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

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. word cloud with common drug side effects over a couple sitting in separate bathtubs and holding hands

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 Man looking at a smart phone while thinking "If Messi keeps slaying like this I'm going to buy season tickets!"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. Man looking puzzled while looking at a paper. He has happy, neutral and mad sentiment emoji's floating above him.

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

Word cloud of words associated with hotel stays floating above a housekeeper making a bedRevinate 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 customer survey with abstracted positive, negative and neutral textPromoter 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.shows how the identified semi-structured text can be extracted into a structured spreadsheet

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:a woman holds up boxes representing machine learning

  • 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 a businesswoman sits on an airplane working on her laptoporganization, 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.

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

 

 

 

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.

Person-Doing-a-Survey-with-Clipboard.pngIt’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.

Further Reading: AI Use Cases, Ethics Concerns and More

AI in Education: Where is it Now and What is the Future?
Text Analytics in Healthcare: New & Emerging Applications
How to Choose an AI Vendor – 4 Questions to Answer
Artificial Intelligence in Retail – 10 Present and Future Use Cases
AI in Healthcare: Data Ethics & Privacy Concerns
AI In Financial Services: Three Current And Emerging Applications

Advice on Adding a Reward Component to Your CX Program

Recently more and more of our clients are considering adding a significant reward component to their customer experience (CX) programs. This may take place by directly rewarding CX outcomes, or by adding them to an existing reward-based incentive program. Many automotive manufacturers have been using CX outcomes in their reward-based incentive programs for decades.

The insights provided below are based on our experience running the CX component of many of those programs. There’s a lot to think about if you are considering combining reward or compensation components with your CX program.

Your program will come under much more scrutiny and participants will care much more about it. Participants, especially those who do not achieve the reward, may also
challenge your program. This is why the process of setting, communicating, and enforcing program rules (i.e., program governance) becomes very important.

For the purposes of clarity, in the descriptions below we are going to use a typical example of a customer experience program that is run by a company to obtain feedback about experiences across its retailers (i.e., the reward program participants). However, when we refer to “retailers,” they could be any customer-facing program participants like franchise locations, bank branch managers, insurance agents, hotel managers, etc.

Consider What You Want to Accomplish

Adding a successful reward component to a program involves making many decisions about how to structure your program, that will ultimately determine its success. Before you begin making these decisions, it is important to clearly articulate (ideally in writing) what you hope to accomplish. For example:

  • What kinds of behaviors are you trying to change, and in whom?
  • Are you looking to reward people whose feedback indicates they are doing an exceptional job?
  • Are you hoping to nudge low-performing retailers to begin focusing more on customer experience?
  • Do you just want to incentivize people to keep doing what they’re doing?

Most programs we’ve encountered are set up to award the majority of retailers, both for marketing and retailer improvement purposes. However, due to budgets, there is a trade-off between the number of retailers you can reward and the size of the rewards you can give.

This is just one example of why it’s important to have alignment on the purpose of your program up front, so that the goals you set, metrics you collect, rewards you give, etc. can be strategically chosen to bring about the specific impact you want.

Qualification Criteria

Once you know what you want to accomplish with your program, you’ll want to decide what criteria need to be met for a retailer to qualify for consideration for the reward. There several factors that should be considered:

Pre-qualifiers: Some programs set criteria for a retailer to be eligible for reward consideration, no matter what their score. These criteria may be financial-based (e.g., minimum sales) or CX program-based.

For instance, if the retailers in the program are the source of the customer contact information, the percentage of provided sample with valid email addresses (i.e., data cleanliness) and/or the overall percentage of customers with valid email addresses (i.e., data coverage) are often used as pre-qualification criteria.

This encourages retailers to collect and report email contact information to be used for surveying purposes. Other pre-qualifiers can include retailers having completed training and other activities that contribute to the delivery of exceptional customer experiences.

Number of Returns: You will need a reliable and valid measure of customer experience upon which to base your rewards. To have enough surveys responses to produce a valid score, the general rule is 1000 is great, 100 is good, 30 is acceptable, and anything below that is questionable.

However, even when using 30 as the minimum responses needed, problems often occur because each retail unit needs to have that number of returns in the time period being measured. For context, many of our programs that receive over a million responses per year have difficulty meeting the 30 minimum responses at the retailer level because those responses are unevenly spread across thousands of retailers.

So, what do you do?

You need to look at the distribution of responses across your retailers and pick the highest number of returns that won’t exclude too many retailers due to low sample size. This analysis will also help you decide what time frame is needed to gather enough returns at the retailer level. Meaning, you might not have enough returns to support a program that gives quarterly rewards, but you may be able to give rewards semi-annually or annually.

Goals and Cut Off Scores

When implementing a reward program, you’ll need a goal or cut-off score that determines who earns the reward and who does not. These goal scores have many characteristics you need to consider.

SMART Goals: First of all, your goals should follow the SMART guidelines. In other words, your goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-Based. Describing the details of SMART goals is too large of a topic to address here, but that information can easily be found online.

A Single-Item Measure vs. an Index: You also need to decide if your goal is going to be determined by a single customer experience measure (e.g., Net Promoter Score, Overall Satisfaction with the Transaction) or an index that combines measures.

An index of key performance indicators (KPIs) is usually preferred because it is more statistically reliable, and you can focus your employees on achieving various KPIs. The KPIs making up the index can also be weighted to account for their relative importance in determining the customer experience.

We recommend that an index contains no more than three or four measures because people and businesses can only focus on a few things at a time.

A Universal Goal vs. Different Goals: Another important decision is if you will use a universal goal for everyone in the program or if you will have different goals for different groups of participants. While a universal goal is easiest to administer, in many cases it is not the best choice.

Because CX performance can vary greatly by geography, most reward-based CX programs set different goals for different countries, and many set different goals by region within countries to ensure fairness.

A Single All-or-Nothing Goal vs. Tiered Goals: One problem with setting a single all-or-nothing goal is that the goal may not be motivating for program participants who are so far away from the goal that they have virtually no chance of obtaining it. Therefore, you might consider adding a smaller reward solely based on improvement or provide rewards based on level of goal attainment (e.g., at 80%, 90%, 100% and 110%).

Another problem with having one all-or-nothing goal is that, when the value of the reward is significant, it can lead to undesirable behaviors when retailers are unable to achieve the goal by honest means. In these cases, retailers may resort to survey manipulation or other gaming behaviors to obtain the all-or-nothing reward.

