Social media is consumed with posts of people complaining about bad customer experiences, services not meeting their expectations and being letdown. The customers network and out-reach invariable become ambassadors of negative publicity for a company’s brand. Social media has given common man the power to act as a journalist and share real-time feeds of poor customer experiences. If organizations don’t act fast, it leaves them open to the dreaded trial by social media, invites competitors to exploit benefits and has a direct impact on other loyal customers and the company’s bottom-line.

Warren Buffet once said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you’ll do things differently.”

Over the past few years there has been a major shift in the way the world communicates. From newspapers, TV, magazines and radio to over 20 social media platforms, 10+ messaging platforms and other real-time mediums to send across a message to millions of people at a time. With more than half the world population using modern channels to share their views and concerns, organizations need to have the capabilities to capture this real-time incoming data and act fast.

How can companies track massive amounts of data and use it to improve customer experience?

With the recent upgrades in the technology and the introduction of Automation, Data Science, AI and Machine Learning, it has become possible to track customer digital activities that are related and relevant to your company, brand, products, solutions and more. A combination of Social Listening, Conversational AI Chatbots and Digital Workforce (RPA) brings about the ultimate customer experience. Leveraging these can enable organizations to capture data in real-time, act fast and take measures to offset or minimize damage to the reputation, credibility and public image of the brand.

There are various social listening tools available in the market today. Social listening can help you track social media platforms for any posts, trends, conversations or mentions related to your brand and provides you the right insights to discover opportunities to act upon. When combined with conversational AI chatbot, the chatbot picks up the conversation on behalf of the organization and responds in a natural way using advance natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU), and dialog management techniques. The chatbot then raises the ticket and passes on the information to the relevant department. At this point the digital workforce, a combination of artificial intelligence, machine learning and robotic process automation takes over and provides a solution to the problem. However complex or time consuming it may be, the digital workforce will automatically find the right solution fast and efficiently, eventually closing the ticket and the chatbot then delivers the message to the customer ensuring satisfaction. With almost no human intervention, bots automate every step in the process with speed and accuracy, eliminating human error.

Although companies may know about their customer’s income, likes, dislikes, preferences and habits, they know very little about customer’s emotions and their state of mind. This is why it is crucial to have social listening to understand the customer emotion in the form of a post, be it positive or negative and act upon it with the help of chatbots and RPA seizing every opportunity to interact with the customer, recovering service, increasing loyalty and overall brand reputation and equity.