You Hear What Customers Say, but Do You Know What They Mean?

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Urbanspoon and hundreds of other social-networking sites, you have unprecedented, real-time access to the discussions your customers are having with their friends, colleagues, families and the world at large.

For your company, this means amazing data is there for the taking. "Effective listening and insights analysis allow you to track not just the volume but also the meaning of online conversations across a complex web of consumer-interaction channels," writes Alex Lustberg at MarketingProfs.

But, he warns, beware of the bias and subjectivity in a keyword-based listening solution. "Let's say a retention analyst tracks customer attrition by setting up searches for the words or combinations of the words 'cancel,' 'leaving,' and 'switching,'" he says.

Without context, such a system would flag a customer comment asking how to cancel a credit card she lost—a false positive since it's the card, and not the service, that she wants to cancel. "Moreover," continues Lustberg, "that approach does not provide any information regarding why customers are dissatisfied or at risk. To obtain those insights, the analyst must manually read all the messages flagged."

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