Tapping into VOC insight through social media: CX Mini Masterclass – E77

Welcome to Decoding the Customer, a podcast about customer experience and how to realize customer-centric change in today’s dynamic business world. I’m Julia Ahlfeldt, certified customer experience professional, business advisor, and host of this program. Thanks so much for tuning in. If you’re new to the show, welcome.

If you’re a returning listener, thanks, and it’s great to have you back. This episode is part of my CX Mini Masterclass series here on Decoding the Customer. These weekly episodes are published each Thursday and designed to be punchy, bite-size overviews of key customer experience concepts and ideas for how you can help your organization thrive through customer centricity. Whether you’re new to the field of customer experience, are preparing for the CCXP exam, or are a seasoned professional looking to brush up on a few basics, this series will help you improve your knowledge, skills, and performance to stand out as a CX professional.

This is episode 77, and it’s the fourth episode of March 2020. For those listeners who are discovering this show sometime in the future, I sincerely hope that the coronavirus pandemic is a distant memory. But those who are listening to the episodes as they’re released are highly aware that we are amid a strange and unprecedented time of global crisis. Last week’s episode focused on approaches for managing customer experience during a time of crisis.

This week, I’m going to shift gears a little bit, not focusing on the crisis, but on a topic that is both timely for this moment and when things finally normalize again. And that’s social media as an avenue for voice of customer data. Twitter announced a few days ago that amid all of the global lockdowns, engagement with their platform has increased during the last quarter. This shouldn’t be surprising since social distancing means that social media has now become many people’s main avenue for engagement with friends, family, and the rest of the outside world.

Global health crisis or not, social media usage is on the rise across the board. When I speak to CX leaders about social media, they often grimace. It’s a public forum for consumers to share their feelings about brands and can be a real sore point for CX leaders. I’d argue the power given to consumers through social media is one of the reasons that customer experience is now a focus for businesses.

So while no one enjoys dealing with the fire drill associated with a disgruntled customer who also happens to be a social media influencer, social media has its benefits as well. One of these is that it’s a valuable and I think often underutilized source of voice of customer insights. So today, I’m going to talk about some practical approaches for leveraging social media data to learn about customers and engage with teams around CX. If you’re looking for tips and ideas on how to turn a thorn in the side of the business into a rich fountain of customer insight, then this episode is for you.

As always, if you’re out and about while listening to this and hear something that you’d like to remember later, don’t worry about writing it down. You can find an overview of the key concepts we’ve covered today in the show notes for this episode, which are on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com. Love it or hate it, it seems like social media is part of the fabric of our modern world and is here to stay. The platforms of choice have evolved over time, but the overall trend of global social media usage has steadily moved in one direction, and that’s up.

One of my favorite reports on this topic, the Hootsuite We Are Social digital report collaboration, found that there were over 3.8 billion social media users globally as of 2020. This is up from 3.5 billion global social media users in 2019. The report also found, unsurprisingly, that social media is a huge part of our lives. Internet users who are on social media spend on average 2 hours and 24 minutes on various platforms.

When I work with clients, they often tell me that engagement through social media is still much smaller than engagement through other channels like call centers, but that it’s growing exponentially. Personally, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see it surpass engagement through some of the traditional channels in the near future. Way back in the late 1980s, the White House Office of Consumer Affairs conducted a research study which found that only 1 in 26 consumers actually says something when they’re unhappy with a brand. That leaves the vast majority, or 97% of people, silent.

I’d love to see this study replicated in the modern context. I suspect that the barriers to providing feedback are much lower, so we’d probably see a reduced percentage in silent consumers. But I do still think that they would represent the majority. Even though it’s easier now to voice your opinion, most consumers still say nothing.

Reflect for a moment on your own experience. How often do you provide feedback when you have a bad experience? Certainly not all the time. Working in the field of CX, I often feel like I have some sort of karmic responsibility to respond to surveys and provide feedback.

And even I’m silent most of the time. That means that what we hear from customers is still just the tip of the iceberg. Below the waterline, there are a lot of unhappy customers who said nothing. Every bit of feedback, therefore, is a gift.

It provides an opportunity for the brand in question to rectify their relationship with that customer, and to look for the root cause of customer experience pain points. Through what they say, customers are indicating what’s important to them. Plus, this also tells us that the customer cared enough to say something. Again, reflecting on your own experience as a customer, oftentimes, we just don’t say something because we don’t care enough, or because we think that our feedback is going to fall on deaf ears.

If customers are providing feedback on social media, it means both that they care enough about their relationship with the brand in question, and that they have some faith that the situation will be fixed. So next time you or one of your colleagues is staring down the barrel of a complaint from a particularly grumpy customer, just remind yourself of that. Now that we’ve covered some of the redeeming qualities of customer feedback and how more and more of this feedback is and will be coming from social media, I’d like to look at how brands can leverage social media as a source of rich voice of customer insight. The first is as a window into what’s important to customers through topic and trend analysis.

If you have all of these customers organically telling you, en masse, that they love or hate something, or that a particular aspect of the customer journey is broken, that’s incredibly valuable information. Teams can leverage this insight to identify opportunities for product and service innovation or to enhance the customer journey. It’s very difficult to get this type of information through a survey because surveys nearly always contain some element of bias. If we’re asking a customer to rate or prioritize a particular attribute of the customer journey, we’ve already confined them to what we’ve decided is important, and we might be missing out on aspects of the journey that we just hadn’t thought of.

The next way that social media data can be used to gather voice of customer insight is through sentiment analysis. Like analyzing incoming data about topics and trends, sentiment analysis allows brands to take a pulse on how happy or unhappy customers are with particular aspects of the journey or the brand as a whole. On its own, broad sentiment analysis might be more of a CX metric, but when you overlay this with topics, trends, or ethnographic insights, it becomes an incredibly powerful source of aggregated voice of customer insight. Many of you are probably thinking, geez, how can we ever sort through all the social media commentary that’s out there and get to sentiment or trends?

The good news is that text analytics capabilities are constantly evolving and getting better. Some of the robust solutions out there blend AI technology with human review of social media posts to catch things like sarcasm. As more and more engagement with customers moves into the realm of social media, I suspect that technology solutions will only continue to improve. The last point I’d like to cover is what I call the digital cookie crumb trail.

Topic and sentiment analysis both look at customer feedback on a macro level. But social media also provides us with an opportunity to do a deep dive into a customer’s journey and their experience with a brand. And why is that? Because we can see the engagement history right there in front of us.

We can see the back and forth and read the emotion. When customers are providing us with feedback about a bad experience, they sometimes also share their backstory. And if they don’t, you can ask them and then piece it together. If they tell you that they called the call center or made a purchase in store, then go and find that call recording or dig up the transaction history.

Follow the cookie crumb trail and bring the picture together. These cookie crumb trail stories can become incredibly emotive examples of where and why a particular aspect of the journey needs improvement. They can become powerful examples that make the customer journey very real for executives or others who are behind the scenes but play a key role in shaping the journey. I completely understand why CX teams get frustrated with social media.

No one likes dealing with angry customers, and it can be a little confronting to have your company’s customer experience weak points laid bare in front of the entire Internet. That said, we can still harness this information to unearth real gems in customer experience insights. The technologies that help teams make sense of unstructured, inbound data are constantly improving. So I hope that more and more brands will begin tapping into social media to listen to their voice of customer.

If you’re looking for help with voice of customer insight, please get in touch. I’d be happy to explore how I can help. You can reach me via email, tweet, or LinkedIn message. My handle is at Julia Ahlfeldt, and my full contact details are also listed on my website, juliaahlfeldt.com or decodingthecustomer.com.

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See you then.