• by D. Daniel Ziv , February 16, 2010

Marketing professionals are always seeking to better understand customer needs and behaviors. However, the ability to foresee or anticipate them early enough to take action is often challenging. While some modifications may be small, others can be industry-changing and hold tremendous opportunity or even potential pitfalls.

The question is how you go about identifying your next customer tsunami. And, the thing about tsunamis is that once they're clearly visible from the shore, it's too late to do anything about them. So how do we go about distinguishing the smaller ripples from the next upcoming wave?

The explosive growth of social media has opened up a new door for consumers to publicly declare their wants and needs, and to display their opinions and behaviors. It's not surprising that marketing departments are starting to tap into this newfound wealth of customer feedback. But the challenge still remains -- being able to truly distinguish a cluster of relatively insignificant "tweets" from real customer behavioral changes or new exponential trends. The more social networks multiply, the harder it is to see the forest through the trees.

Balancing Social Media and Customer Interactions

One proposed solution is using social media in tandem with internal customer interaction analytics, which can be found within a company's contact center. Monitoring social networks can surface what is public, while internal interactions help validate and differentiate between anecdotal incidents and potential tsunamis before they happen. For example, when an increase in tweets, blogs or postings start emerging on the same subject, how can you determine if the topic will turn into the infamous YouTube video about a broken guitar, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YGc4zOqozo which has attracted more than seven million viewers to date?

One way companies can validate such issues is through calls made to their contact center or customer service department. By mining internal customer interactions, such as phone calls and emails, they can capture the magnitude and level of frustration associated with the respective issue. If a significant number of calls on the same topic are discovered, and frustrations/emotions associated with these interactions run high or increase, it may well be time to prepare for a customer tsunami. On the other hand, if a specific incident appears in the blogosphere, but is very rarely found within internal customer service interactions, it is likely a targeted case and less probable to have a high impact on the overall brand reputation.

Taken further, this approach can be used more proactively. By mining customer interactions, issues that may potentially become public can be identified early. As a result, companies can focus social media monitoring efforts to carefully track them -- distinguishing the ripples from the potential tsunamis -- and take action earlier in the cycle.

Creating a Strategy that Works for Your Business

Armed with real and recent customer interaction insights -- which include concerns, requests and questions, as well as emotional customer calls --organizations can craft the right responses within social media networks to defuse, or even ride, the wave. Some of these issues may even turn into marketing opportunities. In leveraging this strategy, marketing departments can be much more proactive and use specific scenarios as benefits instead of disadvantages.

One way to mine through customer conversations is through various customer interaction analytics solutions, such as speech analytics. With such software, organizations can identify competitive threats and market opportunities, in addition to surfacing trends that might not otherwise be detected without listening to thousands of contact center interactions. Increasingly, marketing departments are beginning to partner with their customer service counterparts to take advantage of such intelligence that has already been recorded and mined internally.

Social media is here and now, and can both play to your company's benefit and highlight its shortcomings. Your customer service operations play a role in that every day. And now your marketing organization can as well. Cross-departmental information sharing is the wave to future success where marketing, social media and customer service intersect.