The 80/20 NPS Guide for B2B SaaS

In this guest post, Nathan Lippi, Head of User Research at PandaDoc, shares a Pareto principle approach to getting the most from a B2B Net Promoter Score program. 

NPS. It’s debated, loved, and hated, but in the world of B2B SaaS it’s rarely used to its full potential.

At PandaDoc, we’ve become increasingly customer-obsessed since the introduction of our NPS program two years ago, but we feel as if we still have meaningful room for improvement.

We’ve found there isn’t much written about NPS, specifically for B2B companies, so in order to level up, we’ve gone straight to the experts. With their permission, we’re sharing some key findings here.

We hope this guide helps you to get the most out of your CX program.

Let’s get to it!

The main purpose of NPS is to drive action

NPS is an easy, trusted, and benchmark-able way to start driving customer-focused action at your company.

Many companies obsess too much about the number when they’re starting out.

However, the most successful companies never lose sight of the fact that the primary purpose of CX metrics is to drive customer-focused action.

Once you’re driving customer-focused action, you’ll start to actually reap the benefits of increased retention, expansion, and word of mouth.

One Oracle VP’s Three-Step Recipe for NPS Survey Success

Joshua Rossman is an NPS OG, having run NPS at eBay and McAfee, among other companies. He’s now Vice President, Customer Experience Strategy at Oracle.

Through his years of experience, Rossman has created a three-step system he uses to get the most out of customer experience surveys, including NPS. He’s been kind enough to give us permission to share it publicly.

Step 1: Ask an easy-to-answer anchor question first to improve response rates

This principle is standard for NPS, but powerful enough to use across other CX surveys.

Ask your broad question first, and get a quantitative rating. Making your first question easy to answer will improve your overall survey response rates.

Step 2: Get S-P-E-C-I-F-I-C with your open-ended ask

Rossman has found that the standard open-ended question, “Care to tell us why?” often leads to vague, inactionable responses (e.g. “It’s hard to use”).

He’s found that asking promoters for specific reasons they recommend — and non-promoters for specific ways to improve — leads to much more actionable feedback.

Here are the specific questions he recommends for brand-level NPS:

Promoters: “What is it that makes you most likely to recommend {{company}}?”

Non-promoters: “What is it we could do that would make you more likely to recommend us in the future?”

These questions ask more specific questions — and tend to get more specific answers.

Various platforms such as InMoment can help you automatically categorize your now-more-specific NPS verbatims!

Each company will want to tag their work in a way that makes the most sense to them, but Shaun Clowes, former Head of Growth at Atlassian, says that they used machine learning to tag their feedback into three categories: Reliability, Usability, and Functionality. They used the ratio of different complaints to understand, at a high level, where their product needed work.

Step 3: NPS’ Secret Third Question

Even with the more specific responses you’ll hopefully get from the tweaks recommended in Step 2, not all B2B companies get such a high volume of responses that they can glean mathematically reliable responses from text alone.

One way to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that lead to an excellent (or poor) user experience is to follow questions about satisfaction with questions about various attributes of your brand. Ask a few extra questions with NPS and you can capture the overall sentiment for each area:

Wireframe example | Rating satisfaction of multiple attributes

After you’ve captured these details you can then run a simple linear regression, which will tell you which factors most influence if a person is a promoter or a detractor.

Various versions of the linear regression technique were also mentioned by Allison Dickin, VP of User Research at UserLeap, and other experts.  Hearing them reinforce the power of this third question helps us get really excited about what we might do with it.

“Extra questions should be used judiciously,” counters Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer at Wootric. “Think about it: When was the last time you responded thoughtfully to a multi-question survey?”

If you’re worried that such a long third step may lead to a negative user experience or lower response rates, a lighter option may be to ask the respondent to tell you what drove their score by selecting from a pick list of reasons.

If your follow-up question to detractors is, “What is the main thing we need to improve?,” you could offer a picklist that includes product, support, training, and value.

Not only are you learning what’s driving your score overall, but you’re also generating groups of users to follow up based on their interest. For example, your customer support team can learn more by reaching out to detractors who cite “support” as an issue.

Example 2-step in-app NPS survey with a pick list

Drive Strategic Action with a Cross-Functional Cadence

You may have noticed that our first heading was about driving action on behalf of the customer.

We’re touching on it again because, ultimately, driving action on behalf of your customers should be the primary concern of an NPS program.

Driving tactical action on behalf of customers was something we were already doing well at PandaDoc, before talking to the experts. Getting NPS data into Slack and other systems has been a pillar of our NPS program — this helps us take immediate action on issues that surface in feedback. One example: reaching out to an unhappy detractor and quickly fixing the issue that her NPS feedback brought to our attention.

However, learning how many companies drive strategic action on behalf of the customer in the following way, was eye-opening:

  • Collect customer feedback in a central repository (NPS, sales feedback, CS feedback, etc. — all combined together, somewhere like InMoment, UserVoice or ProductBoard.
  • Perform a 360° analysis of this data on a quarterly basis
  • Set up a monthly cross-functional cadence to decide which action to drive, and to track progress and accountability on ongoing courses of action

Fictional Examples of Driving Strategic Action:

Product Team

Diagnosis: Self-serve onboarding is our most common NPS complaint.  People often come away without understanding our platform’s core concepts.

Initiative: Improve self-serve onboarding to teach core concepts of the platform.

Success Team 

Diagnosis: Feedback about CS indicates all roles except admins are quite happy. Admins specifically have trouble understanding how to set user permissions, and they’d rather avoid going through training to learn something so small.

Initiative: Create micro-videos that explain to admins on how to manage user permissions.

Support Team

Diagnosis: NPS feedback indicates enterprise customers are unhappy with the time it takes to resolve support interactions involving custom features. 

Initiative:  Route tickets from enterprise customers directly to senior agents who have the expertise and product knowledge to resolve their issues.

Marketing 

Diagnosis: Many of the leads we’re attracting cannot benefit from our core value proposition.

Initiative: Better align their SEM campaigns and landing pages with promises that the product can fulfill.

Your metrics should flow from your unique business strategy

NPS has been sold by some as the be-all / end-all metric of a customer-centricity program. But this approach can be harmful.

While NPS is often a great way to understand brand-level sentiment, it makes sense to layer on additional metrics as your CX program progresses.

