and giveaways are great for boosting engagement and expanding your reach. Of the businesses that run social media giveaways, the three most common benefits are increased followers, increased brand awareness, and increased engagement.  

6. Use High-Quality Visuals

Having high-quality visuals in your posts is essential to help capture the attention of consumers on crowded social media feeds. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok are highly visual, so the quality of your visuals can influence whether or not a user engages with your content. 

High-quality visuals don’t just relate to visual clarity, they relate to what is being promoted in the visuals as well. Depending on your industry, your customers are not going to want specific, jargon-filled visuals on their feed. Focus on creating simple, clear visuals that entice a consumer to engage with you and take the next step in the customer journey. 

7. Post Consistently, but Don’t Overdo It

Posting frequency can be a touchy subject in business social media management. You need to post a certain amount in order to be seen, but overposting can lead to social media fatigue among your audience. This can negatively impact engagement or worse, it may even result in a loss of followers. The best posting frequency will also vary by platform. For example, the ideal number of posts for Instagram Stories is two times per day, while the ideal number of posts for Pinterest is just once a week. 

In order to find the frequency that makes the most sense for your business, you will need to understand the resources of your social media management team and the type of content that performs best for your business. This will help you decide how often you can produce quality content for social media. 

8. Repurpose Content Across Platforms

In order to maximize the effectiveness and resources of your social media management efforts, it is important to learn how to repurpose your content across different social media platforms. For example, short-form videos can be posted on Instagram Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts. If a LinkedIn post that links to a guide performs well, consider hosting a webinar around that guide. 

Different platforms have different nuances, so it is important to tailor the content to each platform’s format and niches. But, reusing content can save time and extend the life of your best-performing content. 

9. Encourage User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is any business-specific content that is not posted by the business itself. This can be in the form of an online review, social media post, or photo posted by a user with no affiliation to your organization. UGC is an extremely valuable asset, as 86% of consumers stated they are more likely to trust a brand that published UGC. 

To capitalize on this, encourage your customers to share photos, videos, or testimonials related to your business. Then, repost that UGC on your accounts to engage your audience and showcase success stories. This not only creates a sense of community but also provides authentic social proof that can influence potential customers.

10. Be Flexible

As you probably already know, social media is not a “one-and-done” type of tool. The social media environment is constantly changing, as will your business’s social media management strategies. Be sure that you have a system in place to regularly evaluate your performance against your goals and be prepared to adjust your tactics accordingly. 

Features to Look For in Social Media Management Software

Business social media management can be difficult to do without a dedicated social media management software for your business to utilize. Social media management software will increase your effectiveness and success. When evaluating which software to choose, keep these key features in mind:

Multi-Platform Management

Multi-platform management allows you to manage different social media platforms in one place. This is crucial for effective social media management as it decreases the amount of time you have to go into an individual platform for a certain task. 

Content Scheduling

Part of successful social media and content management is content scheduling. You want to choose a software that gives you the ability to plan and schedule posts in advance across different platforms. This feature also allows you to upload and schedule multiple posts at once, which can help you with time management and ensure that you still have time for other important things like reporting and community management. 

Content Curation

Creating content, especially for social media, can be hard. It is difficult to consistently come up with content ideas to post. That is why a content curation feature in a social media management software can be a game-changer. 

Content curation features provide content ideas based on trending topics or relevant news that relates to your audience. This can help keep your content fresh and make sure that you are always on top of the latest trends, whether they are across social media or in your industry. 

Hashtag Management

Similar to content curation, hashtag management will recommend trending hashtags based on your content to help increase the visibility of your posts. For example, if you are in the real estate business, you would like to know that the hashtags #homesforsale and #firsttimehomebuyer have 13.8 million and 6.4 million posts, respectively. 

Similarly, you’ll want to make sure that you have the ability to track which hashtags perform the best on your social media platforms so that you can improve future social posts. 

Social Listening

Social listening might be one of the most important features in modern business social media management platforms. Social listening leverages AI and sentiment analysis to track keywords, brand mentions, and more to help you stay aware of what consumers are saying about your organization or industry. 

Social listening tools help you understand what customers are saying, how they are saying it, and when they are saying it. Being able to properly identify customer sentiment will help you create more targeted content and drive engagement.

Collaboration and User Permissions

For social media management teams, the ability to control permissions based on roles can be important to make sure that all content goes through the correct approval process and stays within brand guidelines. 

For example, a social media specialist can create three Instagram posts for the upcoming week and upload them to the social media management platform. However, before they can be officially scheduled, the social media manager must approve them. 

