C5i > Case Studies > Leading global software vendor used customer insights from integrated social media analytics for product enhancement

Leading global software vendor used customer insights from integrated social media analytics for product enhancement

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Country

United States

Product

Microsoft products

Tech Stack

Social Media Analytics

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Customer Satisfaction
Productivity Improvements
Innovation Output

Technology Category

Analytics & Modeling - Big Data Analytics
Analytics & Modeling - Real Time Analytics

Applicable Functions

Product Research & Development
Quality Assurance

Use Cases

Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

Data Science Services

About The Customer

The customer in this case study is Microsoft, a leading global software vendor. Microsoft is a multinational technology company that develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services. Its best-known software products are the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft Office suite, and the Internet Explorer and Edge web browsers. Microsoft is one of the world's most valuable companies and is considered one of the Big Five technology companies, alongside Google, Amazon, Apple, and Facebook.

The Challenge

Microsoft needed a solution to more effectively analyze the thousands of conversations taking place online about a wide array of the company’s products. These conversations take place globally 24/7 and in huge volume in Microsoft forums, other forums and across social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, blogs) and in more traditional news sources. While the company was already monitoring some of these sources, there was no one integrating the conversations and providing insights into their relevance to improving product quality and the customer experience.

The Solution

Blueocean Market Intelligence worked with Microsoft to develop a program to listen to social media conversations about Microsoft products with the goal of identifying product quality issues, training gaps and ideas for improving the customer experience. The Social Media Listening Intelligence Program effectively and quickly scans a high volume of online conversations to provide unbiased actionable insights at the right time from the right sources. The program scans approximately 20 million documents daily, including content from blogs, news, forums, Twitter, social networks and YouTube. The approach blends people, process and tools. While relying on search tools and data dashboards, the team goes even further, analyzing content to uncover the story behind the data.

Operational Impact

The Social Media Listening Intelligence Program has had many successes over the years by helping Microsoft teams address customer issues.
The program routinely identifies customer problems and captures reactions to updates and product releases, which helps inform product support and resource allocation strategies.
The program was able to give Microsoft an early warning of customer confusion when the European Union required that consumers must be provided with a choice of internet browsers.
The program was able to identify a problem that customers experienced when they migrated to a newer version of a popular Microsoft product.

Quantitative Benefit

If the content prevented even 2% of those users from calling customer service, it would represent significant savings (350 users X $200 [average help desk call estimate] = $70,000 monthly).
90% of readers were satisfied with the reports overall and two-thirds read them “often” or “consistently.