Use Advanced Social Media Analytics for Better Customer Profiling

Here is an interesting illustration that I came across in retailtouchpoints.com –

The website attributes this graphic to David Dorf, Senior Director of Technology Strategy, Oracle. This illustration explains how Social Media Analytics (SMA) tools play a crucial role in Customer Profiling.

Businesses have a lot to gain from customer profiling. When you know for sure which of your customers are the perfect fit for your products and services or when your customer service decisions are backed by accurate insights on which customer expects what or when your marketing and sales team has valuable info matching every customer’s needs and wants with your product/ services features, then your brand is well set for making outstanding customer service as your forte.

For those businesses that are serious about strengthening their relationship with their social audience, SMA tools provide just the right solution for quick but accurate customer profiling.

Advanced social media analytics tool like Shout Analytics can help your brands in the following areas of customer profiling:

            1.  Psychographics:

Using social media analytics tools, you can learn in-depth about your customer’s demographics and understand well their likes, interests, desires and opinions.

            2.  Influencers:

SMA tools help you find out who among your audience are the most influential ones. Knowing the key influencers in your industry will enable you to target them effectively. Riding on the wave of good reviews and positive comments by the key influencers, your brand can expand its reach and increase its social reputation.

3.  Viral Marketing:

These two are direct results of having influential influencers for your brand. As I said earlier, when your brand’s influencers spread the word about your brand to their audience and from them to more audience, what your brand experiences is viral marketing at no extra cost.

            4. Personalization and Crowd sourcing:

As more people become your customers and use your products, they will come forth to tell you what features of your brand must improve or change. Through SMA tools, you can use these customer ideations to create products and services of their choice, and even make personalized offers personalized exclusively for them; the way they like it.

How important is customer profiling for your business? Tell us in the comments below. To know how Shout Analytics can help in this direction, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Seeing Attrition in Customer Loyalty? Fix it with Predictive Analytics

Every brand or organization has dissatisfied customers. But  then it also has its most loyal customers. Such customers are your trusted brand advocates – their reviews and recommendations will drive your sales and their positive word-of-mouth messages will boost your brand reputation. Hence, it is imperative for brands to retain their ever faithful group of customer.

Predictive Analytics can help businesses a great deal in this direction. Here’s how:

Identify Anything Amiss In Customer Behavior:

Your loyal customers rarely complain about your products and services because they are generally happy with how you service them. However, if you suddenly come across complaints streaming in from any of these loyal customers, then it shows that something’s amiss – a customer servicing gone wrong perhaps.

Do you see a sudden absence or a dip in their transactions? Has there been a hitherto unfound spike in his complaints about your products? All these factors could be predicting impending customer attrition.

Plug Loopholes in Customer Engagement Efforts:

Customers devoted to you have always appreciated your content on social media channels; consistently sharing, liking, retweeting or repinning it. They were in fact your top influencers. In such a scenario, if you witness that their engagement level with your brand has suddenly taken a beating then it could be stemming from a plausible faulty customer engagement effort.

Inefficient social engagement efforts can derail your relationship with your most loyal customers, sometimes even forcing them to end their association with your brand. 

Improve Customer Relationship Service:

Sometimes all that brand loyalists need is a warm gesture on your part reminding them that you value them highly and their unceasing loyalty towards your brand is appreciated. Explore your social data and identify those customers whom you have ignored (in offering the best customer service) in spite of them being your top brand advocates.

At a time when your customers are spoil for choices and your competitors are playing hard to woo your customers with fancy offers and grand promotions on the social media, Predictive Analytics helps organizations to prevent possible future cases of customer attrition and in turn successfully retain its customers.

How do you deal with attrition in customer loyalty? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To learn how Shout Analytics’ Predictive Analytics capabilities can help you in this direction, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

4 Right Ways for Listening to Your Customers on Social Media

On social media, listening to your customers is most vital for the success of your business.