Integration Capabilities

Obviously, your chosen social media management platform should integrate smoothly with all major social media platforms. But, you should also be able to implement other integrations that give you all the necessary data needed to effectively manage your social media. 

For example, integrations with Google My Business, Adobe Creative Cloud, and Salesforce could help you respond to reviews, create content, and offer customer support all in one place.

Paid Advertising Management

Not all of your postings will be organic social posts, so you want to choose a social media management platform that tracks paid social campaigns across platforms like Facebook Ads, Instagram Ads, and more. Monitoring ad analytics in one place, rather than accessing each platform individually to track spend, impressions, and click-through rates, will help you avoid duplicate efforts and give you insights into the ROI of your paid social campaigns. 

Analytics and Reporting

A critical feature of social media management software is the ability to report on the success of your efforts. Look for software that provides detailed analytics on engagement, reach, clicks, follower growth, and other KPIs. 

The ability to generate and customize reports for specific platforms, campaigns, or time frames is essential for tracking ROI. Make sure your chosen social media management platform can export reports into formats like PDF, CSV, or Excel for sharing with stakeholders.

Security and Compliance

Social media is a sensitive channel because everything that appears on your organization’s social media pages directly impacts your reputation and your brand equity. One mispost could cause damage to your brand that takes months or even years to recover from. Because of this, it is important to choose a social media management platform that utilizes security tools such as two-factor authentication to protect your account from unauthorized access. You will also want to ensure that your software complies with data privacy regulations, such as GDPR, particularly if your audience is international.

Improve Your Social Media Management with Pearl-Plaza

With Pearl-Plaza’s reputation management software, you get access to social media management tools through our partnership with Hootsuite. Hootsuite’s industry-leading platform gives you access to content scheduling, social listening, social media analytics, and much more. Those tools combined with Pearl-Plaza’s ability to track ratings and reviews across multiple sites, manage your local business listings, and close the loop with customers will set your organization up for continued success. To see what else Pearl-Plaza can do for your business, schedule a personalized demo today!

Why is Collecting Customer Feedback Important?

Collecting customer feedback is important for businesses because it gives them a roadmap for boosting customer satisfaction and retention. This practice is at the core of a successful customer-centric approach that is impactful for the following reasons:

• It provides insight into customer behavior and expectations. Without an understanding of their customers’ needs and goals, a business might as well be walking in the dark! A clear understanding of your customers enables you to offer personalized services, which is what 60% of customers cite as their reason for becoming repeat buyers.
• It helps pinpoint issues that are hurting your business. Categorizing and analyzing feedback is a great way to identify aspects of your operations that are creating pain points for customers.
• It enables you to manage dissatisfied customers. Collecting feedback is the first step to successful customer experience management. 49% of customers who left a brand they had been loyal to over the past 12 months cited poor CX as their reason. By actively listening to dissatisfied customers, you can resolve their issues more effectively and improve your chances of retaining them or, at the very least, enhancing your brand reputation.

• It helps you retain satisfied customers for the long term. Not only does collecting customer feedback help identify issues, but it also highlights what’s working well for satisfied customers. By continuing to focus on features that have a positive impact, you can improve every aspect of the customer journey.
• It generates ideas for product enhancement. Customer feedback also includes suggestions and feature requests, which can guide strategy on further improving your product to boost business revenue.
• It helps reduce customer service costs for your business. By understanding common challenges for customers and how to resolve them quickly, your business can reduce the time it takes to offer effective customer support. As a result, you spend less on customer service.

Successful Ways of Collecting Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback doesn’t have to be tedious or inefficient. The following tried-and-test methods will help you capture actionable insights from your customers so that you can improve and evolve as a business.

• Make it easy to provide feedback. Customers are more likely to complete simple and user-friendly surveys. In fact, once respondents begin a survey, there is a sharp surge in their drop-off rate for each additional question up to 15 questions! Therefore, a good practice is to make your feedback forms and surveys simple and concise. Tools like Pearl-Plaza’s Survey Builder enable customized survey design to help you capture customer insights easily and quickly while reducing survey fatigue.

