Tool Review: Akosha OneDirect

Social Samosa reviewed Akosha, OneDirect, as a part of their tool review series. Discover how the social CRM platform helps unlock the voice of a brand’s social customer.

Customer relationship management (CRM) became a social media industry hot potato while some top brands were giving it a pass. The CRM executive could be easily cheesed off, if the process is manual.

The social CRM process involves skill for listening, more so from relevant audience; responding, on time by the right department; being adaptive, of all social platforms; deriving analysis, to take ROI driven decisions; tracking, the right keywords and collecting, adequate customer information.

Technology effectively aids this process as opposed to manual sorting. Akosha, One Direct, one of the many technologically advanced Social CRM tool, sorts out online mentions and converts them into intelligent conversations.

40% of the total complaints are not on Facebook and Twitter. It is difficult to create a mechanism to monitor these complaints and feedback. The answer lies in enabling technology and a response team, responding at the same level of urgency, as on social media. This technology uses algorithmic software, such as Indic Crawler by Akosha’s OneDirect Suite, specifically built to track such complaints from Indian complaint websites.

The Review

• Platform Agnostic

Akosha, OneDirect can be integrated with any platform; the tool pulls Facebook and Twitter algorithms as well as brand owned channels. The complaints are stored on the tool dashboard, each tagged with platform source, time stamp and complainer’s impact score.

The impact score suggests the importance of the complaint and is calculated on the basis of follower count; tweet count; twitter activity, and content analysis. It shows you the potential impact of an author, site or mention. It’s a logarithmic scale between 0-100 normalized for your data to help you find what’s most interesting.  

Our take: The web can be maddening. But this is like a magic wand, bringing everything you specifically need to look into, at one place. The impact score is helpful since it rates the complainer on priority list. This can help avoid a big PR crisis.

- Response Management

Most CRM tools in the market are listening tools. However, Akosha, One Direct, creates a differentiation within its offerings, by being a response management tool. Here are a few unique features that make life easy!

• Complaints can be auto-assigned to various CRM executives/departments in the organization from the tool dashboard.

• Response can be drafted and posted from the dashboard itself, since the platforms are seamlessly integrated. You can also expect a thread of conversation from Twitter, pulled straight on the dashboard.

• Reminders can be set using the Remind Me notification system, allowing moderators to keep track of query intervals.

Our take: Response management is crucial, considering the viral nature of complaints. Depending on the timing of the response, a social media crisis can be avoided. Hence, we rate Remind Me as an excellent feature. The fact that a moderator gets to save time by responding within the dashboard is second best thing.

• Everything should be ROI driven

Unless an activity is ROI driven, it is not worth spending time on. The tool indulges the user with amazing graphs; incoming online mentions and their sources; Facebook and Twitter data and engagement; influence of top authors, and sentiment analysis.

Our take: Backing CRM tactics with data driven research is a total win. For instance, if the heat map suggests that the sentiment is way off its usual negative mark, the CRM team can be on high alert. Following this, a crisis can be resolved by activating brand advocates, which again come handy with the tool. Top authors who have maximum influence on a brand’s customers can be reached out to.

What’s Unique?

An in-built natural language processor (NLP) tool, Indic Crawler, tracks online mentions in the Indian context. Hinglish language, certain Hindi words are made competent.

Thumbs up!

Every time customers explicitly tell you why they’re unhappy with your business, they are providing you with a lifeline to keep them with your brand. Access to these channels could be made as easy and frictionless as possible for the customers. Do make an effort to reach out when they do. Akosha OneDirect Customer Experience management Suite helps you in doing that.