A tiered structure with different attainment levels and corresponding reward values can help prevent this.

Absolute Goals vs. Relative Goals: Absolute goals are goals that are set before the beginning of the reward period. Relative goals are usually goals that are finalized at the end of the reward period and are based on all retailers’ performance during that time period. Common relative goals are the national average, or the score associated with the top “X” percent of retailers for the reward period.

In general, we recommend use of absolute goals because relative goals cause retailers to “shoot at a moving target.” This can lead to confusion and frustration, reducing program engagement.

While absolute goals are preferred, that does not mean they can’t be set using relative comparisons. Many programs set their absolute goals by using the national average or score associated with top tier dealers from the previous reward period.

Goal Level: How high you set the bar has important implications for people’s effort, and for the success of the program. Ideally, each individual or retailer will have a goal that is “just reachable” – a goal that is high enough so as to stretch them to perform to the best of their ability, but not beyond their reach in which case they may give up and disengage from the program.

Characteristics of the Reward

There are several aspects of the reward itself that you need to consider:

Type of Reward: The most common decision here is whether you are going to offer cash or non-monetary rewards like merchandise or travel experiences. While cash is often used, it may not be the best choice for a number of reasons.

First, it is important that the reward is a “bonus” to the participants, not something that they need to achieve to maintain their business or livelihood. While most people will say they would prefer cash, it can easily become absorbed into one’s personal budget and spent on necessities, thus becoming a need.

When this occurs, it is much more difficult to discontinue a cash-based rewards program because participants are relying on it for their livelihood.

Non-monetary rewards, on the other hand, are perceived as distinctly different from cash and usually deliver greater motivational and emotional value because they represent the opportunity to treat oneself or others with luxury items that might be difficult to justify if purchased. Also, non-monetary rewards usually have trophy or social value whereas cash does not.

Most program participants would be reluctant to tell friends they received a $5000 cash reward, and many would not remember how they spent that reward money a couple of years later. However, tangible items like merchandise and travel experiences provide lasting memories of being rewarded that are socially acceptable to talk about with others or post on social media. This extends the emotional arc of the reward, making it more meaningful and valuable to the recipient.

Amount of the Reward: Obviously, the amount of the reward will depend on your budget and how many winners you anticipate. Rewards need to be valuable enough to be motivating or people will either fail to engage or consider them unfair in exchange for their time and effort. Conversely, the rewards should not be so large that the need to win them triggers undesirable behavior or resentment if they are discontinued.

Timing of the Reward: You also need to determine the time period in which the rewards will be earned. Most reward programs we have seen provide rewards either quarterly or annually. It is particularly important that you set the time period long enough so the vast majority of participants will reach the minimum survey returns criterion.

For those who cannot meet the criteria in that time frame, you may want to find a fair alternative solution so they will not feel devalued.

Program Administration

Program administration is one of the things that will change most if you add a significant reward omponent to your CX program because there will be more scrutiny of scores and more “score chasing”.

Survey Appeals Process: Most CX programs with significant rewards have some sort of survey appeals process, either a formal set of rules or a “one-off” decision making process. For consistency and fairness, a formal set of rules is preferred. Generally, survey appeals should be granted only in cases where egregious survey errors have occurred.  Sending the survey to the wrong customer or having the customer rate the wrong retailer or transaction would qualify as egregious errors.

The remedy for successful appeals should be to remove the surveys in goal score calculation rather than giving “full credit.” Many CX programs set a limit to the number of appeals a retailer can make to prevent appeals from getting out of hand.

“Mulligans:” In golf, a “mulligan” is a free do-over without a penalty stroke. In the CX world some programs allow “mulligans” by dropping retailers’ bottom one to five percent of surveys in a given time period. This is done to hopefully minimize the survey appeals process and to address the common complaint that, “you can’t satisfy everyone.”

Generally, allowing “mulligans” is not a good idea for a number of reasons:

  • It often does not minimize the appeals process. Retailers still challenge surveys in the hopes they won’t count toward their mulligans.
  • Most programs set goals based on national/regional performance across units. For something to truly be a “mulligan”, goal scores need to be set without removing mulligans, but retailer scores need to be calculated while removing mulligans. Otherwise, you are just “raising the bar” by removing mulligans. While necessary, this process can cause unnecessary confusion to the understanding of program rules and thus less participant engagement.
  • All retailers have to deal with unreasonable customers. That’s part of the job and the effects of having difficult to satisfy customers should “wash out” over retailers.

Establish Rules for Survey-Related Behavior: The key to having a CX component in a rewards program is to ensure that the survey responses are in sync with the actual experience and that participants aren’t asking for a rating inconsistent with actual performance.

Unfortunately, when there is a significant reward on the line, many retailers talk to customers about filling out the survey and encourage them to “give me a good grade.” Therefore, you need to set and clearly communicate rules for what behaviors are allowed and not allowed.

Some programs prohibit retailers from even mentioning the survey to the customer. Others allow retailers to inform the customer that a survey will be coming and ask the customer to please fill it out, but that is all they can say. Things that are typically not allowed include: Telling customers they are “graded” on the survey, showing customers a survey with all top-box responses checked, telling customers their pay depends on survey results, and providing incentives for good survey scores.

Program Adherence Monitoring: Most companies that have significant rewards based on their CX programs have processes in place to detect if retailers are attempting to manipulate the results. There are several markers that could indicate manipulation: duplicate customer contact information (e.g., email addresses), retailer domains in the email address, unusually low percentages of valid email addresses, unusually low or high response rates, unusually high number of multiple responses from the same IP address, and multiple responses from the same computer or smartphone.

A best practice in this area is to keep the specific survey manipulation detection methods unpublished to make it difficult for participants to figure out work arounds. However, the general fact that survey returns are being assessed for manipulation should be publicized. Retailers are less likely to try to game the system if they know their company is monitoring results for cheating.

Establish and Communicate Consequences of Cheating: This is where many programs fall short because cheating is implicitly allowed through the lack of consequences for getting caught. If cheating is allowed, many people will not go to the effort to do the behaviors your program is designed to incentivize.

