FEATURE17 October 2019

Listen to your customer wherever they are

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Jane Bainbridge

Features Impact

Social media means people’s views on brands – from customer service to product design – can be shared in seconds. But marketers must be careful not to assume this is the only valid platform for understanding people’s sentiment. By Jane Bainbridge

Listen to your customer wherever they are

There’s nothing like a Twitter storm. The indignation of the individual, ideally involving a few carefully crafted sentences, eagerly jumped on by others – perhaps with the benefit of a hashtag – and, before you know it, you have a full-on public relations crisis for a brand comms team to try to avert, calm and resolve.

With social media offering such a public platform, easily shareable and able to rack up ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ in minutes, not just days, it’s not hard to see why companies spend so much time monitoring their online sentiment. Just because social media is easy to measure, however, doesn’t mean it’s the only, or most important, platform for customers’ opinions.

Last year, Kantar signed a partnership deal with social intelligence and analytics firm Engagement Labs with the aim of analysing all aspects of consumers’ conversations – online and offline. The TotalSocial platform collects data from social networks and Kantar carries out continuous surveys of a nat ...