Customer Faithful launches new Lifelines™ for social media

NEW PRODUCT RELEASE - Since their release in 2010, Customer Faithful's popular Lifelines™ research studies have become known for their innovative use of conversational techniques, uncovering experiences and stories of patients and carers to pinpoint service improvement needs.

Launching August 1st, Customer Faithful will offer a companion tool, Lifelines Social Landscapes, using social media content to explore how people's shared experiences can build up a picture of healthcare needs, habits and sentiment across geographies and different social groups.

Lifelines Social Landscapes will adopt similar interpretation and coding techniques as those developed for the original Lifelines™ methodology. But powered by the latest generation of social media software offering smart algorithms and fuzzy logic, Lifelines Social Landscapes can represent the views of thousands of participants, and so provide an alternative approach to experience mapping.

"Until recently, although social media monitoring has been quicker to conduct than face-to-face methods, we have been frustrated and disappointed by it" says Rick Harris, Founder of Customer Faithful. "The data itself has been compelling, but the tools and techniques available to explore, analyse and interpret it have simply not been good enough. In particular, we found the quality of automated analysis to be inaccurate, with too much noise like spam, promotion and off-topic content, and not enough ‘signal’.

"Being able to code peoples' comments both for emotion as well as subject topic is vital for our clients, and so we have chosen to wait until we have software that is capable of handling our analysis needs as well as the visual reporting options to display it in a compelling format. It's hugely exciting to finally get to a point where we can offer this kind of service to our clients, as we've known for some time that it's something they're interested in."

Lifelines Social Landscapes has some advantages over its more established cousin, including faster set-up and delivery times, in a matter of weeks instead of months. It also has lower costs than the more medium-term Lifelines™ methodology.

"It will really depend upon the research and business objectives of the client as to which Lifelines product will be more suitable," explains Harris. "We expect the depth and detail of a traditional Lifelines™ project is still going to be the preferred option for many of our clients, especially where we're seeking a retrospective understanding of an experience going back across a number of years. But for very topical issues, or where we're looking to see how conversations and attitudes develop across a community, Lifelines Social Landscapes has a lot to offer as a standalone tool."

Lifelines Social Landscapes launches in the UK on August 1st, and internationally from September 11th.

For enquiries, contact info@customerfaithful.com