General Archives – Page 6 of 18

Customer Experience in the Era of Product-Led Growth

Executives and end-users look for different things when choosing software products. An executive, for example, might be more interested in ROI and scalability, while the end-user often cares more about just getting their work done, quickly and easily.

There was a time when executives were the gatekeepers who decided which B2B software products their companies purchased while the end-user experience took a back seat—but that era has ended. Today, you’ve got to win over your end-users to gain a foothold in an organization and give your product a fighting chance.

What does this look like? Picture Sophie, an Accounting Manager who uses the free version of Zoom to chat with her brother in Spain. She prefers Zoom over Skype, so she recommends it at work. The department tries it out, likes it, and begins using the paid version. Eventually, other departments try Zoom and it gains company-wide adoption. Cut to Zoom’s IPO in 2019, and global adoption in the wake of the pandemic.

What is Product-Led Growth?

A Product-Led Growth (PLG) model focuses on the end user’s needs when developing products, crafting education and support strategies, and shaping user experience.

“Growth in a PLG business comes from consistently fine-tuning the product experience to optimize the rate at which new users activate, convert, and expand in the product. Ideally, these improvements start to compound over time, allowing PLG businesses to accelerate growth as they scale (unlike traditional SaaS businesses). Customer feedback is critical to prioritizing the areas that will make the biggest difference to your customers.”
— Kyle Poyar, Market Strategist, OpenView

Where end users rule, customer experience is everything

Welcome to the end-user era, a time when users (rather than CIOs or other executives) introduce SaaS products to organizations and drive product adoption. If you want to succeed as a SaaS company in the end-user era, you need to find ways to eliminate end-user pain points and create a seamless experience.

Word of mouth drives new customer acquisition. Then viral adoption within a company increases customer lifetime value. This is a powerful combination. In recent years, PLG is how many of the most successful SaaS companies have rocketed to IPO. Think Zoom, Slack, Hubspot, and Atlassian.

If you’re at a company that takes a traditional approach to CX—tinkering around the edges, nudging the product team to “improve customer experience”—get ready for a big change. Once your C-Suite or VP of Product embraces Product-Led Growth, the spotlight will be on customer feedback in all forms. CX metrics will drive cross-functional alignment and priorities.

The relationship between CX and Product-Led Growth

Despite the name, Product-Led Growth is not solely the domain of the Product team. Customer experience is an integral part of any PLG strategy. “If there is a challenge in implementing Product-Led Growth, it is actually achieving alignment across and within teams along with monitoring the multiple digital and physical touchpoints affecting customer experience,” says Despina Exadaktylou, Director of Programs, Product-Led Growth Hub, the world’s first PLG academy.

Product Teams are taking note and initiating collaboration.

“Customer Experience focuses on brand loyalty and customers’ likelihood to recommend. User Experience [within a Product team] focuses on the immediacy of user interaction with your product. But the lines between them have blurred as the role of the UX researcher and the tools in our toolkit have expanded beyond the narrow focus of the user’s engagement with the user interface, “ says Carol Barnum, Director of User Research and Founding Partner at UX Firm. She counsels product teams by saying, “If you are siloed within a UX group that isn’t engaging with CX stakeholders, seek opportunities to … collaborate with them. We all want the same thing—great user experiences and strong loyalty to brand.”

Source: UXMatters

Kieran Flanagan, VP of Marketing and Growth at Hubspot, takes this one step further. “To excel and thrive in a product-led company, you must be great at cross-functional collaboration,” says Kieran “A lot of the benefits that [PLG] has brought to companies is distilling your funnel down to these very concise metrics and the ones that actually matter.”

The importance of end user feedback

In the Product-Led Growth era, a seamless end user journey is paramount–from acquisition to advocate. As a result, product teams are hungry for data about user experience inside and outside of the product. Product managers and UX teams need to understand anything that is slowing end users down, so they can figure out how product design can alleviate that friction.

CX professionals and front line teams are skilled at using established CX metrics to monitor loyalty and gather feedback. They have valuable information about end user pain at critical touchpoints in the SaaS user journey, including:

- Onboarding experience
- Support experience
- Product or feature adoption

Creating Alignment

Product-Led Growth success demands shared accountability for metrics, so be ready to co-create a plan. Product teams benefit from the customer journey insight that CX teams (along with Success, Support, Sales and Marketing) bring to the collaboration. CX champions finally have the kind of cross-functional partnership that they’ve been seeking all along.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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10 Things Every SaaS Business Should Know About Net Promoter Score

So you’ve been reading up on Net Promoter Score. Your colleagues in the SaaS world tell you that it’s the best way to take your customers’ pulse. You’ve seen a few case studies claiming it’s the only number you need to measure.

It’s true that Net Promoter Score is a great way to engage with your customers and solicit tons of feedback. But it’s also true that there are quite a few nuances that result in a successful survey program.

As a SaaS company with SaaS customers like Zoom, DocuSign and Hubspot, we have a unique perspective on NPS in cloud software. To make the most of your time and energy, we’ve put together this list of things SaaS businesses should know before they dive into the NPS world. Read More…

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What Customer Success means now, during the COVID-19 pandemic

Three years ago, I wrote a post on “How to start a customer success program from scratch” and outlined all the reasons to do so:

The ROI from increased referrals, cross-sells and upsells
The potential for a customer success program to become a “growth engine”
The sheer impact of returning revenue and customer lifetime value
The ‘free marketing’ of brand advocacy

And the list goes on. But, we’ve all had some paradigm shifts recently, haven’t we? So I’m not going to talk about what customer success can do for you. Because it’s not about you. It’s never been about you. It’s always been about other people.

What they need most, and what they need right now.

I predict that the companies that will grow from the Covid-19 pandemic crisis are the ones who deeply, genuinely care about their customers’ wellbeing. Not just their success.

How are your customers feeling right now? And how can you support them?

We can answer the first question ourselves — we’re all feeling isolated, lonely, cut-off, mournful, insecure, anxious. Maybe our kids/partners/dogs/cats are driving us a little crazy at this point. Maybe we’re self-isolating alone and wish we had kids/partners/dogs/cats around.

What we need most right now is to feel connected and cared about. And I’ve seen two companies step up to meet this need in vastly different ways.

[Yes, if we were to put traditional “Customer Success” verbiage around this, we’d say “what success looks like for your customer right now is to *feel* less alone. Not to get their work done faster. Not to multi-task with better focus. But to *feel* connected.]

Community Building

When these lockdowns started, many of us shared memes that read: “Check on your extravert friends… they’re NOT okay!”

As time dragged on, however, even the introverts among us started to crave human connection. Human beings thrive on community, and you may be in a unique position to give it to them.

Wootric held informal CX “office hours” via Zoom for CS and CX professionals who want to offer each other support, ask questions and compare notes on how they’re adapting (or anything else, for that matter).

“I’m part of an online community of marketing leaders. There’s something incredibly valuable about being with others who are facing the same challenges that I am, so offering that kind of forum to leaders in the CS/CX trenches became a priority for me, ” says Lisa Abbott, VP Marketing at Wootric.

On the last CX Office Hour call, a Customer Success professional at a startup shared that she was feeling overwhelmed after losing her team and being placed on the front lines, dealing directly with customers. Members of our newly formed community jumped in with advice on how to prioritize and set boundaries, helping her get through it while maintaining her sanity.

Consider creating a similar forum for your customers—a live video conference where they can come together, connect, and share their wisdom and support.

Be there for a chat

I got an email last week from one of my favorite online companies, Greetabl, a service that sends beautifully packaged thoughtful gifts. I’ve been using them for years to cheer up friends from afar or show appreciation to clients and colleagues, and I didn’t think I could love them more, until I found this in my inbox:

Hey there Greetabl Insider,

Brittany from Greetabl here (you might recognize my name from Greetabl’s marketing emails). If you saw Joe’s note on Medium over the weekend, you know that Team Greetabl has cleared our calendars of all scheduled meetings and we’re reaching out to our people to see if they want to talk. About anything.