It can also undermine a program by creating a sense of unfairness for the participants who try to earn their rewards honestly. Programs that do enforce cheating rules usually use an escalation approach where the retailer first receives a warning and is given time to rectify the situation. If infractions continue, the penalties usually grow in severity.

Publish a Program Manual: As you can see, you’ll have to establish many program rules and these rules will need to be clearly communicated to the program participants. Many program managers do this by publishing an annual program manual that describes both the rewards and the rules.

Final Points

The primary point we hope you take away from reading this paper is that combining a significant reward program with your CX program is a very big decision that needs to be considered carefully. It is a decision that is usually very difficult to reverse.

Once you start giving rewards based on customer experience, if you decide not to continue to do so in the future, your retailers will likely interpret that decision as, “the company doesn’t prioritize customer experience anymore.” As a result, your customers’ experiences will probably suffer.

Finally, if you add a rewards component to your CX program, your program will likely become much more complicated. Many decisions will need to be made about such things as the ultimate goals of the program, the criteria for inclusion, and how success will be measured and rewarded. You will also need to implement many new rules and procedures to oversee the program.

Overall, a well-designed and well-executed reward program can have a meaningful impact on the loyalty and behavior of your stakeholders.

Financial Services Disclosure Compliance Monitoring

Financial services firms around the world face strict regulations around disclosure compliance and monitoring. For example, the Australian government mandates that financial Statements of Advice (SoAs) include disclosures covering conflicts of interest, own-product recommendations and more. Each disclosure, in turn, may contain a dozen or more sub-components. This adds up to a major burden for the service provider. On average, globally, financial firms dedicate 10-15% of their workforces and spend a combined $270 billion on regulatory compliance annually. New Regulatory Technology solutions can help financial services firms lower the costs associated with disclosure compliance monitoring and reduce their non-compliance risk. Here’s how.

The Costs of Non-Compliance are Huge and Growing

The cost of compliance failure is huge and growing. McKinsey found a 45x increase in regulatory fines and settlements over 5 years. GlobalScape estimates that non-compliance can cost a firm up to $39.22 million in lost revenue, business disruption, productivity loss and penalties. And the Institute of International Financial says compliance can cost a firm over $1 billion per year.

Chart showing the costs of Financial disclosure non-compliance
From Lexalytics’, an InMoment company,AI for Regulatory Compliance white paper

Meanwhile, a 2016 BBVA Research report found that financial services firms are dedicating around 10-15% of total workforce just to governance, risk management and compliance – that number has almost certainly gone up in the intervening years. In the very next sentence, the same report identified “compliance costs” and “reliance on manual processes in data management” as two of the top issues facing financial institutions.

Financial Document Templates Are Great for Disclosure Compliance, But You Have to Go Further

Faced with strict disclosure mandates, many financial firms build libraries of document templates. Each template is “pre-loaded” with all of the proper disclosures and legal language. Each advisor or broker then modifies the appropriate template, such as a Statement of Advice, on a client-by-client basis. As far as reducing non-compliance risk, this strategy is certainly a good start. But it’s not enough on its own.

The problem is that an average-size financial services firm may produce thousands of pages of client-facing documents every week. In the process, important disclosures may be accidentally modified or removed entirely. What’s more, the sheer volume of data and information in each document may obscure problematic or even predatory advice.

Many firms rely on spot-checks and keyword searches to confirm disclosure compliance and ensure that their advisors are working in each client’s best interests. But this process is slow, costly and unreliable.

Consider this: Looking for individual keywords may return hundreds of irrelevant matches littered through a document. Searching for whole phrases may miss where a disclosure has been truncated or deleted. And how can you use keywords to search for bad advice?

Document templates are a start. But you have to go further.

This is where Regulatory Technology (RegTech) comes into play.

Quick Context: What is Regulatory Technology? and Why Do Many “AI for Regulatory Compliance” Tools Fall Short?

Regulatory Technology (RegTech) is a category of systems that help companies comply with government regulations. For example, solutions like NetGuardians help companies with identifying, tracking and managing fraud incidents.

The RegTech market is hot. Between 2012 and 2017, RegTech companies raised $2.3 billion in funding, according to CBInsights. And ComplyAdvantage reports that the automation of due diligence is at the forefront of the RegTech revolution. But they caution that custom-fitting is key. Indeed, our own research supports the idea that one-size-fits-all RegTech solutions are, by their nature, more likely to fail.

The truth is, traditional data analytics tools often can’t handle legal, financial and and medical documents. In short, many RegTech tools don’t have the technology they need to parse the structure and content of regulatory documents. As a result, disclosure compliance systems may leave behind valuable data or overlook important context. (More info in this client story)

Story Time: A Financial Disclosure Compliance Monitoring Solution That Empowers, Not Replaces, Human Auditors

An Australian financial services company came to Lexalytics for help reducing the time they spent auditing hundreds of pages of Statements of Advice (SoAs). Regular contract analysis tools couldn’t be customized to do exactly what they wanted. And costly failures of other large-scale AI systems had made them wary of entrusting millions to one of the Big Tech companies.

So, rather than building a high-cost, high-risk “AI for disclosure compliance,” Lexalytics focused on improving the Australian firm’s existing process.

Chart showing technologies used in Lexalytics' financial services disclosure compliance solution
Lexalytics combined several technologies to build a bespoke financial services disclosure compliance solution

First, we trained our semi-structured data parser to understand the underlying structure of Statement of Advice documents. This included teaching the parser how to identify where sections begin and end, such as Scope of Advice and Duty of Disclosure portions.

Then, we built a custom natural language processing configuration to extract and analyze entities and other text elements. In an SoA, important entities are things like recipients, needs, goals, product recommendations, risk attitude and the actual disclosure statements.

Finally, we built a connector to structure and export the resulting data into a simple spreadsheet. (Then, based on user feedback, we made a few tweaks to how the data is organized and displayed.)

Using this system, the firm’s auditors can see at a glance whether proper disclosures were made across hundreds of SoA documents, and even where an advisor’s recommendations may go against their client’s stated goals and risk attitude. This substantially lowers their time spent on SoA review, reduces their non-compliance risk, and helps them demonstrate disclosure compliance whenever needed.

"Illustrated

(See this other white paper for more on the process we followed for building this “semi-custom” regulatory compliance application.)

How to Build a Better Regulatory Compliance Solution

Regulatory compliance as a field varies by industry, by country, and even by company. This means that every compliance challenge is unique to some degree.

