And why did you choose Coosto?
Lara: “We did a comparison like we test everything here, haha! We started with a shortlist of six providers, three of which we tested based on our requirements in a trial period of three months. We chose Coosto, mainly because of the monitoring. We want to see what is happening in society and with more than 390,000 sources in Coosto this is clearly visible. We use a lot of terms at the same time, luckily you can add that yourself as a user. There are many tools where you can't add this yourself, which is absurd - it happens in real time !
Based on what comes out of the search results, we decide as a team whether we are going to act on it or not. In order to do this, we first delve deeper into the search results, to see if it is actually relevant for us to act on them. This can be done very easily and clearly in Coosto.”
This conversation has been tagged with 'compliment' by the Consumers' Association web care team.
After an explanation of all the search terms, I feel a bit dizzy: in addition to their own name, mentions and hashtags that are responded to, the Consumers' Association also searches for broad terms such as 'complaint', 'dtv', 'bad' and 'fail' and for well-known companies. They then respond to a tweet and try to provoke a dialogue. The trial period showed that they achieve more if a conversation arises instead of a simple question and answer. Romy explains: "We do want to be a human account, so we try to advise tweeters immediately and otherwise we refer them to something like the complaints compass or our website ."
Impact on business not yet clear
But will it stop there, or will there be a process afterwards? Lara talks about singapore mobile phone number list her ambitions: “Coosto has a webcare function that allows you to see the history of our conversations with consumers. We want to link these consumers and the conversations to SAP, so that we can keep track of where we have had contact and what kind of contact. But that link is not there yet and I see no point in manual solutions. We would like to have that, so a future tool should really have that.”
I know the Consumers' Association as people on the phone who stop after a minute if you turn out not to be a paying member.
Would you also like to make this distinction in webcare, or does the Consumers' Association give away free advice?
Romy: “We always give advice, even if people are not members. But because of the nature of Twitter, you can’t give very detailed answers, you really have to call – that’s where you gain the most. Hopefully, the tweeters will become ambassadors and tell others.”
When I ask whether it might even generate new members after the webcare team has given free advice on Twitter, Romy responds: “Well, many people think we know everything, while we mainly focus on consumer law. In such cases, we refer people to other sources or parties. So in that sense, webcare helps, in addition to the campaigns, to make clear what we are doing. It creates value and certainly contributes to our image.”