Your customers are talking. Are you listening?

I think we can all agree, the digital revolution is over. By that I mean the shift from analog to digital is fully underway and there’s no way to unring the technology bell. Think about it. More than half the world is online with more people connecting every day. People everywhere are online, blending their work and personal lives while searching, reading, watching, playing, listening and connecting to share experiences, opinions and information - every minute of every day. Consider these numbers published by TNW earlier this year:

• 57% of the world is online where on average they spend almost 7 hours of the day
  
• 45% of the world are social media users
  
• 2.8B people are shopping online, spending almost $3B/year ($634 each)
  
• Over 95% of consumers say they are at least somewhat influenced by what other people say about brands on social media
  

If you’re a customer experience (CX) expert, take note - these are your customers. And, their move online has fundamentally changed how they interact with your brand - sharing their thoughts, preferences and experiences at every stage of the customer journey - and you may be missing all of it. Status quo customer experience and Voice of the Customer programs chug along - trying to integrate new data sources while relying on tried and true traditional research methods - surveys, focus groups and interviews. By overlooking a wealth of untapped social data, your picture of your customer only grows murkier.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. 

Imagine getting an unprecedented view of your customer through realtime, unprompted and authentic reactions to your brand, surfacing what’s important now as well as who and what is influencing them.  And, imagine putting those insights to work to respond to your customers’ needs and shape their experience for the better, winning their approval and loyalty.

People around the world are sharing hundreds of millions of Tweets every day, making Twitter the world’s largest publicly available searchable archive of consumer thoughts, experiences and opinions. You can tap into and harness those conversations through social listening and monitoring. Combined with your other data sources, those tweets paint a more accurate picture of your customers. Not only can this newfound understanding catch an issue before it becomes a crisis, but it can also lead to new products and services, customer retention insights, process improvements and more. All ultimately driving towards the holy grail of CX, increased customer satisfaction scores.

We’ve been thinking a lot about how Twitter data can contribute to CX programs and I’ll be sharing some of those thoughts in upcoming posts. In the meantime, if you’re looking for inspiration, check out data.twitter.com for case studies that illustrate the power of social listening. When you’re ready,  talk to your customer experience service provider about incorporating Twitter data into your program. 

Your customers are talking. Are you ready to listen?