• Ask your customers relevant and impactful questions. Focusing on the right questions helps you keep your surveys concise and gather high-quality feedback. For instance, if you want targeted feedback on your checkout process, you need to query customers on that specific touchpoint instead of asking them about their general thoughts on your business.
• Leverage interactions with customers via live chat. Given that 72% of customers want immediate service, the live chat feature goes a long way toward customer satisfaction. Data from live chat interactions presents opportunities to learn about customer expectations, including common complaints or remarks.
• Use conversational surveys to engage customers in impactful dialogue. Conversational surveys provide an interactive means of collecting feedback from customers. While they can elicit higher-quality feedback due to their mobile and conversational nature, they can be time-consuming to create and manage.  Pearl-Plaza’s AI-powered Active Listening feature can simplify this process for you by listening and responding to customers in real-time without the need for human intervention.

• Collect feedback right after the purchase or service for accurate insights. Asking customers for feedback right after they complete a transaction helps you capture raw and honest thoughts on this key touchpoint. It also strengthens customer relationships, as buyers feel valued when their opinions are taken into consideration every step of the way.
• Monitor social media comments and reviews. Social media is the top choice for US consumers when communicating with brands. Both positive and negative experiences are even more amplified when customers share them with their followers or online networks. A robust reputation management software like Pearl-Plaza provides a complete picture of social media sentiment toward your brand and helps you generate the best possible responses by leveraging generative AI. These features empower you to make the most of online feedback and use it to enhance your brand reputation.

• Connect with your customers via an online community. You can engage with your customers on a deeper level by creating an online community around your product or service. From Discord servers to Facebook groups, these communities provide access to targeted opinions and help boost your brand culture.
• Offer rewards to incentivize customer feedback. Collecting feedback can be challenging when customers don’t feel inclined to do so. One tried-and-tested method of incentivizing feedback is to offer a valuable reward in exchange. From discounts to gift cards, these rewards not only encourage feedback but also foster customer loyalty. 
• Integrate feedback forms on your website. Customers like knowing that they have options to express themselves while they are using your product. Adding feedback forms to your website makes it easier to collect your customers’ opinions at crucial touchpoints and gain their trust over time.
• Measure your CX performance. By gathering feedback on how well your customer service team and contact centers are handling customer interactions and resolving issues, you can determine key areas for improvement. This practice helps you continuously improve your customer service and contact center optimization, which results in higher satisfaction and retention rates.

• Use icons and emojis to create short and sweet surveys. Customers might not be inclined to say much sometimes, especially after a neutral or even positive experience. A great way to improve response rates in these cases is to include icons (stars, thumbs up/down, etc.) and emojis that customers can simply click on to express themselves.
• Include in-app feedback collection messages. An in-app request for feedback is convenient for customers as they don’t have to go to a third-party website to provide opinions. It’s also a great way to engage inactive users by sending them notifications for feedback after a certain period of inactivity.

How to Collect Feedback from Clients?

Sometimes, collecting feedback from clients calls for a tailored approach, especially when it comes to distinguishing between B2C and B2B interactions.

Collecting Client Feedback

When capturing insights from other businesses, you want to focus on more detailed and structured feedback collection. Methods like one-on-one interviews, comprehensive surveys, and dedicated online portals help gather specific and detailed context from decision-makers to enhance the B2B customer experience.

Collection Consumer Feedback

On the other hand, B2C feedback collection should prioritize simplicity and convenience while maintaining the quality of insights. This is because B2C clients usually expect quicker and more user-friendly ways to interact with the business or to resolve their issues. Methods like conversational surveys, simple feedback forms, live chat, and social media reviews are proven ways of successfully engaging B2C clients for feedback collection.

Collecting Customer Feedback for the First Time

A good practice for encouraging feedback from first-time customers is to keep it simple. The following feedback metrics enable businesses to quickly identify areas for improvement without intimidating new customers:

1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend a product or service to their colleagues, typically on a scale of 1-10. Based on the NPS value, customers are categorized as detractors (1-6), passives (7 or 8), and promoters (9 or 10).
2. Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for customers to perform a specific activity, like placing an order or reaching out to customer support. Typical methods include using a 7-point scale, emoticon survey, or even an open-ended question. A more positive CES score indicates that the customer experienced very little friction in completing a task.
3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) queries customers on how satisfied they are with the product or service, typically on a scale of 1-5. The higher the CES provided by the customer, the more satisfied they are with the business. This metric provides a quick snapshot of customer satisfaction, which is especially useful when collecting feedback from first-time users.

Example Questions to Gather Customer Feedback

The quality of feedback you collect is strongly linked to the clarity and specificity of the questions you ask. Some examples of questions to capture valuable insights from customers include:

1. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our productivity app to a friend or colleague? (NPS)
2. How easy was it to track your shipment on our website? (CES)
3. On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the overall shopping experience? (CSAT)
4. What can we do to make your experience better? (open-ended)
5. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our web hosting service for its cost-effectiveness? (B2B NPS)
6. Was there anything about your experience that didn’t meet your expectations?

