Please welcome to the stage, Retriever Listen!

The product, Retriever Listen, is a brand new tool for monitoring, listening and analyzing social media – created from scratch in close collaboration with our customers.

Johanna Strande is one of our analytics and product experts here at Retriever, and she has been responsible of  developing Listen. In this blog post, she shares her thoughts on the new product and gives us some insight into the unique development process!

So, Retriever Listen is, as we mentioned, a completely new tool developed for monitoring, listening to and analyzing social media. What makes this launch so special is that the product is created together with our clients. We wanted to launch a product that would give our customers exactly what they need and want. Johanna and her team realized that to do so, it wouldn't be enough to develop our already existing products and then try to match them to our customers' needs. If they were to truly create something new, they'd have to start from square one and work side by side with our customers all the way. And now, by doing so, they've been able to develop each and every part of the tool based on the actual needs instead of trying to fit it all into an already existing framework.

So, what does that mean? What has the unique process resulted in, and how can it benefit our customers?

– First of all, the tool is incredibly intuitively designed. An essential part of the development of Listen has been designing the tool so it’s simple to use, no matter what your previous experiences and knowledge are. User-friendliness is incredibly important to both our clients and us; you shouldn't have to have a degree in analytics to read and understand the information presented in the system. To us, it's crucial that our customers are comfortable working with the system on their own. The more independent they are, the more efficient their work becomes – which in turn leads to them saving time while also getting quicker and better results.

When talking to our customers, we quickly noticed a need for useful statistics and target group data. Retriever Listen uses artificial intelligence to interpret and measure the data we have access to. This way, we are able to meticulously compare our customers' brands to their competitors or other benchmark actors on social media with the help of Retriever Listen's smart data interpretation functions. Consequently, our customers can easily understand what others are doing differently and how they can learn from that to improve their own results. Artificial intelligence also allows us to measure if the things written about the brand online are positive or negative and help our customers understand what they need to do to improve their situation.

This intuitive way of interpreting data and presenting precisely the information and statistics that our customers actually need – in a way that they can easily understand – makes Retriever Listen unique. Finding the information you need and using it in ways that give you valuable insights that can be used and transformed into business value should be easy. With Retriever Listen, it is.

What do you think our customers will appreciate most with the new tool?

–One of the things we noticed was really appreciated during the beta testing of Listen was the market part of the tool. That's basically the part of Retriever Listen that you can use to compare yourself to your competitors or other actors on the market who you've noticed are doing really well. Listen breaks down all the data and activity into detail and can easily show you the differences side by side. Simply put, it's a new way of looking at the same data, resulting in brand new insights. And why is that so important? Well, if you want to know how good you actually are, you need to compare yourself to something else.

If, for example, a client has been struggling with their Instagram results, but a competitor seems to be thriving, our client can easily use Listen to compare their competitor's content and activity with their own and see what the differences actually are. Then, hopefully, they'll be able to change and improve their own results. It's also possible to compare your results with results from previous campaigns or content, for example, if one campaign had great results and the other didn't. With Retriever Listen, you're able to quickly see what the differences were so that you can optimize the content you produce in the future.

When is Retriever Listen expected to launch?

–The product's first version will be released at the end of this month and will go live for many of our existing customer in all the Nordic countries. So keep an eye out for that!