How Brands Track Customer Experience Through Social Media

Most modern brands have relied on focus groups, surveys, expert reviews, and feedback from customer support to understand how customers feel about their products and services.

While these methods have generated valuable insights into what customers think about a brand, the social-media revolution has given voice to billions of consumers around the world, who now share a steady stream of insights that brands can’t afford to miss.

Today, focus groups and other traditional market research methods tend to yield information that’s already outdated by the time it’s available. That’s because customers have essentially become a real-time source of valuable insights, sharing their experiences – good or bad – across different social-media channels.

And if your brand isn’t capturing these real-time customer experiences from social media, not only do you risk losing valued customers and others in their social network, you risk missing out on insights that allow you to quickly improve your company’s products and services.

Specific Topics, Valuable Insights

Social listening has become so common, in fact, that brands can fall behind if they aren’t using it to its fullest potential.

For example, if I’m unhappy with the food on an airplane, I tweet about it. And today, many airlines use social-media tools to capture – and respond to – customer complaints.

That said, most of them don’t have the ability to capture food-specific or any issue-specific complaints. They also don’t route these food-specific messages to the meals department, which can take action in real-time and prevent poor customer experiences.

Similarly, when a brand launches a new product, it receives feedback on social media a few weeks before the customer support team hears anything. Imagine if your product team could identify a major bug in your product weeks before it became a major support issue. Not only do you save big time on your extra support cost, you prevent your loyal customers from having a bad experience.

Tracking Customer Experience in Real Time

Social media is no longer just a playing field for PR and marketing efforts. It’s also a means for tracking, in real-time, whether a brand is providing a good customer experience.

With Sprinklr, big brands are measuring the quality of customer experiences on a granular level. For example, a finance company can tap into countless customer voices to understand which major bank credit card is the most popular, and which one draws the most complaints. Or an automaker can determine which feature of a new car is drawing the most chatter among customers talking on social media, and track the corresponding sentiment around it.

Sprinklr In Action

Recently, a major airline mapped its entire customer journey on social media through Sprinklr’s listening platform. The brand divided its customer journey on social media into three major parts: “flight booking,” “airport experience,” and “in-flight experience.” It then mapped what customers were saying (good, bad, or otherwise) about those facets of their journey.

The analysis went deeper than that. For instance, when listening around the term “airport experience,” the brand could track what customers were saying about their experiences related to “check-in,” “baggage,” and “lounge” among other relevant terms.

(Screenshot from Sprinklr platform: Customer Experience score on in-flight parameters, for top US airlines. Diameter of the bubble represents the volume of social media messages.)

Similarly, to better understand customer sentiment around “in-flight experience”, the airline listened for conversations related to “food,” “crew,” “wi-fi,” and “entertainment,” among others.

Sprinklr’s listening essentially powered the brand to track the quality of experience at every customer touch point, using a steady stream of real-time insights straight from the customers themselves.Sprinklr is empowering hundreds of brands to capture customer experience on each stage of their product and services life-cycle.

It then automatically routes specific messages to concerned functions in the company.

Social listening tools have moved beyond just capturing your share of voice on social media to measuring customer experience. In 2018, an AI powered social listening platform has become an integral part for big brands to deliver a great customer experience.

Learn more about Sprinklr’s AI-powered automated routing.