Over the past decade, Social Listening has emerged as a mainstay in the toolkit of marketing and communications teams alike to monitor social media platforms for mentions of their organisation, products, or services. By tracking and analysing unsolicited data via publicly available online conversations, comments, and reviews, these teams gain valuable insights into public sentiment, identify trends, and inform their communications strategies.

Despite the emergence of Social Listening, Customer Experience teams have primarily relied on solicited feedback to drive their VoC programs, such as data collected from surveys and feedback forms, to understand customer opinions and experiences. While these methods provide valuable insights, they have limitations as they only capture a fraction of the customer experience. Many citizens do not participate in surveys or provide feedback through traditional channels. Further, surveys can only capture insights at specific moments in a customer’s journey, leading to an incomplete picture of their overall experience.

In today's rapidly evolving business landscape, unsolicited feedback is becoming increasingly crucial for a deeper understanding of the customer experience. Unsolicited data, often found in the form of social media comments, reviews, and forum discussions, provides an unfiltered view of citizens’ thoughts and opinions. This type of feedback can reveal pain points, preferences, expectations, and emotions that may not be apparent through solicited feedback alone.

Modelled with other enterprise datasets, unsolicited data obtained through Social Listening also enables an organisation to derive greater meaning and value out of their data.

As an example, say an organisation was looking to enhance customer experience by improving its customer service delivered through its contact centre. Traditionally, the company may have only relied on customer satisfaction surveys and support ticket data to evaluate the performance of its customer service team. By integrating Social Listening data, they may discover that customers frequently complain about long wait times on social media or the lack of customer service channel variety, even though their case management data indicates satisfactory response times. This would prompt the company to re-evaluate their customer support strategy and implement changes to reduce wait times.

The integration of unsolicited data into VoC programs should be a high priority for organisations looking to stay relevant. Combining solicited feedback with unsolicited feedback offers a more comprehensive understanding of the customer experience, leading to improved products, services, and organisation trust.