There are over 5 Billion social media identities, with an average time of 2 hours and 20 minutes spent on social media platforms daily per user. Every day, consumers use social media to talk about their lives through text, photos, and videos and create over 120 zettabytes (ZB) of data (in 2023), which is approximately 15.87 TB per user per day. In this haystack of 15.87 TB of daily user data lives critical information about your brand, your competition, and insights that might change your product/service and help you deliver an exceptional experience.  

Social media is a bustling hub of conversation, feedback, and sentiment in today’s digitally connected world. Brands that tap into this wealth of information can gain invaluable insights into customer preferences, pain points, and trends.  

How can companies listen to this vast amount of data and gather meaningful insights to make actionable changes and deliver exceptional experiences for each user? ‍

From Listening to Action: Leveraging AI with Social Listening

Beyond monitoring your social media channels for mentions of your brand, social listening is more about what’s being talked about your competitors and your industry. Social listening is essential to understanding customer behaviour and sentiment and creating exceptional customer experiences.

However, one challenge with social listening lies in navigating the sheer volume of social media data, which can be overwhelming. This is where AI comes into play. Sifting through vast amounts of data, identifying patterns, trends, and sentiments more efficiently than any human could, these AI-powered tools can:

1. ‍Identify Sentiment: Analyze text to determine if the sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral, helping brands understand general feelings towards their products or services. ‍
2. Detect Emerging Trends: Spot recurring themes and keywords and identify trends before they become widespread for brands to capitalize on new opportunities or address issues before they escalate. ‍
3. Predict Issues: Enable proactive measures by leveraging historical data and current conversations to predict potential problems and prevent customer dissatisfaction.

Making Social Listening Insights Accessible to Customer Service Teams

The true value of social listening lies in transforming insights into action. This requires making these insights accessible to customer service teams in a timely manner. Many times, when a customer has complained on a social media platform, it means that they have already tried other channels beforehand and are now expecting a quick response and resolution. Yet, now they are once again asked to share their complaints in detail when they interact with the contact center or confirm their customer identification details.  

On top of that, contact centres today have teams that handle both social media mentions & interactions. However, when the same customer connects with the contact centre (via chat or call), the agent does not know that this customer has already complained on a social media platform and what the history of the interaction has been. So, while social media listening tools on their own are good, customer service teams must focus on the following steps to get the most out of these tools:

1. ‍Integrate Systems across CRM, Contact Center & Social Media Listening Tools: While marketing teams have been using social media monitoring tools effectively when it comes to customer service teams, there needs to be an integrated approach between the contact center systems, CRM, and the data from the social media listening & monitoring systems to provide a centralized and holistic view of the customer journey.  ‍
2. Build Unique Customer Identity for Creating Personalized Experiences: Identifying a customer’s identity across social media platforms and the organization’s internal customer identifiers is critical to personalize the customer experience.  ‍
3. Identify Insights to Predict Volumes & Recommended Resolution: Knowing the sentiment around an industry event, product issue, or marketing campaign on social media is crucial for customer service teams. Because of this, the teams can better predict interaction volumes and be prepared with the right agent scheduling, suggest better responses for the agents to resolve the issue, and deliver a better experience overall.  

Social media platforms are where customers express their joys, frustrations, and everything in between. These conversations provide a real-time snapshot of public opinion and can reveal underlying issues that might not be apparent through traditional feedback channels. By paying attention to what customers say, companies can stay ahead of the curve, anticipate needs, and address issues promptly, leading to a more personalized and happy customer experience.