Creating brand advocates through excellent customer service has been a key tenant of Pandora since it's inception in 2004. Last year Pandora's in-house Listener Advocate team responded to over 1 million emails, averaging over 86K emails per month; an effort to respond to 100% of those who emailed.
For the past six years Pandora's Twitter and Facebook pages have been key to expanding this tenant into the new age of communication. We have vibrant, growing communities of 312K followers on Twitter and 7.2M fans on Facebook. A smaller subset of five Listener Advocates, the social support team, respondedto an average of 18K tweets and Facebook posts each month in 2014, up to 45% of incoming tweets to Pandora's @pandora_radio handle, resulting in 74% of messages we receive having a positive sentiment. Working seven days a week, the team strives for one-hour response time during business hours (8am – 6pm PST) and 24 hours for messages received outside of that. The team helps listeners craft uniquely personalized listening experiences, troubleshoot issues, connect with artists and make new discoveries. Our goal on @Pandora_Radio is to nurture an active community of music lovers by directly engaging with them on all topics surrounding music and Pandora. Our in-house social support team creates a conversation with our community that is just as personalized as their listening experience.
Pandora now (as of December 2014) has 81.5 million active monthly listeners. Active engagement with listeners and building brand advocates has been a consistent element of the company's strategy.. Customer service has grown from email into community building and engagement in social media. The effort put forward by Pandora's Listener Community Advocates directly mirrors to the service's personalized nature and has contributed to the exceptional word of mouth growth of the company. All of our support team sits in Pandora's main Oakland office and closely in touch with all facets of the company creating a situation where our listeners get the best social support possible and can truly have an impact on the service.
