Client: Microsoft

Industry: Technology

Business Impact: • Actionable insights• Market intelligence• Consumer insights

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Improvement of product quality and customer experience by implementing social media listening intelligence program

Business Challenge

Microsoft needed a solution to more effectively analyze the thousands of conversations taking place online about a wide array of the company’s products. Because these products are used so widely, conversations take place globally 24/7 and in huge volume in Microsoft forums, other forums and across social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, blogs) and in more traditional news sources. While the company was already monitoring some of these sources, there was no one integrating the conversations and providing insights into their relevance to improving product quality and the customer experience.

Solution

Blueocean Market Intelligence worked with the client to develop a program to listen to social media conversations about Microsoft products with the goal of identifying product quality issues, training gaps and ideas for improving the customer experience. The Social Media Listening Intelligence Program effectively and quickly scans a high volume of online conversations to provide

• The right information (unbiased actionable insights) • At the right time (tuned to the product lifecycle; quick turnaround) • From the right sources (no “noise,” participation of authoritative voices) trends

The first step of the solution is the listening component. However, Blueocean Market Intelligence also successfully driven action to improve customer

Case Study

experience by ranking issues and communicating customer needs and ideas to product engineers.

How We Listen

The Blueocean Market Intelligence team processes data from thousands of sources using a variety of free and purchased social media tools as well as internal Microsoft tools. The program scans approximately 20 million documents daily, including content from blogs, news, forums, Twitter, social networks and YouTube.

The approach blends people, process and tools. While we rely on search tools and data dashboards, we go even further, analyzing content to uncover the story behind the data. The teams are in contact on a daily basis, discussing content choices, identifying new conversation themes and innovative ways to package and communicate insights.

At the height of our reporting program in fiscal year 2011, we produced 26 reports each week (a mix of daily, weekly and trending reports) on eight of the most widely-used Microsoft products. Each report runs on a schedule attuned to the product’s life cycle (daily for new launches, weekly for more stable products).

How We Drive Action Ultimately, listening to social media conversations is important, but not an end unto itself. The key value of the program is to improve the customer experience by helping Microsoft teams identify users’ most pressing problems, pain points and suggestions.

In addition to listening for issue themes, the Blueocean Market Intelligence team ranks large-scale issues weekly using a variety of criteria to determine the severity of an issue. These include volume of the conversation, authority of the people discussing it online and what types of users are most impacted. We report weekly on the top issues for a product and how these issues are trending in terms of conversation volume and tone.

Each issue is formally graded within the trend report on a range of qualitative and quantitative criteria (reach, scope, resolution status, customer experience impact), resulting in a social media severity ranking. Our criteria is consistently applied and measured, so that we can track the evolution of the problem over time. The scoring enables us to rank issues in terms of severity that correlate to other internal Microsoft support systems, so that they can be fully integrated with other customer support databases. The team now adds social media data to existing Microsoft alert systems in a way that product quality teams can immediately understand.

Outcome

Most corporate social media reports provide numbers – mentions, sentiments and brand “health” units – to track campaigns and general attitudes. Blueocean Market Intelligence has gone beyond traditional social media search dashboards to provide intelligence that is more relevant, actionable and measurable in terms of the business and financial impact.

There are a number of Microsoft programs that measure social media “buzz” (volume, views, number of followers, etc.) but ours uniquely focuses on identifying product quality and support issues. While traditional measurement is valuable in many ways, it isn’t effective in telling the story of the customer experience.

The Social Media Listening Intelligence Program had to reach beyond standard marketplace tools and measurement methodology to incorporate a listening framework that treats tools and metrics as a means to an end, not the end of the process. The result is actionable intelligence versus monitored dashboard numbers.

The focus of any Blueocean Market Intelligence project is to tell the story behind data. Our unfettered reporting of customer issues has raised some eyebrows, but we do not manage messages. Reports tell the story as-is with a strong customer perspective.

By combining typical social media brand/campaign research techniques with added deeper content aggregation and trend analysis, we can connect similar content and topics across the social media spectrum to produce a more holistic view of each issue discussed. We use data from high authority sources to show the depth and reach of the conversation, and then apply ranking criteria that help teams prioritize and take action.

The Social Media Listening Intelligence Program has had many successes over the years by helping Microsoft teams address customer issues. Our reports help impact resource allocation decisions in many ways.

Identify emerging issues not captured elsewhere

Reports often pinpoint customer issues before they appear in other Microsoft listening systems (help desk, bug reports, etc). For example, we were able to identify a problem that customers experienced when they migrated to a newer version of a popular Microsoft product. Many customers lost access to their data within a commonly used tool due to a change in the product’s design and licensing structure.

Forum and blog complaints appeared immediately following the product launch. No other listening system was able to capture the issue - it was not considered a user support problem because the program was designed that way. Backed by social media conversation data, the product quality team addressed complaints by releasing a free download of the tool for people who migrated to the newer version. Customer feedback was overwhelmingly positive and within two months, the tool was downloaded over 30,000 times.

Identify training development opportunities

Aggregating customer complaints from a variety of sources enables identification of areas where customers need additional training and/or workarounds. For example, early social media listening was able to identify a situation in which a particular product function failed to install on some 64-bit systems. The exact number of customers impacted was not clear.

Our reports were able to capture early discussion about the problem among IT professionals beta testing the software. Social media evidence convinced product quality engineers to take action by working with these beta testers to develop a solution. By the time the first consumer complaint about the issue came into the help desk, Microsoft already had a tested solution.

Guide product development

Information captured in our reports gives Microsoft product engineers’ information about customers’ top needs and wants, helping them design more effective product and services. Our program routinely identifies customer problems and captures reactions to updates and product releases, which helps inform product support and resource allocation strategies.

For example, social media discussion captured in a daily report identified a “bug” present in the new beta version of a popular product. This convinced the team to correct the issue in the final version released to manufacturers and consumers.

In some cases, social media listening early in the product cycle can also help Microsoft maintain market share by identifying potential adoption blockers. Our reports have been a critical data stream for alerting product engineers about problems in early beta versions that were solved in the final product release - directly impacting long-term company loyalty and overall revenue.

Prove ROI on customer education and engagement measures

Blueocean Market Intelligence tracks ROI as a measurement of how Social Media Listening Intelligence facilitates a response to customer needs, thereby lessening the need for help resources. In order to reduce 1:1 customer contact, issues must be identified early so that Microsoft can publish solutions and take pre-emptive action to update products as needed.

For example, our Social Media Listening Program was able to give Microsoft an early warning of customer confusion when the European Union required that consumers must be provided with a choice of internet browsers. Microsoft preemptively created training content to address specific themes identified in our social media reports to explain the requirement and typical user scenarios.

Customers viewed this content 17,000 times in just one month. If this content prevented even 2% of those users from calling customer service, it would represent significant savings (350 users X $200 [average help desk call estimate] = $70,000 monthly).

Such success stories have made our reports essential reading for employees across the company. We recently surveyed readers and found that 90% were satisfied with the reports overall and two-thirds read them “often” or “consistently.”

About Blueocean Market Intelligence

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