There’s a lot of uncertainty right now and social distancing can get lonely FAST, so I just wanted to let you know I’m here to talk. No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind. Drop some time on my calendar if you want to chat.

Best,

Brittany

Director of Marketing

Joe Fischer, Greetabl’s CEO, had everyone clear their calendars of their regularly scheduled meetings and instead, reach out to talk to people. Brittany, their Director of Marketing, sent out this charming email, and my favorite part is “No sales pitch, no agenda; just a virtual coffee meeting to talk about whatever’s on your mind.”

My friend, copywriter Lauren Van Mullem, took her up on this offer and says “Chatting with Brittany was the highlight of last week for me. We just hopped on a video chat, and we were both in our comfy sweaters, and just talked about life, these weird times, and some of the best and worst things we’ve seen from companies right now. It felt like talking to a friend, but almost better in a way. Our social circles are sort of confined right now. You don’t get a chance to talk with a stranger very often these days. So having a chance to connect with someone I didn’t know was really special. I can’t wait for a chance to repay that kindness by sending Greetabls, especially since I know that wasn’t the point of the call at all.”

SaaS companies are uniquely positioned to help

SaaS companies of all sizes have something to offer that even the big companies don’t have: Many of us are used to working remotely and using online tools to stay focused and connected at scale. We’re agile by nature, able to navigate quickly-changing environments. We’re adept at creative problem-solving, finding opportunities in challenges, and listening – really listening – to what our clients need.

Those are life skills not everyone has right now.

So now, more than ever, listen to your customers and your community.

Create the solutions they need right now.

Give them the frictionless customer journeys that get them where they need to go under the current, world-upside-down, circumstances. And don’t assume their “ideal outcome” this month is the same as it was just a few weeks ago. Everything has changed.

And above all: Reach out. Genuinely. Meaningfully. Human to human. Because generosity and human connection are what’s really going to get us all through this.

What can you do as a CSM right now?

Back to Customer Success – what can you do as a Customer Success Manager to support your customers during COVID-19?

Focus on empathizing with your customers and doubling-down on retention.

Because in times of crisis, existing customers are the lifeblood of your SaaS company.

Four questions to ask your customers

Be proactive. Reach out and get the conversation started. How to begin? Recently, on a CX Office Hour call, customer experience thought leader Melinda Gonzales suggested that CSMs ask every customer these questions:

How are you doing, personally?
What is the impact of the pandemic on your business?
How do you think it will impact your plans for 2020?
How can we help?

And, many clients right now are ranking their spending to decide what gets cut. Where your company lands on that list may depend on…

Empathy

How can you show empathy for your clients? Both personally, individually, and for their businesses? What solutions might greater empathy lead to? Here are some options to consider:

Being open to negotiating contract terms – especially payment terms.
Offering a short-term discount.
Show your customer how they can get more value from your product without spending another dollar. Are there features they are paying for but not using? Can you share a best practice that will help them see more success?
Presenting downgrade options from a Customer Success standpoint (give them what they need to succeed right now, with the awareness that this may mean reducing spend).

Sure, will a few opportunists try to use COVID-19 as an excuse to negotiate a better deal? Maybe. And if you get one of those, present the “downgrade” option and make it very clear what that means in terms of reduction of services and reduction of results.

But for most customers, give them the benefit of the doubt. So many industries and individuals are struggling right now. And the long-term ROI of empathy is worth some short-term sacrifices.

What you choose to do right now can ignite and cultivate long-term, lucrative relationships in the future.

And for our CSM friends and clients, can we just say: We understand how hard this time is for you too.

You may not be able to do your best work right now, or afford the best tools to support your work. You may have dogs/kids/spouses/cats interrupting your client calls. You may be feeling what we’re all feeling — frustration, helplessness, fatigue, fear for the future.

Take it easy on yourself if you can. Upsells aren’t likely to happen right now, and that’s okay.

But your core goal remains the same: Helping your customers reach the results they need, by whatever means necessary.

Measure and improve customer experience. Get Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score microsurvey feedback with InMoment.

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Understand how your team is doing with free employee pulse resources from Wootric

RESPONDING TO COVID-19

Everything has changed. How are your people doing?

Understanding how your employees are feeling right now has never been more important, nor more difficult.

Let us help.

Wootric is offering free employee pulse tools to help you stay connected to your teams. The program includes access to our CXInsight text analytics platform for 6 months.

You have a couple of options:

Free employee pulse survey program

We’ll get you a new Wootric survey project account to get started with simple link or email surveys to employees. This account includes a survey dashboard and the ability to forward feedback to an email address or Slack channel.

Analyze existing employee survey results at scale.

If you already have an employee survey program, Wootric will help you understand what employees are telling you. For the next six months, companies with more than 200 survey responses with comments are eligible for a free CXInsight account. HR teams can upload survey data for instant insight. Qualitative feedback comments will be autocategorized for theme and sentiment using our machine learning algorithm that is optimized for employee engagement feedback.

Reach out to us and we’ll get you started.

How to Send Employee Pulse Surveys

Step 1. Decide whether you want to ask about satisfaction or effort.

Asking about satisfaction. You will customize the classic two-step satisfaction (CSAT) survey “How satisfied are you with _______?” and followup question.

Example questions about effort:

- - How satisfied are you with the support you are receiving from [our company] during the crisis?
  - How satisfied are you with the resources you have to do your job at this time?
  - How satisfied are you with the communication updates you are getting from us?

Using the customizable followup question, gather employee comments:

Example follow up question for satisfied employees: Thanks for letting us know. Please tell us how you are doing, and any concerns or suggestions you may have.

Example follow up question for unsatisfied employees: Sorry to hear this. Please let us know any suggestions you have, and reach out to ____ directly if you need support.

Asking about effort. You will customize the standard two-step effort score survey (CES), “How easy was it for you to __________?” and a followup question.

Example questions about effort:

- - How easy was it for you to work from home this week?
  - How easy was it for you to manage daily life this week?

Example follow up question for satisfied employees:
Thanks for letting us know. Please tell us how you are doing and any concerns or suggestions you may have.

Example follow up question for unsatisfied employees:
Sorry to hear this. Please let us know your biggest challenges and any suggestions you have. We know this is hard. Please reach out to ____ directly if you have an urgent request.

Step 2: Think about how you will survey your employees.

Do you want to send a link to a survey or send an email survey?

If you want employee responses to be anonymous, send a link to a survey in an email, Slack, or other means.
If employees know their response is anonymous, they may be more likely to be honest. However, you won’t be able to reach out to individuals who express concern or offer good suggestions. Here is our help article about survey link setup.

If you want to be able to respond to employees one-on-one, use Wootric email surveys. You will be able to see every individual’s survey responses and reach out to address concerns, right from the Wootric dashboard. However, advise your employees of this so they don’t share private information.

Note: Organizations with more than 200 survey responses with comments are eligible for free access to the CXInsight text analytics platform. Employee comments will be automatically categorized by topic and sentiment, giving you instant insight into what is most important to employees.

Step 3. Sign up and get started!
(Existing customers please reach out to us)

Deepen connections and retain your team

An employee pulse program will help you:

Learn how employees are feeling and uncover needs in real-time.
Prioritize ways you can help your team feel supported and productive during this challenging time.
Monitor sentiment over time.
Stay connected by sharing what you are hearing and how you are responding to requests and feedback.

We’re here to help you get the insights you need to understand and support your people.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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How to Retain Customers in a Time of Crisis: A CX To-Do List for SaaS Companies

Financial markets are sliding, a pandemic is spreading around the world, and every company is scrambling to respond to quickly changing circumstances. Planned investments that were intended to drive growth — like hiring, media spend and software purchases — are being reevaluated as business leaders are forced to triage what they need to do to weather the storm. We’re all in survival mode, but survival is about prioritizing what is most important.