Jessica Pfeifer at Wootric and Allison Dickin at UserLeap agree on the idea that your CX metrics should flow from what’s most critical to your business’ success.

“You’ll be able to benchmark and track trends over time when you complement NPS with established metrics like CSAT, PSAT, or Customer Effort Score at critical touchpoints in the customer journey,” says Pfeifer.

“For example, you might trigger a Customer Effort Score survey to gauge how easy it is for a user to achieve ‘first value.’ What is that critical milestone in your product? In PandaDoc’s case, it might be sending a document. Here at Wootric, it’s when a customer has live survey feedback flowing into their dashboard.”

Both took time to talk to us about questions that can be used in addition to (or as an alternative to) NPS. Here are some examples:

Example Non-NPS Questions

Business question How to ask it
Examples from Allison Dickin @ UserLeap
What are the factors that affect churn, and what can we do differently to reduce it? First question:

How likely are you to use {{company}} for the next 3 months?

Follow-up question:

What would make you more likely to continue using {{company}}?

How well are we delivering on our core value proposition? First question:

How well does {{company}} meet your needs for {{value prop}}?

Second question:

How could {{company}} better meet your needs?

How is our first session going for users, and how can we improve it?
One option here is to pop up a question in-app, before the median session time. Another option is to email users after their first session.
First question:

How would you rate your experience getting started with {{company}}?

Second question:

How could {{company}} better meet your needs?

Examples from Jessica Pfiefer @ Wootric
How satisfied are users with our product, a feature, or service and how can we improve them? E.g. support interactions. Survey in product for feedback on features, survey via email or Intercom Messenger for support interactions. CSAT

First question:
“How satisfied are you with your recent support interaction?

Second question (customize based on score):
“What could we do to improve?

We have a key but difficult task that we need to make easier for users.
How difficult is the task, and how can we make it easier to do?
CES

First question:
“How easy was it for you to {{key but difficult task}}?

Second question:
“What could we do to improve?”

Takeaways

  • NPS is a great way to get started with driving customer-centric action
  • Use Josh Rossman’s three-part system to get the most out of your CX surveys, including NPS
  • Use analysis and a cross-functional cadence to drive org-wide, customer-focused action
  • As your business grows, layer on metrics that fit your specific business needs

This is just the tip of the iceberg for NPS, but we hope it will help your company squeeze the most out of your CX research program.

Hit me up on Twitter (@nathanlippi), and to let me know what’s worked well for you and your company!

Retain more customers with InMoment, the #1 Net Promoter Score platform for SaaS

10 Things Every SaaS Business Should Know About Net Promoter Score

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s not toilet paper.

It’s our existing customers.

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

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

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

Shift from a growth mindset to a retention mindset 

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

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

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

Listen to your customers even more carefully – and respond

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

Take care of your people

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

Be a good citizen

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

Establish a company policy of flexibility

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

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

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

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

Close the loop with customers when they offer feedback

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

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

Improve customer experience at customer journey touchpoints

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

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

SaaS Customer Journey touchpoints and surveys

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

SaaS Product Feedback with topics auto-categorized
Source: Wootric CXInsight Analytics Platform

Focus product development on reducing friction for existing customers

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

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

End User Era - example software products

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

Accelerate end user adoption

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

Now is the time to deepen relationships and partnerships with promoters

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

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

We couldn’t agree more!

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

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

Customer Experience Enablement: What it is and How it Can Help Your Business Bottom Line

Since you’re here on the Wootric blog, you probably already know that providing a high-quality experience to your customers is vital to your business.

You’ve heard people talk about CX becoming the key differentiator for brands in the coming years.

Stats on how customers values CX

(Source)

You’ve watched brands in a variety of industries revamp their customer-facing operations to improve the consumer’s experience.

You may have even begun investing in improving your brand’s customer experience in a variety of different ways.

But, when it comes down to it, you still aren’t exactly sure if your efforts are paying off for the customer—or for your business.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone: According to a 2018 report from CustomerThink, only 30% of brands report experiencing enhanced differentiation or any other tangible benefit from their CX-related initiatives. Moreover, Oracle reports that only 43% of CX executives are highly confident in their organization’s preparedness and ability to provide an enhanced CX as time goes on.

While there are a number of reasons this is (which we’ll get to), the overarching takeaway is that improving the overall customer experience requires much more from an organization than most realize. In order for a company to make sustainable improvements to its CX—improvements that lead to tangible benefits for the business—a fundamental shift within the organization must occur.

This is where customer experience enablement comes in.

What is Customer Experience Enablement?

Customer experience enablement is an holistic approach to improving CX by making foundational changes to both customer-facing and internal processes within a company. It is worth noting that approach is sometimes known as customer experience management (CXM or CEM). So many acronyms!

Breaking that down a bit more, customer experience enablement (CXE) is all about:

  1. Providing a branded experience that aligns with both the customer’s expectations and the experience the company intended the customer to have
  2. Enabling teams and individual employees within an organization to provide this experience to the customer effectively and efficiently—so that the customer’s experience is equally as efficient throughout their buyer’s journey

As we mentioned above, it’s the second part of our breakdown that organizations often overlook. Unfortunately, this leads said companies into a situation in which they have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to improve their CX—but are unable to actually put these initiatives into action in ways that benefit both the customer and the business.

That being said, let’s now dig into the key components of customer experience enablement—and why becoming more aligned with these components is essential to the growth of your business.

3 Key Components of Customer Experience Enablement

In the previous section, we broke down customer experience enablement into the customer-facing and internal sides of the same coin.

As you’ll see as you read through the rest of this article, the key components of CXE can touch on either side of this coin—and can sometimes touch on both at the same time, as well.

(If this is a bit confusing, don’t worry: It will start to make sense right away. We promise.)

Without further ado, let’s dig into the three key components of customer experience enablement.

1. Organizational Alignment

In order for an organization to become truly able to enhance the experience they provide their customers, everyone within the organization needs to be on board with the initiative.

Instill Ownership of CX Throughout Your Organization

In some cases, this is pretty obvious. Of course your marketing, sales, and support staff will be involved in CX-related initiatives; they do engage directly with the customer, after all.

In other cases, though, it can be a bit difficult to get certain team members on board. That is, it’s not exactly uncommon for teams that don’t interact with the customer (e.g., accounting, logistics, etc.) to overlook the role they play in the customer experience.

