The Eight Stages Of Listening
The Eight Stages Of Listening
Stage 1 – No objective at all
Description – Organization has a listening program but has no goals, nor uses the information for anything resourceful.
Resources Needed – Simple alerting tools, like Google Alerts and feedreaders will suffice.
Impacts – At the basic level, simple self-awareness. Yet without any action from the data, this is useless.
Stage 2 – Tracking of brand mentions
Description – Like traditional “clip reports” of media relations, companies now track mentions in the social space. Despite tracking there is no guidance on what to do next.
Resources Needed – Listening platform with report capability based on brand or product keywords. Radian 6, Visible Technologies, Techrigy/Alterian, Buzzmetrics and Cymfony, Dow Jones are providers.
Impacts – Improved self-awareness to track volume of information, yet unable to track depth, and tonality of conversations. As a result, not a full understanding of opportunities.
Stage 3 – Identifying market risks and opportunities
Description – This proactive process involves seeking out discussions online that may result in identifying flare-ups, or possible prospect opportunities.
Resources Needed – In addition to a listening platform staff must actively seek out discussions and signal to internal teams. Alerting tools, and listening platforms are required.
Impacts – Organization can reduce risk of flare ups before they become mainstream, identify prospects and poach unhappy competitors customers.
Stage 4 – Improving campaign efficiency
Description – Rather than just measure a marketing effort after it’s occurred, using tools to gauge during in-flight behavior yields real-time marketing efficiency.
Resources Needed – Dedicated resource to manage reactions, activity, and sentiment to a marketing effort, and the resources to make course corrections nearly real-time. Traditional web analytics tools like Omniture, Webtrends and Google Analytics are common.
Impacts – Campaigns can be more effective, as hot spots are bolstered, and dead spots are diminished.
Stage 5 – Measuring customer satisfaction
Description – In addition to customer satisfaction scores,organizations can measure real-time sentiment as customers interact. Sysomos and Backtype have focus areas into this space.
Resources Needed – Customer experience professionals will have to extend their scope to the social web, using a listening platform and sentiment analysis. Insight platforms like Communispace and Passenger offer online focus groups solutions.
Impacts – Brands can now measure impacts of real time satisfaction or frustration during the actual phases of customer interaction. Then identify areas of improvement during customer lifecycle.
Stage 6 – Responding to customer inquiry
Description – This proactive response finds customers where they are (fish where fish are) in order to answer questions. Example: Comcastcares account on Twitter asks customers if they need help –then may respond.
Resources Needed – An active customer advocacy team that’s empowered, training, and ready to make real-time responses nearly around the clock.
Impacts – Customers will fill a greater sense of satisfaction, yet this teaches customers to ‘yell in public’ to get a response.
Stage 7 – Better understand customers
Description – Evolving the classic market research function, brands can improve their customer profiles and personas by adding social information to them.
Resources Needed – Social CRM systems are quickly emerging that tie together a customer record and their online behavior, locations, and preferences. Salesforce, SAP, both have partnerships with Twitter to synch data.
Impacts – The opportunity to not only serve customers in their natural mediums, but to offer them a richer experience regardless of their customer touchpoints.
Stage 8 – Being proactive and anticipating customers
Description – Minority Report: This most sophisticated form actually anticipates what customers will say or do before they’ve done it. By looking at previous patterns of historical data, companies can put in place the right resources to guide prospects and customers.