Social media - How should customer strategists be involved? - Customer Focused Innovation

At the 2010 Walker Fall Forum, we asked customer strategists from some of the worlds most customer centric companies how the voice of the customer champion should be involved in the social media strategy. Here is what they came up with?

The customer strategist can use social media to engage with customers. Social media should be built into our internal and external communication plans. For example, when customer insights are identified through the customer listening program, the company should blog about the key learnings and promote that blog through various social media channels like Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook.
Social media is a tool that can help a company address customer concerns in real-time. It is an extension of customer service and support functions. The customer strategist can leverage the insights from customer service interactions to help social media strategist enhance the processes that are involved to respond to customer issues via social media.
The voice of the customer champion can look for opportunities to align the loyal customer base with social media actions. For example, are your loyal customers fans of you on Facebook? Do you have a strategy in place to attract these customers to the social media locations in which you have a presence? They are a great source for testimonials. How can we leverage their loyalty to spread the word?
We can help identify the noise. When designed properly, customer listening programs are representative of the entire customer population. Insights from a customer listening program can help identify which online conversations are noise compared to those that build customer loyalty.
We can garner competitive insights. Many social media sites are publicly available. We can extend our customer listening to include conversations about our most intimate competitors.
We can gain information about our most valuable customers. Like conducting a deep dive on the competition, we can also use social media conversations to learn more about our key customers. This information can be integrated in our account plans and sales playbooks.

Social media is kicking out the ladder and forcing customer strategists to consider how it can be used to capture customer sentiment and improve customer loyalty and retention.

How is your voice of the customer champion using social media?

Visual credit: David Armano