How 11 Businesses Use Social Listening To Increase Customer Retention
What social listening methods (surveys, social media monitoring, follow up calls, etc) do you utilize to listen to customers and how has this increased customer retention?
To help you increase customer retention through social listening methods, we asked business professionals and leaders this question for their insights. From finding comment trends to managing with SaaS, there are several ways to increase customer retention with social listening methods.
How to use social listening to increase customer retention
As an early stage founder, one of the best ways I can spend my time is by interviewing customers. I aim to conduct ten interviews per week with our customers to “listen hard, and change fast.” On these calls I’ll look to learn about their experiences in using our product, showcase a feature or two that we have in development, collect feedback, and make a meaningful connection. Not only do these interviews help us develop the right features to best serve our customers, but I also like to think that these brief connections help strengthen the community behind our company.
Follow-up calls are a must. Even if you’ve spoken at length with someone about making a sale or even if it’s related to a complaint, you can’t take their future business for granted. In following up, you show a high level of attentiveness, personalizing the experience for your customers. If they believe you care about them as human beings, your customers will come back for more.
Surveys, or quizzes, are a wonderful way to gauge what customers are looking for. It can also help them discover which product is best for themselves. And, after they’ve made a purchase, we can follow up to see whether they’ve been getting the results they expected or wanted. If something is lacking, we can learn that through the surveys and follow-ups and make changes that hopefully keep customers coming back for more.
The level of customer service you provide online should be no less attentive and helpful than that you would provide in person, so I monitor social media in a big way. If customers have a problem, they’re not shy about sharing their thoughts for all the public to see.
If you’re responsive to a customer’s complaints or issues, you stand a much better chance of keeping them going forward. What’s more, other people will see how responsive you are, which could entice them to do repeat business with you, too.
We use Socialbakers for managing our social listening strategy. It can monitor over 8 million business profiles across all major platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, and many more. It helps us gain vital insights into our audience using AI-powered analytics and benchmarks. It helps us control our brand reputation by enabling us to continuously listen to our audience across the entire customer journey. We always know what is being said about our brand online and directly engage in those conversations.
We instantly spot product errors or problematic campaign messages before they turn into big problems. We leverage social listening insights together with Voice of Customer data to boost customer engagement. We stay on top of what our customers really want and this full social listening overview has increased our customer retention.
We follow up — and quickly. Part of the appeal of our product is its ability to save time and increase office efficiency and productivity, and we hold ourselves to that same standard. We’re able to field inquiries and respond to them faster because of who we are. This sends out the message that we’re serious about what we have to offer, and our customers appreciate that.
We’ve started to do regular webinars (mostly thanks to COVID) and they have proven invaluable when it comes to social listening. Not only do we field questions before and after the webinar, but we also take a lot of inspiration from attendees on what they’d like to see next – it’s been a great success in terms of engagement, sales, and customer insights!
For me, it’s important to be aware of what’s being said about my brand online, so I get a great benefit from Sprout Social’s social monitoring features. According to a data roundup by BrightSocial, 72% of consumers surveyed said they wrote an online review for a local business in 2020, a 6% year-over-year increase. Whether you like it or not, virtually sharing opinions and experiences is becoming more of a norm.
Being alerted when my brand is mentioned enables me to promptly respond to customer feedback, whether positive or negative. I think joining conversations puts businesses at a big advantage when it comes to managing their online reputations.
By being active on our social media channels, we’re able to read what customers are saying. They’re able to ask us questions directly, which increases our customer engagement and brand loyalty. We even gain ideas from our customers. Their suggestions fuel us to better our product.
We have also run qualitative studies with our customers to better understand their needs, and to allow some of them to test our new products in advance. When we communicate directly with our customers and work hand-in-hand with them, not only does our product improve, but our customer retention does as well.
Ready To Leverage Social Listening In Your Business?
You’ve heard what the experts had to say, now it’s your turn.
How do you plan on using social listening to increase customer retention in your business? Be sure to let me know in the comments below.