Challenges of Collecting Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is a great way to make your brand stand out, but it comes with several challenges, including:

1. Capturing detailed and meaningful feedback. Customers may provide short and vague responses, which can make it difficult to identify specific areas for improvement. For instance, a customer might say, “It was okay,” without going into detail as to what could have been improved. Pearl-Plaza addresses the challenge of capturing detailed and meaningful feedback. Our patented Active Listening solution overcomes this by using advanced AI to encourage rich, context-driven conversations. This technology allows businesses to understand the reasons behind customer responses, ensuring that feedback is more detailed and actionable. 
2. Asking the right questions every time. High-quality questions are likely to yield high-quality responses. However, determining the right questions to ask can be quite tricky at times. If the questions are too broad or irrelevant, the feedback may not be useful. Businesses often struggle to come up with questions that will provide actionable data aligning with their goals.
3. Managing an overwhelming amount of feedback. The more feedback you collect as a business, the higher the volume of responses and insights you will have to manage. Sorting through and analyzing the data to find common trends or issues can be time-consuming and challenging without proper tools or processes in place. Pearl-Plaza leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning, and self-serve analytical tools to uncover critical insights, enabling you to explore specific areas of interest within 100% of your experience data from various sources across your business. This saves you and your CX team significant time by eliminating the need to manually sift through large volumes of data to find valuable insights. With our software, your team can focus on prioritizing and executing actions that drive the most impact, enabling you to achieve a faster customer experience ROI.
4. Prioritizing feedback for business goals. Even after collecting and analyzing feedback, businesses face the challenge of deciding which insights to act on first. Not all feedback will have the same impact on customer satisfaction or business growth, so prioritizing which areas to address can be difficult.
5. Interrupting the Customer Experience. Collecting customer feedback, especially within digital interactions, can be viewed as intrusive, ill-timed, or irrelevant to the customer’s journey. This not only diminishes the overall customer experience but also creates skewed or misleading data. Customers might respond hastily or negatively due to the inconvenience, which can distort insights and lead to inaccurate reporting.

How to Collect Customer Feedback Without Ruining the Experience

To avoid interrupting the customer journey to obtain customer feedback, it’s essential to design requests that are integrated seamlessly into the digital experience—ensuring that they are relevant, timely, and respectful of the customer’s context. This thoughtful approach not only enhances the quality of feedback collected but also reinforces a positive brand experience.

Tip #1: Map Out Possible Site Pathways for Customization

Instead of drafting one intercept survey to serve your entire site, consider all the different touchpoints you want to collect data from and then craft questions.

• Keep in mind how users are browsing your site and craft intercepts around that information. For instance, a feedback tab may be perfect for desktop users, but it’s far too small in size for mobile users. Consider using a banner on your mobile site instead.
• Be creative by using triggers to target specific user groups for feedback. For example, if you want to collect more feedback from customers in a specific state, you can set a trigger based on IP addresses.
• Avoid asking unnecessary questions or irrelevant questions. 

Tip #2: Gear Questions Toward the User’s Specific Experience

In order to get the best feedback possible, you have to ask the right questions about the right experience for each type of customer. For instance, a question asking about the checkout experience would be irrelevant to a customer who has yet to make a purchase. Instead, set a trigger for an intercept to appear for a customer with a few lingering items in their bag to learn why they haven’t taken the plunge. 

• Keep it simple. Surveys that are too long are less likely to be completed and also take away from the user experience. Try to keep it to a few high-quality questions so you can get the information you need without losing your customer’s attention.
• Revisit the map of possible visitor pathways you created to help prescribe questions to specific user situations. The more tailored your questions can be to a customer scenario, the better. For example, you can ask specific questions targeting those who use the mobile site in order to improve the mobile design and experience.
• Don’t have a survey form pop up right away. 

Tip #3: Give Customers Time to Provide Informed Feedback

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is especially relevant when you’re collecting data; if you aren’t collecting quality feedback, your insights won’t create real business impact. This is why it’s especially important to give your customers the opportunity to navigate your site before asking them to give you feedback.

• Strategically place a feedback tab or another always-available channel on the website for instant feedback. This way, customers have the ability to provide you with feedback outside of the triggers you’ve set up.
• Set up an intercept for customers who have lingered on the site for some time but haven’t made a purchase or reached out. This allows you to check in and see if they have any questions or concerns.

