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In Strategic Customer Service, John Goodman describes a process of handling customer complaints that incorporates two key activities:  (1) addressing and resolving individual customer problems, one-at-a-time, and (2) aggregating and analyzing multiple customer problems to define priorities for improvement.  The first activity is necessary to manage individual customer experiences and relationships.  The second activity enables a firm to identify and eliminate the root causes of recurring problems.   The first activity deals with problems incidentally, while the second deals with them systemically. [1]

Organizations can and should use a similar approach in dealing with social media. 

In How to Get the Most from Social Media – Part One I shared results of research, recently conducted by MaritzCX, demonstrating that the use of social media to manage relationships with individual customers is a common practice in organizations having very successful VoC programs.  These organizations routinely attempt to turn customers who have posted about positive experiences into brand ambassadors. They also regularly acknowledge and try to “make things right” with customers who have shared negative experiences. 

Another very powerful practice is to integrate social media with other VoC data sources to set priorities for systemic improvement.  Our research shows that sixty-six (66) percent of firms having very successful VoC programs use a formal process to integrate customer survey data with social media and other sources of customer feedback.  In other organizations, this number is only twenty-nine (29) percent.

A formal process of VoC integration consists of three essential steps:

• Build a comprehensive, uniform set of customer experience elements or categories
• Use this set of categories to capture and organize both structured and unstructured VoC data
• Make “apples-to-apples” comparisons among all VoC data sources to draw conclusions and set priorities for action and improvement

VoC integration enables an organization to build a strong case for targeting specific customer experience elements as action items.  A performance improvement team might hesitate to focus on a particular issue based on just one source of customer feedback alone.  However, if insights gained from several VoC sources all point to the same issue, the team likely will pursue that issue with increased confidence and conviction.   For example, if customer survey feedback, posts from social media, and inbound customer communications all point to “ease of using the company’s website” as a source of customer dissatisfaction, this issue will be difficult to ignore. This is especially true if “ease of using the company’s website” also happens to be a key driver of overall customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Any given source of customer feedback has its strengths and limitations.  That’s why managers are well-advised to draw conclusions and set priorities for action based on the convergence of insights drawn from multiple VoC sources.   Voc integration is another practice that can ensure managers get the most from social media, as well as other sources of customer feedback.