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Volume vs. Meaning: Effective Customer Listening Requires More Than Keywords

Is it your job to listen to and analyze social media messages and direct customer feedback about your product, brand, or service? Are you leading corporate initiatives that leverage consumer-generated content to uncover meaningful insights about your business? Effective listening and insights analysis allows you to track not just the volume, but also the meaning of online conversations across a complex web of consumer interaction channels.

Customer Listening and Machine Learning

Most companies make great efforts to listen to their customers. They may sponsor a survey, assemble a focus group, or even hire a market research firm. Such efforts emphasize getting specific answers to specific questions, i.e., structured data. Collecting structured data requires that you choose the structure, before collecting it. But, what’s on a customer’s mind may not fit into the categories you define. And of course, structured data can’t possibly answer questions that you don’t even know you want to ask!

Why Not Do It By Hand? Manual Processing Vs Automated Listening

Marketing, customer experience, and social media professionals often hold the misconception that manual analysis of customer conversations is an adequate and accurate way of analyzing the voice of their customers to derive actionable insights. However, a closer look at the process of manually monitoring customer comments – “doing it by hand”— reveals increased error rates, high costs, and delayed time to insight. This paper explores the shortcomings of manual conversation analysis, and demonstrates the value of automation technologies like OpenMic to increase analytical accuracy and time-to-insight across customer listening initiatives.

Automated Listening vs. Keyword-based Monitoring

The monitoring of user-generated content has become increasingly important as companies seek to mine large volumes of text-based brand conversations across today’s complex web of customer interaction channels. These include both direct feedback (web sites, surveys, emails, discussion boards) and indirect sources in social media (forums, review sites, blogs, Twitter, social networks, etc.).

Best Practices for Integrated Listening

1. Introduction

Listening to customers does not mean the same thing today as it did five years ago. Today consumers have found strength in numbers. In essence, the community is becoming the consumer. Socialization has dramatically reduced the barriers to group communication and organization. This is a huge risk for companies who can now watch missteps spread through an entire universe of critics, fans and self-appointed journalists, many of whom are not even customers.