When setting up a method to collect customer feedback, consider whether it will enhance or disrupt your customer’s experience. By ensuring that each question adds value and contributes to a positive interaction, you position yourself to collect more meaningful feedback and insights, ultimately leading to a greater business impact.

Make Collecting Customer Feedback Easy with Pearl-Plaza 

Collecting customer feedback is a powerful tool for transforming your business, especially with its positive impact on customer relationships and brand reputation. From AI-powered conversational surveys to effective social media monitoring, Pearl-Plaza helps you make the most of every piece of insight you collect from your customers. To see how you can simplify the feedback collection process for your business, schedule a demo today!

• Increase sales revenue by up to 7%
• Increase cross-sell rates by up to 25%
• Increase shareholder return by up to 10%

These statistics show that customer experience improvement is something that should be a priority across your entire organization, rather than being a siloed effort. 

What is Customer Experience Improvement? 

Customer experience improvement refers to enhancing the interactions and overall satisfaction a customer has with your business across all touchpoints. This involves understanding customer needs and expectations, as well as any pain points they have in the customer journey, and working to address them. 

The goal of customer experience improvement is to create a positive customer experience where the customer always feels supported. 

What is A Customer Experience Improvement Program?

A customer experience improvement program is a structured initiative designed to enhance the interactions a customer has with a brand. Customer experience programs are built upon strategies for gathering customer feedback, analyzing voice of the customer data, and implementing changes to the customer experience. 

A customer experience program helps your organization improve customer experience by facilitating cross-functional collaboration between various departments such as sales, marketing, support, etc. 

Benefits of Improving Customer Experience

When you improve customer experience, you will notice benefits that reach every part of the organization. Some of the benefits of improving customer experience include: 

Increased Customer Loyalty

When you have a consistently positive customer experience, you will create loyal customers. Customers will become loyal to your brand after a varying number of positive experiences. 50% agree that it takes between three and four purchases, while 37% agree it takes more than five purchases. But, by improving customer experience, you will have no problem achieving these customer milestones and increasing customer loyalty. 

Higher Customer Lifetime Value

Satisfied customers tend to spend more over time, especially when compared to new customers. By improving customer experience, you increase the customer lifetime value by encouraging repeat purchases, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities. 

Improved Customer Satisfaction 

You will increase customer satisfaction by improving customer experience and reducing the pain points in the customer journey. As a result, those satisfied customers will be more likely to recommend your products or services to others. 

Enhanced Brand Reputation 

When you improve customer experience, customers will trust you more. And 88% of customers who trust a brand will become repeat customers. Improving customer experience will also result in increased brand equity, which is a key determining factor in what organizations consumers choose to give their business to. 

Stronger Competitive Advantage

In competitive industries, customer experience is often a key differentiating factor. As a matter of fact, 93% of businesses cite CX as either a primary differentiator or a partial differentiator. Improving the customer experience will help your business stand out in the market and attract more customers. 

10 Ways to Improve Customer Experience

It can be easy to get overwhelmed with all the things that can be done to improve customer experience for your organization. However, these ten action items represent the most important and impactful factors of the customer experience. 

1. Listen to Customer Feedback

Most companies receive customer feedback, but few organizations take the steps necessary to listen to and implement customer feedback in their organization. It is important that you actively examine the voice of customer data to understand what is going well, and what could be improved, in your customer experience. You can also improve customer experience by utilizing tools like sentiment analysis, which will help you analyze unstructured data. 

How Can Sentiment Analysis Be Used to Improve Customer Experience

Sentiment analysis can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience by providing real-time insights into how customers feel about your products or services. By analyzing text data from reviews, social media, surveys, and support tickets, your business can identify trends in customer emotions as well as promptly address complaints, and adjust your offering based on customer sentiments.

2. Personalize Interactions

The majority of today’s consumers expect personalized interactions. You can improve customer experience by tailoring communications and offerings based on individual customer behaviors. 

Examples of Personalized Interactions

For example, an e-commerce website might suggest a hat to go with a recently purchased shirt. Or a financial services institution might notice a customer opening a new savings account and suggest they meet with an in-house financial advisor. 

3. Streamline Processes

One of the best ways to improve customer experience is to improve organizational performance. If your organization is operating efficiently, your customers will almost certainly experience an efficient experience. For example, undergoing contact center optimization may help customer profiles become more easily accessible to agents. If agents can access customer information easier, they can improve issue resolution time and, as a result, improve the customer experience. 

