Customers are talking about brands, products, and services in a multitude of places. These customer conversations are unstructured and idiosyncratic, and often outside the control of the enterprise. Strangely, few companies are even listening to this valuable source of feedback – fewer still have strategies and programs in place for collecting, categorizing, analyzing and acting on this rich source of insight about their brand performance. This paper has outlined listening best practices enabled by sophisticated software and organizational expertise. Companies that continue to ignore the new best practices of integrated listening, who continue to ignore the customer conversation, will be left behind and miss the power of truly engaging with their customers’ brand experience.

1. Best Practices for Integrated Listening
WE HELP COMPANIES UNDERSTAND THE MEANING OF THE WORLD’S ONLINE CONVERSATIONS
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2. Introduction
To listen effectively and continuously – and be successful – companies need a
combination of several capabilities:
•Access to large volumes of customer comments from both direct feedback channels
and indirect channels in social media.
•Technologies to automate the categorization of comments based on a company’s
brand attributes.
• Expertise to perform complex analyses and guide strategic decisions.
•The ability to execute automated engagement actions based on listening insights.
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3. The Integrated Listening Process
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4. Collect
•Make it easy for your customers to provide direct feedback
•Provide opportunities at all major customers touch points/ Transactions
•Develop and participate in on-line communities to obtain customer opinions and
sentiment
•Mine external social media sites for customer opinions and sentiment
•Encourage comments through the use of rewards and promotions
•Capture structured data in addition to free-form comments
•Acknowledge direct feedback immediately upon submission
•Publish findings to customer communities to encourage virtuous feedback cycle
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5. Categorize
• Define categories and category groups that reflect your company’s brand
attributes
•Implement the right tools and technology to automate categorization
•Categorize comments in real time to identify emerging issues and sentiment
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6. Analyze
• Provide systematic structure for analysis efforts
•Utilize business intelligence capabilities to automate analysis
•Create a central repository of all customer verbatim records for every channel
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7. Act
• Dynamically respond to direct feedback
•Participate in Social Media conversations
•Engage Influencers
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8. Monitor and Improve
The listening team should monitor all feedback in order to:
•Ensure the volume and quality of customer comments collected remains
consistently good
•Categorization criteria are relevant and accurate;
•Analysis are delivering actionable business insights
•Engagement actions are producing the desired business results.
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9. Monitor and Improve
The listening team should monitor all feedback in order to:
•Ensure the volume and quality of customer comments collected remains
consistently good
•Categorization criteria are relevant and accurate;
•Analysis are delivering actionable business insights
•Engagement actions are producing the desired business results.
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