Technology

Would you ever let your phone ring in your customer call center and not pick it up? This is what happens on a daily basis inside social media tools. I see where people are praising companies or complaining about a recent experience and no one is responding back to those comments. Are your customers talking about you or your company right now? Don't let that phone go unanswered!

What kind of information should you be listening for? Everything from comments about competitors to keywords, event triggers, and positive or negative comments. But don't worry—you don't have to be perusing social media sites all day long in order to catch these things. Here are some tools you can use to monitor what is being said about you, your company, or your brand:

You can use google.com/alerts or socialmention.com for free. Be sure to set the search for your name, leader names, company name, event triggers, or company brands.

For larger brands, consider using a tool that you pay for, such as alterian.com or radian6.com. These are dashboards that come with great workflows and analytics. They show user sentiment, identify the influencers in a situation, and allow more keyword search capabilities.

Social media is a great tool for research and customer service. When using it for research, listen for new ways that your product is being used. For instance, a manufacturing company recently learned that their product was being used in a different way than it was originally designed. This opened a new business opportunity that the company had not recognized before, and it might not have occurred to them had they not been using social media.

You can also use social media to improve your customer service efforts. A friend of mine once stayed at a hotel in Cleveland and had a bad experience there, so she posted it on Twitter. Within two minutes, the hotel was following her in Twitter and sent her their customer service number. She couldn't believe it. She called the number and they were very apologetic about her experience. Then they offered her a free night's stay for the next time she visited the hotel. That hotel turned around a negative situation. They answered the phone.

Have you thought about using social media to listen for potential customer needs? Has your company identified event triggers that it would look for in social media?