4. Train Employees 

You can improve customer experience by ensuring that your employees are equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver excellent service. Furthermore, suppose you understand the importance of employee loyalty. In that case, you know that employee retention is crucial in keeping costs low so that more time and effort can be spent trying to improve customer experience. 

Employee training goes beyond the onboarding process. It is also important to effectively manage and train employees continuously throughout their careers. Tracking employee statistics and their engagement with customers will help you train them to provide the best service.

5. Reduce Customer Churn

It might seem counterintuitive to try and improve customer experience by decreasing customer churn. But, the two are closely related. If you analyze your customer churn rate and find out what is driving churn, you can implement initiatives to eliminate churn factors in your organization. 

By removing the things that are causing your customers to leave, you will give them more of a reason to stay, which will improve customer experience. 

6. Reward Loyal Customers

Implement a customer loyalty or rewards program that acknowledges and incentivizes repeat business. 83% of consumers say that belonging to a loyalty program influences them to buy from a brand again. By offering discounts, early access to new products, or other perks, you can retain loyal customers by creating a sense of appreciation and rewarding them for doing business with your brand. 

7. Offer Self-Service Options

79% of consumers expect organizations to provide self-service tools, and 77% view organizations more positively when they do. By offering self-service options, you can help customers save time while simultaneously reducing the pressure on support teams. This leads to overall increased issue resolution and increased satisfaction. 

8. Respond to Reviews

Responding to reviews is an important part of improving the end-to-end customer experience. Pearl-Plaza research shows that the majority of consumers expect organizations to respond to reviews within a week, but 63% of consumers say they’ve never heard back from a business after leaving a review. Responding to reviews is an important part of making your customers feel valued and understand the real-time performance of your customer experience efforts. 

With Pearl-Plaza’s reputation management software, you can utilize AI to generate review responses. The responses can be tailored to your organization to match your brand’s tone and style guidelines. This functionality can make sure all customer reviews receive a response in a timely manner. 

9. Create an Omnichannel Experience

An omnichannel customer experience allows customers to have a consistent journey across all platforms whether online, in person, via mobile app, or over the phone. Customers should be able to switch channels without having to repeat information or experience a delay. By creating an omnichannel experience, you make it easier for your customers to interact with your brand how they want to, which will improve their experience. 

10. Track Customer Experience Metrics

You can continuously work to improve customer experience by tracking customer experience KPIs. You can use metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) to monitor specific aspects of your customer experience and identify areas of improvement. By attaching metrics to your customer experience efforts, you make it easier to ensure that customer needs are consistently met and also gives you the ability to show customer experience ROI to key stakeholders in your organization. 

Pearl-Plaza’s XI Platform gives you an overview of how your organization is performing on your most important metric, with the ability to dive deeper into specific aspects of the reporting. The XI platform also identifies the biggest areas for improvement to help you continue to realize CX success. 

Improving customer experience is an initiative that requires alignment throughout your entire organization. While the tips listed above represent a great starting point in your customer experience improvement journey, some industries require more specific focuses to move the needle. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Retail

The ecommerce customer experience for retail brands has become increasingly important as consumers spend more time online shopping each year. In order to improve the overall retail experience, you need to take into account the ways in which your customers prefer to shop. Here are some tips to improve customer experience in retail: 

1. Offer Omnichannel Shopping Experiences

Retail consumers expect to switch between channels during their shopping experience easily. In the last 5 years, buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) orders have increased by over 200%. This means that more consumers than ever are starting their shopping online, and finishing it in-store. To account for this, ensure that your store is up to date with the latest technology so that these orders can be completed seamlessly. 

2. Implement Virtual Try-Ons

Using augmented reality technology to allow customers to try products virtually will enhance their shopping experience. One retailer saw that when a customer engaged with AR technology, they had a conversion rate that was 90% higher than customers who did not engage with the same technology. Utilizing this technology creates an interactive and engaging experience that helps customers make informed decisions and reduces returns. 

3. Curate Personalized Product Recommendations

88% of consumers are more likely to continue shopping with a brand that gave them a personalized experience, and 68% of consumers bought an item that they didn’t intend to based on recommendations. Using customer data to curate personalized product recommendations will increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Financial Services

The financial services customer experience has changed a lot in recent years. Consumers are rarely visiting branches, and digital banking usage has increased exponentially. However, there are some values that all financial consumers share, and capitalizing on those will help your institution improve customer experience. 

