Social Listening: How Companies Hear Feedback Without a Survey

Your customers are talking about you behind your back and the entire world is listening.

Luckily, you can hear what customers have to say even if they aren’t speaking directly to you. Every mention provides an opportunity to replicate the good (or troubleshoot the bad before it turns into a national or global brand crisis).

Enter: Pearl-Plaza Social Listening.

Social Listening taps into popular online review and social sites where customers share meaningful experiences about brands. But the social sphere is a big place. Pearl-Plaza helps find, compile, and analyze brand mentions and reviews, and sorts them into easy-to-digest insights for all levels of an organization, from frontline staff to top-level executives—and everyone in between.

For many companies, the initial plunge into Voice of Customer (VoC) begins with customer experience surveys. However, with the prevalence of social sharing, listening isn’t complete without the social perspective, and this angle is becoming more central to business strategies. Large brands with multiple locations don’t have the ability to easily monitor social media and review sites, glean a sense of customer opinion, and take action to rescue dissatisfied customers. There’s simply too much data from too many sources to compile, analyze, and act without some help.

Social Listening allows companies to track multiple social channels in one place. Pearl-Plaza embeds these social stories alongside experience data from voice, online, and other sources into alerts, reports, dashboards, and apps for a broader view of customer sentiment.

Several powerhouse brands have seen significant benefits from using Pearl-Plaza technology to streamline social listening. Here are just a few real-life examples from some of our clients.

Aggregated Insights

Comprehensive insights are integrated directly into Pearl-Plaza’s platform, and are analyzed and displayed in a centralized location alongside other types of customer feedback for comparison. Area and regional managers receive rollups relevant to their service area, while executives receive a companywide outlook.

Competitive Analysis

Companies receive the added—and critical—ability to “listen” to competitors and gauge how a specific location is performing within a given area, such as a shopping mall.

Real-Time Response

Designated employees are alerted on customer complaints, and may respond directly within the same social channel, or transfer the case to a dedicated customer service department.

Employee Coaching and Recognition

Social listening allows location managers to identify key areas of service and focus their employee training and coaching. Additionally, managers may recognize service teams and individual team members who receive praise on social channels.

Access to Richer Data

By taking in feedback from various social sources, companies find the conversations on review and social sites form an in-depth set of unstructured data to complement the data from customer experience surveys.

Less Intrusive Collection

Collecting critical feedback through social channels allows companies to keep their customer experience survey short, which increases the response rate, and keeps interactions feeling more like conversations than interrogations—gaining insights without having to ask too often.

Focused Marketing Efforts

Companies are able to create targeted social content, based on social conversations, in the form of offers and advertisements.

Social Media Dashboard

Companies receive at-a-glance information about customers’ experiences, including a breakdown of the most common topics mentioned on social media, so they can easily identify trends and address common issues.

Advanced Text Analytics

Companies are able to run the same advanced text analytics on social comments as they do on unstructured survey feedback, automating the ability to quickly understand the large amounts of social data, instantly alert on urgent issues, and easily spot emerging trends.

Asking for feedback from your customers is a good thing. Being able to listen to the stories, understand what they mean to your business, and then act on them quickly, is a great thing.