Céline Dumais, vice president of consumer affairs at L’Oréal USA, is spearheading the project with the aim of building “sustainable relationships with consumers in the digital space and gaining valuable insights from them”.

L’Oréal USA is already a big hit online: its Twitter feed has almost 41,500 followers, while its Facebook page has had 1,503,984 likes and – as of yesterday – 17,000 fans talking about it. With these social media channels generating hundreds of thousands of consumer comments each day, L’Oréal USA was concerned that it wasn’t making the most of all this information.

Dumais set out to change this by partnering with Clarabridge, tapping the text analytics software firm to get a better picture of how the L’Oréal brand is being perceived in the digital space and how successful it is in engaging consumers.

“Social media has transformed the way we leverage brand awareness and loyalty to drive growth,” says Dumais. “It is all about real-time, so we need to react in real-time when it comes to customer engagement and Clarabridge helps us achieve this goal,” she says.

For its part, Clarabridge will help L’Oréal to monitor what is being said about its 24 brands across social media outlets.

Sid Banerjee, CEO at Clarabridge, says the brand will be able to “automatically route consumer insight to the right people and more effectively engage with its consumers”.

“They will have all the tools and support to collect, cleanse, classify and understand the sentiment of customer feedback posts across millions of social media platforms in real time,” he adds.

Importantly though, Clarabridge will not serve as a moderator for all this information. While the firm will help with mining the data and filtering it, L’Oréal USA analysts will be responsible for automating the process of identifying actionable customer comments for further analysis and monitoring.

Dumais explains: “With the system, the comments flagged for review are routed in to our ‘Voice of Beauty’ Command Centre. From this, the appropriate team member takes the next step in the engagement process and interacts directly with the customer.

“Since the data is organised by our analysts, the team has full ownership of how the data is cleansed and monitored. What we aim to see is improved data quality that makes the analysis and categorisation processes more transparent than ever before.”

Having this process embedded into the company culture should help produce strong customer bonds, Dumais says.

“We expect to see significant ROI through our ‘Voice of Beauty’ mission and, most importantly, we expect to continuously improve our relationship with our customers – something you can’t put a price on.”