Social Media: Grievances

Dr RGS Asthana

Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract

People sometimes use social networking sites, emails or other forms of social media to air their grievances as it may have long term impact not only on the brand/ product/ service but also has vast reach. For example, a customer may complain about a product and its quality, such feedback may be disturbing for the company which may take it seriously and resolve the grievances of the customer as early as possible.

Besides listening to the activities on social sites, customer profiling is equally important, particularly, a profile for each type of customer. You may use a tool which automatically does listening, profiling and generates analytics.

Today, you need to involve community including your employees in promotional activities and you also need to ensure that info given is genuine and authentic.

Keywords

Grievances, Community Marketing, Pinstorm, Radian6, LocoBuzz, Simplyfy 360, Google Alert, FaceBook, Instagram, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, YouTube, News forum, Blogs

Prelude

A grievance as per dictionary is a wrong considered as grounds for complaint or something believed to cause distress or resentment against an unjust act.

Recently, I went to bank who sold me a Life insurance saying it does include a health insurance too. My mistake was that I believed the bank Manager as she was well known to me. However, when policy was delivered to me about a month later I realized, it had no health cover. I went to the bank and met the Manager but I realized soon that the manager herself was unaware of the fact that policy did not have the health cover. I decided to drop the insurance and plan to complain though I had a grievance of being cheated. I would have definitely filed a complaint if the manager would have tried to justify. So the behavior does matter. The question therefore is that in a community where you encounter generally unknown persons, “How do you get even with a rude bank executive, a bank which has sold you a wrong insurance policy or a provider of internet connection that is annoyingly slow?”

E-commerce websites offering services such as online bookings or purchase of products have the second highest share of consumer grievances in India [1]. Long time success and failure is therefore function of how well the e-commerce websites handle such a situation. For example, Amazon has a policy of return and refund without any questions and other marketing social media sites have more or less similar policy. Secondly, one fourth of India's online customers are aware of brands and companies having social media presence. Before lodging complaint with the company or the consumer court, they express their annoyance by posting a strong comment on social media where one has wide reach and people do read these and very often make opinion too. Companies do bother about such opinions and try to sort out grievances ASAP. The importance of content and Internet is adequately described in the following quotes [9]:

Content is fire; social media is gasoline.

- Jay Baer

Word–of–mouth marketing has always been important. Today it’s more than important because of the power of Internet.

- Joe Pulizzi and Newt Barrett

Not only this but it is also true that the companies do track negative sentiments expressed on social media by people as every company with long time perspective want satisfied customers as they want only positive words about their brands/ products/services. However, negative vibes from an unhappy customer can damage brand/ product/ service by condemning it publicly.

Tools to Track Social Media

The tracking, analysis and management of online content falls under digital media marketing and is commonly termed as Online Reputation Management or ORM. The process uses tools such as Pinstorm, Radian6 , LocoBuzz , Simplyfy 360 and Google Alert to pick up 'keywords' associated with the company or the brand concerned and track online conversations/postings that mention them. These tools empower you to create online professional profiles for a client.

Pinstorm [2] is a digital advertising firm headquartered in Mumbai, India with offices in Asia, Europe and USA. It ranks amongst the leading digital advertising firms in the world. It offers pay per click advertising services including display advertising, web and mobile presence, online communities, viral advertising and search engine optimization. The company does not charge a retainer fee, media or creative charges. Clients are only charged on the basis of the results their communication campaigns deliver.

Radian6 [3] is now part of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and it facilitates listening, engaging your prospective customers, publishing on social media and analyzing to make the most of your presence on social media.

LocoBuzz [4] enables brands to listen to Social media, facilitates detailed analytics and engages with the right target audience across all digital platforms using multiple social profile management and e-mail automation. It helps brands to reach customers on Social Platforms and maximizes opportunity and buying potential by using analytics as well as empowering true cross channel communication. LocoBuzz addresses the need for better user segmentation and also exploits customer behavior insights it has learned from analyzing data. LocoBuzz is an analytics based tool and includes data from key channels like – FaceBook, Twitter, Instagram, Google+, YouTube, news forums and blogs. In addition to all the above, it provides dashboards which are role based, prepares multiple sentiment analysis and creates in-depth analytics and insights on brands and competition.

Simplyfy 360 [5] presents a unified view of a customer across social media. It helps in addressing the grievance of customers and resolves them in a reduced time frame. It is tightly coupled with CRM also.

Google Alert is a free service from Google. It is easy to set up alerts in Google Alert [6] for any search terms, such as, your company name or targeted phrases relevant to your function. You can specify the types of results you want and their frequency. You can even get alerts as mentions occur for real-time online reputation management. Google sends alerts directly to you in an email digest, so there’s no ongoing legwork involved.

After analyzing the complaints, companies move to resolve the 'genuine' grievances. I have noticed that from year 2016, Reputation Management (RM) is no more part of SEO (Search Engine Optimization), which ensures your Google results showed relevant and positive links.

Social Listening

Social listening is now essential. Think of the fact that one is truthful only when one knows that you’re not listening. Only social media can catch you that truthful feedback but then you need to use it for improvement of your product/ service.

