Today, people have a network of social channels at their fingertips, making it easy for them to spread the word about their best and worst experiences with a brand. And this online customer feedback is easily available to see at a multitude of social and review sites.

Social reviews drive decision-making when prospective customers are deciding where to dine, shop or rest their head on a pillow for the night. It is the modern-day word of mouth but with a lot more influence and the power to go viral.

And for location-based businesses, like those in the retail and hospitality sector, it is really important to listen to this feedback, act on it, and be able to use it to increase the trust and loyalty that future customers will have with your business—in real-time. 

Challenges with Tracking Social Reviews

In the age of instant social reviews, it is important to capture the signals that your customers are leaving for you.  

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy to capture the relevant information from the data. The volume and unstructured nature of social data can be overwhelming and can require technology to capture and make sense of it. 

For location-based businesses, a standard social dashboard may not do the job for you. You want to know how your brand as a whole is faring, but you also need to be aware of how each location is stacking up against the local competition. What reviews are they receiving Google or TripAdvisor? Where are they falling short or excelling? Are they winning back the customers you lost last week? 

Your business also does not exist in a vacuum. It is great to have all this data on your own business, but how do you stack up to competitors near each of your business locations? This is where Social Rival Intelligence comes into play. An innovative capability in Medallia Social, Social Rival Intelligence helps retailers and other location-based businesses understand what customers are experiencing and sharing about the competition on review sites such as Google and TripAdvisor.

These signals are data points in your arsenal of understanding the full customer experience. There is a wealth of insights that will improve customer experience embedded into this social data. You can extract it if you have the right tools for the job.

Introduction to Medallia Social

Medallia Social provides an integrated view of the social feedback your business has received and could be a solution to all the challenges just mentioned. Medallia Experience Cloud captures these signals along your customer’s journey and helps you turn these insights into actions that improve customer experience.

Medallia Social will track down reviews and feedback from social review sites and bring them to your dashboard. But it is not just about looking at numbers on the screen. It’s about capturing these insights, turning them into actions, closing the loop with your customers, and catching detractors before they churn…all while keeping a pulse on the competition.

Dashboards and analytics are personalized by role, so you can give the right people in your organization access to the insights they may need to improve customer experience. That means giving executives a global view of a brand’s performance and allowing managers to narrow down their view to a specific location or region.

But Medallia Social is not just a passive dashboard. Its built-in alert workflows will allow you to respond to customer issues quickly or thank people right from the Medallia dashboard.

Introduction to Medallia Social Rival Management

You also likely need to know how your brand or location stacks up to other brands. Rival Intelligence is a key feature of Medallia Social that helps you gather competitive intelligence to understand why your competitors have the score they do.  

This work sounds impossible to do manually. Multiply your locations plus your competitor’s locations by the number of social review sites your customer may visit, and you start to get an idea of the work involved.

To further expand upon our Rival Intelligence functionality, we are pleased to announce our launch of Rival Management.  Rival Management allows end-users to easily add competitors by searching for any rival location in the world and including them into your rival list with a single click. The best part, you don’t need to manually add in the names, addresses, or URLs of your competitors, and Medallia will keep this information fresh as business names change or go in/out of business.  

With Medallia Social’s Rival Management, you have the tools you need to help provide a better customer experience than your competitors and have the data to back it up. And with Medallia Social, you have key information to take charge of your online reputation.

Want to learn how you stack up against your competition? Learn how to take charge of your social reputation.