Can Customer service be a new metric to gauge a brand’s performance online?

While everyone is talking about content marketing and social media marketing on the online marketing strategies, I believe all of them are turning a blind eye to a gold mine of content in context to their respective brand/service/product – Customer/Consumer created content in form of sentiment. Almost all the marketers focus the bulk of their energy on creating campaigns that will enhance their brand health, but often overlook the importance of what people are saying publicly through social media about the organic customer service experiences they have.

With this curious question in mind out team at TheSocialPeople initiated a research via our ORM tool that helps us capture the brand/industry related data on the social media space, we discovered that there is an immense opportunity for companies to win back lost customers, improve customer service experience and track the customer service performance. By doing this we were able to develop a metric that can enable businesses to define an ROI on customer loyalty & customer retention basis via a strong engagement methodology of converting a threat into opportunity.

During our research we realized that the customer service performance on the Social Media and online space includes two key dimensions – Customer Loyalty and Brand Reputation. These two factors directly impact factors like rate of customer acquisition, wallet share, sales & revenue and customer retention.

So in today’s world of Social media where a customer is brutally honest about their sentiments (positive or negative) brands needs to rigorously monitor their online reputation and ensure that every negative sentiment is well attended to ensure customer retention while every positive sentiment is propagated to all possible circles of the company’s social media ecosystem. In another world a happy customer is the greatest brand ambassador your company can ever afford – Invest more on them!

Viral Thaker, Founder & Director | TheSocialPeople
A seasoned HR & Marketing professional, Viral was one of the early adopters of social media. With over a decade of industry experience under his belt, his skills span corporate strategy, delivery management, customer relationship management, business development and operations management. Viral is a voracious reader, a travel enthusiast and enjoys adventure sports. Follow Viral on Twitter @vrlthaker