When you’re facing end-of-life for a tool you need to do your job, approach it as an opportunity to elevate your technology and optimise your processes. Many businesses are in this spot with their social listening and engagement tools. Here’s why it matters. 

Social listening tools and social monitoring tools give businesses real-time actionable insights into customer opinions, enabling a deeper understanding of target audiences and a path to respond rapidly. By analysing social media conversations, companies can gauge customer sentiment, identify emerging trends, and gather valuable feedback on their products and services. These tools also help companies manage their reputations by detecting potential PR crises early to mitigate negative impacts.  

Social media listening plays a big role in customer experience (CX). The tools in use today facilitate proactive engagement, enabling businesses to respond to customer concerns and queries quickly. This level of responsiveness has a positive impact on customer satisfaction and loyalty. It also informs content and marketing campaigns by highlighting what resonates with the audience, ensuring more targeted and effective campaigns. 

Both types of tools perform valuable roles by helping businesses understand digital conversations about their brands, their brand reputation, and the products and services they offer. And now, change is on the horizon with an announcement about the Salesforce suite of social media listening tools. 

Why You Should Pay Attention to Social Listening Software 

Customers are increasingly using social channels to engage with companies they do business with. Not being able to see or respond when they contact or reference you on social media via mentions, tags and direct messages can negatively affect customer relationships or even your brand. In 2022, Salesforce announced end-of-life plans for its Salesforce Studio Suite solution, currently set for November 2024. And once that access is lost, all customer data associated with these accounts is also lost.  

Social media plays an increasingly important role in creating great customer experiences. Engaging with customers on multiple channels increases brand visibility, improves audience engagement and generates leads. Social media also provides a way to use targeted advertising and discover customer insights. Without a robust social listening solution, you’ll lose out on time-sensitive market insights. Your social response rate also drops. And in this “always-on” world, fast responses to queries are expected. 

That’s why it’s wise to evaluate alternative solutions to Salesforce Social Studio now. Start with the “must haves” and how you want to improve upon your current solution. 

Set Expectations for Alternative Social Listening Solutions 

Artificial intelligence (AI) has driven advancements in all types of technology, including social listening and monitoring. At a minimum, users transitioning from Salesforce Social Studio should expect: 

  • Native integration with Salesforce – This enables access to all available customer data in Salesforce and presents it in one view. With centralised data, your social media support team can trace social interactions back to customers and see any previous queries or issues. This also saves time in anticipating customer requirements. 
Radarr, salesforce data sync, social media, customer experience, cx
  • Support for multiple platforms – If your business is present on multiple social media platforms, you need to take care of the conversations on each platform — using only one tool. Otherwise, you’ll waste resources and still miss a lot of messages. 
  • Social listening – This has become essential to track conversations about your brand along with industry trends, potentially discovering new sales opportunities that you can respond to. For example, you can track select pain points of your target audience and engage accordingly. More importantly, you’ll learn what to avoid and better serve your customers. 
  • Sentiment analysis – Understanding what a customer feels when they mention your business or post a comment, enables you to reply to them in a language and tone that appeals to those feelings and demonstrates empathy. 

Go Beyond the Basics with Radarr by Genesys 

New technology enables businesses to be more proactive than reactive with social listening. Radarr by Genesys, an AppFoundry® solution, uses a powerful machine learning and AI algorithm to process millions of online conversations every day. In addition to helping you tune into the conversations your audience is engaging in, it also monitors their health and runs in-depth sentiment analysis on the same conversations. 

This gives you deep insight into how your audience perceives your brand, how your marketing and advertising campaigns are working, and action you can take to optimise campaigns for better results. 

Along with the essential capabilities of a modern cloud solution, Radarr provides the benefits of the strategic partnership between Genesys and Salesforce.  

As organisations rely on Salesforce for both sales and service, customer experience has become increasingly critical across all channels of engagement. That’s one reason why the Genesys integration with Salesforce is so important to social listening and monitoring.  

It offers pre-built integration for Radarr that makes it easy to enhance existing Salesforce implementations. This support for a seamless and consistent customer experience includes the flexibility to use Radarr inside either Genesys or Salesforce.  

Extend Business Value to More Teams 

Typically, social listening and monitoring solutions have lived in the marketing side of a business. That’s still important to be able to inform content and marketing strategies by highlighting what resonates with an audience, which supports more targeted and effective campaigns.   

But now, social listening is becoming a valuable part of the customer care function. In fact, some customers will reach out about an issue on social media first before ever entering a traditional contact centre channel. Part of this is due to a preference to engage over these channels, while another is a perception that they’ll get a faster response if voicing concerns over a public-facing channel. As a result, it can be a major benefit to address these concerns before a customer calls in, handling an issue on a more cost-effective channel but also earlier to reduce frustration.  

Overall, a more comprehensive view of your customers enables you to deliver better experiences, while getting a better sense of their overall customer journey. 

Radarr improves efficiency as you extend your use of the tool. It brings social listening capabilities so that posts needing a response can be routed to an agent through the same interface used for voice, email or any other channel. This streamlines access to data via a single agent workspace, reducing the time spent moving between applications.  

 Other Radarr advantages include: 

  • Easy two-way integration and authentication that lets you pull required fields from Salesforce to the Radarr Social Media Response tool. This makes it convenient for social media and support teams to access data and take quick action. 
  • Automatically fetch and sync messages – Push all complaints and queries to Salesforce, where you can manage every support request for collaboration between support and sales teams. 
  • Tailor analytics using multiple sets of criteria, getting a pulse for trends and also early detection to spot potential global issues your customers might be facing. 
  • Translate messages as they come through from one language to another, helping to decipher which messages might need a response.  

Manage Social Conversations and Build Customer Loyalty  

Maintaining a competitive edge requires a deep understanding of your customers, and there are many sources of data for capturing those insights. Today, companies depend on social for answers, supported by social monitoring and listening tools that work across multiple platforms in multiple languages. 

As Salesforce Social Studio hits end of life, Radarr by Genesys offers the critical functions needed in your transition — with all the advantages of the Genesys and Salesforce partnership.   

When you listen to what your audience says, and discover the emotion behind those conversations, you’re able to build a more satisfied and loyal customer base. 

Interested in learning more about how to leverage Radarr by Genesys for social media management? Check out Radarr on AppFoundry to start a free trial and for additional details.