And what is most important to a SaaS business at this moment?

It’s not toilet paper.

It’s our existing customers.

Now more than ever, customer experience is job #1.

We think the SaaS businesses that focus on retaining customers and building loyalty are the ones that will survive and thrive in this uncertain climate.

Of course, the question then becomes how do you retain customers and build loyalty?

Shift from a growth mindset to a retention mindset

This may not hold true for every business we work with – Zoom, GrubHub, and the e-commerce toilet paper company Who Gives a Crap are having quite a moment. But most businesses are facing contraction because people don’t buy in a panic. Budgets are being trimmed everywhere, and customer success and renewal conversations must be deeply empathetic to this.

So, if a customer is achieving goals with your software, and you have other features and capabilities that will make them even more successful in 2020, then, by all means, paint a bold vision of an expanded partnership. But, if that isn’t the case, and they want to reduce or leave, don’t come across as tone-deaf. It’s likely that everyone in their company has been asked to find ways to trim spend.

That means that it’s even more important to know that your internal champion can confidently advocate for you – because you are delivering value. Step up your customer success initiatives. Make sure you and your clients are recording successes. And don’t be afraid to change the conversation from trying to get the customer to buy more, to showing him or her how the company can get more value from what they’ve already purchased.

Listen to your customers even more carefully – and respond

Even when you’re focusing on your existing customers, don’t make the mistake of thinking they’re the “same” customers – they’ve changed. We all have. Because our needs change in a downturn. Companies that are on the pulse of those changes by proactively listening are better poised to adapt, innovate, survive, and serve. Make calls to key customers. It’s even more important now than it usually is to listen and respond to concerns quickly.

Take care of your people

Your employees, your teams, are the key to your customer relationships. They may be concerned about their health or the health of their parents, or grandparents. They may be struggling to find childcare options if their schools are shut down. They may be stressed about their 401K balance. Whatever it is, empathy and flexibility are going to be key – and so is prudent business planning. How can you plan to support your employees through these challenges?

Be a good citizen

For the collective good, and for the good of your brand, it’s so important right now to prioritize the good of the community and show conscientious, caring judgment. To do this, you may need to make some tough calls that hit your short-term profits, but protect people. We’re all making sacrifices – the New York Times dropped its paywall for coronavirus news and Zoom is giving K-12 schools free video conferencing. Is there a way your company can help people in need right now? You’ll be remembered for it.

Establish a company policy of flexibility

Just as you have to be flexible with your employees and their quickly-changing challenges, you also have to be flexible as a company. For example, if a client calls customer support to request an extended payment plan, empower your support team to deviate from your standard policies and allow it. Be open to changing how you usually do things if it makes sense and shows compassion. You’ll likely prevent avoidable churn.

Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, shared this recent story with our team:

“I just had a customer reach out about putting their subscription on hold. They operate in the hospitality sector which has been particularly hard hit. We offered to work out a plan to enable her to continue to get customer feedback during this critical time. Her response was ‘That would be amazing! Thank you!’ I know we’ve strengthened customer loyalty.”

Customers notice the companies that support them in difficult times, so be flexible when you can, and you’ll build loyalty for the future.

Close the loop with customers when they offer feedback

This may be built into your CX program already, but if not, now is the time to double-down on listening and responding to customers. Ensuring your customers feel heard and cared about in times of high stress carries more weight than when times are easy. So if a customer responds to one of your surveys, be sure to close the loop and let them know you value their time and will take appropriate action.

Customer success managers can reach out one-on-one via email or phone, but that isn’t always practical. Closing the loop can be automated when you have your feedback readily available in systems like Intercom or Salesforce. Here’s a quick guide on how to automate closing the loop on customer feedback.

Improve customer experience at customer journey touchpoints

In SaaS, this often means using an NPS survey to gauge overall loyalty and surface any issues that may affect renewal. To get serious about retention, consider asking for feedback at critical SaaS journey points–after onboarding, support interactions, and during product/feature use.

This isn’t about quickly adding a slew of new surveys overnight; it’s about prioritizing improvements to moments that, if not successful, can sow the seeds of churn. Now is the time to double-down on understanding and improving the customer journey.

Also, remember to analyze the qualitative feedback from these surveys. A customer who is “satisfied” but mentions a concern over price may now be at a higher risk of churn.

Source: Wootric CXInsight Analytics Platform

Focus product development on reducing friction for existing customers

In the software business, product experience is the all-important driver of customer experience. So, to foster customer loyalty, think about what you can do to create more ease for existing users.

Blake Barlett at OpenView says product-led growth is the key to success in the End User Era. In this era, end user annoyance spells opportunity. Think Slack vs. email, or Zoom vs. Hangouts.

In financially uncertain times, a product-led development philosophy can hold the key to faster end user adoption and increased retention. Tune into those day-to-day annoyances – they hold the key to retention.

Accelerate end user adoption

Happy end users make your application stickier, so if your champion is struggling to persuade others in their company to use your platform, you need to know why. You may need more in-app cues and guidance to make tasks easier. What is “so annoying” about your product? Ask your customers that, and you may find exactly what you need to reduce friction – which will pay off in retention.

Now is the time to deepen relationships and partnerships with promoters

Guneet Singh, Director of Customer Experience programs at Docusign, spoke about this in a recent Voice of the Customer webinar. He looks for champions among his promoters who have a common pain point, and then brings them together in councils that engage with DocuSign’s product team. Through this customer advocacy program, his customers learn from each other, get a first look at new product features, and provide valuable insights for the DocuSign product development roadmap.

How do you begin a customer advocacy program like this? Pay attention to customer requests and “start with small wins,” says Guneet. “If you complete the feature that a customer asks for, by listening and acting on their words, you’ve won that customer for life.”

We couldn’t agree more!

The most valuable commitment we have is to our customers. And as much as we work to grow, to scale, to expand — it’s times like these where we have to remember to appreciate the people who already support us and show them support too. We’re all in this together.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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A Sales Gong for CX : Broadcast Real-time NPS to Your Entire Workplace

The sales gong is a motivational technique used on sales floors around the world. Every time someone closes a deal, they bang a gong or ring a bell to celebrate their success. And when the office gets quiet? Everyone knows it’s time to hustle.

In other words, there’s never any question about how the team is doing at any given moment, and the constant feedback gets the entire sales force aligned in their mission to sell, sell, sell.

Now… imagine doing the same thing, for your entire organization, regarding Customer Experience (CX)? Rather than a sales gong, picture a TV monitor that broadcasts real-time customer feedback and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), getting everyone from accounting to operations aligned in the mission to turn customers into raving fans.

Broadcasting real-time NPS data will help you build a customer-centric culture, which ultimately leads to greater customer loyalty and powerful returns.

What is a Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

Measuring your Net Promoter Score is relatively straightforward. An NPS survey asks your customers to rate, on a scale of 0-10, how likely they are to recommend your company, products, or services to a friend or colleague.

Responses are then grouped into:

Detractors (those who responded 0-6)
Neutrals (7-8)
Promoters (9-10)

To determine your Net Promoter Score, subtract your percentage of promoters from your percentage of detractors.

NPS = (% Promoters – % Detractors)

Example: You survey 500 customers, asking how likely they are to recommend your company to friends or colleagues. 50 respondents (10%) answered 0-6, another 100 (20%) answered 7-8, and 350 (70%) answered 9 or 10.

Your Company’s NPS is 70% – 10% = 60.

The Net Promoter Survey is then followed by one of the following open-ended questions (depending on their answer):

“What can we do to improve?” (those who rates you 0-8)
“What did you love about your experience? (those who rated you 9-10)

Why does NPS matter?

