A major automobile manufacturer is using the latest social media monitoring and analysis to find out what its customers really think about the brand. For some time, Eclipse has been implementing and managing a customer satisfaction programme for a major automobile manufacturer, based on a telephone survey created by the customer research experts JD Power. Eclipse felt, however, that the client was only seeing half of the picture. “The data was collected in a structured way, measuring customers’ prompted responses,” said Eclipse’s Managing Director, David Pickering “All very valuable but what about those unprompted customer conversations that take place every day online across the social media venues? What about Word of Mouth?” Working with 1000heads, experts in digital dialogue, Eclipse set up a programme to collect, interpret and measure these unprompted online conversations.

The brief was to look at customer satisfaction in general, as well as in relation to the customers’ intent to buy. “From hundreds of posts in venues like message and discussion boards, forums, newsgroups, review sites, blogs, podcasts, vodcasts and folksonomies over a six month period, we were able to build up a picture of how customers and prospective customers felt about the brand,” David said.

Researchers looked at instances of conversation about topics such as dealerships, vehicle servicing, sales and performance, rating each unit of conversation on a sliding scale according to the sentiment expressed - whether positive, neutral or negative. Customer intent was one particular area of interest. Instances of conversations that mentioned a specific intent to buy, or not buy, the brand were singled out for more in-depth examination. The results were analysed and reports produced, containing metrics, quantitative and qualitative data, as well as drilldowns into specific elements of the gathered data. From these, the client was able to identify specific areas where improvements could be made or processes refined.

“This kind of brand intelligence allows companies to interact directly with their customers and complements offline activity perfectly. Our client was so impressed with the results so far that we’re now talking to them about an ongoing monitoring programme, tracking trends and looking at impact of traditional media programmes,” David concludes.

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