The thing is:

Your team needs to be willing to put in the effort required to improve your CX before they are able to do so. Or, more accurately, if your various teams aren’t willing to work toward improving your brand’s CX, it won’t matter if they’re able to or not: it’s just not going to happen.

Unfortunately, data collected by Adobe shows that a “lack of clear ownership of the customer…holds companies back from a true customer focus,” with nearly half of responding organizations denoting this as a problem.

Furthermore, Kapost’s 2016 B2B Benchmark report found that only 12% of B2B marketers believe that they’re “very effective at delivering a consistent customer experience.”

Only 12% of B2B marketers say they are delivering consistent CX

(Source)

The silver lining of all this is that, if you can instill ownership of the customer throughout your organization, you’ll be a step ahead of half of your competitors.

Communicate the Benefits of CX Ownership

Another area in which generating buy-in is vital to your CX-related initiatives is in proving the value of doing so to your company’s various stakeholders.

At this point, it’s important to frame the benefits of CXE in ways that matter to a specific team or individual. For example, marketing managers will likely care more about engagement metrics, while executives will be focused on revenues and profit margins of the potential initiative. For teams responsible for internal processes, this value likely comes in an ability to be more efficient in their duties, overall.

(Keep this all in mind, as we’ll talk a bit more about it toward the end of this post.)

Enabling Your Teams and Facilitating Ownership

Once you’ve generated buy-in throughout your organization, the next step is enabling all of your teams to actually play a more active role in creating a top-notch experience for your customers.

As CXE specialist Melissa Madian explains in an interview with Vision Critical, CXE is about enabling “revenue-generating and customer-facing teams with the processes, tools and training they need to help close business faster and deliver a superior customer experience.”

While “playing a more active role” can mean different things to different team members (and different organizations), the key to being able to do so is active, intentional, cross-team communication throughout a given organization.

For one thing, this means building avenues of communication between all teams—and breaking down any barriers to communication that may exist within your organization. In a literal sense, this may mean making it easier for your various teams to interact with each other (whether physically or via technology). More symbolically, this means breaking down silos and cutting through any red tape that may hinder communication between certain teams.

Secondly, you’ll need to actively facilitate and systematize internal communication processes (as opposed to just hoping it occurs organically simply because you’ve “enabled it”).

This may mean restructuring processes to include more of your team members as needed—with the focus remaining on the customer experience at all times. Again, even if a certain internal process doesn’t seem to impact CX all that much, your marketing, sales, and support teams might discover otherwise when an internal decision ends up causing chaos for your customers.

Going along with this, another way to facilitate and enhance internal communications is via knowledge management, specifically by making use of knowledge sharing and knowledge transferring systems. Doing so will allow various teams to stay apprised of the goings-on throughout your organization, and can also easily communicate vital information from their department to other teams as necessary.

To reiterate, the goal of this initial step toward customer experience enablement is to get your team members on board with your initiative—and to begin putting structures in place that allow all of your team members to pursue this initiative both individually and as a company.

Bluntly speaking, without this piece of the puzzle in place, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish what we’ll be discussing next.

2. Focus on Customer Intelligence and Other Valuable Data

The second key component of customer experience enablement revolves around the collection, assessment, and analysis of audience-related data.

To be sure, most modern organizations already know that big data plays a huge role in their CX-related initiatives and efforts. According to data collected by MarketingProfs, 40% of marketers say data is “critical to improved decision making,” while 36% say data “drives the ability to provide personalized experiences.”

importance of big data to executing customer centric programs

(Source)

The problem, though, is that most organizations don’t feel fully equipped to actually put the data they collect to good use. Case in point, 61% of CMOs admit to shortcomings when it comes to using big data to make improvements to CX.

While Adobe’s data shows companies are adept at data hygiene-related processes (i.e., ensuring data is accurate and reliable), this is only a part of the equation. It’s in understanding the contextual meaning behind the data that causes issues for most companies. And, when it comes to data relating to the customer experience, context is key.

Collecting Customer Data that Matters

With the above in mind, your first order of business is to focus on uncovering the data that provides the most valuable and accurate insight into your customers’ expectations. This is where Voice of the Customer is huge: it’s all about digging into the specifics of what your customers want from your brand—and minimizing the potential for your customer-facing data to be taken completely out of context in the future.

It’s important to note, here, that customer experience—and, by extension, CXE—refers to all engagements that occur between your organization and your customers, whether pre-, post-, or during a given purchase.

By looking at a specific data point, metric, or piece of customer feedback with the customer’s journey in mind, you’ll add an extra layer of context to the data you collect and analyze. In turn, you’ll be able to tailor their experience with your company even further—making them more likely to stay loyal to your brand for some time to come.

(Again, we’ll get to that momentarily.)

Collecting Internal Data that Matters

Another data-related part of CXE is prioritizing customer-facing info that provides the most value to your company.

Essentially, this means focusing on data that refers to your most valuable and loyal customers, as well as your highest potential prospects. This will enable your team to start making CX-related improvements to get your high-value customers even more engaged with your brand. Needless to say, this will lead to nothing but good things for your business moving forward.

Speaking of making improvements to your customer experience…

3. Improvements to CX that Matter—and Last

Before we get too far into this last section, let’s quickly go over the aspects of CXE we’ve discussed thus far:

Now, to be clear, all of these initiatives are done for one main reason:

To be able to make impactful and lasting improvements to your brand’s processes—in turn enhancing your brand’s overall customer experience.

As we said earlier, these improvements can manifest in any number of ways, such as:

  • Streamlining transactional processes, making it easier for customers to receive the product or service they require quicker and with less downtime
  • Improving onboarding processes, allowing customers to “hit the ground running” with your product or service—and maximizing the value they get out of it, as well
  • Making iterative changes to your product or service based on customer feedback, ensuring your customers continue to receive more and more value from your brand over time

Notice that each hypothetical improvement listed above is tied to a specific target outcome focusing directly on the customer’s experience. At the risk of being redundant, that’s literally the point of customer experience enablement: to enable your team to provide a better experience to your customers.

CXE is also about making sustainable and long-lasting improvements to your processes, ensuring that you’ll be able to provide an enhanced experience to your customers not just once or twice, but from here on out.

This is why it’s essential for CXE to start at the foundational and systemic level of your organization: Skipping this crucial step could cause your team to revert back to the “old way” of doing things—rendering any gains you may have experienced in the meantime moot.