What’s more, the nature of the documents involved in regulatory compliance means that to build an “AI for regulatory compliance,” you need more than just AI. In fact, you need a combination of semi-structured data parsing, natural language processing, and machine learning. (More on why that is in this paper.)

Of course, not every RegTech system will necessarily need all three technologies at the same time. Our financial services disclosure compliance monitoring solution, for example, only uses semi-structured data parsing and natural language processing. (Of course, the NLP itself involves a lot of machine learning.)

Together, these factors mean that traditional data analytics techniques and one-size-fits-all compliance tools will often, by their very nature, fall short.

To really solve regulatory compliance problems, the most important thing is to choose a solution provider who combines the following characteristics:

  1. Has all three of these technologies at their disposal (semi-structured parsing, NLP, and machine learning)
  2. Can demonstrate that they know how, and where, to use them (and when not to use them)
  3. Demonstrates a proven methodology for building a system that’s custom-fit to your unique needs

Feel free to contact us if you’d like to discuss your own regulatory compliance challenges and how Regulatory Technology could help reduce your costs and risk.

The Employee Experience is Crucial to a Successful Patient Experience

Employee Experience and Patient Experience Go Hand-in-hand

Let’s be clear: I love my job. Truly. In fact, I’m one of those people who truly enjoys going to work. Sickening? Perhaps. But hang on…here comes the punch line: it’s been A WEEK. School is back in session, which means a new and unfamiliar schedule…and necessary bedtimes. (I really dislike bedtimes, especially on beautiful August summer evenings here in WI.) Kid sports and activities are again in full swing, most nights of the week. And we’re nearing Q4 on the business side of things, which means…client budgets need to get used and therefore, we are UBER busy. Which truly, is a good thing.

What’s not a good thing? The 13 hours of sleep I’ve managed across the last three nights. And, confession time: I’m simply not my best in this intense a situation, on this little sleep, with this level of stress. I’m not patient, I’m less kind than I should be, I don’t listen to my kids and husband very well, and I don’t truly engage in my life. I’m surviving.

After the week started the way it did, I saw this meme on a social media site the other day and it struck a chord with me. UNTIL, I had a friend say to me, “You don’t want to be a survivor, a warrior…you were made for better – you’re a THRIVER.”

And you know what? She was absolutely right. All the personal stuff aside, when I’m stressed, tired, overwhelmed, I’m most certainly not as professionally innovative and sharp as I know I’m capable of. And it got me thinking…healthcare professionals, with whom we are working more and more, work in this type of environment frequently. The stress, the “go-go-go,” the utter fatigue…this is a common scenario for many of those we trust to help us get and remain healthy – our physicians, nurses, and the office and admin staff that support them.

You know those moments when you stop in your tracks and think “holy cow?” Yeah, I had one of those moments. Because about a month ago, the pediatric after-hours line sent me to the emergency room with a sick kid. A physician friend on staff that night came out to greet us. He then stopped in our room to check in again at the end of his shift at 12:30 AM before heading home to his wife and three kids. Thinking back now, I realize how much better our experience was that night because this employee cared.

This is one key reason why we need to care about – and measure, monitor, and respond to – the EMPLOYEE experiences in healthcare, and not just the patient experiences.

These physicians, nurses, office staff, they are human and prone to human emotions, reactions, flaws just like the rest of us. Which means that they also get tired, frustrated, and stressed – and that this can also impact the way in which they perform their jobs that day.

As was the case for my family that night in the ED, these employees are the ones that can make or break a patient experience. And that night, we were fortunate to have care reflective of a healthcare organization that values, appreciates, and actively works to engage its employees in their roles.

Recently, I was trying to schedule a specialist appointment for my son and the “first available time” was 4 months out. My poor child suffers from major allergies, has asthma, and we couldn’t get his prescription renewed until we’d visited his allergist. Realistically, by the time we’d have been able to get in, all the allergens would have been frozen out, since we live in the frozen tundra of Wisconsin, so it made more sense for us to cancel that appointment and free that slot up for someone else!

This brings us to a second reason why we must care deeply about healthcare employee experience: the current shortage of healthcare professionals.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics, in 2018, projected that 1.1 million additional nurses are needed to avoid further shortage, and that as a profession, employment opportunities for nurses will grow at a faster rate than all other occupations from 2016-2026.

There’s a similar story on the physician side, with the Association of American Medical Colleges projecting a shortage of 120,000 physicians by 2030. With Baby Boomers getting older, this shortage will only increase due to increases in patient volume and demand, and as Baby Boomer healthcare professionals retire.

Undoubtedly, these shortages will impact both availability and quality of care. While not a macro solution, one way healthcare systems can proactively mitigate these shortages on a local level is to focus on efforts designed to retain their teams. Employee retention is a complex concept, and impacted by a variety of factors: the nature of the work, the employee’s manager and teammates, the work environment, work-life balance, perceived value of the work the employee does, etc.

Understanding what matters to healthcare employees, and actively working to engage them is going to be critical in both the short and long term.

I was reading an article recently about a nurse on her way to work who, upon seeing a mother running down the highway, pulled over and was able to revive the woman’s non-breathing infant child. When these stories make the news, two things often strike me as consistent elements: the individual involved in the life-saving measure is a healthcare professional, and the drama has played out outside the confines of the hospital or clinic in which this healthcare professional works.

But here’s the thing: this is what these professionals DO. Not all may actually work in a role in which they are called to save lives on a daily basis, but on the whole, it is these same employees, going about their jobs on a daily basis, who are frequently the reason why a patient in their care has lived instead of died.

This story illustrates a third reason why a program measuring a holistic patient experience MUST also include measurement of employee experience. The actions, the attention, the engagement of the doctors, nurses, in-take staff are often what separates patients from life or death.

Healthcare systems and hospitals are the entities that have the power to proactively understand and manage the employment experiences of their employees. Whether they do so, not only impacts the delivery of care, it can literally mean the difference between life and death.

