Why monitoring visual content on social media is important for customer service

It’s no secret that when it comes to volume, text has given way to visual content on social media platforms. Primarily visual social networks such as Instagram and YouTube continue to acquire more daily users, with these users visiting the platform more frequently and collectively uploading billions of photos and videos every day.

Moreover, social networks with algorithmic feeds, such as Facebook and Twitter, have been prioritizing visual content over text-only content, which in turn earns image-based posts higher engagement.

Such volumes of visual content become increasingly difficult to monitor for customer service brands, especially if the tools at your disposal only look for written content. Social media users often skip captions, tags or any other kinds of explicit brand association in their image posts. However, since those image posts may still be earning high engagement and reach, it’s vital for brands to be aware of such 'implicit' mentions.

Images also provide valuable context to the written contents of the post. A post that may be evaluated as praise could in fact be veiled criticism, but one that cannot be detected by ordinary sentiment analysis tools that are 'blind' to visual content.

If you’re a customer-focused brand, it’s worth investing into a social media monitoring system with sophisticated image recognition capabilities to avoid missing out on that context. This can help you assess a potentially problematic situation quickly and efficiently, and even catch wind of customer pain points before they reach out with their concerns. Awareness of visual mentions can help you collect customer feedback, address service gaps, and improve existing products or services based on their real-life use cases.

Let’s take a look at a few examples of how user-generated visual content can be leveraged for excellent customer service.

Use visual mentions to collect better customer feedback

Analysis of the visual content surrounding your brand can help you get a better idea of your customers’ reactions – whether it’s an evaluation of your new product line, impressions from a rebrand or suggestions for further improvement. Finding such cases of user-generated content can also help you become more proactive in customer interactions and create opportunities to surprise and delight your customers.

Let’s take a look at the example of aeroplane food. Meals are an important part of customer experience during air travel. Plus, food pictures make up one of the oldest and most common types of social media content. So why not make those photos work for you? Using photos of meals, you can gauge the customer satisfaction level with this essential part of customer service for airlines.

In this example, we’ve browsed through some photos from United Airlines travellers.

Pro tip: If you have access to a tool with robust image recognition that can identify separate objects, people and scenes, you can filter visual content based on the area you want to explore. In this case, we sorted by 'food' in the Object section of YouScan’s Visual Insights filter to view photos of food associated with an airline.

In this example, the first user is excited about the introduction of a new cuisine to the menu. But the second one seems to be unsure whether others would like this option. If this introduction were a test launch, you could collect feedback from customers in real-time by browsing visual mentions.

Photos from your customers also provide more context for their written feedback.

These two users were not pleased with their meals. While the tone of their message is quite neutral, it’s not until you see the images associated with the tweet that you see the dissatisfactio with the meal. Such subtleties can only be gleaned through image research

By picking up on complex sentiment in your brand mentions, you can create opportunities to delight your customers and tailor your products and services to their unique needs.

Browse customer photos to address service gaps

You can also browse through objects that frequently show up in your visual mentions to reveal potential gaps in service. This is particularly relevant for companies where an object is often part of the offering, but not the main attraction.

For example, in certain settings, people may be taking photos of their computer screens to illustrate Internet connection issues.

Pro tip: Look for objects like “computers” or “screen” using your image recognition tool if you want to monitor for technology issues.

In this example, we look at a popular hospitality service, Airbnb.

For a home-sharing platform like Airbnb, amenities such as the Internet connection and wi-fi signal are crucial to the ratings and preference of their hosts.

A lot of similar user-generated visual mentions can be a sign of a service gap. Being aware of these issues through diligent social media monitoring can help you swiftly address the individual situations and work on creating solutions to bridge the gap.

Improve products and workflows based on real-life use cases

Conducting a thorough visual analysis of your brand mentions can also help you find potential inefficiencies in your current workflows.

For example, you could be conducting an audit of a specific step in your service – let’s use the example of delivery notices from FedEx, a multinational courier service provider. In addition to problem-solving individual customer cases, image analysis allows you to ask bigger questions about workflows for the entire company or franchise.

If you were only analyzing written content, you might not find a lot of references to delivery notices specifically, except for maybe their presence or absence. But with image recognition, you can see real examples of the kinds of notices your customers receive.

Pro tip: Using an object recognition tool such as Visual Insights, you can filter your brand mentions by “document” to view what delivery notices left by couriers around the world might look like, and whether there is room for improvement.

You might find that some notices are not getting filled out properly.

There might also be surprising cases preventing delivery.

Identifying customer complaints through photos or screenshots of delivery notices can also help you reduce response times for your customer service team, and make sure no complaint gets missed.

Decrease your response times with integrations

Managing visual content is no different from managing text mentions when it comes to customer service – response time still matters.

YouScan will alert you on all the mentions as soon as they’re published and will instantly turn them into tickets into your CRM or helpdesk system. YouScan supports integrations with the best industry software - bpm’online, Zendesk, Freshdesk etc. You can configure YouScan to send all the mentions of your brand or send only some kind of mentions according to the specified rules. This will save you precious time switching between apps and eliminate the probability of any data silos.

What’s more, you can integrate YouScan with the top messaging systems, such as Slack and Telegram and keep a finger on the pulse of your business all the time.

YouScan is constantly working on the expansion of its out-of-the-box integration capabilities. Thanks to the Webhook integration, it is possible to connect YouScan with virtually any third-party system you need.

You can set up Visual Insights filters and assign your Customer Service or Customer Success teams to monitor user-generated visual content. This tool allows you to reap the full benefit of image analysis for customer service.

Conclusion

Millions of images and videos are being published on social media every day, and all this visual content has a huge influence on brand reputation. With no image recognition in your customer service toolbox, you risk missing out on opportunities to address complaints and delight your customers.

A social media monitoring tool with image recognition capabilities such as YouScan can help you collect meaningful customer feedback, address service gaps, and improve existing products or services based on their real-life use cases. By linking your YouScan and CRM/Helpdesk workflows, you can deliver outstanding customer service without your customer having to say (or write!) a word.

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