But, with a deep-seeded, evidence-backed understanding of all that goes into enhancing CX, your organization will understand the importance of adopting and integrating new CX-related processes into their daily operations.

While any temporary or superficial improvements made will likely not lead to any long-lasting benefits for your organization, those more systemic and strategic improvements can only lead to great things for your business.

First of all, the more enjoyable and valuable your CX in the eyes of your customer, the higher your customer satisfaction rate will climb. Of course, with this increase in customer satisfaction, you’ll also likely experience a boost in retention, advocacy, and acquisition, as well.

Additionally, as your organization becomes more acclimated with your CXE-related initiatives, your teams will become more proficient and efficient in completing their individual duties. More efficiency means less wasted resources—which, in turn, means more resources on-hand to reinvest into improving your CX even further.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we ignored the fact that effective customer experience enablement leads to massive profits for companies of all sizes.

The more value your customers receive from your brand, and the easier it is for your company to provide this value to them, the more money your company will make as time goes on.

It’s that simple.

Josh BrownAbout the Author: Josh Brown is a Customer Success Engineer and part of the marketing team at Helpjuice. Helpjuice provides easy-to-use knowledge base software that guarantees less support emails and more happy customers.

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

CX Experts We Love

Why do we love whom we love? It’s a question for the ages, unanswerable by poets, philosophers or songwriters. And yet, for some people, there are so many reasons why we love them. They make our lives better, share their expertise, uplift our spirits, and show profound generosity. This is a Valentine to those people, and more specifically those people who work in CX.

These authors, speakers, thought-leaders and dedicated customer experience professionals have all helped contribute to the widespread adoption of CX, not just as a strategy, but as a higher goal. They’re here, tirelessly working in every industry to make people’s lives just a bit easier, and a lot more joyful.

These are the CX experts we love, and we are happy to introduce you to them all.

If you’re on this list and you’d like for us to update your details, please send us a note.

Amy Etheridge

Why we love Amy: She’s head of Customer Advocacy at MindTouch. She was tapped to look after the customer experience as a whole as company growth accelerated. Her She is a customer journey expert whose analysis of customer feedback at key touchpoints has led to product and service enhancements that have delighted customers.

Angus Yang

Why we love Angus: He’s the Customer Experience Manager at Sendoso and prides himself in “helping people connect the old fashion way.” His responsibilities change on any given day but you’ll usually find him deep in conversation with a client, answering questions in the support queue, helping explain a new product feature they released, or onboarding clients for success. He’s a big believer in building relationships and is proud dad of Owen the corgi.

Annette Franz

Why we love Annette: She’s the Founder and CEO of CX Journey Inc. She has experience in both helping companies understand their employees and customers and identifying what drives retention, satisfaction, engagement, and the overall experience – so that, together, they can design a better experience for all constituents. She co-hosts the weekly #CXChat on Twitter, serves as an executive officer on the Board of Directors of the Customer Experience Professionals Association (CXPA), mentors other professionals in this field to help them advance their careers, and is a speaker and an avid writer.

Augie Ray

Why we love Augie: He’s the Sr. Director Analyst: Senior research analyst & executive advisor on Customer Experience at Gartner. He has had a rewarding career as both a thought and people leader. He has implemented successful CX, VoC, social media and marketing programs and led highly-engaged teams, both co-located and remote around the globe. People refer to him as an iconoclast, skeptic, and change agent for his desire to bypass hype, solve business issues, and exploit customer opportunities with speed, creativity, and collaboration. Plus, his Twitter feed!

Blake Morgan

Why we love Blake: She’s a self-described “customer experience futurist”, keynote speaker, author of More Is More: How the Best Companies Go Farther and Work Harder to Create Knock-Your-Socks-Off Customer Experiences, and host of The Modern Customer Podcast. She’s also a contributor to Forbes, the Harvard Business Review and Hemispheres Magazine.

Clare Muscutt

Why we love Clare: She’s a digital nomad, keynote speaker, Founder of CMXperience, and shares her personal thoughts and experiences on The CX Nomad. Having held a number of senior CX leadership roles in Marketing and Retail, across a number of sectors, working for and with some of the UK’s best known brands, Clare has finely tuned her expertise to educate and engage internal teams to design and deliver industry leading services, and create innovative solutions that deliver the desired results for her clients at pace.

Colin Shaw

Why we love Colin: He’s a keynote speaker, best-selling author of several books such as The Intuitive Customer: 7 Imperatives For Moving Your Customer Experience to the Next Level, the CEO of Beyond Philosophy, and Co-Host of The Intuitive Customer Podcast. Also, LinkedIn has recognized him as one of the world’s Top 150 Business Influencers.

David Yin

Why we love David:  He’s VP of Customer Insights at Ancestry.com. A seasoned CX pro, David was with the Global Consumer Insights team at Clorox and Head of Global Research and Brand Strategy at Fitbit before joining the venerable family history and genomics company. He took a crawl, walk, run approach to building out his function at Ancestry, delivering early wins that built momentum and respect for the Voice of the Customer across the company.

Ellie Wu

Why we love Ellie: She’s a speaker, writer, and Senior Director of Customer Success at SAP Concur. Through hyper-growth SaaS companies, Ellie developed a fascination with the customer. Realizing the impact and the translated value for an organization, she created PictureCS (CliffsNotes for Customer Success Best Practices). She counsels leaders and teams responsible for customer outcomes by designing stronger organizations and guide cross-functional teams to leverage mutually beneficial opportunities with an advanced understanding of the customer journey, sales, product marketing, and operations.

Guneet Singh

Why we love Guneet: He’s Director of Customer Experience & Advocacy at Docusign where he leads the company’s NPS, customer advocacy, customer labs & customer research.  He uses state-of-the-art technology to retrieve and analyze customer data to boost the likelihood of delivering meaningful improvement in customer experience. Sharing this data is key to garnering support for change, he says: “There are journey points that need to be addressed. But if you don’t have hard facts attached to them … then your management team will [ignore these points].”

Jeanne Bliss

 Why we love Jeanne: She’s a speaker, best-selling author, most notably for Would You Do That to Your Mother?: The “Make Mom Proud” Standard for How to Treat Your Customers, a coach for Chief Customer Officers, host of the podcast The Human Duct Tape Show, and frequently writes articles on her site, Customer Bliss. And we probably haven’t even got everything covered.