So how can the healthcare industry value their employees while providing an excellent patient experience? Below are some best practices to be considered:

  • Include employees in conversations that involve patient feedback and care, as they are the ones who interact with patients day to day. Paying attention to feedback can help bridge the gaps in experiences for both patients and employees. Employees need to know that their voice is valued.
  • Remember that employees are human. Healthcare industry leaders are in position to look out for the physical, emotional, and mental well-being of their employees. Something simple like providing a meal during a long shift, or making sure employees are highlighted for their important work is a good way to start. Recognition goes a long way, and helps employees feel valued by the patients they serve.
  • Provide growth opportunities for employees, allowing them to learn new things while helping them with their career paths. This not only makes the employee feel valued, but also increases loyalty to patients and their respective healthcare employers.

3 Reasons Why Behavioural Science is Critical for CX Transformation

Spare a thought for the millions of emails that are never opened.

For the millions of letters that are never read.

For the millions of website clicks that never reach conversion.

For the millions of full baskets that are never checked out.

For the millions of forms that are never filled out.

For the millions of conversations that leave the customer unsatisfied.

Despite the strive for customer-centricity, many businesses have forgotten what is most important: the customer. So how do we bring back the human touch?

More and more customer experience teams are starting to use principles from Behavioural Science to transform their customer experience. Want to try taking this innovative approach for yourself?

Below are three reasons to start incorporating nudges from Behavioural Science in your customer experience today:

1) You Can Use Behavioural Science to Better Understand and Change Customer Behaviour

There is no doubt that Behavioural Science provides a compelling toolkit for understanding what is really going on inside customers’ brains. Behavioural Science uses these customer insights in order to change behaviour and drive compelling results.

For example, when our brains are faced with too much information, we experience “cognitive overload.” To reduce this problem for one of our clients, we helped them to “chunk” complex information in phone calls into digestible parts. This made it easier for customers to take action, and improved the sales conversion by +68.5%.

2) Behavioural Science Transforms the Internal Customer Experience for Employees, as Well as the External Experience for Customers

The brilliance underpinning Behavioural Science is that the human insight is universal. We’re using the very same techniques to improve the experience for employees and, by doing so, this creates valuable experiences for customers.

For one of our clients, we used the principle of “reciprocity” to make conversations in contact centres more meaningful and fulfilling for both employees and customers alike. Customers aren’t saying, “I don’t know what you mean,” anymore, and employees are enjoying their conversations more.

As a result, the churn rate of staff is down to a one quarter of the previous levels, and employee NPS has improved considerably.

3) Behavioural Science Benefits From Academically Rigorous Techniques that Prove the Value of Customer Experience Transformation

Customer Experience Transformation Programmes are often challenged on their ability to deliver concrete value to the business, and one of the benefits of Behavioural Science is its academic rigour. Being able to prove that customer experience interventions are backed up by science is a real asset in a business context.

Randomised Control Trials, A/B split tests, MVTs all combine to accurately and statistically prove the value of any investment, and make a robust business case for future investment.

In order to demonstrate the value of using Behavioural Science to transform customer experience, we work with our clients to design rigorous experiments.

In one such experiment, we demonstrated that our Behavioural Science intervention delivered transformational commercial returns of £37:£1.

There’s no doubt that using Behavioural Science allows you to deliver a superior customer experience with transformational results. If you’d like to learn more about how you can start using Behavioural Science to improve your customer experience today, come and say hello at the Cowry Consulting stand at CXForum on the 9th of October.

www.cowryconsulting.com

MaritzCX Unveils the Healthcare Industry’s First CX-Based Patient Experience Platform

MaritzCX is the first and only CX platform company that’s been CMS-certified to offer Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (HCAHPS®) surveys.

Identifying the need for an all-inclusive, customizable patient experience survey and reporting framework, we developed the MaritzCX Patient Experience Platform, the healthcare industry’s first CX-based patient experience platform.

The platform allows for HCAHPS, patient experience, employee experience, safety and quality, point-of-care/rounding, operational, financial, and clinical data can be uploaded into a single platform, in real time.

With an inclusive view unlike anything before, healthcare organizations can identify more significant and impactful improvements to enhance patient experiences, scores and reimbursement.

They can also view and analyze patient experience data from multiple sources and surveys to gain a more comprehensive view of what impacts the patient journey.

 

“Healthcare organizations have long looked for patient experience best practices outside of their industry. Meanwhile, MaritzCX has spent 50 years implementing customer experience best practices for leading global organizations in industries that include hospitality, retail, high tech, and financial services. Finally, MaritzCX has smashed the regulatory and technology barrier between the two arenas. MaritzCX has spent the last two years building a platform that offers the functionality needed to revolutionize the patient experience. With the MaritzCX Patient Experience Platform and CMS certification, we help healthcare firms break free of the inflexible and stagnant offerings provided by current patient experience vendors in the space today.”

— Mike Sinoway, MaritzCX President and CEO

 

Hospitals and Patients Benefit from a Revolutionary Patient Experience Platform

  • Limitless Customization Capability

 From self-serve to full-serve with MaritzCX experts, healthcare teams can easily design survey questions down to the level of each individual patient, if desired. Customization extends to dashboard views, reports and distribution options directly within the platform.

  • Seamless Integration with Existing Systems

 Easily integrate current survey initiatives and systems into the MaritzCX Patient Experience Platform and view data from HCAHPS, Safety, Quality, Employee Experience or any other data source in one place. Viewing data dynamically together aides in understanding connections and performance.

  • Patient-centric Platform

Make the patient the priority and offer options via responsive mobile, text, email, online and mail capture feedback from beginning to end along the patient journey.

  • Employee Experience (EX) and Patient Experience (PX) Linkage

MaritzCX is the only firm that focuses on true EX-PX linkage and transparency of patient experience data across the organization, coupling it with employee awareness, training, management and recognition/reward programs. This linkage helps PX teams get to the root of organizational change (employees) to positively impact patient experiences.

 

Customer Experience Experts that Know Patient Experience Too

Experts in customer experience, MaritzCX is the only CX platform company to earn CMS certification. Our Patient Experience Platform is built, supported and implemented by MaritzCX, ensuring complete HIPAA compliance.

Click here to start improving your patient experience today.

Ready to Tackle Customer Churn? Here’s How.

Is there a business that hasn’t lost a single customer? Doubtful. Customer churn is inevitable. For this reason, maintaining superior customer experience in a world of insurmountable choice and lagging brand loyalty is of utmost importance. Now I’m no mind reader, but since you’re still here, I’ll assume that you’re struggling with generating new demand for your business and keeping existing customers around at the same time.

For starters, let’s define customer churn.

