Strategies for Monitoring and Managing Customer Experiences Online

PRLog (Press Release) - Apr. 25, 2011 - Social media is more and more becoming an important channel for customer contacts. "Customer Service Newsletter's" most recent Standards and Benchmarking Survey shows that as many as 40 percent of companies participating in the survey have put the customer service department in charge of monitoring and responding to customer comments from social media channels.

But the truth is, many companies — smaller companies in particular — are at a loss in terms of what they need to do to establish a social media presence and to monitor and manage what gets said via social media.

In the April issue of "Customer Service Newsletter," online business authority and author Marsha Collier provides some guidance. She recommends a three-step plan to monitor and respond to customer comments online. The first step is to track customer comments.
For a smaller consumer company, she recommends starting with sites like Yelp.com or Angie's List (www.angieslist.com). Here you simply register your business and monitor what people are saying about you.

People go to these and other sites like them to rate and comment on local businesses ranging from house painters to retailers. Simply go to the site, claim your business, and monitor what people say about you. There are also a number of industry-specific sites that solicit comments from customers.

To follow customer comments on a broader scale, and on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and others, Collier recommends signing up for Google Alerts, which will notify you when your company name is mentioned. You can also use Twitter Search (search.twitter.com) to search for mentions of your company on Twitter.

"But for a more complete picture of what your customers are saying online, you'll have to go to a site or use a tool that aggregates searches from all over the Web," Collier says. For instance, SocialMention.com searches various sites and presents graphics to indicate such things as customer sentiment, strength, passion, and reach. Other search tools are available from SocialSearch.com, Twiogle.com, and Whostalkin.com.

The complete article "Strategies for monitoring and managing customer experiences online," appears in the April issue of "Customer Service Newsletter," along with information on how Health Care Service Corp. is preparing its call center for the unexpected, and expert advice on becoming a more accessible and responsive manager.

# # #

About the Customer Service Group

For more than 20 years, the Customer Service Group has helped customer service, call center and help desk managers increase productivity, improve service quality and boost customer satisfaction, loyalty and retention. The Customer Service Group publishes "Customer Service Newsletter" and "The Customer Communicator."

Website: http://www.CustomerServiceGroup.com