Jeannie Walters

Why we love Jeannie: She’s a TEDx speaker, CEO and Chief Customer Experience Investigator at 360 Connext, trainer, workshop leader, consultant, and podcaster. Her specialty is connecting with audiences to help them emotionally connect with those they serve. It’s not as easy as we think and our brains work against us! Using humor, stories and her experience as a customer experience consultant, she uncovers what’s stopping your organization or association from really delivering great experiences.

Jessica Pfeifer

Why we love Jessica: We might be biased because she was Chief Customer Officer at Wootric, but she’d make our list even if she wasn’t. At InMoment, Jessica works with our phenomenal team to build a modern approach to enterprise customer feedback management. She guides our mid-market and enterprise customers by helping to solve complex problems and execute Voice of Customer strategy using machine learning. Her expert, consultative approach to customer experience gives her customers a competitive edge in the CX space. 

Joey Coleman

Why we love Joey: As a keynote speaker, workshop leader, and consultant, Joey helps businesses design creative ways to engage customers – especially in the crucial first 100 days of the customer lifecycle. As a professional speaker who has given thousands of speeches all over the world, he also works with a small number of private coaching clients to develop and hone their speaking skills. His book Never Lose a Customer Again discusses the 8 phases your customer has the potential to travel through as part of their customer journey and the 6 tools you can use during that journey to create remarkable experiences for your customers.

Kia Puhm

Why we love Kia: She’s the Founder and CEO of K!A CX Consulting. She has held chief positions in customer success, services, account management and support at companies such as: Oracle, Eloqua, Day Software (Adobe), Intelex Technologies, and Blueprint Software Systems. Kia has pioneered the art of Customer Experience by leading businesses through the transition to customer-centric organizations. Her methodology provides clients with a disciplined and sustainable approach to increasing customer lifetime value and loyalty. She also holds a Bachelor of Applied Science in Computer Engineering.

Maxie Schmidt

Why we love Maxie: She’s a keynote speaker, author, Principal Analyst at Forrester, and has a PhD in Business Management on Customer Care. She helps clients achieve smart profit growth through product and price optimization based on deep customer insights and has managed engagements and projects in a wide range of industries like telecommunication, retail, software, transportation, and high-tech.

Melinda Gonzalez

Why we love Melinda: She’s a Customer Experience Strategist with experience in Customer Success Management, Customer Experience Design, Voice of the Customer, and Customer Retention/Loyalty/Advocacy practices. She spent a decade at Salesforce and is now part of the incredible team at WeWork, bringing the Powered by We vision to life.

Rachel English

Why we love Rachel: She’s the Director of Customer Experience at Zuora. Rachel has built and led high-performing, thought-leading customer-focused teams. Through those experiences, and as a regular customer herself, she has developed a proven philosophy and methodology for creating Customer Success and honing an end-to-end Customer Experience. Rachel believes that companies and their customers are only truly successful together, and she understands the building blocks and the details needed to compound that effect.

Sandra Mathis

Why we love Sandra: She’s the Customer Experience Director and thought leader for Strong-Bridge Envision Consulting. She helps organizations and clients develop customer experience strategies, measurement programming, actioning of insights, and facilitate workshops focused on: customer journey mapping, employee engagement, to enable organizations to move the needle with customer experience adoption for higher customer loyalty and satisfaction.

Sarang Bhatt

Why we love Sarang: Sarang is an Account Executive at InMoment. His big heart, quick wit, and eye for process have made him besties with many a customer. “I learn a customer’s goals and what motivates them – why do they want implement a Voice of Customer Program? To reduce churn? Optimize their product or service? Knowing that enables me to anticipate their needs and present them with a plan that will give them success. The real transformative customer experience comes when you can answer the questions they don’t know they have. It’s in that moment that you win a customer for life.” His specialties are NPS, CES, CSAT and text analytics.

Shep Hyken

Why we love Shep: He’s the CAO (Chief Amazement Officer) of Shepard Presentations. He’s also a keynote speaker, Customer Service trainer, and the author of The Convenience Revolution: How to Deliver a Customer Service Experience that Disrupts the Competition and Creates Fierce Loyalty, among other best-selling books. In 2008 Shep was inducted into the National Speakers Association Hall of Fame speaker for lifetime achievement in the professional speaking industry.

Steven Van Belleghem

 Why we love Steven: He’s a keynote speaker, entrepreneur, author of four best-selling books, one of his most popular being Customers the Day After Tomorrow: How to Attract Customers in a World of AIs, Bots, and Automation. He is also Co-Founder of consultancy firm Nexxworks and the Co-Founder of content creation company Snackbytes. He is an investor in the AI startup Hello Customer and the fast-growing digital agency Intracto.

Sue Duris

Why we love Sue: She’s a speaker, writer, mentor, Director of Marketing at M4 Communications, and co-host of #CXChat, a weekly Twitter chat on customer experience and employee experience. She’s passionate about helping organizations differentiate and grow by coaching them to be customer-centric, advising them on their digital transformation initiatives, and collaborating with them to design omnichannel experiences that engage employees and deliver customer value. She’s also a diversity and inclusion advocate.

Venk Chandran

 Why we love Venk: He’s a customer-obsessed Director, Product Management at Salesforce.com who is an evangelist for the use of Customer Effort Score metric at SFDC and in the broader SaaS technology space. Venk uses CES and other customer metrics to monitor and improve the self-service customer experience at Salesforce. Bottomline, customers are his playbook.

How to Learn from Bad Net Promoter Scores

This guest post was written by Martin Ceisel, the lead Content Strategist at MindTouch. His hobbies include writing, writing, and writing some more. MindTouch is a self-service platform that helps companies improve support agent productivity, increase ticket deflection, and fuel self-service support.

A quick look at some Net Promoter Score benchmarks will quickly reveal a painful truth: bad NPS scores happen. It’s inevitable.NPS Calculation

The worst response to your company’s detractors, though, is no response at all. So, how to best learn from bad Net Promoter Scores and use them to improve the customer experience?

Here are a few strategies to consider:

Do your research

Look at all of the support tickets your detractor customer has put in and read all the notes that your agents have written about these interactions. Review the goals they had when they initially became a customer. Check which help articles they may have read. This will give you important context when you close the loop with the customer.

