Companies are missing out on excellent opportunities to build loyalty by not fully harvesting and analyzing information available through Twitter feeds, according to Michelle de Haaff, vice president of strategy for Palo Alto, Calif.-based social media company Attensity.
The company is one of a dozen partners involved with Twitter’s Certified Products Program, which is designed to make it easier for businesses to find the right tools to engage with customers, understand what people are saying about them on Twitter and learn more about their customers/followers in order to share valuable, timely content.
Attensity Respond provides a real-time view of the conversations that are happening right now on Twitter by identifying the trends developing in those conversations.
According to de Haff, companies that do this can mitigate any customer complaints, changing customers from complainers threatening to leave for competitors to loyal customers. For example, Nieman Marcus found through Attensity analysis of tweets that a woman was having a hard time finding a high-end item. The retailer reached out via Twitter to her to tell her Nieman Marcus sold the item and where the nearest company location was.
“This changes the whole loyalty question,” de Graff said, explaining that companies that follow this example show that they are not only listening to the Voice of the Customer, but that they are also proactively reacting to customers, an important element of building and retaining customer loyalty.
She added that telephone companies, which are the subjects of an estimated 25,000 tweets every day, can mine that information to find customers upset about their plans and offer them different plans. Churn is one of the top financial issues in the telecom industry – companies include it in their financial reports.
“Customer service has really transformed itself,” de Graff added. “People used to go to the phone, and then e-mail in order to get help. Now, with social media, they go out to the public domain and Twitter is one of the main channels that they use. Most companies have used push for customer service (calls and e-mails). With social media out there for everyone to see, companies have to start using pull (i.e., pulling and analyzing tweets). But most companies are not set up for engaging in social media.”