Where to look for customer feedback?

Today the Internet has become the most prominent communication media where people easily and enthusiastically exchange their opinions online on products and services they use.

Independent user feedback is trusted much higher than any advertising in traditional media, so private opinions expressed online can boost demand for some products and ruin market prospects of others.  

People are generally more willing to share negative experience than to tell ‘success stories’, so the more customers a company has, the more complicated online environment it has to cope with in order to win more customers or just hold market positions.

Social media – blogs, forums and social networks – are places concentrating this valuable customer feedback that businesses need to know and work with every day.

How you benefit from Social Media Monitoring

Social media monitoring delivers structured information directly from end customers and other company's stakeholders, which enables you to:

• Monitor and maintain your brand perception
• Keep in touch with your target audience, build and manage relations: find out what people think and establish direct communications to nurture customer loyalty
• Stay aware of what your competitors are doing and how customers are reacting
• Determine market trends through informal customer opinions
• Accumulate customer feedback in a categorized structure to detect advantages and drawbacks of the current offering and develop market-winning products/services
• Improve customer experience by providing instant and personal online support
• Identify critical situations before they grow out of control and instantaneously resolve them by addressing negative comments directly
• Ensure your marketing efforts are effective, tune promo campaigns “on the fly” reacting to instant feedback of the target groups

What is crucial for social media monitoring solutions?

• Coverage

  Search engines cannot guarantee the full coverage due to being too general, no matter whether manual or automatic information retrieval is used.

  To provide a close to complete collection of information on a company / product / service (object of monitoring), some additional search technologies should be applied along with common search engines. Using a proprietary web crawler with specially composed set of key words allows gathering over 90% of relevant data from literally unlimited number of online platforms, such as blogs, forums, social networks, and digital mass media. There should also be an option to manually add specific sites as data sources so that nothing is missed.

• Data extraction accuracy

  Web search even with correct keywords brings vast amount of diverse links, a great deal of which are irrelevant to the object of monitoring, are duplicates or homonyms. Such entries must be filtered from the gathered information before analysis is started.

• Real-time monitoring

  Average "life span" of a blog post or online news generally equals to 6-8 hours. To provide a complete view and enable real-time reaction when needed, a social media monitoring solution should detect relevant data as soon as they appear (not later than in several hours) and generate reports at any required time.

• Automatic text analysis with sentiment extraction

  The collected information should be processed, structured and analyzed. Comprehensive linguistic technologies are to be applied to provide automatic categorization and sentiment scoring (positive, negative, neutral) of each mentioning with high fidelity (over 80%).

• Industry focus

  There is no universal language, and same words may have different meanings and express different emotions in various contexts. So to ensure the high accuracy of automatic sentiment analysis it's necessary to consider the current context, mainly conditioned by industry specifics. A 'linguistic model' should be created for each industry under monitoring.

• Support for multi-language text analysis

  Especially important for monitoring products / services of geographically distributed companies.

• Visualization and reporting

  The results of customer intelligence should be available in easy-to-use visual forms. The system users should be able to build standard and ad hoc reports with any required filters at any needed time. Interactive graphs can make it easy to dig into details or have a general view.

InfoWatch offering for customer experience and reputation management

InfoWatch KRIBRUM is a cloud-based social media monitoring solution that successfully meets all the requirements considered above. The system automatically gathers and analyzes unlimited data volumes on a company / product / service throughout the Internet, enabling businesses to improve customer care, leverage customer feedback for increasing marketing efforts efficiency, and manage corporate reputation online.