Dell’s social media listening effort translates into insights and content

Dell was one of the first companies to launch a social media monitoring program. The computer giant’s capabilities have grown since the earliest days of social media, currently monitoring 290,000 web sources and 1×1 engagement on 14 platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, WeChat, Line, WhatsApp, Sina Weibo, YouTube, Baidu, Reddit and three Dell-owned communities. For its leadership in the social media listening realm, Dell has won first place in the “Social Listening and Real-Time Response” category of PR Daily’s 2019 Digital Marketing & Social Media Awards.

The social support team listens to more than 35 million conversations about Dell in general every year, as well as specific support experiences reported by customers. Using natural language processing and artificial intelligence, the listening engine automatically generates insights that are delivered to the appropriate departments for action.

The program gives the company a crucial advantage: It learns of issues as much as 2–3 weeks before a customer picks up the phone and calls for support, allowing the company to resolve issues before they begin affecting a large portion of the customer population.

The company is also able to convert the insights it gains from the online conversation into content, ranging from videos, images and GIFs to articles that can help customers solve problems and never have to contact customer support in the first place.

Because of the sophistication of the system, the company is able to deliver responses to customers within 30 minutes; the average time to resolve a customer issue from start to finish is about two days. Chatbots also factor into the equation—they’re used in customer support on messaging apps like WeChat and WhatsApp, reducing the average speed of answer from eight minutes to barely two.

Congratulations for the work being done by Richard Fitzgerald, Nishant Mishra and David Bohl.