Smart companies monitor social media conversations to better understand consumer preferences, unmet needs, satisfaction levels and opportunities to improve service delivery. This results in retaining a higher percentage of customers and lower costs to secure new customers, who are not being well served by your competitors.
Consider a few well documented behaviors. Those customers who take the time to complain, for the most part do so because they want you to fix their problem. Assuming you correct the problem to their satisfaction, they will remain your customer and may be even more loyal than they were prior to the problem occurring. The circumstance you should worry about is the customer who will not contact your call center, or use your on-line help capabilities, and simply leaves you without letting you know they are unhappy.
That’s where social media provides a huge boost. And it does so in real-time, before problems have a chance to escalate and you take corrective action.
While your customer may not pick up the phone, or come to your website, they will often tweet or blog about their dissatisfaction. And if you are listening, you will learn about their problems. Problems you can fix, one at a time in a highly personal way, or through wide reaching outreach to hundreds or even thousands of customers. You can use this insight proactively to inform call center scripts,develop self-help web copy, and even eliminate the need to escalate a problem before it is resolved. You can also use this insight to understand product availability problems that can be resolved through simple inventory balancing. Most importantly, if you are not listening, you won’t hear the early warning signs and you’ll miss the chance to hear from roughly 50% of your customers who won’t take time to reach out through your traditional channels. With customer acquisition costs, on-boarding costs and servicing costs being as expensive as they are, why wouldn’t you take advantage of this low cost channel to significantly improve your competitive advantage?
The five competitive boosts that social media provides your business include:
- Reduced switching risk/costs
- Lower call center costs through faster problem resolution
- Improved understanding of unmet needs for cross and up sell
- A forum to “hear from the 50% who won’t contact you” through other channels
- A means to proactively reach out to the customers of your competitors who express their dissatisfaction in social channels
A reactive case in point— A customer tweets their dissatisfaction with their cell phone carrier. The smart competitor capitalizes on that unhappy customer and offers to solve their problem by making it easy for them to switch.
A proactive case in point—Why target expensive lists of prospects you hope are open to your switching offers, when you could target prospects you know are unhappy right this minute? Conversely, you can take advantage of this opportunity to keep your customers, by solving their problems, thus making them far less receptive to your competitor’s offers.
If you’d like to learn more about the specific things social media can do to boost your competitive advantage, we’d love to share even more examples that illustrate how smart companies are honing their competitive edge.
