"Social media listening has given us invaluable real-time insights about our customers offering greater immediacy and depth than traditional methods such as surveys. The traditional way is a very proactive way of understanding insights whereas what we're trying to do is to complement that through a very passive way: what people are already saying, and trying to find insights from there."
Samsonite Group runs two of the best-known brands in travel across 13 markets in APAC and the Middle East, where customers talk about their luggage on everything from Instagram to Xiaohongshu. Working with Onclusive, the regional team turned roughly 50,000 monthly mentions into a system that now answers complaints within a day, and which has influenced product change too.
The challenge: 50,000 monthly mentions, very little signal
Samsonite’s regional team was watching conversations across 13 markets in several languages, on platforms that behave nothing like each other. Instagram sits alongside Xiaohongshu, WeChat and Douyin, and the volume ran to around 50,000 mentions a month.
Most of what came through was promotional noise. Genuine complaints about repair times or pricing were landing in the same feed as influencer posts and reseller chatter, and by the time anyone spotted a pattern the damage was already done. Customer care was reacting rather than anticipating, product teams were missing pain points entirely, and China’s platform ecosystem sat outside the reach of standard monitoring tools altogether.
By the numbers
50,000
Social mentions a month across the region
13
Markets monitored, in multiple languages
24 hours
Current response time to a customer complaint
7 days a week
Continuous coverage, including China-specific platforms
The solution: AI monitoring with a human check every morning
Samsonite and Onclusive built the program on three components, deliberately combining automated coverage with the expertise of people who know the markets.
- Region-wide listening, including the platforms most tools miss. Onclusive Social tracks brand conversation across all 13 markets, with specialist local partnerships extending coverage into China’s closed platform ecosystem. This closed an important blind spot that the team had been grappling with.
- A daily human validation pass. Every morning, regional analysts go through the alerts by hand, strip out the promotional noise and pass on only what a team can actually act on. This is the step that turns volume into something useful.
- Reporting built around who needs it. Customer service teams get daily alerts, regional leadership gets a weekly summary, marketing and product get monthly trend reports, and executive leadership gets a quarterly strategic review.
The results: complaints answered in a day, products changed
Business impact
- Complaints about repair delays led to a new replacement policy with time-bound guarantees
- Pricing concerns in one major market fed into reduced component costs and wider warranty coverage
- A gap in brand perception in a premium market prompted Samsonite to open a flagship store in a high-end retail district
- In India, the Head of Customer Care rebuilt the operation around social insight and took on direct case management for the first time
Operational impact
- Customer complaints are now answered within 24 hours
- Continuous monitoring can happen seven days a week across all 13 markets
- Coverage of China’s most-used social platforms, where the brand previously had none
Why Onclusive
Multi-market brands rarely struggle to collect social data. Instead, they struggle to work out which fraction of it matters, particularly across languages and platforms that behave differently from one another. Onclusive Social handles the collection, and our regional analysts do the filtering, which is what turns a monitoring feed into something a customer care or product team can act on the same day.
Ready to turn social noise into decisions your teams can act on?
- Monitor brand conversation across complex, multilingual markets, including the platforms most tools cannot reach
- Separate genuine customer feedback from promotional noise, every day
- Get the right intelligence to the right team at a cadence that suits them
- Use what customers are already saying to shape product, pricing and service
FAQs
How does Samsonite monitor social media across 13 different markets?
Samsonite uses Onclusive Social to track brand conversation across all 13 of its APAC and Middle East markets, with local partnerships extending coverage into China’s platforms. Regional analysts then validate the alerts manually each morning, so teams only see feedback that is genuinely relevant to them.
Can social listening tools cover Chinese platforms like Xiaohongshu, WeChat and Douyin?
Standard monitoring tools generally cannot reach China’s closed platform ecosystem. Onclusive covers it through specialist local partnerships, which is how Samsonite closed what had been a significant blind spot in one of its most important regions.
What is the difference between social listening and social monitoring?
Monitoring tells you what is being said and how often. Listening is what happens when someone interprets it: separating noise from signal, spotting patterns across markets, and turning that into a decision a product or service team can act on. Samsonite’s program is built around the second of these.
Download the Samsonite case study here:
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