Today’s interview is with Dana Miller, the SVP of Client Services at Crimson Hexagon, a social media data analytics firm that enables users to listen to and understand the opinions expressed on social media. Dana joins me today to talk about “voice of the customer” (VoC) programmes and how listening in social media can help.

This interview follows on from my recent interview: Turning your customers into a horde of zombie loyalists – Interview with Peter Shankman – and is number 137 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to their customers.

Highlights from my interview with Dana:

• Some brands are starting to include social listening as part of their voice of the customer programmes.
• Social listening can make a voice of the customer programme more robust.
• Traditional voice of the customer (VoC) programmes can often be expensive, not very flexible and don’t allow follow up.
• A VoC programme that incorporates social data and listening can also incorporate competitive analysis too.
• Even if firms don’t have a big data set or a large number of customers, they can use social listening to gain competitive, demographic, persona and topic insights.
• Spontaneity and sincerity are key benefits of any voice of the customer programme that incorporates social listening.
• Dana tells a story of a basketball team (Brooklyn Nets) that used social listening to gauge fan and local opinions and how they could engage their fans when they were working towards relocating their home stadium.
• Dana tells another story about Bugaboo International who used social listening to find out who was talking about their brand and what else their customers were interested in. However, what was most interesting was that they found that their US customers were more interested in the functionality of their products rather than the fact that they were positioning themselves as a high-end brand. This allowed them to refine their strategy moving forwards.
• There is a scenario where social listening could replace more traditional voice of the customer methods and programmes at some point in the future.
• Dana also uses social listening as part of her client services role to add value to her clients.
• She aims to proactively help her clients be better, get more out of their software or help them serve their customers better.
• Most of the ‘listening’ in companies is done by marketers.
• However, the leading firms have social listening embedded into their service and operations teams as a way of breaking down silos and getting the maximum amount of value from the data.
• Social media and social media listening is not just about counting likes and comments.
• The value is in asking questions and gaining additional insights into your customers, what they are talking about amongst themselves, what they care about and what they are interested in.
• However, you have to ask questions where customers are hanging out which means that firms have to look beyond their own channels.

About Dana (taken from her Crimson Hexagon bio)

Dana Miller leads the Client Services team at Crimson Hexagon, including Application Support, Customer Success and Managed Services. Miller brings with her over 20 years of international experience in growing and operationalizing client services organizations from a variety of large-scale and startup software companies.

Prior to Crimson Hexagon, Miller was responsible for directing the overall customer experience for Percussion Software, an enterprise content management provider. In addition, Miller has directed accounts and managed client services for startup organizations in Toronto, Canada.

Miller holds a Bachelor of Commerce from the University of Alberta and an MBA from Wilfrid Laurier University.

Dana can be found on Twitter @dmillerch and on LinkedIn here.

Photo Credit: sadmafioso via Compfight cc