Want to do wonders for your customer success strategy? Easy, listen to what your customers are saying about your brand online. If done well, the best social listeners are able to take that unstructured data from customer conversations on the Internet and turn it into processes, innovations, or product changes they can actually act on. This process has proven to turn unhappy customers into happy ones.
At the same time, do you also want to understand your competitors and the stories they are creating around their own brands? If that’s the case, you’ll need a competitive intelligence strategy to augment your social listening tactics. Social listening is not as robust of a competitive intelligence tool as some might believe. This is mainly due to its customer-driven data approach. Relying only on this method for competitive intelligence could mean missing out on a whole chunk of the story.
Over 64.3% millennials believe that brands should respond to them on social media if they mention them and although social listening can energize your customer success strategies, it has its own disadvantages, challenges, and limitations. What are some things it doesn’t do? What are some of the downsides to social listening? What information is it leaving out and what are some of the difficulties of monitoring your customer’s conversations about your brand?
Disadvantage #1: Attempting To Filter Through The Noise
Social listening can be extremely noisy. Sifting through data from real people is one challenge, but many times the data that is being collected is from bots or organizations as well. These impostor sources are not the target audiences you are seeking for when deploying social listening collection techniques. This can inadvertently affect the quality of your data when it comes time for analysis. Brands must make sure that the data they are going to act on is truly from their customers. Subsequently, the more data your brand collects and interacts with, the longer and more difficult it will be to clear out the non-human clutter
Disadvantage #2: Working With Unstructured Data
A primary downside to social listening is the mass of unstructured data a company receives that only tells them what is being said, not the actual context and background of why it was said or who said it. Unstructured data, the comments, arguments, and unfiltered praise or criticism about your brand only tells what a person had to say at a given time. Outside of their words, it does not provide much context of the situation that brought them there in the first place. Think of it like this: when it rains it pours, and your customers may have had a rainy day before they left a message about your brand on the Internet. In addition to this, categorizing this data can be a subjective process when messages aren’t clearly positive or negative.
Disadvantage #3: Amount Of Channels Customers Can Use To Connect With Brands
Source: Social Media Examiner, May 2013
About 89% of customers switch to a brand’s competitor after a poor customer service experience. Although social listening is becoming more commonplace, this issue is much more pervasive than ever before due to the increased amount of channels customers are able to connect to brands with. The problem is compounded because brands must now decide if, when, and how to respond to customer’s comments through which Internet channels. This connectivity has led to about 50% of consumers who give brands a deadline of one week for a response before they stop doing business with them. Just to add some icing to the cake here, there also exists a delicate balance between responsibly answering customer issues and being an overwhelming presence on forums, social media and other digital channels.
Disadvantage #4: Social Listening Is Only One Ingredient In The Recipe
Brands need to know not only what conversations are taking place on the Internet from their customers, but also what their competitors are doing and how they are doing it. While social listening allows you to understand and act on customer conversations, it does not provide all the market insight required to be an industry leader. Using both competitive intelligence and social listening processes for your brand’s competitor and customer operations is a much more comprehensive and effective method than relying solely customer-driven metrics. Social listening only works well when paralleled with well thought out customer strategy goals in mind but is not a one ingredient recipe for market success!
In determining your brand’s market strategy, social listening should not be the only component in determining your industry success; it should just be one of the keys. Keep in mind that is not a complete approach and should be used in conjunction with competitive intelligence tactics to maximize your brand’s understanding of the marketplace you live in. All in all, if not done well social listening can also turn out to work against your brand. This can occur from overstepping the bounds and having an annoying online presence, not replying to customer’s comments in a productive manner or a multitude of other ways. Customers control the purchasing process these days and if your brand is deciding to interact with their conversations online, make sure it is an approach that you would want to be interacted with as well.
What are some other disadvantages or difficulties to social listening? Lets us know in the comments below or give us a shout on twitter (@TrackMaven).