1. Implement Personalized Financial Advice

Use data analytics to provide personalized financial advice based on customers’ spending habits, life stages, and goals. For example, Pearl-Plaza research found that 25% of Gen Z and Millennials were not interested in pensions and retirement plans. These customers would prefer to hear about other money management opportunities. Consider implementing online portals or virtual advisor meetings that allow for these consumers to get personalized advice. Offering tailored financial advice will make customers feel valued and increase customer loyalty. 

2. Focus on Security and Fraud Prevention

Pearl-Plaza research found that 90% of financial consumers were concerned about cybersecurity. In order to retain these customers, they need to trust that your organization will keep their data secure. Implementing advanced fraud detection systems, offering two-factor authentication, and regularly educating customers on cybersecurity practices can enhance trust and create a sense of security.

3. Develop Financial Literacy Programs

One of the best ways to retain financial services customers is to assist in their education. Offering educational resources such as webinars, tutorials, or guides, can empower customers to educate themselves and make informed decisions. By supporting financial education, you show your customers that you care about their long-term financial well-being. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare

In order to improve customer experience in healthcare, you need to make it easier for patients to engage with your practice. In an increasingly digital world, patients are spending less time making phone calls to a provider’s office and spending more time researching and booking appointments online. Here are three main things you can do to improve the healthcare customer experience. 

1. Simplify Appointment Scheduling

The majority of consumers prefer to book appointments through digital channels such as online or via a mobile app as opposed to calling an office. To match this demand, make sure your practice has user-friendly scheduling systems that can be accessed from multiple devices. By offering these services along with appointment reminders, you make it easier for new and current patients to book and attend their appointments. 

2. Manage Local Listings and Reviews

It has never been more important for healthcare providers to have up-to-date information online. The quality and completeness of a provider’s profile is the most important factor to someone looking to book an appointment. Reviews are also important, as patients read an average of five reviews before choosing a provider. 

Consider choosing a local listings management software to help you ensure that your practice has the most accurate information available to prospective patients. This can also be used alongside a review management platform that will help you monitor and respond to reviews across the most important sites such as Google, Yelp, and Healthgrades. 

3. Build Mobile-Friendly Pages

When conducting research and reading reviews about a provider, almost 70% of patients prefer to use a smartphone or tablet. Similarly, the use of laptops or desktops to do this same research has dropped by almost 30%. In order to make your pages available to consumers on all devices, make sure that your website can support mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers. This functionality will allow all consumers to view information about your practice and read reviews with ease. 

Why Improving Customer Experience Is Important for Organizational Performance

Improving customer experience is important for organizational performance because it can directly affect the amount of revenue your organization generates. Forrester research shows that improving your CX Index score by just one point can generate anywhere from $36 million to $1.2 billion in additional annual revenue depending on your industry. 

Improving customer experience gives customers more of a reason to stay customers, as well as recommend your organization to others. By finding the relationship between CX and growth in your business, you can accurately predict the financial improvement driven by CX improvement. 

How to Start a Customer Experience Improvement Program

Starting a customer experience improvement program is a step forward to becoming a customer-focused organization. When starting from scratch, there are three important things to consider to improve customer experience. 

1. Define the Vision and Goals

Start by outlining the kind of customer experience your organization is trying to deliver. This should align closely with your brand’s values and overall business strategy. Furthermore, choose which customer experience metrics your customer experience improvement program will track. You can choose between customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort (CES), or any other metric that makes sense for your business. 

2. Secure Executive Support

It is important to make sure that the leadership and executive team at your organization understand the importance of CX and are committed to supporting the program. This will help secure resources and drive organizational alignment. 

After you have received executive support, you will want to appoint a CX leader. This can be a singular person or a team. The CX leader will spearhead the program’s initiatives and ensure accountability. 

3. Map the Customer Journey

After setting your goals and securing buy-in, you are ready to get started. You can start by utilizing customer journey mapping to understand the journey your customers go through when choosing to do business with you. This will help you understand the most important touchpoints and make an initial plan. 

To see a more in-depth look of running a customer experience improvement program, check out all the capabilities you gain with a dedicated customer experience platform. 

Improve Customer Experience with Pearl-Plaza 

Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience platform is designed to help you improve customer experience, regardless of if you are just getting started or already have an established system. Our best-in-class tools and experienced consultants will help you improve your main metrics. To see how Pearl-Plaza’s platform can be customized to fit your needs, schedule a demo today!

To dive deeper into these advancements, speak with an expert or contact a dedicated account manager.