Social listening is important for businesses because this is one way to understand what their customers and target audience are saying on social media– what are they talking about, how they feel about their brands/products/services, and what are their needs and wants, what do they expect from customer service et al. Using Social Media Monitoring tools, businesses can use this vital information to improve products and services, enhance customer service, find the correct takers for their products and above all, offer customers tailor-made services.

But the question still persists – how to use Social Media Monitoring tools for effective listening?

Here’s how:

Understand Your Goals and Objectives:

Business organisations must first be very clear about their business goals and objectives. Once you are clear on this one, you can structure your social listening methods around your goals and objectives. Else, you will be listening to everything on the social and not know which piece of information is beneficial to your business and which is not.

Pay Attention:

Not just listen to your customers’ conversations but pay close attention to what they are saying. How is their tone of voice – good, bad or ugly? Do they seem happy with your products or can you sense a palpable dissatisfaction? What your customers say and more importantly, how they say it are all critical indicators of your brands’ reputation and its customer perception.

Filter Signals from Noise:

Once you have understood what part of your customers’ conversations are useful to your business goals, the next step is to separate the usual talk from that relating to your specific objectives. Social Media Monitoring tools are a huge asset to businesses in this aspect.

Covert Customer Talk to Your Tactic:

As I mentioned earlier, your customers’ social conversations are enriched with actionable insights. Therefore, business cannot afford to take this phenomenon lightly. Therefore, along with social media monitoring, it is also essential to analyze, decipher and decode your customers’ conversations.

Henceforth, businesses must equip themselves with tools that offer both social media monitoring and social media analytics to make sense of what they are listening and glean critical, actionable business insights from their customers’ conversations.

To learn how Shout Analytics can help your business with both social media monitoring and analytics, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

The Power of Predictive Analytics in Helping Banks Build Excellent Customer Relationship

Wouldn’t it be great if banks could foretell which of their customers would be a perfect potential buyer for their latest credit card or home loan? Well, Predictive Analytics can help banks do exactly this and much more.

Banks deal with voluminous streams of unstructured big data. Using cutting edge social media analysis tools and Predictive Analytics tools in particular, banks can closely monitor their customers’ banking behavior; depending on which they can pitch new offers and promotions with greater success. 

A banks’ marketing department is often faced with intriguing questions like these –

•   Which customers would opt for what promotions
•   Would combining offers on loans and credit cards be a hit  ?
•   Which offers and promotions would attract new customers

Similarly, the bank’s operations manager would want answers to questions relating to detecting and identifying fraudulent customers, credit card faults, and account mismanagement. He would also want to identify and reward the banks’ long standing, loyal and ‘bank-perfect’ customers.

Predictive Analytics helps banks find answers to the above questions. From the time a new customer makes his first transaction till he turns into an influential brand advocate for the brand, banks can use Predictive Analytics to make him a happy customer and build a healthy relationship with him. 

To start with, banks can pinpoint exactly what services and products the new customer prefers the most by identifying his banking behavior pattern. This also indicates his responses to new offers and products, thereby telling the bank if he is the right prospect for the new product or not. Over a period of time, as the new customer becomes a known customer; predictive analytics can help the bank to craft tailor made services to him. 

Thus, aided by predictive analytics, when banks make sustained efforts to know, understand and provide need-centric services to their customers, they succeed in nurturing and growing a group of loyal customers who only have good things to say about their bank. These customers (remember, you and predictive analytics made them that way) are strong brand advocates who are powerful enough to influence others (read potential customers) banking decisions.

How else do you think Predictive Analytics can benefit banks? Share your thoughts in the comments below. To know more about Shout Analytics and its Predictive Analytics capabilities, write to us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Effective Customer Analysis Using Social Media Analysis Tools

We, as heads of businesses, acknowledge the fact that our consumers or customers are the real drivers of our success. A high rate of customer satisfaction is vital for the success of our brands/ products and services. And with increased use of the social media, consumers today have an online presence more than ever before and they use the social channels to make purchases, get feedback on a product, review services etc. In other words, a customer’s purchase decision – something that’s so important for our businesses – is now radically influenced by the social media.