Also known as customer attrition, churn refers to the rate at which your customers stop purchasing your product or service, signaling the end of their relationship with you. These customers stop bringing in revenue for your business. 

Customer Churn Rate Equation

Let’s say that you started this quarter with 500 customers but lost 25; this means your churn rate is 5%. 

Other measurable ways for customer churn include:

  1. Number of customers dropped
  2. Percentage of customers lost
  3. Amount of monthly recurring revenue (MRR) lost
  4. Percentage of MRR lost

What Causes Customer Churn?

  • Value Pricing is tricky because customers are always looking for the most cost-effective solution to the problem they wish to solve. Customers need to feel like their purchase was worth the cost, so it’s crucial to establish value early on, through customer onboarding and education. Otherwise, they’re at risk for churn. 
  • Product Fit – Another common reason for customer churn is an inferior fit. If you have a sales team that’s hustling to hit quota but isn’t incentivized to sell to good-fit customers, your company will face consequences. Soon after their purchase, customers will realize they can’t achieve their goals with your product and will churn.
  • User Experience – If you have a product that’s not very intuitive or your software is glitchy, chances are customers will be less likely to use it on a regular basis and build expertise with it. They may not stick around for long. 
  • Competitors – Even if you believe you’re assisting customers to achieve their desired outcomes, they’ll still churn if they firmly believe that a competitor can do a better job. Competition is fierce these days, so you need to work hard to set yourself apart from your competition.
  • Missing Features/deliverables – Let’s say you fail to fulfill a goal that was initially agreed on while getting a client on board. When you fail to provide services as promised, you’re bound to lose a customer.

What Are Some Churn Indicators to Watch Out For?

1. Weak CX metrics – When thinking about churn, there are two CX metrics, in particular, that you should pay close attention to:

    • Net Promoter Score.  The grand-daddy of customer experience metrics, a detractor or passive NPS survey response is a leading indicator of churn. 
    • Customer Effort Score. Many software companies have adopted CES to measure the ease of getting started with your company or product. If this critical phase, often known as onboarding, is too difficult, churn can follow. 

2. Usage levelCustomer churn is often preceded by a period of decreased usage level, so keep a close eye on users’ login activity. This will help you to identify at-risk customers right before they churn. Also, if a customer downgrades to a lower tier of your product, this should be worrisome news – there’s a good chance that this customer will soon stop using your product altogether.

3. Customer’s KPI’sIf your product or service isn’t helping customers achieve their KPIs, then the chance of them churning is much higher. If you notice that a valued customer isn’t reaching their desired goals, it’s crucial that you reach out to them and find out what you can do to better help them achieve those goals.

4. Customer HealthWhile measured definitively when a customer renews or doesn’t, customer success teams look at a number of factors to assign a customer health score to an account. Take a look at the kinds of customer support interactions you’re seeing from the customer. After using your service, do you think the customer is getting what they’re paying for? How does the account manager feel about the customer’s state of mind about the services they’re buying from you? Factor in the account’s CX metrics. As soon as you have an idea of who might leave, you’ll be able to take all the relevant steps to define the problem, fix it, and retain their business. Eventually, you can start to implement a systematic approach to measuring customer health, uncovering at-risk customers, and reaching out to them.

5. Feature AdoptionEvery product or service has some key feature that makes it stand out from competitors. If a valued customer isn’t using these features, this is an indicator that they might churn soon.

6. SupportThis point refers to the number of support issues raised, the severity of the issues, the time it took to resolve them, and the customer’s satisfaction with the interaction (often measured with a CSAT survey). These factors can have a significant impact on a customer’s health, so they’re important to pay attention to. If a customer hasn’t reported any issues or asked any questions, this could also be a red flag – a silent customer doesn’t mean they are happy with your product. 

What Needs to Be Done?

1. Engage with your customers.

This might sound obvious, but engaging with your customers is the best way to make them stay. Proactively inquire about how they are doing using CX surveys at key journey points. This will help you identify who is happy and who is at risk. Armed with this information, follow up with a conversation if warranted. Get them on the phone and show that your company genuinely cares. But don’t stop there – keep engaging. Depending on the size of the customer, you may want to schedule a quarterly check-in, and certainly one in advance of renewal. 

In addition to talking directly to customers, provide ample and educational content about the key functional benefits of your product. Offer regular news updates, to communicate your commitment to innovation in service of their success.
With this kind of communication, you can get customers to keep coming back by showing them the value of using your product and how they can make your product a part of their daily workflow. 

Last but not least, I’d like to recommend social listening – the process of finding and contributing to conversations about your company online by seeking out brand mentions, specific keywords or phrases, and comments. 

By doing these things, you’ll be able to keep tabs on what’s going on in terms of customer satisfaction.

2. Educate Your Customers

Another churn-prevention trick: provide plenty of quality educational or support materials. Try offering free trainings, webinars, video tutorials, and product demos. Do whatever it takes to make your customers feel comfortable and informed. Put simply, you must not only give customers tools that work but also offer training on how to best use these tools. In this way, you’ll also be able to demonstrate the full potential of your product or service.

3. Set realistic expectations

As I mentioned before, failing to deliver on services as promised can result in a very unhappy customer that is at high risk of churning. One of the common practices I have seen across several industries is to over promise and under deliver. Why would a salesperson want to do this? There could be numerous reasons: 

    • They fear they might lose a potential customer
    • They’re facing pressure from their boss
    • They desire to come across as the “deal maker”  
    • They’re desperate to close the deal
    • They’re unwilling to tell the customer what they don’t want to hear

4. Keep a keen eye on competitors

It’s a bad sign when your customers perceive your competition to be better. As you work on reducing customer churn, pay close attention to how your customers might perceive your competitors’ products, and don’t forget to benchmark your overall performance and customer satisfaction against your competitors. 

Lastly, remember, the stakes are higher than ever. It’s time to make smart moves!

Author Bio:
Vikash Kumar works as a manager in the offshore software development company Tatvasoft.com. In his free time, Kumar enjoys writing and exploring new technical trends and topics. You can follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Automakers Focusing More Attention to “Retention/loyalty”…But Can Dealers Deliver at the Customer Facing Level?

There’s a change going on with automakers! For the first time, automotive OEMs are creating and implementing proprietary customer loyalty programs for their dealer network.

