Listening to Your Customers 2.0

We’ve heard this from every self respecting marketing and sales person in the world.  You must listen to your customers.   Without customers – whilst we may enjoy a few days of quiet reflection – ultimately means we don’t have a business so having a conversation and listening should be at the top of the list for almost any company be it service, retail or otherwise.

So how do you listen? Some solid time tested strategies include sending regular surveys, organising a round table with key customers to get feedback about your products and services, talking with them through regular meetings and having a feedback form on your website.

But what if your customers are complaining about you online?  The problem with surveys is that they aren’t necessarily individualised so you while might identify a pattern of unhappiness, you may not identify an actual individual you can help right now.  And the reality of many businesses is that it is difficult to gather true feedback about your products and services.

That is, unless your customers are using Twitter – and with Twitter recently exceeding  200 million users it stands to reason that at least one of them is using your product.  Twitter works like a series of SMS messages.  As people punch out 140 character messages the power of the Twitter service itself is its ability to monitor for trends and keywords and those who are tuned into social media use free tools to monitor the conversations and take action if needed.  If you’re smart about it you can not only quickly jump in if somebody says something negative about your product or service, but you can also keep an eye on what people are saying about your competitors and possibly offer them your services to help.  Suddenly “twittering” which to many looked like well.. a waste of time, suddenly makes a lot more sense.

Indulege me in an example.  A few weeks ago I had to park my car in Kent St, Sydney for a meeting.  Kent St is not the cheapest place to park but I thought I would only be about an hour.  I was right, in fact I was only about 55 minutes – but when I returned to the pay station it was broken.  So, I went to the window, but the window guy was out on a break or something.  I’m left unable to pay my ticket so I head back to my car thinking I’ll just pay at the gate but to make matters even more frustrating the “pay at the gate” feature wasn’t working either.  I called through to security and was told to go to another gate.  You can probably see where this is going – by the time I got to a working gate and paid my ticket, the price had doubled.  I was in so much of a hurry that I had to go.  But I certainly had time to punch this out on Twitter using my mobile: “Secure Parking in Sydney=Daylight Robbery. 1hr1min $50 instead of $25. Nevermind that it took 10 mins to find spot and 10 min queue to pay!”

Normally one might expect that this would be the end of it.  A few of my friends messaged me to say they too could relate, having had a frustrating experience themselves but of course that was that.  Then, a few hours later I got a message from a competing car park on Kent St stating that they had better deals only a few blocks down and that maybe I could try them out next time.  Wow!  Now this is good marketing for them and the next time I need to park down there I’ll check them out – but more importantly the lost opportunity here is for Secure Parking who weren’t watching.  They had a unique opportunity to help me and fix my problem but they didn’t.  Imagine if  they had?  I probably would have gone back and not really given it a second thought.  What if I wasn’t the only one to complain about the problems they had that day?  Perhaps there are numerous conversations going on about your business that you don’t even know about.

In the past you might be able to ignore such small conversations.  After all, I’m only one guy.  But the reality is that my friends on Twitter and Facebook are likely to have an interest in what I have to say – and if I say don’t park at Secure Parking on Kent St because they’ll rob you blind – well, that’s potentially pretty dangerous stuff.

So how can you take advantage and prevent a bitter Twitterer from tarnishing your name in front of a potentially large audience?  If you’re just wanting to check it out I recommend simply visiting Twitter (you’ll need an account) and just do some basic searches.  Using the parking example (I’ll help you out here Secure Parking) just start with some basic terms “parking” “park” “parked” and see what comes up.  If you want to drill down of course you will want to search your own company name.  The important thing to remember is people have their own unique ways of saying things so keep the searches simple and very broad at first and then get more specific once understand how people are talking about your industry.

There are tools that will do this for you automatically and send you an email alert when someone tweets a phrase or word that interests you – this saves you trawling Twitter looking for keywords and either you or someone on your team can be responsible for responding quickly when you need to.  HootSuite is a popular free tool that does this and also has unique features to keep your other social media accounts under control as well such as Facebook.

While Twitter won’t be a magic bullet for solving all customer complaints, it is a unique opportunity to tune into conversations that up until recent years probably were conducted around the dinner table or amongst close friends – never has there been a time where you could leverage technology to be a fly on the wall and intercept a negative conversation about you or your industry and at little to no cost it just doesn’t make sense not to.