Smartest Actions

1. Smart Recommendations and Summaries

Reduce time to insights and improve program engagement with coaching recommendations

Let AI be your sidekick to make sense of your customer voice in seconds. Generate contextual program recommendations and summaries on any widget to understand the data behind visualizations and suggestions for improvement. These summaries can be shared across teams, helping to streamline decision-making and foster engagement across the organization.

Use Case: “As a CX Analyst, I want to quickly understand anomalies in my data and provide a summary of findings and recommendations for next steps to my Executive audience.”

Understand Conversational Experiences: Reduce time to insights and improve program engagement

2. Google Post Publishing

Drive sales with easy publishing from Local Listings

Promote your business updates, sales, and events directly on Google through streamlined post publishing. Engage local customers and enhance local business listing visibility, ensuring your business stays top-of-mind as potential customers browse online.

Use Case: “As a marketing manager, I need to be able to share business updates, promotions, and events via Google Posts, so that we inform and engage with our customers as they browse online and allow them to make better decisions.” 

Local Listing Management: Create and publish Google Posts.

Richest Insights

3. Pinpoint Speaker Insights

Gain personalized insights by targeting individual speaker sections

Target individual speaker insights with accuracy. Section-level filtering surfaces specific conversations with sections meeting your criteria, such as the exact speaker and certain mentions, ensuring you can focus on what matters most—understanding a customer’s intent or identifying agent performance improvement areas.

Use Case: “As a CX manager, I want to focus on the insights from an individual speaker so I can identify pain points, optimize agent performance, understand the overall conversation, and create a plan to address needed areas of improvement.”

Conversational Insights on Particular Areas of a Document: Speaker-specific insights for targeted agent training and customer understanding

4. Add Context With Widget Comments

Describe events in specific areas of charts and graphs

Reduce confusion by adding comments to specific sections of widgets, offering clear context on particular events or trends. Whether explaining sudden changes in performance or a shift in customer feedback, widget comments enable clarity for better decision-making.

Use Case: “As a CX Manager, I want to quickly explain things to my ELT viewer, such as why there is a dip in this line graph or why the NPS changed from last month to this month.”

Enhance Understanding: Add comments describing events and observations for specific areas of charts and graphs.

Strongest Signals

5. Ingest Competitor Review Data via API

Gain a competitive advantage with richer insights into how to take market share from competition

Easily merge competitor review data from multiple review sources with other key experience signals in your preferred BI tool. Gain deeper, actionable insights that reveal your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, allowing you to focus your strategy to increase performance and become the brand that customers prefer over others. 

Use Case: “As a marketing manager, I need richer insights from our competitor analysis to build effective strategies to outperform the competition.”

Competitor Review: Combine your competitor reviews with other experience signals in your preferred BI tool.

6. Set Local Search Zone

Optimize your local SEO with a fixed search zone radius

Most companies have a specific search zone radius in mind they’d like to monitor and track across their search terms and locations. Focus on the areas that matter the most in your local SEO strategy, and extract consistent search rank data, across locations and search terms, that allows for easy comparison. Quickly spot top-performing search terms with clearer, actionable insights and apply learnings to increase organic revenue.

Use Case: “As a marketing manager, I need to be able to set and track a fixed search zone radius across all search terms and locations, so that I can focus exclusively on the area aligned with my strategy and better capture and analyze business opportunities within that zone.”

Localized Reviews: Set a fixed local search radius across your locations. 

Discover These and Other Innovative Product Features 

The features unveiled today offer a glimpse into the innovative products and features currently available, as well as those on Pearl-Plaza’s extensive innovation roadmap. Contact us or a dedicated account manager if you want to learn more. Pearl-Plaza has shared its press and release notes, highlighting its technological advancements and industry leadership.

2024 Product Feature Releases

Explore the latest product feature releases, with more details available below.

• Q3 product feature release notes  
• Q2 product feature release notes 

Each product feature supports an integrated customer experience approach, empowering businesses to collect customer data across the entire customer journey. Our proprietary AI-based technology automates and analyzes data from every channel, revealing key areas for business growth, enhancing efficiency, and providing deeper insights into feedback, sentiment, buyer behavior, and market dynamics.

Stay Ahead with Pearl-Plaza’s Innovative Solutions

Stay ahead of the competition with Pearl-Plaza’s continuous innovation. Our latest product features empower businesses to better understand customer feedback and enhance operational efficiency, giving you the tools to make smarter, data-driven decisions. With a commitment to evolving our solutions, Pearl-Plaza helps you stay agile, gain a competitive edge, and drive meaningful business outcomes. Learn more about our XI platform, the world’s most recommended CX solution.