Today’s customers frequently use two or three communication channels, such as phone, email, social, mobile applications and Web, when engaging with businesses. However, the failure by companies to combine customer insight across all customer channels results in missed opportunities to improve business performance and gain competitive information. Although social channels are newer and contain a wealth of customer insight, they are often not integrated with other customer data sources. Due to this lack of comprehensive multichannel customer reporting companies often duplicate support processes and fail to take advantage of their existing workflows established with their traditional contact center operations. Lack of a holistic customer view affects marketing, sales, and service departments and may delay critical decisions regarding product positioning and service offerings.
Companies need a single dashboard of their customer that draws data from all channels for valuable customer insight and to understand the total customers experience. It is important to consider that today’s customer is more knowledgeable and relies heavily on social media communities when seeking out information. Because they are more demanding, customers expect consistent information, timely response to their social comments and personalized support regardless of channel.
Comprehensive customer insight supports better decisions for marketing, sales and service. Marketing departments have a major opportunity to quickly identify which products and services generate the most attention and evaluate how well their ad campaigns trigger the anticipated response. Sales organizations use cross channel information to identify competitive issues and measure customers’ sentiment. Service departments have a means to spot issues early and take steps to mitigate problems.
There are several vendors that offer applications for market analysis and reporting of social media behaviors. Most applications report only on social site activities and need to be combined with data from other channels to create an integrated customer view. When considering aggregating customer data look for products that will facilitate a real time and near real time collection of data across all communication channels. Vendors with notable multiple channel products for combining social media with web analytics include Attensity and Radian6.