The correlation between revenue and CX is solid. And, NPS is the foundational metric that can serve as a north star on the journey to customer-centricity and the growth that comes with it. However… simply gathering feedback and measuring NPS gets your nowhere.

The real power of NPS comes from the system you build around it. This means:

Closing the loop with customers (i.e., fixing the problem, thanking them for their feedback).
Analyzing responses to prioritize improvements to products and services.
Using NPS to create a more customer-centric culture.

Only then does NPS help you retain more customers and drive growth.

In a custom-centric company, the Success and Support teams works diligently to close the loop with customers, the Product team analyzes the data to create superior products, and Marketing crafts their messaging to educate and answer objections before they arise.

As for shifting company culture? That’s a job for the CEO or a C-Suite sponsor of your NPS program (often with the support of the VP or Director of Customer Experience).

Creating a more customer-centric culture with NPS

Culture change is a multifaceted undertaking, but you can anchor it with your NPS program. Evangelize NPS as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), right alongside revenue, churn, and other important figures.

What does evangelizing NPS look like?

Educate everyone (from new hires to the board) about why NPS is important to customer experience management.
Share the results of NPS surveys in company newsletters and quarterly board decks.
Don’t just share the score by itself. Include customer comments and NPS trends by customer segment.

Where reports and memos fall short

Unfortunately, in between those quarterly reports, NPS can get lost. Unlike the Sales gong that keeps everyone on the floor tuned into customer acquisition as a Key Performance Indicator, NPS can be out of sight and out of mind.

And that’s where a real-time display of NPS feedback comes in. You can bridge that gap between reporting cycles when you display your evolving NPS live, on a monitor, along with raw customer feedback.

Real-time NPS, trends, topics, and comments on a Wootric TV display.

4 Reasons to broadcast real-time NPS and feedback in the office

If your goal is to create a more customer centric company and reap the benefits of a high NPS, an “NPS TV” can help unite everyone on that mission in the following ways.

1. Reinforce awareness of NPS as a KPI.

Certain KPI’s are more obvious than others. Revenue, profit, and conversions get a lot of airtime, but NPS is easy to ignore unless you put it front and center.

In reality, everyone should be thinking about NPS if you want to drive growth!

2. Build empathy with the customer.

There is nothing quite like seeing the latest comments from active customers appearing on screen. Overjoyed, frustrated, curt, complimentary—it’s the emotions in the verbatim comments that humanize your customers and creates a connection to their experience. For more tips, check out these ways to build customer empathy.

3. Reach departments that don’t normally engage with customers.

The customer success team lives and breathes NPS because it’s an early indicator of churn. But the finance team? Not so much. At customer-centric companies, everyone understands their responsibility for customer loyalty.

Set up the monitor in a prominent place. It could be on a wall everyone sees as they come in or out of the office, opposite the coffee machine, or in any hub in the workplace.

That way more people are likely to read customer comments and tune into NPS trends.

4. Invest in an easy, low-cost enhancement to your NPS program.

For the cost of a computer and a monitor, you’ll be in business in minutes—and that’s a small price to pay if you are after customer experience transformation. As far as NPS tools go, it’s one of the cheapest and most effective ones on the market.

Note: For remote teams, a monitor doesn’t work. What to do? Create an NPS Slack channel! Click here to learn how to use Slack and NPS date to build customer-centricity.

Customer centricity… and beyond!

Your customers are the lifeblood of your business, but unless an employee’s job is customer-facing, it’s easy to lose sight of what your customers are going through. Making everyone aware of NPS brings the customer experience into stark relief, and it unites everybody in a single, all-important mission.

Remember: Net Promoter Score has a solid impact on revenue, and it’s the single best metric for predicting long-term growth and success—when you build a customer-centric culture around it. If you can involve everyone with creating a positive, seamless customer experience, your NPS score will rise and your revenues will soar.

Learn how InMoment can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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6 Customer Experience Best Practices to Transform Your Patient Experience Program

In many important ways, healthcare organizations and consumer businesses are fundamentally different. And yet, there is no question that today’s patients bring a distinctly consumer mindset to their healthcare experiences. That means patients are better informed about their healthcare choices. They have easier access to information and reviews about providers and facilities. And they are much more willing to walk away from providers that can’t deliver both quality care and good overall experiences.

This dynamic raises an intriguing question: If patients are increasingly bringing consumer expectations to their healthcare experiences, what (if anything) can the healthcare industry learn from leading consumer companies about improving those experiences?

The answer, as it turns out, has important implications. A growing number of healthcare providers are discovering new solutions to long-entrenched challenges and limitations by exploring, adapting, and applying proven customer experience (CX) best practices to their patient experience (PX) efforts. There are many examples, but to begin the conversation, here are six proven and broadly accepted CX best practices that are especially relevant and useful for healthcare organizations looking to breathe new life into their patient experience programs.

Best Practice #1: Build a Winning Patient Experience Strategy

Today, 90% of healthcare organizations say improving patient experiences is a high priority. But only 8% of those organizations have managed to put a successful patient experience strategy in place. [1] This huge gap highlights the challenges of actually creating a balanced and complete patient experience strategy that defines who your patients are, clearly outlines what kinds of experiences you want to provide, and describes how you want patients to feel after they receive care from your organization.

There are obviously no easy, one-size-fits-all prescriptions for developing a strong, effective PX strategy, but there are some core ideas from the consumer world that can help guide your efforts:

Create a more patient centric culture. Cultural changes are never easy. But many leading consumer organizations have proved that with consistent, ongoing effort, you can successfully define what “patient centricity” means to your organization, communicate that definition and get buy-in across every level of the organization, and ultimately shift your core culture to focus more on delivering complete, world-class patient experiences.
Align your patient experience strategy with your core brand and business strategies. The world’s best consumer businesses understand that a successful CX strategy has to be closely connected to and aligned with the organization’s brand and business strategies. The same is true in the healthcare world. With the proper alignment in place, you can make clear promises about what patients should expect from your organization (brand strategy), consistently deliver on those promises (PX strategy), and then connect those experiences back to your organization’s overall goals (business strategy).
Find and engage with a dedicated customer experience executive. Getting organizational buy-in for patient experience improvements that impact multiple departments always requires strong leadership from the top. Smart consumer businesses often assign a dedicated executive to provide the leadership, influence, and continuity needed to develop and execute on a successful CX strategy. The same approach will help drive the success of your PX program.

Building and implementing a successful patient experience strategy takes time and a lot of persistent effort. But with the right strategy in place, you’ll reach a point where all the people, data, technology and processes you put in place start to yield results that are clear to everyone—from employees who are now empowered to deliver better experiences to patients who experience the results first hand.

Best Practice #2: View Your Patients’ Experiences Through Multiple Lenses

Many healthcare organizations depend on standardized survey programs as their main (or only) source of patient experience data. But the best consumer organizations have learned that meaningful improvement comes from collecting information from the widest possible range of sources along every step of the customer journey. For healthcare organizations, this involves combining and complementing standardized surveys with more targeted and personalized information gathering tools. It also includes finding ways to unify and tap into all of the incredibly rich sources of patient information that exist in your point-of-care, safety and quality, operations, and other healthcare systems. Surveys ask patients to look back at their experiences after they’re over, but these other tools often measure reactions and responses in real time at specific points. They also make it possible to incorporate and share (with permission) the perspectives and experiences of family members who are involved in caring for their loved ones.

Of course, this “multiple lens” approach requires a technology platform that’s capable of normalizing all these different sources of data, analyzing them, and converting them into cohesive and useful patient experience insights. But when this platform is in place and working properly—and all of your different patient systems are connected to it—you gain an incredibly rich and unified view of the complete patient journey.

Best Practice #3: Use Predictive Analytics to Prioritize Your PX Efforts

In addition to combining and analyzing customer experience data from different sources, smart consumer organizations leverage advanced predictive analytics to accurately identify what matters most to their customers and pinpoint what types of CX changes will have the biggest positive impact.

