Social customer service seems to be the fastest growing area of social media and has huge potential – if you use it correctly.
It can be pretty difficult to look through the 100s or even 1000s of tweets a day your company will receive in order to find actionable ones, but using social analytics allows you to see tweets about your business in a whole different way. How? Here’s some simple social analytics you can start to use to help you understand those tweets.
- The big picture – setting alerts for keywords – Social analytics allows you to broaden the listing for the amount of Tweets you see. This means you will be able to see all tweets that mention your company or product brands, without the customer having to use your twitter handle in the post. For example, a customer will not always put ‘@XYZ provide terrible customer service’, they might just put ‘XYZ provide terrible customer service’ – social analytics allows you to see all these tweets.
- Filter out the noise – Social analytics has the ability to sift out irrelevant tweets and will only show you relevant and actionable posts. As you action tweets, the analytics will ‘learn’ and be able to accurately detect which tweets are relevant and actionable. There is a lot of spam on twitter, so having an analytics system that can sift through all of this spam to only show you relevant posts is important.
- Listing topics and taking a deeper dive – Social analytics programmes will list all tweets based on a selected topic, and let you explore them further. So, for example if you just wanted to see tweets around your service, the programme will filter out service-based tweets, such as ‘great service today at XYZ’ or ‘Service at XYZ needs improving – terrible experience!’. It will also expand the list into categories, such as poor or good service, so you can action them accordingly.
- Show intention – One of the main social blind spots is not understanding the intention of the tweet. Social analytics can provide lists based on the intentions of tweets, for example, if you want to find tweets of people looking for advice on how to use your website, a complaint, a question about products/services or feedback, social analytics can do this for you.
Social analytics – it’s a learning process
While social analytics will work immediately, and will predict which tweets are actionable and relevant, it also comes with a built-in learning process. The analytics will show how many tweets you received that were actionable and how many were ignored, but it also allows you to check through all of the tweets it has deemed actionable that you have ignored, and enable you to indicate to the system whether they are indeed actionable or not. This allows the system to learn and start to understand what tweets you deem relevant to your business, and can present the analytics to you more accurately.
No more blind spots
Remember, it is seven times more expensive for a company to acquire a new customer than to retain one, yet companies are still spending more money on customer acquisition than customer service and retention. In this new digital age where Twitter is fast becoming the pulse of a company, it is clear that social analytics is a worthwhile solution to invest in. It really helps a business deal with its customer blind spots, helps customers as and when they need it and overall, helps to improve business and retain customers.