In fact, an article by Karthik Sharma in CIO.in, summarizing a Gartner report, points out that social media is “the most compelling example of how consumerism drives enterprise IT practices.” Of course we realize this, don’t we? That’s why we specially invest in innovative social media strategies and devise social media campaigns. But, while there is no denying that social engagement will take us one step closer to our customers, we still lack in important information relating to the customer’s emotional, social and demographic state, the knowledge of which is so critical to making business decisions in the future.

I believe that organizations can do better business when they productively harness the social data surrounding their brands and products or services. Investing considerable time and effort to analyze and uncover insightful revelations about customers – both existing and potential – can prove extremely useful for your business success. The insightful data gathered from customer analysis can be used to propel superior product development plans, customer relationship management and marketing strategies.

Serving organizations in this end are efficient and highly competitive social media analytics tools which facilitate effective customer analysis using which marketing and customer relationship department heads can:

·         Understand trends in their customers’ purchase habits.

·         Know their customers’ sentiments and attitudes.

·         Identify their brand advocates and key influencers.

·         Monitor and measure their brand reputation and share of voice.

The above insights will assist organizations to:

·         Develop and design specific products that will meet customer requirements.

·         Design accurately targeted marketing campaigns.

·          Foresee negative reaction to products or promotional campaigns

·    Identify causes of customer dissatisfaction and chart strategies for resolving these issues.

Shout Analytics is one such high-end Social Media Analytics platform that enables organizations to perform an effective, efficient and insightful customer analysis for leveraging their business.

To know more about Shout Analytics, contact us at info@shoutanalytics.com

Listen To, Engage With And Monitor Your Customers

 Author: Suraj Arukil 

 About the Author: CEO/Founder of Nuvento ( a technology firm that specializes in Business Intelligence and Software Architecture.)

It’s raining social media everywhere. I read somewhere today that LinkedIn has surpassed Twitter in social media channel of choice among B2B marketers for content distribution." I believe, even our buying decisions are influenced by it! The social comments from our friends and like-minded individuals are a source of reliable information that we refer to before buying something.

Statistics indicate –

•90% of consumers trust peer recommendations whereas only 14% trust advertisements.1

I see three key takeaways for businesses from this growing customer trend:

1) Listen

Listening, according to me is the most vital part that helps you in understanding your customer. You can extend your market reach, fight competition and improve your business if you get more active with your social data. Just pay attention to your customers’ conversations.

For example, an insurance company can leverage social media to obtain a lot of cues about the customer needs and wants. The audiences have started using social media as an open channel to propose their opinions, the companies should pay attention to the complaints or the pain points the customers have been dealing with, or make note of the testimony that you received from the happy customer, and try to build it up as the best practice for your business as one happy customer can multiply your reach to many.

2) Engage

Image Source:phaseware.com

 I would consider this the best method to strengthen and build  customer relationships. Foster your social alliances by engaging with your customers in an interesting and fun way.  For this, we have to constantly create new avenues for customer participation on your social sites.

Taking forward the example of insurance companies, in order to engage their customers the insurance companies can provide useful and meaningful information such as family safety, retirement facts and other general topics that people care about. This engagement propels the customer to develop a feel good factor about the organisation and builds strong customer relationships.

3) Monitor

Don’t just limit your conversations to answering product queries or saying thank you to a positive comment. Instead, try to decipher the attitudes, sentiments and feelings conveyed in the conversations.

Understanding and knowing your customers’ needs and opinions helps you to serve them better by giving them the exact products and services of their choice.  Plus, good customer service is always appreciated and often recommended to friends and family.

In summary, I think actively listening, engaging with and monitoring your customers (and also your competitors’ customers) empowers you to gain a competitive advantage, learn from your customers, enhance your products and services, better target marketing efforts and market innovation, improve your ROI and leverage your business. 

Shout Analytics is one such new-age social media analytics product that enables organizations to use the power of social media to effectively understand, monitor and engage with its customers. To learn how Shout Analytics can improve your business profitability, contact us at info@shoutanalytics.com