By adding this additional intelligence to your patient experience technology platform, you gain the confidence of knowing that your efforts are making the largest possible contribution to increased loyalty and improved patient experiences.

Best Practice #4: Empower Employees to Make Smarter, Faster Decisions

For consumer businesses, survival often depends on making smart decisions faster than the competition. In the CX realm, this typically takes the form of dashboards and reports that quickly synthesize multiple performance measures and data sources into clear, simple, and actionable insights—and then makes them available to everyone who needs them in nearly real time.

In most cases, healthcare organizations have been much slower to adopt these types of dynamic, customizable tools. But a technology platform that combines and unifies different sources of patient data also lays the groundwork for the types of near-real-time dashboards that can drive smart, informed, and relevant patient experience decisions across every layer of your organization.

Best Practice #5: Take Advantage of the Net Promoter Score

The Net Promoter Score (NPS) uses a single, standard question to measure how likely a customer is to recommend a product, service, or brand, and it has been nearly universally adopted by companies in the consumer world. NPS serves a uniquely valuable purpose, because it uses a single numeric score to consistently measure satisfaction and brand loyalty across nearly every market and industry.

Today, the healthcare industry rarely uses NPS, but it presents an interesting opportunity for forward-looking healthcare organizations. By adding NPS to your patient experience program, you can gain a perspective that goes beyond the healthcare industry—and measures your performance against the larger consumer landscape. This becomes especially valuable as patients increasingly bring consumer expectations to their healthcare experiences. Of course, with NPS—as with any other metric—it’s important to focus on meaningful action and improvement, rather than simply “chasing the score.”

Best Practice #6: Focus on Actions and Results

Nearly every consumer organization collects customer experience data and documents the results. But the true CX leaders also know how to translate those efforts into meaningful, systematic changes and improvements, and they know how to do it quickly. This is an especially relevant area for healthcare organizations, because there is a strong tendency to focus more on collecting patient experience data than actually driving and managing change.

That’s not surprising. Gathering survey data, generating reports, and documenting scores are focused, self-contained activities that fit neatly into familiar, well-defined boxes. Effective change management, on the other hand, requires the buy-in and active participation of virtually everyone, across all roles, levels, and departments. As a result, many healthcare organizations dedicate resources to the part of the process they can more easily understand and measure—and hope that the information somehow leads to improvements.

For consumer businesses and healthcare organizations alike, closing this gap between measurement and action means investing equally in the information gathering and change management sides of the equation. If you’re collecting more complete and relevant information about your patients’ journeys in real time and from more sources, turning that data into actionable insights in near real-time, and then feeding it into a unified and effective change management framework, you can quickly identify, prioritize, and implement changes that will make the biggest difference for your patients.

Start Applying CX Best Practice to Your Patient Experience Program Today

The world’s biggest and most successful consumer businesses have been obsessed with improving their customers’ experiences for decades. And despite the important differences between healthcare organizations and consumer businesses, there is a very long list of techniques, tools, and best practices you can adapt and apply to breathe new life into—and create new possibilities for—your patient experience program.

Find out how MaritzCX can help you apply best practices from the consumer world to enhance every part of your patient experience program and meet the rising expectations of your patients.

Call 385.695.2800 or visit maritzcx.com/patient-experience to talk to a representative and schedule a demo.

[1] Kaufman, Hall & Associates report 2017 State of Consumerism in Health Care: Slow Progress in Fast Times.

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The Importance of Onboarding in the Automotive Industry: Part 2

By: Chris Travell

January 30, 2020September 17, 2020

To view the first part of this blog series, click here.

The Important First Day of the Employee Journey

In the last blog on the Employee Experience in the Automotive industry, we looked at the strategic importance and economic benefit of an effective onboarding process and focused on what should happen prior to the employee’s start date.

In this post, we’ll look at what happens when employees arrive on their first day. As before, we are focusing on the automotive industry, but the principles equally apply to other industries as well.

Creating a Welcome Kit

Once the day has arrived, you want to make it special and the best way to do that is to create an exceptional first impression. Have your receptionist be aware of the start date and ensure that the new employee is welcomed appropriately.

In fact, consider creating a “Welcome Kit” that contains numerous positive first impression opportunities such as branded assessories. Have a welcome letter from the Dealer Principal, or even from the OEM President, prepared and left at the new employee’s desk.

Often items like these are used daily and a new hire will feel an immediate attachment, so much so that they will often continue to use them for years all the while linking back to that first day.

Lastly, provide any desktop resources and in this case, the term desktop is in the literal sense. Any print materials such as dealership newsletters, upcoming community involvement notices, employee recognition programs -anything that conveys positive dealership activity will help to make a new employee feel good about their decision to join the team.

From an online standpoint, consider adding a dedicated Welcome page to your intranet or LMS. Creating a specific Welcome starting point will be engaging and will direct a new hire to specific curriculum best suited for their role.

Be sure to include a Welcome video or a step-by-step tutorial of where and when to access available training resources which, again, builds on that important first impression and helps to ease the potential training concerns people face with any new job.

As the day continues, ensure a dealership tour takes place and introduce the new hire to the various departments and team members. This is just as important for the existing team as for the new hire as positive introductions will help break the ice and hopefully lead to productive working relationships.

Engaging the New Employee Beyond the First Day

After the tour, review any administrative processes and outline not only the orientation for the remainder of the day, but also for the week ahead. For example, if this is a sales role, you may want to suggest the new hire learn as much as possible about one specific model per day.

Encourage them to drive the vehicle and speak with other salespeople. Have them talk to the service personnel to better understand the maintenance requirements of the vehicles they’ll be selling. Learning all the details of an entire product lineup can be daunting, so focus on small daily or weekly goals that are attainable.

To sustain this positive feeling past the first day, OEMs or even large dealer groups should consider conducting monthly webinar sessions for new hires. This would be a great way to meet others, online at least, who are in a similar situation and allows for the moderator to run through the onboarding process once again to promote upcoming events, answer outstanding questions, and receive important feedback.

This also could be a great opportunity for a short, anonymous employee survey to uncover any opportunities for improvement in the onboarding process.

Who Should Lead the Onboarding?

In terms of leading the onboarding, often this is left up to a Sales or Service Manager and while this is optimal, typically these managers are busy and other responsibilities may interfere with the full attention they can bring.

As an alternative, consider creating a role for an onboarding Champion, an individual whose responsibility it is to see that new employees are thoroughly walked through the onboarding process and are there to help answer additional questions in the upcoming days and weeks ahead.

This role would not take the place of a manager, as it would likely be a secondary role for a peer in the new hire’s respective department and as such, is designed to be another level of support.

When developing this role, consider making it a possible precursor to a management position as it will involve people skills, accountability, and guidance – all valuable traits in any future manager.

Onboarding is an Essential Part of the Employee Experience

To recap, onboarding is an essential part of the employee experience. Onboarding any new hire will be most effective when done in a consistent process. Include it in the hiring stage, allowing you to demonstrate your commitment to their success, the level of support available, and necessary accountability to complete the required curriculum.

Turnover is costly and leads to lower employee and customer satisfaction so ensure you take onboarding seriously and allocate the necessary resources to make a new hire feel comfortable, valued and a welcome part of your dealership family.

Onboarding is one of the most important processes a dealership can have, as it often predicates the likelihood of a new hire actually staying long term and starting a successful career. Not only will the implementation make a difference in the company, but it will also help individual employees to feel valued and achieve their career goals.

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The Importance of Onboarding in the Automotive Industry: Part 1

The Automotive Employee Journey

Let’s start with some good news. According to Tinypulse.com, 91% of employees are retained by an organization with an effective onboarding process and 69% of new hires are likely to stay for three years if there is a well-structured onboarding programme in place.