User-generated Content [8]

Besides your usual marketing material producing agencies, you need to invite your users to generate and upload content. The content can be in form of videos, images, tweets, vines, etc. A customer posts a selfie with your product and uploads it say on Instagram. Similarly, a customer may write a positive review for your brand/ product/ service and post it on his favorite media. However, you know this only if you listen to all relevant media relevant for your type of business and thus, acquire your most treasured marketing material.

Customers will only generate content about your brand/ product/ service if you encourage it as well as perhaps motivate them. Creating reviews is a common practice and followed by the food and beverage, movie, beauty and hospitability industries. In fact, customers are your best as well as knowledgeable marketers and you need to involve them in your brand promotion. It’s possible that you may often also get some bad reviews, but your marketing team needs to see it as a big opportunity and thus can benefit from each bad review published online.

Employee Reviews [8]

Like customers, you can use your employees too in marketing your brand/ product/ service. Do send marketing material to your leads as well as your employees too to educate your employees about your products and services.

Employees are your best experts to promote your brand so you need to keep them well-informed about your brand/ product/ service. This approach may include employment reviews, engagement on social media, word-of-mouth marketing, and more.

How Customer Profiling can increase Sales

Trying to sell products and services without understanding your ideal customers is like driving a car with eyes closed. Customer feedback is ideal to gather information on your customers and the next step for business owners is how to exploit this information.

The guidance to develop a simple customer profile template is given below.

Create descriptions of Ideal Buyers

Create descriptions in terms of demographic data or any sort of personal information (group as other info) for each ideal customer for your brand/ product/ service. This may include elements about the customer and their attitude you need to look at how your customer typically feels towards the other offerings available in your industry. Your “About” section should briefly describe where your product fits in with this customer’s search.

Identify unique Customer Goals and Features

This is where you enhance your customer’s personality with thorough insights that may help you to form an improved request for each customer. You need to identify the user goals for each customer type and the key features that may affect their readiness to purchase from you.

To understand user goals for a customer personality, you need to know the language customer uses to express his problem, difficulty customer faces in using your product or service and how best you can engage such a customer?

You also need to identify reasons why a customer is shy to try your product. Last but not the least, how to engage these different customer types? For achieving positive results you need to be familiar with, where these customers are likely to find you. What websites, blogs, Social media sites and search terms these customers may use and what sort of content appeals to them the most?

Take a close look at the other information you’ve gathered on this customer and assemble a list of websites that they frequent regularly. As a B2B company, look at the sample metrics of people at various social media sites and make a guess which sites are ideal for your customers based on their profiles. Now, you need to guess search terms likely to be used by your customer personalities. Lastly, think about what sort of content will appeal to each customer type, and what sort of content could be useful for support. Put up such content at the right places.

Negative feedback by celebrity

Negative postings by a celebrity (known to you through profiling) with large followers may cause more discomfiture for companies. Therefore, such situations necessitate more serious handling. In case of a hostile or negative Twitter comments by celebrities, businesses typically react straightaway. Businesses do try to reply to tweets ASAP even though a solution or resolution may take time, an assurance that the company is working on the problem is given to the customer.

Community Marketing [7]

As per Wikipedia, “Community marketing is a strategy to engage an audience in an active, non-intrusive prospect and customer conversation. Whereas marketing communication strategies such as advertising, promotion, PR, and sales all focus on attaining customers, Community Marketing focuses on the needs of existing customers. “

Sponsored form of community marketing has negative impact on customers mind due to suspicion among customers that businesses do deliberate advertising. It is, therefore, important to be genuine in order to be credible. Prefer to be a caring brand than a brand that sells. Work on marketing and reputation management to be successful, particularly, on social media. Do involve in networking and conduct Public Relations besides your advertising strategy, and talk to bloggers about the things that interest them. Remember targeting is also very important. And do visualize that reputation management takes time and your company needs to have a reliable approach and a strategy to prosper.

Wrap up

In case of online Internet based scenarios people express grievances freely hence there are good chances that you will get more grievances/ complaints. Businesses however need to monitor the web (read social media) and control any negative sentiments expressed by anyone against your brand/ product or service [8]. Such scenario needs to be tackled on priority and if a customer is involved please him if possible. It may be worthwhile to be familiar with the fact that inactive users are 2.5 times more likely to visit various business sites than active users.

Besides listening and responding to the relevant info (particularly, grievances and complaints) on the social media, the importance of customer profiling is discussed and it is a good practice to make a profile for each type of customer. This can be accomplished automatically by use of tools – a few or reviewed here.

Community marketing is to involve everyone in the value chain in marketing. Let it be your employees, customers or community. One important component of your success is how well you attract all in spreading genuine and authentic info about your brand, product and/or service.

Any negative vibe on the social media has not only to be listened but has to be acted on to ensure that only positive vibes are present on the media and corrective action is taken to wipe the negative sentiments of customers. This is the key mantra for success for businesses, i.e., for building your brand/ product / service, raising awareness, and generating leads for business by using social media in ways only to benefit you.

References

[1] Jul 18 2016: The Times of India (Delhi),”CONSUMER WOES - E-commerce sites have 2nd highest share of grievances,” Dipak Dash, New Delhi

http://epaperbeta.timesofindia.com/Article.aspx?eid=31808&articlexml=CONSUMER-WOES-E-commerce-sites-have-2nd-highest-18072016011027