Uber, the world leader in ride-hailing, has given birth to the term “Uberization”, meaning the transformation of an industry by introducing a different way of using it, especially with mobile technology. Thanks to new technologies (web, mobile, geolocation, broadband, computing time, etc.), new players are transforming traditional industries by creating a new intermediary that allows end-users and service providers to connect directly. By making digital platforms available, these new players reduce costs, connection time, and administrative formalities.
In this context of disintermediation, social media listening, ie. listening to conversations on social media and the internet, makes it possible to not only better understand your market, but to also identify the evolution of needs and new expectations of platform users.
For start-ups that are already "uberizing" their sector, social media listening makes it possible to detect and better understand the following:
For established players, listening to social media, industry intelligence, and trends will enable them to detect upcoming disruptions, new entrants, and key drivers to anticipate changes. In turn, this will help them initiate a digital transformation and develop an updated platform that serves new needs and behaviors. Monitoring how consumers perceive their brand also provides them with valuable insights.
Many sectors of the economy, offering consumer products or services, have been uberized, some by multinationals with great economic and financial power. Traditional players are increasingly challenged by innovative and disruptive new entrants.
Marketing, travel, education, logistics, and fashion are also sectors in the process of becoming uberized.
For a start-up that has already partially disinter-mediated its sector, it is advisable to strengthen your positions by monitoring these four consumer axes:
Expand your scope of monitoring to include sources outside social media, i.e. specialized forums and customer review platforms.
With social media listening tools like Digimind Social, companies can complete their own “customer ticket” service and target key discussion areas, namely: consumer review sites, social networks, forums, and blog comments.
You will then have to monitor the keywords most associated with your brand, product, or service. Given the huge volume of searches on the likes of Google, where 15% of daily queries are unpublished, some keywords and phrases can alert you to positive or negative customer experiences, recurring concerns, or upcoming competitors.
Analyze the expressions most associated with your platform
Social media listening chart displaying top keywords associated with a brand on Google search.
What types of insights would you be able to gather from the content posted by your customers or those of your competitors?
Evaluate key stages of your customer’s journey.
First, you need to build your social listening queries to cover the entire customer experience. This includes the use of an app, contact with the service provider, the progress of its service, after-sales service, billing, key words, and expressions. These queries must cover a wide range of concepts, preferably associated with specific phases of your customer's journey.
Nature of platform user insights
From then on, the types of messages collected will be extremely diverse and potentially instructive, as they will concern online experiences (research, ergonomics, navigation, payment, etc.) as well as offline (quality of service, compliance, relationship with the service provider, advice, etc.). The effectiveness of social media listening for collecting consumer insights depends on the extent and variety of sources, and the finesse of the criteria for analysing all the messages collected, whether by:
Competitive intelligence, one of the great classics of strategic intelligence, is essential in the world of platform disinter-mediation, where new entrants can quickly emerge. It is therefore necessary to not only monitor your current competitors on all the above-mentioned axes, but also your entire sector.
For example, if your company is in the ride-hailing industry, it is important to analyze all the current mobility actors, as well as key discussion themes related to new mobility in order to detect completely new entrants. An effective social media listening platform can automatically distinguish within a large volume of mentions, the different types of entities, such as a company, product, or executive for example.
In order to maintain the upper hand in your industry, you need to be on the lookout for all kinds of technological innovations that can impact the performance of your platform, and those of your competitors. In addition, innovation monitoring concerns not only your industry, but also other key areas, including:
Even industries that are traditionally “ubiquitous” in consumers’ lives can also find themselves faced with technological changes initiated by an entire ecosystem. This includes platforms, GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon), and startups.
Thus, even an industry that is already heavily "ubiquitous" is undergoing constant technological changes initiated by the entire ecosystem (platforms, GAFA, start-ups, etc.). For example, the "Alexa for Hospitality" program for the hotel industry is changing the customer experience for room service and concierge services, an innovation that can in fact be extended to the entire hospitality sector.
Some uberized platforms have come under the spotlight of criticism concerning, in particular:
It is advisable to monitor these topics on news sites and social networks, as well as gather user sentiments through your social listening dashboard. Through extrapolation, it will also be necessary to monitor the evolution of regulations inherent to your sector, as well as other social, fiscal, and legal developments that may signal potential changes.
Monitoring of internal and external environments.
Your social media listening strategies should therefore focus on gathering and analyzing insights on the following areas:
Let’s now examine the angle of a traditional player, whose sector has not yet been uberized or experienced minimal uberization.
In order to avoid this intense disintermediation, it is necessary for firms to anticipate it and arm themselves by adapting their product or service to offer more digitalized functions, even developing a platform.
This is a dilemma that the G7 Taxis in Paris faced with the arrival of Uber. They knew they had to completely rethink their strategy: offer, design, fleet, application, service quality, brand identification, etc. Transformations took place far beyond the digital perspective! G7 was able to retaliate against Uber, but with a "traditional player” who resists uberization, how many suffer or disappear?
In order to overcome digital disruption and transform their businesses, traditional players have to monitor and analyze their markets, and understand their users, especially through social media and forum discussions.
Here are some steps to take:
Whether for your brand or your competitors, social media listening can be deployed to detect the following aspects of your customer's experience:
Looking at the example of traditional car rental companies, there are numerous criticisms, including little to no digital transformation, poor customer service quality, little customization, and heavy process, among others. By responding these criticisms and prioritizing developments to address these gaps in customer experiences, this sector could innovate instead of being overcome by an influx of disruptors.
How can brands apply these consumer insights?
This focus of the customer experience must also constitute the "common thread" of other types of monitoring and listening.
Which applications and platforms pose a significant opportunity or threat to your company? Which technologies or processes are missing or can be improved (e.g. centralization of customer data for a seamless experience between your website, mobile application, and the internal system of your branch network), and which are present in other sectors?
Which types of direct and indirect competitors or services are you being compared to? For example, ride-hailing companies may want to consider rental services for trains, cars, planes, or carpools by individuals.
The aim here is to detect changes and future standards, laws, and regulations that may challenge your business model and, conversely, generate platform development opportunities.
As we can see, the social media listening axes of established companies are very similar to those of a start-up that has already disinter-mediated its industry. The difference is timing. It is necessary to be aware of the need to collect this information early, in order to start the necessary transformations and mutations as quickly as possible, based on analyses fed by all detected insights.