But here’s the bad news – 22% of staff turnover occurs within the first 45 days.

According to Fred Reichheld, the inventor of NPS:

“If you wonder what getting and keeping the right employees has to do with getting and keeping the right customers, the answer is everything. Companies need to care about the employee experience because that’s the only way they will be equipped to deliver a great customer experience.”

The reality of the statement seems to be hitting home. We do a lot of work in the area of employee engagement. We have received more requests for information and proposals in the last year for employee engagement projects than we have in recent memory.

The automotive industry suffers from higher-than-average turnover, especially in the key areas of frontline roles that deal directly with the customer. And without a positive employee experience, it is much more difficult to deliver a positive customer experience.

Manufacturers seem to be recognizing more acutely the need to have fully engaged, interested, and satisfied frontline employees which is particularly challenging, in an industry that globally still tends to operate on a franchise model.

In this two part blog series, we will be looking at the employee journey. The first will deal with the time leading up to the employee starting their first day of work; the second will focus on what happens once they actually get there. Even though our focus in this post is on onboarding for the automotive industry, the principles can be applied across industry.

Minimizing Turnover While Increasing Satisfaction

For the automotive industry there’s a very strong economic argument for decreasing employee turnover. According to Ted Kraybill, president of ESI Trends which conducts the annual National Automobile Dealers Association Dealership Workforce Study in the US, a 10-percentage-point increase in turnover will cost the average dealership $7,500 in gross profit per employee per year.

If the average dealership has 70 people, a 10-point increase in employee turnover for the average dealership costs more than $500,000 in gross profit annually. Multiplied by NADA’s count of roughly 16,500 dealerships, it’s an $8 billion-plus problem (Automotive News, 2017).

The first step to minimise a high employee turnover is to implement a strong onboarding process for your next hire. A good process will increase the employee satisfaction and retention, whereas a poor one will result in consistent and costly turnover.

Showing Commitment to the Development

By presenting the onboarding steps, brand history, curriculum and resources available, you demonstrate your commitment to an individual’s development, success, and comfort level when first starting a new role. This can be a tense time for anyone in a new position, and the more structure you can present before they are hired, the more likely you are to attract a better candidate.

Communicate Accountability

A second goal along with this support, is to communicate the accountability that goes along with it. By demonstrating that certain courses are to be completed, and a culture that is to be adhered to, you are setting expectations that will need to be met. Too often a new hire exhibits the wrong behavior simply for the fact that they were not told of the desired behaviour by the employer.

By doing this before the actual hire takes place, you ensure they understand what is expected with no surprises after they start.

Share Onboarding Plan Prior to the Employee’s First Day

Once you have made the hire official, often there can be some time gap until the actual start date. If this is the case, you may want to consider sending any applicable resources to the new hire to help prepare them for your brand and/or dealership.

Even having them explore the websites in depth with specific information needs will help them become more familiar with their new surroundings. Here they can learn more about the product and possibly the team they will be working with which can help them feel more at home.

It may also raise some initial questions that they can be prepared to ask on their first day.

Speaking of the first day, an effective onboarding process is transparent, meaning that you need to choreograph the day and prepare the new hire for what’s ahead. Sending an email or text in advance with the day’s agenda will help to confirm your commitment and help them start off on the right foot.

Positive Employee Experiences Turn Into Positive Customer Experiences

The bottom line is that in order to retain employees, effective onboarding processes need to be put into effect. Better preparing employees before their first day and during training will decrease turnover and ultimately help new hires to feel supported by their team, stay committed to development, and increase their communication with leadership.

With an exemplary onboarding process, automotive companies will see an increase in fully engaged, interested, and satisfied employees. And when employees have a positive experience with the company, they are more likely to pass on the positive experiences to their customers.

Click here to read the second part of this series.

Sources:

Automotive News (‘Employee turnover costs dealers billions’ Jan.23, 2017)

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9 Novel Natural Language Processing Applications in Business

Building an effective NLP application starts with defining a concrete use-case within a specific domain. No two companies are completely alike, and the same goes for business solutions. But this doesn’t mean that learnings from one project cannot be applied to another. With this in mind, we’ve collected case studies across nine different industries to illustrate the potential uses for natural language processing and text analytics.

Biotechnology

When someone calls into the Medical Information Department (MID) at Biogen, they’re routed to operators who search through FAQ’s, brochures, and product resources to answer questions. If the answer cannot be provided within a minute, the call escalates to an expensive medical director. Biogen wanted to reduce the involvement of these directors. So, they turned to InMoment for a solution to empower, not replace, their human operators.

First, we configured our core NLP to identify relevant information within Biogen’s resources. Then, we combined this solution with an open-source search engine and custom user interface. The resulting system understands complex relationships within Biogen’s data. Now, MID operators can now type in keywords or questions to get answers in seconds. Early testing by Biogen already shows faster responses and fewer calls sent to medical directors.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“We’ve worked with InMoment for years on programs surrounding Voice of the Patient, Voice of the Key Opinion Leader (KoL), and social media monitoring… They’ve always been a key partner.” — Keith Ho Director of Customer Focus and Medical Digital, Biogen[/perfectpullquote]

Sports & Entertainment

Brandtix delivers actionable brand performance insight for the world’s top athletes and teams by gathering data from social media and news platforms. They turned to InMoment for a powerful NLP platform that could analyze and decode the jargon-filled language of professional sports. Together, Semantria API and Brandtix’s proprietary algorithms now process fan vernacular across 19 languages. As part of this, Semantria analyzes and structures the sentiment of fan conversations as positive or negative, based on context. These capabilities allow franchise owners, player agents, and PR teams to separate meaningful mentions from general chatter and address PR problems before they get out of hand.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“Choosing InMoment over its competitors was easy — thanks to the mix of service, price, ease of use, and language packs. Further, InMoment counts extraction and sentiment analysis as one action. The other solutions we looked at bill extraction and sentiment separately, charging double the volume and double the price.” — Shahar Fogel Vice President of Product, Brandtix[/perfectpullquote]

Social Media Monitoring

evolve24 is a data analytics firm that combines myriad data sources to help companies develop strategic direction. To process information and provide market intelligence in real-time, evolve24 can only employ best-in-class toolsets with the lowest possible latency and downtime. Salience, a core AI-based NLP engine, provides low-latency text analytics that processes five or more tweets every second, expediting evolve24’s time-to-value for their customers. Salience’s power and customizability give evolve24 the ability to keep up with increasing volumes while helping them maintain high standards of consistency and measurement across a range of text data sources.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“The text analytics engine is a key tool for us in conjunction with our proprietary emotion metric; this next evolution of functionality promises an even more comprehensive look into the conversations our customers’ customers are having.” — Noah Krusell VP of Product Development, evolve24[/perfectpullquote]

Customer Experience Management

VOZIQ offers a suite of Predictive Customer Retention and Customer Experience Management solutions for call centers. Traditional churn prediction models rely on transaction histories and demographics data but fail to incorporate consumer-generated input with real customer sentiment. VOZIQ turned to InMoment to fill this gap.

Through Semantria, VOZIQ categorizes the text comments and identifies customer sentiment from survey scores and keywords in each call log. Since partnering with InMoment, VOZIQ has retained thousands of customers for their clients, resulting in millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.