Those programs are anchored by redeemable rewards points and aimed at keeping customers in the dealership “loyalty loop.” And car makers are even funding entire programs…one has even deposited $210 worth of points for each new car buyer so that new sold customers can use their points immediately.

It’s a first for the automakers, who, until recently, have ridden the wave of robust car sales following the great recession of 2008. The past hot market for sales placed retention on the back burner. But that wave is now ending, prompting dealers to search for other means of profits…mainly from used cars and the service center.

Loyalty programs, driven by redeemable points, are not new. Those programs offered by vendors have been around for decades. What makes them more attractive today is the new awareness on the part of retail auto leaders of the true value of a retained customer.

Loyalty programs can send a clear message to the customer that “we care about a relationship with the customer for the future”.

In addition to creating loyalty rewards program, car makers are also focusing more and more on retention rate benchmarks of their dealers…even rewarding them with bonus cash for meeting manufacturer preset goals.

And there is an increasingly strong feeling among retail auto leaders that “retention” will eventually replace “CSI” as the key measurement for the customer’s experience at the dealership.

In one case, a major automaker has already replaced the traditional service CSI score with an expected retention number.

These changes are also prompting a subtle but significant shift in dealership strategy. Traditionally, dealer leadership has always focused on the showroom, but now, with the plateauing of sales, that same leadership is now gaining a more intimate awareness of how the service center is the key to retaining customers for service revenue and repeat sales.

Dealer Service Centers are Ground Zero for Customer Retention

There is little doubt that what happens in the dealer service center has the most profound effect on customer retention. I spoke about this in two previous posts in the Maritz CXCafe Your Other Showroom, The Service Center and Client Loyalty Is Not Dead…But Client Follow-Up is!…but some of that information bears repeating in this latest post.

Success with ramping up acts of retention will require a dramatic cultural change that dealers will not adapt to easily.

Ever since the dawn of auto retailing, budgets for bringing traffic to the showroom have far exceeded those allocated for the service center. That will have to change with the new focus on loyalty.

Consider these NADA stats from 2017:

  • Dealers spent an average of $7.00 on retaining their already sold customers (2017)
  • Luxury dealers spent an average of $762.00 on each vehicle sold, non-luxury spent $670.00 (2017)
  • Average gross on referral vehicle sales was $1,200.00 vs $817.00 for fresh “ups”
  • Referrals have a 51% service usage vs 29% for fresh ups
  • Referrals have a 96% CSI score vs 73% for fresh ups

Clearly, increasing budgets for the service center have had a hard time gaining traction with store General Managers, a group dominated by those whose pedigree was developed in the showroom. That will have to change.

Greatest Deterrent to Focusing on Retention is the Existing “Transactional” Culture

Dealer service advisers don’t instinctively view the value of customer retention. I know this after observing it for 3 years as customer experience manager/retention (the service center exclusively) for one of the largest Buick dealers in the country.

As I stated in a past MaritzCX Cafe post, the number one enemy of customer retention is what I call transactionalism…the preoccupation with an all-consuming focus by dealers on the sales “deal” or the service “RO”, to the detriment of creating a “memorable” experience for the customer with follow up to match.

That proverbial focus on the transaction pushes a “memorable experience” and “customer follow up” to the back burner.

Customer Rewards Programs: A Platform for Delivering a Memorable Experience

We already have established that the service center is ground zero for retention success/failure for dealerships. We also know that service advisers are the primary brand ambassadors for that retention.

Sure, the CX delivered by the sales unit is important, but not as critical to retaining customers as the service lane experience and customer follow up. And while the customer experience during their visit to service is important to retaining them for future loyalty, the follow up of that same customer is even more critical.

That’s why loyalty programs, featuring redeemable points for future service discounts are so critical to repeat visits to service…and eventually to that next vehicle purchase.

Those programs not only offer the customer future discounts on products and services; they also convey a perception that the dealership cares about a future relationship with the customer.

The Crucial Piece that NPS Misses, and How to Fill the Gap

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is great for a quick overview of customer satisfaction and brand health. But NPS ignores nuance. A single number can’t tell you why customers feel the way they do. The upshot? You may be making bad decisions based on misleading NPS metrics. In a world where customer experience is everything, this can be disastrous.

Key take-aways

A high Net Promoter Score doesn’t mean your brand is healthy

People often leave comments that don’t match their NPS

You can fill this consumer insights gap by analyzing open-ended survey responses, social comments and online reviews

For best results, combine NPS and NLP-powered BI tools into a holistic Voice of Customer program

Read on to learn more about the dangers of measuring customer satisfaction with pure-NPS, and how you can use NLP-powered BI tools to fill this customer insights gap.

  1. What is NPS?
  2. The benefits of NPS
  3. Why is it bad to rely on NPS alone?
  4. The NPS insights gap
  5. How NPS can be misleading
  6. Bridging the NPS insights gap
  7. Customer review analytics in action
  8. How to build a better Voice of Customer program

What is NPS?

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a single-question survey designed to measure customer brand loyalty. NPS asks,

“How likely are you to recommend [Company X] to a friend or colleague?”

Customers can answer on a scale:

0-6 = Detractor

7-8 = Passive

9-10 = Promoter

Promoters are likely to buy again or generate referral business. Detractors are unlikely to buy again and may actively discourage others. Passives fall between the two.

A company’s net promoter score is a simple calculation:

Company NPS = [% Promoters] – [% Detractors]

Image by Medallia

As we’ll see, NPS is a versatile number that offers a wide range of benefits and practical applications. But NPS can be dangerously misleading without deeper, supplemental business intelligence.

The benefits of NPS

First and foremost, the NPS system is proven to increase survey response rates by giving customers a chance to have their voice heard, without requiring a substantial time investment.

Next, a company’s Net Promoter Score can simultaneously be taken as a snapshot and tracked over time for predictive analytics.

Third, NPS can be measured by company, product, franchise location, support agent, and a wide range of vectors.

Image by Okuma

Fourth, NPS can serve as a predictor of business growth. A Promoter’s customer lifecycle value (CLV) is usually higher than a Detractor’s or Passive’s. So, a higher NPS naturally correlates with higher revenue, and vice versa.

Fifth, NPS drives rapid changes in policies, products and processes. By using a simple, shared vocabulary, NPS lets you quickly share information within an organization, while being sure that everyone reaches the same conclusions. This helps companies reduce the communication delay between customers, support agents, and product managers.

