L'Oréal pursues "social listening" in US

NEW YORK: L'Oréal, the cosmetics giant, is attempting to develop its "social listening" capabilities in the US, and thus enhance engagement levels with shoppers in the country.

As part of a scheme called "The Voice of Beauty", seeking to build "sustainable relationships" with consumers, the firm has asked Clarabridge, the analytics group, to provide a range of online tools.

These systems will allow for real time monitoring of the buzz about the 27 brands in L'Oréal's portfolio from social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, as well as blogs and user or professional reviews.

According to the company, this has become essential if it is to "efficiently and accurately analyse" the data drawn from the "hundreds of thousands" of comments uploaded every day.

"Social media is all about real time, so we need to react in real time when it comes to customer engagement and Clarabridge helps us achieve this goal," Celine Dumais, vice president of L'Oréal USA's consumer care center, said.

Other benefits of the system being deployed by L'Oréal include automating, the process of choosing which posts need additional analysis or a response, and sending them to the appropriate employee.

Comments are sent to a dedicated "Command Centre", where team members will assess the message concerned, with staff directly replying to individuals if required.

In order to make further use of the data yielded from the web, L'Oréal has the power to create customised dashboards tracking key brand metrics.

As the company's in-house experts are taking responsibility for handling the information received, it also believes the research process will be more "transparent" than if using a third party.

"We expect to see significant ROI through our 'Voice of Beauty' mission and, most importantly, we expect to continuously improve our relationship with our customers - something you can't put a price on," said Dumais. 

Data sourced from L'Oréal; additional content by Warc staff, 3 August 2012

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