Industrial & Aviation Design

Gensler’s Los Angeles Aviation and Transportation Studio partnered with InMoment, leveraging sentiment analysis on customer feedback to make better-informed decisions about the planning and design of airports. The result is a data-driven voice of customer program that can help win contracts and build airports that better serve stakeholders and travelers alike.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“As a global industry leader in airport architecture, we utilize the power of Semantria’s rapid and precise data analysis to create better-informed designs for the airports of tomorrow.” — Andy Huang, AIA LEED Associate Designer, Gensler Aviation and Transportation Studio[/perfectpullquote]

Hospitality & Hotel Management

Revinate helps over 30,000 hospitality providers measure online presence, analyze consumer feedback, and reinvent the guest experience. With over 2,700 categories, 100 restaurant topics, 200 hotel topics, and nine languages, Revinate gives their customers the ability to measure consumer sentiment in critical categories, such as rooms, staff, service, and food. Semantria’s customizability lets Revinate’s users create lists of custom topics, follow trending topics as they evolve, and compare sentiment scores across multiple organization-specific metrics.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“The support from the team at InMoment was outstanding; they made a very complex project seem simple. With their partnership, we met our goals on time, delivered the best possible product, and were set up to ensure continued success.” — Matt Zarem, Senior Director of Product, Revinate[/perfectpullquote]

Technology & Electronics

A large tech company’s Customer Market Research (CMR) team helps managers across the company make better decisions regarding product and market strategy. Before, the CMR team used to listen to the Voice of the Customer by designing, distributing, and analyzing a wide range of surveys. As the group began working to integrate social media data, they turned to InMoment.

Their team needed to effectively filter social content in order to extract relevant data, reduce survey spend, easily configure flexible one-off analyses, and validate long-term trends. Traditional social listening tools didn’t offer the customizability and scalability that the CMR team needed, so they contacted InMoment to discuss a “semi-custom” solution.

First, the CMR team extracts a subset of social comments from a InMoment-built data warehouse, based on the products and brands they want to know more about. Then they use Spotlight to analyze this data and understand what people are saying, how they feel, and why they feel that way. Next, they validate the results and relate the net sentiment score to quantitative Likert™ Scale survey data. This approach allows them to compare and contrast what people say in structured surveys, versus what they say in the unstructured environment of social media.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“InMoment is the only vendor we’ve seen that can offer the flexibility that is required to support our complex product line.” — Csaba Dancshazy Senior Market Research Manager [/perfectpullquote]

Fitness Lifestyle & Events

Tough Mudder Inc. has grown to become a leading active lifestyle brand and endurance event company with more than 2.5 million global participants. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an essential measurement for the company. However, the volume and the qualitative format of their post-event surveys make it challenging to garner insight.

Using Semantria for Excel, the Tough Mudder team reduced manual survey coding time by 90%. Working with InMoment staff, they designed custom queries to solve an industry-specific sentiment analysis problem. In total, Tough Mudder uses InMoment to process 2,000 surveys for each of the company’s 78 events per season, some 156,000 surveys total.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“By teaming with InMoment, Tough Mudder is able to report Net Promoter Scores and review participant feedback within a week of every event. The company’s ability to make strategic adjustments based on customer insights is invaluable to providing the ultimate event experience.” — Sydney Friedkin Consumer Insights Analyst, Tough Mudder Inc.[/perfectpullquote]

Regulatory Compliance & Financial Services

The Australian government mandates that financial Statements of Advice (SoAs) include disclosures covering conflicts of interest, own product recommendations, and more. Financial services providers doing business in Australia use SoA templates and frequent spot-checks. This helps make sure that financial advisors aren’t modifying or deleting critical disclosures.

An average-sized firm produces hundreds of pages of SoAs each week. Manual review is costly, unreliable, and exposes the firm to high non-compliance risk. One such firm, unable to find an existing contract analysis tool that could solve this exact problem, turned to InMoment for help. First, we trained our semi-structured data parser with machine learning to understand the underlying structure of the Statement of Advice document. Then, we built a custom natural language processing configuration to extract and analyze entities and other text elements. Then, we structured and exported the resulting data into a simple spreadsheet.

Now, in mere minutes the firm’s auditors can see whether proper disclosures were made across hundreds of documents. They can even identify where an advisor’s recommendations may go against their client’s stated goals and risk attitude. This substantially lowers the firm’s non-compliance risk even while reducing their disclosure compliance costs.

Deploying NLP in Your Business

All of the NLP applications above show how text analytics/NLP can help companies increase revenue and reduce costs. But can a natural language processing application solve your business problems?

Start by answering these questions:

What’s your need?
What’s your desired outcome?
Do you have enough data?
Do you have the right data?
Does the technology exist?
Can you build it?
Is there an established vendor you can work with?
How will you measure your outcome?

Your answers will help you figure out the best way towards solving your own business problems in a cost-effective way. Often this comes down to a question of Build vs Buy. In many (most) cases, it will make more sense to partner with a reliable NLP vendor – so long as you do your homework.

The truth is that many companies flaunt shiny AI systems that promise to solve all the world’s problems. But while moon-shot projects certainly are admirable, the nature of those projects often doom them to failure from the outset. And in the end, business users are not angel investors. They need real applications that deliver results today, not years in the future.

We can’t stress this enough: Everything comes down to how applicable an NLP solution is to your business. Whether you’re in hospitality, entertainment, financial services or any other text data heavy industry, natural language and text analytics can be utilized to unlock value. If you see potential for NLP within your organization, then the next step is to reach out to a vendor. If you speak with InMoment, we’ll start by sitting down with you to understand precisely what you’re trying to achieve, the context you’re working in, and why other providers don’t meet your needs.

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Best Practices to Improve Experiences in a Patient-as-Consumer World

In just a few short years, technology and business innovations have fundamentally changed how people interact with—and what they expect from—the services and organizations they depend on. Today, the unavoidable fact is that people make decisions and invest their loyalty based mainly on experiences, not necessarily the nuances of products or services.

This consumer-focused and experience-driven reality has profound implications for the healthcare industry. People expect fast, deeply personalized, and highly mobile experiences in nearly every aspect of their lives. They won’t tolerate long wait times or dismissive providers. And they won’t hesitate to share their opinions on social media, use the power of the Internet to investigate other options, or switch to a healthcare provider that offers them the kind of patient experience they expect.

In this landscape, your organization simply can’t afford to stick with the status quo or fall behind the patient experience curve. You need more effective, innovative, and unified programs to understand every aspect of your patients’ journeys; accurately measure their experiences; and quickly convert all the patient data you collect into practical, meaningful improvements. And you need to get there quickly.

1. Fully Explore and Understand the Challenges

There are legitimate reasons why healthcare is rarely at the top of people’s “best experiences” list. Understanding what those reasons are, how they impact your patient experience efforts, and what you can do to overcome them is the first step in taking your patient experiences program to the next level.

Siloed and Regulated Patient Data

In the healthcare industry, incredibly rich sources of data are sitting in various safety, quality, point-of-care, operational, and employee systems, but all that information is locked inside protected, regulated silos where it serves a narrow purpose that is completely disconnected from patient experience concerns. This inevitably leaves you with a narrow, incomplete view that limits your ability to understand the complete patient experience.

Limited Standardized Survey Tools

Since CAHPS inception in 2006, the surveys have brought public accountability to the healthcare industry, and an increased focus on patient satisfaction. But now, forward-thinking organizations are looking for immediate, within hours, feedback instead of weeks, from social media and other digital channels, and there are new innovative tools that can supplement patient feedback.

Ingrained Cultural Mindsets and Processes

Healthcare professionals are dedicated to providing the best possible care for their patients, and they do a remarkable job. But depending on the circumstances, the experiences that surround that care can leave something to be desired. Complex regulations and internal processes create confusing check-in procedures and stacks of paperwork. Budget-driven understaffing leads to long wait times and rushed, overextended providers. Understanding the root of the problem is key in determining what actions are needed to make the working environment and patient experience better.

2. Overcome Challenges with an All-Inclusive, Results Driven Approach

When you fully understand the scope of the patient experience challenges you face, it’s clear that more patient surveys and a deeper investment in standardized CAHPS surveys is not the answer. Jumping to the head of the patient experience pack will require a more flexible, holistic, and results-driven approach.

