A recent Gartner Survey reports more than 37% of CEOs identify customer experience management as a top priority investment over the next 5 years. But what should such an investment entail?
A spend on tools that provide fast and accurate actionable data is a reasonable answer, but what does that really mean? And don’t social analytics already provide this kind of data?
A Finely Drawn Bigger Picture
The answer to the first question is: Yes, a spend on tools that return accurate data you can use is mandatory for all brands. Unlike the early days of social media, social data isn’t about winning a numbers game, it’s about understanding consumer attitudes to inform the long game.
The answer to the second question is also “yes.” Social analytics data offers a slew of valuable insights for brands to apply – but that’s not the only data worth considering.
To really know what consumers feel, and how those feelings inspire their behavior, you need access to Voice of the Customer (VoC) data as well. Here’s the distinction:
Social data is just as it sounds – insights gleaned from social channels like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. It also includes data from social forums like Reddit, news outlets, and blogs.
VoC data collates the wide variety of verbatims data beyond social: surveys, star ratings, net promoter scores, website feedback, chat messages, market research, and data from internal systems like call center, help center, and web support collected via CRM tools.
While social listening and sentiment analysis provide the foundation for social analytics, social data and VoC data together are the foundation for customer experience analytics. It’s the one-two punch your brand needs to move into the future without losing consumers along the way.
Two Data Sources Are Better Than One
The beauty of combining VoC with social data is they each validate the other, depending on use case.
For example, an airline brand may see a tweet complaining about flying, but not know if that person is a customer. Survey data, on the other hand, is from customers. So if there’s a complaint mentioned in a survey, you can look to social for validation of such issues in the broader sense, as well as their magnitude. Then you know which action to take.
Conversely, a new product launch might see immediate feedback coming through on social, like a problem that needs to be addressed. A survey wouldn’t communicate that information until later, when it’s too late to save your product launch campaign.
Social catches what VoC misses – and vice versa. And that’s to say nothing of the competitive data available on social. No survey can tell you how your competitors are doing – in case you were thinking VoC data could replace that surfaced on social. You definitely need both.
For example, this tweet points to lens issues for Canon:
But you don’t know how big a problem you have without the additional information of this Amazon review – and all the other VoC data out there.
VoC Tools Complement the Those You Already Use
The good news is, VoC tools aren’t a replacement for what you already use – at least, ours isn’t.
Our new comprehensive, cross-channel, customer experience analytics solution combines VoC with social analytics to provide:
- Real-time social data contextualized with NLP and sentiment
- Star ratings from point of purchase on a website
- Surveys after product usage
- Net promoter scores after six months or a year
This offers an aggregated view of data across the entire customer journey. And it’s all done by taking data from the CRM systems you already use. Our goal is to complement and extend such systems by bringing social data into the mix for the most comprehensive picture available.
This approach to customer experience analytics powers every aspect of your brand – breaking down data and communication silos, bringing everyone into the customer experience journey, and driving better decision-making.
And with better data, you can address your biggest CX challenges to improve revenue, improve retention, and lower cost. That’s something worth investing in!
Want to see our VoC tool at work? Get in touch for a one-on-one demo!
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