Respond promptly and personally

Though the customers behind bad Net Promoter Scores might still be feeling the sting of their negative experience, receiving a prompt response to their NPS survey might help turn the tide. If nothing else, a personal response is an opportunity to take the NPS survey beyond a transactional call and response to an ongoing (and honest!) conversation. You’ll be surprised how much constructive feedback a simple “What can we do to improve your experience?” might unlock.

Segment response types

What customer group or business segment is driving the bulk of your bad Net Promoter Scores? One way to find out is to segment NPS scores to identify hotspots. You might find that a particular point in the customer journey, such as onboarding or renewal, is creating an inordinate number of detractors. Or maybe your NPS from product A is higher or lower than product B. Ask yourself why one group of customers is more successful than others. By categorizing responses, you can drill down and identify actionable takeaways. One way to see themes is to create reason codes, a method of categorizing responses so they can be organized and analyzed.

Don’t get tunnel vision

Remember that NPS is just one measure of customer sentiment. Don’t forget key metrics like customer effort (CES) and customer satisfaction score (CSAT). These, too, are important metrics that can lead you to the root cause of negative customer experiences. Regarding NPS specifically, consider trends in your industry. What are the NPS benchmarks you should be aiming for? This will help you decide how urgent an action to take—which bad Net Promoter Scores to prioritize first.

Because it’s about the whole customer experience

Tunnel vision makes for a good segue to my close: remember the reason we pay such close attention to customer sentiment. Perusing, parsing, and responding to bad Net Promoter Scores is about more than improving your company’s own internal metrics. It’s about improving the customer experience. If we can’t deliver low-effort customer experiences throughout the customer journey—if we don’t demonstrate a commitment to reading and responding to what our customers are telling us—we risk losing those customers entirely.

Make follow up on Net Promoter Score feedback convenient with InMoment’s many integrations.

Using Net Promoter Score Benchmarks to Set a Good NPS Goal

“What grade did you get?”

Do you remember getting asked that question in grade school? Or maybe you were the one asking it? Humans like to know how they’re doing compared to everyone else.

This carries over into customer experience as well. At Wootric, we advise companies on setting up an effective Net Promoter Score (NPS) program. We get asked questions about NPS industry benchmarks all the time.

In general, we believe focusing on an external NPS benchmark is not incredibly helpful.

The Net Promoter System is the quantification of customer loyalty and the process for improving it over time. The power of this system lies in the analysis of feedback and the action taken based on that analysis.

However, net promoter score benchmarks are still useful in certain cases, which is what this article is all about.

If you’re unfamiliar with NPS, here’s a quick rundown:

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric between -100 and 100 that captures the propensity of a company’s customers to attract and refer new business or/and repeat business.

NPS also stands for the Net Promoter System®, which was built around the Net Promoter Score. It is a model that ties a corporation’s bottom line to customer happiness and loyalty.

Get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score. Learn how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

In the NPS survey, customers rate their likelihood to recommend your company on a scale of 0-10. To get your Net Promoter Score, take the percentage of people who are happy and willing to recommend your product or service (those who respond with a 9 or 10) — “promoters”– and subtract the percentage of people who would not be willing to recommend your product or service — (score of 0-6) “detractors.”

NPS Calculation

For example, a +50 NPS means that the company has more than 50% promoters and less than 50% detractors, so generally an NPS score of +50 is, indeed, great! You may see scales out there that say +30 is a decent score, and that +80 or greater is the ultimate dream score.

To learn more about NPS, get the ebook, The Modern Guide to Winning Customers with Net Promoter Score, which teaches how to modernize your NPS program for growth and higher loyalty.

Net Promoter Score industry benchmarks

There are two different types of NPS: absolute and relative. Absolute NPS refers to the NPS in and of itself, and comparing the score with what is generally considered a “good” or “bad” score. Relative NPS is taking into account the average NPS within an industry, which takes into account the factors that could affect an average Net Promoter Score, and can change the NPS benchmarks you set.

While an absolute NPS goal is nice and simple, it can be helpful to take a look at what others in your industry have been able to achieve, since every industry is different and has unique relative NPS results. The relative Net Promoter Scores generally achieved in each industry help construct what are called the NPS industry benchmarks. NPS Industry benchmarks give you a way to evaluate your NPS relative to your competitors. They help control for factors that often create major differences in what is considered a good NPS score.

Oftentimes, other companies in your industry have established an average NPS for you to use as a net promoter score benchmark. If you make smartphones or other tech hardware, for example, companies like Apple have been tracking NPS for years.

To get averages and examples from your industry, try reports from the Fortune 500.

NPS Benchmark variance between industries

Let’s take a look at some examples of net promoter score benchmarks according to your industry.

Let’s say you have an NPS of +50. As we explained, that’s already pretty good! But if you’re a department store or specialty store, you are actually below the NPS benchmark (+62) for the industry.

Walmart pharmacies have an NPS score of +32. Considering the highest score is +100, you’d guess that they’d be lukewarm with this score, but I’m sure that the folks in charge of customer experience there are actually ecstatic. Walmart pharmacies have one of the highest NPS scores within the drug store & pharmacy industry.

Compare this number to the software industry, where +34 is the average. Becoming a leader in the software industry would mean having an NPS in the +60 range, like Salesforce (+66) and Adobe (+62).

If I tell you that the industry average NPS for laptop computer manufacturers is +43, can you guess what Apple’s NPS is? Consider their brand reputation and customer loyalty…

In 2018, Apple’s laptop product team reported an NPS of +63. You probably got pretty close, since you knew the industry average! This is why relative score comparison by industry is more useful than evaluation based on an absolute scale.

Caveats for using NPS industry benchmarks

Unfortunately, NPS benchmark programs aren’t always as helpful as you’d hope. This comes down to the nature of surveying for feedback. There are so many contributing factors to an NPS benchmark, such as:

  • Which channels you use to survey customers
  • Demographics and habits of your customer base
  • Customer tolerance levels
  • The size of your competition
  • The difficulty of building brand loyalty
  • External circumstances (such as a global pandemic)
  • When and how often you ask
  • Whether you have enough data to be statistically significant or not

All of these factors can have varying effects on your overall NPS score. For example, your competitor may ask the NPS question within the context of a longer annual brand survey, while you survey using just the NPS question after a transaction. These will have different consequences for the feedback you gather. If you don’t have enough feedback coming in, your NPS may vary significantly from quarter to quarter or month to month.