Embrace a Centralized Technology Platform to Unify Patient Data and Additional Research Capabilities

An all-inclusive approach to patient experience has to start with a centralized technology platform that combines all of your patient data sources into a single, unified, and multi-faceted view. It is imperative that patient experience organizations leverage a technology platform that takes advantage of CAHPS, adds depth and flexibility to collecting patient data, and engages with patients in different ways, traditional mail, email, mobile, social media, and more.

Data and technology are essential components of any all-inclusive patient experience program. But you can’t reach your full potential without some proven customer experience strategies and proven services like understanding the patient care journey, easily customizing and personalizing patient survey design, adding a governance component to your strategy and plans, and being able of dig deeper into data using some type of true driver analysis tool.

The healthcare industry can learn a lot from customer experience programs in other industries. But that requires experts who understand both customer experience best practices and the complex nuances of the healthcare industry.

3. Design, Diagnose, and Deliver a World-class Patient Experience Program

It’s important to understand the big picture. But what does an all-inclusive program look like in practical terms? And what does it allow you to do that you can’t do today? Here are a few practical capabilities and benefits you can look forward to with a comprehensive patient experience program.

All of your existing survey tools, including CAHPS, become part of an all-inclusive patient experience program, visible within one platform.
Surveys are easy to customize and change, so you can design them for each individual patient, collect more reliable data, and measure every patient’s complete journey.
Patients can access surveys using whatever methods they’re most comfortable with – from completing a paper survey and mailing it to tapping responses on a smartphone.
Data from every source is instantly uploaded to a platform, so you can combine survey data with safety, quality, operational, financial, and clinical data to gain deeper, more complete insights and pinpoint specific areas for improvement.
Use tools to call out immediate action
Learn about patient experience services to fill gaps, meet specific needs, and enhance and expand every part of your patient experience program.
Follow a specific, step-by-step patient experience roadmap – based on best practices and created specifically for your organization – so you can focus your efforts and resources on initiatives that lead directly to your desired outcome.
You should leverage expertise from customer experience (CX) best practices to enhance your team and guide your efforts.

Find out how healthcare organizations break the mold and build a results-focused patient experience program that’s built to meet the expectations of modern patients in the digital age. Contact us at 385.695.2800 (8am-5pmMT) or visit www.maritzcx.com/patient-experience

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How to Use AI to Solve Real Business Problems

When people think AI, they often think big, such as curing cancer or solving climate change. Everybody is dreaming up the biggest problems possible and attempting to solve them with AI. Or there’s the flip side: not knowing what to do with AI and avoiding it accordingly. Hence why, according to McKinsey, just 20% of surveyed executives use AI-related technologies in their businesses.

There is a middle ground that will allow you to effectively integrate AI into your business without shooting for the moon (and blowing up on the launch pad). Look for business use cases where AI is already a proven solution — or an emergent one. And ensure that you have the data ecosystem available for AI to do its work.

With the right business case and the right data, AI can deliver powerful time and cost savings, as well as valuable insights you can use to improve your business.

Let’s take a look at a handful of business problems and how AI has been employed to solve them. These are practical, pragmatic, replicable efforts. It’s not intended to be a comprehensive list but instead a group of examples of “right-sized” projects.

The Problem: Predicting Customer Churn And Acting On It

VOZIQ provides customer experience management software to contact and call centers. (Full disclosure: VOZIQ and AlternativesPharma are Lexalytics, an InMoment Company, customers.) For these centers, churn reduction is a major KPI. And they do so largely by using demographic and transaction history data.

However, this approach fails to capture the real-time, dynamic customer data picked up over the phone, much of which is recorded in notes taken by call center workers.

Rather than letting this data sit untapped, VOZIQ made use of it. It integrated AI to analyze post-call comments, categorizing them by topic and flagging sentiment scores that indicate customer dissatisfaction and the likelihood of churn. The company’s call center clients now receive insight into customer motivations, concerns and reasons for calling and are able to use this data to quickly spot and address customer churn.

The Problem: Creating Surveys That Deliver High-Quality Responses

SurveyMonkey is a leading survey software that lets businesses create and publish digital surveys in minutes. The system crunches an incredible 3 million responses every day. Since launching in 1999, SurveyMonkey has built up a powerful database of consumer and employee responses, and it’s now using AI to leverage this data.

It’s doing so in a few ways. One of them is by tapping into past survey results to help businesses create high-performing surveys with high completion rates. The system delivers real-time recommendations for adjusting which questions are asked and how in order to generate higher quality data. The data received by SurveyMonkey comes from unpaid survey-takers, so optimizing for high-quality responses is essential.

The company is also using AI to help organizations map customer feedback via sentiment analysis and to help vet candidates for jobs, scholarships and programs. Together these changes mark SurveyMonkey’s shift toward becoming a business intelligence tool.

The Problem: Reading And Handling Online Reviews

There are countless online reviews sites for guests, travelers and diners to post their experiences. But reading and reviewing them is no simple task. Reviews are scattered across a variety of sites, many of which use different formats. Add to this the challenge of unstructured, text-based reviews and the multilingual nature of the hospitality industry, and obtaining a comprehensive snapshot is a serious challenge.

But this is exactly the sort of situation where AI shines. For example, luxury hotel operator Dorchester Collection is using AI to monitor its own and competitor reviews to identify genuine guest needs. Using a platform called Metis, Dorchester Collection parses, summarizes and contextualizes reviews in order to gain insights, plan next steps and maintain a competitive advantage.

The Problem: Creating Messaging That Resonates With Users

What patients say in a clinical setting is different from what they say behind closed doors — or in the anonymity of the internet. AlternativesPharma is all too aware of this, which is why it uses qualitative data from web forums, social media and blogs in its efforts to help pharmaceutical marketing teams connect with both patients and doctors.

However, sourcing, collating and analyzing such data on a suitably large scale is impossible without the help of technology. To get the insights and in-depth analysis needed to improve pharmaceutical messaging and communications, AlternativesPharma turned to AI. This has allowed the company to analyze, categorize, and “theme” patients’ online discussions around particular diseases and pharmaceutical products. With new insights into how patients talk about certain ailments, AlternativesPharma has been able to help its clients more effectively communicate with patients and medical providers.

Building A Business Case For Your AI Problem

So how do you go about bridging the gap between AI as a possibility and AI as your chosen solution? Building a business case for AI isn’t so different from building one for any other business problem.

First, identify a need and a desired outcome (automation and efficiency are common drivers of successful AI projects). Then undertake a feasibility assessment. You’ll need to determine whether you have enough data to work with and whether it’s the kind of data that lends itself to pattern identification and subsequent decision making. You’ll need to make sure that the technology is sufficiently advanced to do what you need to do. If not, an existing solution may be the more cost-effective option.

Finally, you’ll need to ensure that the ROI of “success” is there. How will you measure your outcomes, and how will you incorporate these new understandings into your business model?

Implementing AI can be a big undertaking. But if you start with a business problem and take an incremental approach, you’ll be able to leverage its time and cost efficiencies to stay competitive both now and in the future.

This article originally appeared on Forbes Technology Council.

2023 Consumer Experience Trends

2023 Consumer Experience Trends

What is Product-Led Growth?

Where end users rule, customer experience is everything

The relationship between CX and Product-Led Growth

The importance of end user feedback

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Sources:

Automotive News (‘Employee turnover costs dealers billions’ Jan.23, 2017)

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Customer Experience Management

Industrial & Aviation Design

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Technology & Electronics

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1. Fully Explore and Understand the Challenges

2. Overcome Challenges with an All-Inclusive, Results Driven Approach

3. Design, Diagnose, and Deliver a World-class Patient Experience Program

The Problem: Predicting Customer Churn And Acting On It

The Problem: Creating Surveys That Deliver High-Quality Responses

The Problem: Reading And Handling Online Reviews

The Problem: Creating Messaging That Resonates With Users

Building A Business Case For Your AI Problem

Further Reading: AI Use Cases, Ethics Concerns and More

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