Finally, you can compare your company’s aggregated Net Promoter Score against your competitors for a simple picture of your brand’s relative health. If your business has an NPS of 70, but your chief competitor boasts a 90, you know to start digging deeper to find out why.

In short, the Net Promoter Score system is a simple, easy way for businesses to paint a clear picture of consumer opinion and brand health.

For these reasons and more, NPS has become a go-to customer success metric for companies and agencies across every industry and vertical. But NPS isn’t enough on its own.

Why is it bad to rely on NPS alone?

The NPS system delivers an easy-to-understand measure of customer satisfaction. And because NPS questions generate more responses than traditional satisfaction surveys, NPS can give you more data to act on. But in the end, this is a dangerous oversimplification. A high NPS doesn’t mean your brand is healthy.

The chasm between Facebook star ratings, represented here by O’Hare ATC Towers, illustrates a fractured opinion of the airport. But why?

Customers don’t care about your NPS. They want to know that they’ll enjoy the experience of using your products and services. And without understanding why you’re receiving your scores, and without giving your customers the chance to tell you in their own words, you’ll never have the data you need to make informed, effective decisions.

The “why” comes from open-ended survey responses, customer comments, social media posts, and online reviews (which is an information source that is notoriously challenging and labor-intensive to utilize). As we’ll show, this is where natural language processing comes into play.

The NPS insights gap

Meet Stephanie.

Stephanie just wrapped up a four-night stay at a San Francisco hotel while in town for a conference. When asked how likely she’d be to recommend the hotel to others, Stephanie responds with an enthusiastic 9.

Sounds great, right? Another promoter created, a higher NPS for the hotel, and a happy management team. Bonuses all around!

Not so fast. Stephanie also left a free-text comment on the same survey:

“Stayed for 4 nights. The room was spotless, and the bed was super comfy. Especially loved the shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom since I forgot mine at home! I did notice the fruit in the bowl at the front desk looked off and the breakfast was kind of lame. But overall a great stay.”

Overall, Stephanie describes a positive experience and offered a generous Net Promoter Score. But her comment raises two red flags that demand attention: rotten fruit and a “lame” breakfast.

How NPS can be misleading

As we said before, NPS deliberately ignores the nuance of open-response customer surveys in favor of higher response rates and fast action. That’s a fine way to gather basic feedback. But customers often leave comments that don’t match their Net Promoter Score. Ignoring this disconnect can seriously damage your business.

Remember that Stephanie gave her hotel a Net Promoter Score of 9.  In her open-ended survey comment, however, she mentioned that the fruit at the front desk looked old and the breakfast was “lame”. Both of these data points are valuable. But a traditional NPS system will totally ignore the critical feedback about the front desk and breakfast service.

[AtlantaThemeVolumeVersusNPS.png]
Evaluating NPS by Themes from real customer reviews of Atlanta International Airport – read our full analysis
And it gets worse. What happens if Stephanie posts her review on TripAdvisor, Yelp, or the hotel’s Facebook page? That shiny NPS may be quickly overshadowed by lost revenue from people turned off by her review.

Without a system in place to analyze Stephanie’s open-ended comment and identify her complaints, the hotel’s managers may never even know why business is down.

Bridging the NPS insights gap

As Stephanie’s story demonstrates, a customer’s Net Promoter Score and their actual comments can send two very different messages.

The best way to fill this “NPS insights gap” is, of course, to read survey responses, online reviews, social comments, and other sources of open-ended feedback.

But the sheer volume of this text is impossible to handle. Until recently, businesses had to comb through customer satisfaction surveys and online review sites by hand. This was a tedious process that required an enormous labor investment for minimal returns.

[woman feeling overwhelmed by customer reviews.png]

As a result, customers had few channels through which they could tell companies about their experiences. Companies were all-but-deaf to these stories, and everyone suffered for it.

Today, however, customer feedback analytics tools like the Lexalytics Intelligence Platform enable you to analyze thousands of open-ended survey responses and real, unstructured customer comments and reviews, all in the time it takes to brew your morning coffee..

These solutions combine natural language processing and artificial intelligence to show you how people talk about their experiences with your products, brands and services, in their own words.

[woman who used to be overwhelmed now inspired by sentiment-analyzed customer reviews.png]

Through intuitive dashboards, you can see exactly what people are talking about, how they feel about those subjects, and why they feel that way.

In short: By analyzing open-ended survey responses and real customer comments, you’ll catch the valuable, context-rich data that NPS systems would fail to pick up on.

The outcome? Better customer experiences can increase lifecycle value 6-14x, reduce churn up to 55% and grow revenue 4-8% (source).

Read our guide: Voice of Customer Analytics: What it Is and How to Do It

Customer review analytics in action

The flexibility and customizability of these platforms make them applicable across industries and verticals, particularly in hospitality/transportation, financial services, pharmaceuticals, and retail.

For example, take a look at this dashboard built in the Lexalytics (an InMoment company) Intelligence Platform, using a data set of Facebook reviews of San Francisco International Airport (SFO).

[SFOReportsDashboard.png]
Click image to enlarge, or read our full analysis of SFO reviews
This dashboard tells a compelling story of traveler experiences at SFO.

Overall, guests are satisfied with the airport – but there are several areas of concern that the airport’s management should investigate. For one, there’s a problem with the charging stations that needs to be addressed immediately. Travelers are complaining about flight scheduling, and mentions of this issue have been increasing over time. And Terminal 1 should be speedily modernized like Terminals 2 and 3.

Through rich, multi-layered analytics dashboards like this one, you can uncover compelling stories of customer experiences, as they tell it.

How to build a better Voice of Customer program

To be clear: Net Promoter Score can and should still have a role in your customer experience management. But as we’ve demonstrated, the NPS insights gap can lead you unwittingly into disaster.

To fill this gap, combine NPS and an NLP-powered Voice of Customer analytics tool to paint detailed pictures of customer experiences.

For example, send NPS surveys for a quick, easily-digestible snapshot of brand health. Use this information to make fast, agile changes.

Meanwhile, use your VoC platform to analyze unstructured customer comments, reviews, and open-ended survey responses at scale.

[SuccessfulVoCProgram.png]

Together, this comprehensive VoC analytics program will deliver the detailed information you need to make informed, effective changes to improve your customer experience.

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