Autoglass shifts social media monitoring up a gear with Tracx

• 
  Brian McKenna

  Business Applications Editor
• Published: 22 Jun 2015 9:30

Autoglass, a vehicle glass repair and replacement company, has shifted its social media monitoring up a gear with its use of Tracx.

Felix Billson, global social media manager at Belron, which is the international company behind Autoglass, says the firm had been doing social monitoring “to a degree” before, but in a siloed way. “With Tracx, we can take more strategic decisions since we can now quantify how much engagement we get on social channels,” he adds.

Belron is using the Tracx platform to help it bring together enterprise social media management across five continents, 21 countries and 16 languages. It has 60 or so workers who use Tracx.

Belron needed a system that would deliver quick and accurate data aggregation and flexible reporting across geographies and departments. It also wanted to be able to benchmark “share of voice” metrics and sentiment against local competitors in each region.

“We knew there was valuable insight to be gained from the global social landscape we operate in, but we had no ability to scale and leverage this intelligence into tangible strategic actions at a local level,” says Billson.

Billson has led Belron's engagement with the Israeli-founded social media analytics company globally. Belron customer care teams have been using Tracx for the past year to monitor social streams from services including Instagram, Reddit, LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

Billson is attuned to the sentiments of an audience, as a former child actor. He is used to seeing things from another’s point of view, as he did in Woof, a children’s television programme about a boy who turned into a dog. He also starred in Bernard’s Watch, a programme about a boy who could stop time using a watch given to him by a gipsy. And he auditioned for Harry Potter, getting down to the final 10 before deciding “marketing was the way to go”.

From Tracx, he says, Belron has obtained a “unified social platform which allows us to leverage internal social networks and experts to give best service to our customers and business partners, aggregating up to a global level”.

The platform also supports the company’s omni-channel programme, reaching customers through new digital means, beyond television and telephone. “These all need to interlink well, given how customer-centric we are,” says Billson. “As we move into this world of the hyper-connected consumer, just being on the phone is not good enough. Our user demographics will increasingly come from generation Y or Z, who are expecting to have digital interaction, and that has to be robust.

“We also wanted to use this technology not only from a customer service perspective, but also to find efficiencies. We service 11 million customers per year globally, and communications are happening far more online than offline. We were not optimising those online conversations to convert opportunities into [glass repair] jobs”.

With Tracx, Belron is achieving 15 times more reach, says Billson. Some 20% of its customers come from online.

“I think there is a competitive advantage here because we are going above customer expectations. If someone tweets, ‘Cracked my windscreen. What a nightmare’, we are able to contact them, engage and, regardless of whether we get business from them, that simple human connection is hugely valuable.

“We also know, on a location-by-location basis, where the hotspots of digital users are, let us say within London. So we can optimise sales and marketing spend and operations, even down to street level. This is so important with the mobile model that we have”.

He and his colleagues have also used Salesforce’s Radian6, and looked at Brandwatch and Falcon Social. “There is a lot out there, which testifies to how important this sort of investment is,” says Billson.