Bear in mind, a ‘good NPS score’ doesn’t just depend on your industry, since it’s not difficult to game the system. It’s not always fair to compare your NPS score to another company’s NPS score because you don’t know their survey methods, or their employee compensation plans.

When competitive individuals are incentivized based on NPS score, things can get ugly.

A motivated person or company could improve their numbers by letting their customers know that positive feedback would mean a lot to them or by only showing the survey to customers who are positively inclined. They might offer incentives to customers to complete the survey. Clearly, the feedback received from these methods will lead to an inflated NPS score that is not a useful comparison for those using a more objective survey process.  

Setting an NPS goal if you don’t have a benchmark

If no Net Promoter Score benchmark exists for your industry, benchmark against yourself.

The great thing about NPS is that it is an actionable metric. It’s a number that you can rally the company around as a north star to guide improvement efforts.

“A good NPS score is one that is better than the last.”
– Jessica Pfeifer, CCO & Co-founder of Wootric

Remember, NPS isn’t just a score. It’s a system that’s meant to drive business improvement in product and customer experience. It helps you identify and close the loop with unhappy customers and solve their specific problems in real time.

Your goal is to boost customer loyalty and retention, and that happens by reading verbatim comments to understand the why behind the scores you receive. By making changes based on customer feedback, and responding quickly to detractors, you will naturally see your NPS improve. And gains in NPS correlate with revenue growth.

How to report NPS

After all this, you will want to report numbers to the rest of the team on a regular basis. NPS should be shared along with other monthly or quarterly metrics like revenue, new customers and customer churn.

We understand that, so here’s what we recommend:

  • Instead of fixating on your score in the absolute sense, we recommend focusing on improving your score over time. Understand NPS as a trend over several periods, like if you were looking at a stock’s price.Trends-NPS-with-SaaS-segmentation
  • Determine the business goals of your NPS program, then report NPS in relation to the goals. For instance, if you are trying to improve retention, report NPS alongside churn data.
  • Pay attention to trending topics in your verbatim responses. Reporting these topics will help everyone understand what’s important to your customers, and the pain points they experience. Share what customers love and what they don’t love about your company with internal stakeholders. Then you can work to make those points as frictionless as possible. 

Note: For startups, be sure to read and respond to every single comment. As you grow, you’ll start needing aggregate and to pull themes from customer comments. To automate that process, check out AI-powered text and sentiment analysis.

  • Segment your Net Promoter Score by relevant customer groups. For example, this could be by user role (in the SaaS example above), geography, or size/frequency of purchase–whatever drives your business. This will help you pay close attention to groups that are critical to your business success. Learn more about segmentation here.
  • If you want to compare your score to a competitor, choose a company in your industry that you admire and use their score as an aspirational benchmark. Many companies have volunteered their NPS scores to research and reports such as this one by the Fortune 500.

Measure NPS and work to improve it over time.  Dig into customer comments and close the loop with customers. You will learn their needs, and their pain points, and have plenty of guidance to make those improvements. Both your NPS and your customer retention rates are sure to improve. 

Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score feedback with InMoment.

Top CX Survey Use Cases for Integrating Wootric and Intercom

In case you missed it, customers’ expectations have changed.

The way we communicate with them has changed, and Intercom users are leading the way. Customers and prospects like communicating via Intercom chat. It’s efficient, modern, and conversational.

Integrating a customer feedback program with Intercom takes customer experience to the next level. Having all your customer experience data gathered, viewed, and managed in Intercom sets you up to build high-quality relationships with your customers.

Easy, breezy, and code-free option: Surveys in Intercom chat & email

Wootric gives Intercom users two code-free ways to survey customers – in Intercom chat and via email. The survey responses then flow back into Intercom records to view for follow-up.

Wootric Surveys is an Intercom Messenger app, available now in the Intercom App Store, that lets you send surveys within the Intercom Messenger chat bubble. From your customers’ point of view, sending Wootric surveys through Intercom makes sense — that is where they are used to getting communication from you.

Alternatively, you can survey your customers via email. Download the free Wootric email survey template (you’ll find it in Wootric settings) and upload it into Intercom.

Whether you are surveying in Intercom chat or via email, you can create auto-messages based on Intercom rules and attributes, or send a survey out to individual customers manually.

Here are the top 5 use cases for the Wootric-Intercom integration to unify your customer feedback program.

Target a specific customer segment with an NPS survey campaign

To better understand the sentiment for each your customer personas, set up a campaign-style auto message with a Net Promoter Score survey in Intercom.

For example, you may choose to target all of your enterprise customers, or all of your self-service customers. Perhaps you want insight into customers in the EU, Asia, or South America. You could also choose to survey customers who have been with you for 6 months.

With Intercom and Wootric, you can send a survey can be based on any group of customers that you can define in Intercom.

Target customer surveys based on a product or service milestone

Gather feedback after product or service milestones. The feedback you gather at customer journey points can help you prioritize improvements that will increase customer retention. Here are two popular examples:

  • Deploy a Customer Effort Score (CES) survey after a product milestone is achieved

If you are trying to understand customer sentiment around installation processes, onboarding, or other product milestones, the Customer Effort Score is the survey for you. Measuring customer effort gives you insight into pain points or friction that customers may experience while using your product or service. Asking “how easy was it to __” will help you quantify ease and give you wide-ranging feedback. You may find that your processes (e.g. installation, getting started, etc.) are easy enough, but documentation is difficult to find. Customers may end up going to Customer Support because they are frustrated about finding answers and instructions on their own.

 As for when to send a CES survey, you may choose to send a survey via auto message for folks who have logged into your platform after completing onboarding. You could choose to send an email survey to users who have exported their data to another platform to see if the process is easy enough. Surveys can be triggered based on any event you are tracking in Intercom, giving you a plethora of options.

  • Send a Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) survey to ask about product features

Customer Success and Support aren’t the only teams that will benefit from surveys via Intercom.

This channel is a great way to survey customers about different product features as they use them. For example, you can choose to deploy a CSAT or “PSAT” survey to all users who have used a feature X number of times or 30 days after upgrading to a new feature set.

The feedback you get from asking the Customer Satisfaction question can be valuable to your product development team and product managers.

