The blogosphere has created a new dynamic in today’s pursuit of customer feedback: opening the door for consumers to publicly declare what they expect from an organization, in addition to sharing opinions on products and services. When customers recount their experiences—good or bad—on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, the result may potentially impact customer perception, and ultimately, the bottom line.    

It's not surprising that organizations are starting to tap into this newfound wealth of information to determine customer desires. But the challenge still remains being able to truly distinguish a cluster of relatively insignificant “tweets” from real customer behavioral changes or new exponential trends.  The more social networks multiply, the harder the challenge becomes. 

Leveraging social media in tandem with the speech analytics software typically found in contact centers can help organizations find balance in identifying real customer issues. By mining internal customer interactions, such as phone calls and emails, they can capture the magnitude and level of customer satisfaction or frustration. Speech analytics helps surface the intelligence needed to pinpoint trends, identify brand/process strengths and weaknesses, and understand how offerings are perceived by the marketplace. It has become a secret tool for the frontline defense of a brand against dissatisfied, vocal customers.  

Being armed with real and recent customer interaction insights—which can include anything from concerns, requests, and questions to emotional customer calls—organizations can craft the right responses within social media networks to defuse, or even ride the wave. In leveraging this strategy, customer-facing organizations can be much more proactive and use specific scenarios as benefits instead of disadvantages. 

The sheer number of calls that contact centers receive in any given time period can make spotting a vocal customer akin to finding a needle in a haystack. However, with speech analytics, organizations can take a strategic and targeted approach to monitoring hundreds of customer interactions in an organized way.

Traditional speech analytics solutions allow organizations to search for calls by keyword, phrase, or business category, helping users find relevant conversations quickly to determine the underlying causes of rising call volumes, costs and customer dissatisfaction. A new generation of speech analytics can now help automatically identify changes in customer behavior using technology such as Customer Behavior Indicators. These next-generation solutions can proactively index every single word and phrase, and create a baseline of all dialogues that occur within customer interactions. This capability automatically surfaces the increases/decreases of terms and phrases that may reflect a new potential trend, without the need to predefine terms in advance.  

For example, a well-known insurance company leveraged its speech analytics CBIs to recognize that the term “clunkers” was starting to make its way into more and more discussions that occurred on weekends. While the term wasn’t pre-defined by the company, speech analytics identified that it related to the government’s “Cash for Clunkers” campaign. With minimal analysis, the company determined that people were shopping for new cars on the weekends and calling its contact center for quotes. With this new-found information, the organization was able to staff its workforce accordingly, and was armed with the right messaging to manage the overflow of new and potential customers.

Once issues are identified through speech analytics, companies can then focus social media monitoring efforts to carefully track these specific concerns and take action earlier in the cycle. How can you tell what’s critical from what’s not? In general, if a significant number of calls on the same topic are discovered, and frustrations/emotions associated with these interactions run high or increase, it may well be time to take a look at the ways in which the issue at hand can be corrected. On the other hand, if a specific incident appears in the blogosphere, but is very rarely found within internal customer service interactions, it is likely a targeted case and less probable to have a high impact on your overall brand reputation.

Vocal, dissatisfied customer voices on YouTube, Facebook or Twitter can potentially make or break a brand. Customer-centric enterprises are the ones that know how to listen to the voice of the customer and put their requirements above all else. Technologies such as speech analytics can serve as a "crystal ball" to pre-empt marketing nightmares that can emerge when the most vocal critics flock to social media to air their grievances.  Listening to customers should be a priority, whether they talk to us directly or publicly. 

Daniel Ziv is vice president of customer interaction analytics at Verint Witness Actionable Solutions. He can be reached at daniel.ziv@verint.com.