We constantly work for a better shopping experience, integrate more and more channels into the customer journey, and improve our personas. But it feels like a one way road.
Social media are not only an important channel to reach our customers. They also offer an A1 channel to learn what they think about our furniture. In other words, whether our efforts have the desired effect or not.
But social media also comes with a problem: Images are the preferred format to post things about our brand. And that's the dilemma: Images do not "tell" whether they carry positive or negative impressions.
We tried to get off this dilemma and a step closer to the opinions and thoughts of our customers by hiring temporary staff. Our staff is doing a great but manual job to search and recognize positive and negative social media posts.
Are we working in the year one?
On the one hand, we manage to leave mere socio-demographic customer patterns behind, and on the other hand, we shall rely on a costly and time-consuming procedure to sort out fruitful efforts.
I heard about "visual listening" and it seems to be a suitable way out of my dilemma. But then, for a short moment, I came across the next barrier: Our preferred commerce platform does not support this feature, and they told me that it's not on their road map.
When I searched on for a loophole, I read about "the template way". It is an interesting topic by its own, and, among all the different templates, there is one made for visual listening. Problem solved.