Social Analytics is the New Survey

How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend? Please answer on a scale from 1-10. This simple question developed by Fred Reichheld in 2003 during his time at Bain & Company became known as Net Promoter Score (NPS). Since then, this score has been largely accepted to be a way to measure customer loyalty, but that was before social media existed.

Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter now have around 2.77 billion users and command 33 percent share of digital media spending in 2018. With social is there potential to modernize NPS? Social analytics can be an interesting way to improve personalization, implement design-led thinking, and improve overall customer experience.

1. Personalization: 77 percent of marketers say that personalization is crucial but 60 percent struggle to personalize in real time. A personalized experience can provide a great opportunity to connect on a direct level with your customer. I’m not talking just emails with their name in it (that’s so 1990), but rather an experience when they log into your site or interact with your customer service team. Using social and usage data of past behavior from your brand can be a way to truly understand how a customer operates and to remove frustration that may come from a generic response to a long-time customer.
2. Design thinking: I recently finished an executive degree at Stanford, and one of the courses I took was design-led thinking. The professors Perry Klebahn and Jeremy Utleydescribed how it is good to “fail cheap and learn early.” The likes and dislikes of your customers for your brand, and affinities for engaging with your social content linked to purchase behavior can be a powerful way to design an experience. It can be tested cheaply with a targeted group and expanded once the right match has been created.
3. Customer experience: Sixty-seven percent of consumers now tap networks like Twitter and Facebook for customer service, according to J.D. Power. It is becoming a first line of defense for interaction with customers. Capturing and analyzing customer interactions on social media can help to fine-tune customer service, improve process, and give speedier, more personalized responses. Social can also be a great place for brand monitoring. If systems or products have issues, people love to hit Twitter to talk about it.

We may be a few years off from a social-led NPS score, but it’s not hard to see how social analytics and truly listening to your customers can be a great way to improve personalization, test out design-led thinking, create customer experiences, and, as Fred Reichheld put it with NPS, “improve customer loyalty.”