Make sure everyone is covered

  • Send a survey in a live conversation

“Oops, I didn’t mean to score you a 2!”  Sometimes a customer will make a mistake or get distracted and fail to click “submit” when they see your survey.

Now, you can manually insert a fresh survey into the conversation. This lets you fill in the gaps that automated campaign-style messages may leave.

  • Hear from more customers by sending an in-app survey to people who don’t respond to email surveys

If you’ve been surveying your customers via email, you may find that a good portion of them go unopened. Other email surveys may be opened and the surveys don’t get filled out because folks think “Oh, I’ll get to that after I finish up this other thing!”, then get distracted and forget about your survey.

Cover your bases and reach customers where they’re already working by sending these users another survey via Intercom messenger.

The set & forget option: Wootric in-app surveys

One challenge with Intercom auto-messages is that they are not recurring. If you want to survey your customers say, every 90 days, the best way is to install the Wootric code snippet on your web application (or use the SDK for you mobile app). Then you can easily configure your sampling requirements and survey cadence in your Wootric settings.  The best part is that survey responses collected this way will still flow into Intercom records for follow-up action.

See survey feedback & respond to customers in Intercom

Consolidating all of your customer experience data in one platform isn’t just efficient. It provides your customer-facing agents with vital context as they interact with users without having to shift from one platform to another.

For example, your Customer Success Managers will be able to see each company’s survey responses, including user comments.

Your Support and Success agents can manage the follow up with customers in the same platform that they view users’ survey responses. The Wootric integration can be configured to automatically open a conversation when a survey response is received. This can prompt team members to reach out to personally to thank the customer or follow up on any issues. Or, set up auto-messages to response to customers based on their score. For example, trigger an email that asks happy customers to write a review of your product. 

With Intercom, customers know where to expect communication from you and know exactly where to reach out for help. Using Wootric and Intercom together is a convenient way to close the loop with customers, letting them know you value their feedback.

Get started with the InMoment-Intercom integration today!

5 Ways to Break Down the Data Silos that Hurt Customer Experience

Do you have a data silo problem?

  • Do customers complain of having to explain everything about their business to sales, and then to customer success, and then again to customer support?
  • Is customer support hearing about the same issues, over and over again, that aren’t being addressed by product?

Those are just two of the most frequent symptoms of data silos. Here are some more, reported to us by our friends at Segment.

  • Inability to answer complex questions about your customer journey.
  • Inability to quantify the impact of a given campaign against down-funnel, often offline conversations (like Salesforce lead status updates).
  • Inability to affect targeting criteria in a given channel based on interactions that occurred in another (ie. you’re spamming users across channels when they’ve already converted or signaled their preferences in another.

What do all of these silo symptoms have in common? They all damage customer experience, and they all result from data not being shared between teams and departments.

Three main causes of data silos

Data silos are isolated islands where information sits, visible to just one or a few people. Usually, the cause of data silos isn’t some greedy information hog, unwilling to let anyone see his or her hoard of numbers. It’s nothing so Dickensian. Here are the main reasons they exist.

  1. Structural

Businesses that have been around through multiple owners, leaders and ideologies typically have incompatible systems in place from various eras and incarnations. Older software or apps that haven’t been updated or replaced probably don’t play well with others. Whereas newer data collection and analysis programs have built-in capacities to share information with other apps, older systems don’t. Or, they don’t do it automatically. If no one is tasked with disseminating the information, it doesn’t get shared.

  1. Social

Maybe teams aren’t rewarded for sharing, or required to share information. Or, maybe there is a data hoarding person or group who keep data to themselves to maintain a sense of power and control. But usually, it’s a case of ‘this is the way we’ve always done it’ resistance to change. Having a ‘silo mentality’ in your business makes it difficult or impossible to quickly spot opportunities and take advantage of them, because when information isn’t shared, you can’t make fast, informed, data-driven decisions.

  1. Vendor lock-in

Maybe it’s not you, it’s them. The software vendors. Yes, even software-as-a-service applications can effectively ‘trap’ businesses within their platforms by requiring heavy investments in special training, or they may lack native integrations or an open API. In either case, they make it difficult to switch information over to other apps.

Breaking down these data silos requires a lot of effort and commitment. Structural causes require an overhaul of all or most of your existing systems; social causes may take a company-wide initiative to improve company culture; and vendor lock-in-related causes are, by nature, tricky to remedy.

So before we get into how to break down data silos, let’s look at why it’s worth all of the time, effort, and investment.

What you stand to gain by breaking silos down

One of the biggest threats data silos pose to companies is blocking customer success. Customer success depends on everyone in the company being aligned behind the same data-informed vision of the target customer – their needs, wants, challenges and desired outcomes.

But that alignment depends entirely on sharing information across the entire organization, not just once, but continuously, to facilitate collaboration between sales, marketing, customer success and customer service (at minimum). When customer-facing departments run entirely separately from each other, it’s the customers who pay the price.

When customers run into trouble, they have to repeat themselves as they’re bounced around from agent to agent.

If a loyal customer was unhappy with the last order, s/he will feel pestered and aggravated when a clueless sales rep tries to upsell them.

Of course, it’s not only customers who suffer – nobody benefits from data silos! A 2016 brief from Forrester observed the high rates of “misaligned performance metrics, lack of clarity around lead scoring (and definitions)” and other misunderstandings between marketing and sales that leaves “sales ops in the middle to make sense of the chaos.”

Another Forrester statistic is “less than 1% of leads in B2B ever become customers,” which means businesses are wasting money on marketing that doesn’t work, salespeople are wasting time on leads that will never convert, and – when you have data silos, marketers might not even know what they’re doing wrong.

With some types of data, sharing is even more important because so many departments stand to benefit from having easy access to it. Voice-of-customer data, for example, is a must-have for marketing (for testimonials, ad/sales page/email copy, content ideas), sales (for upsells), and product (to optimize features).

The bottom line is: Breaking down data silos is an absolute requirement of creating the customer-centric culture customers want and companies need.

How to break those silos

“A customer-centric culture should be the North Star and guiding principle for tearing down the silos [between marketing, sales, and customer service]… Before joining Salesforce, I spent 12 years running global engineering and also serving as a [chief marketing officer]. Silo busting was how I spent most of my time. I realized that I had to try to align different areas of the business, and the only way to do that was to silo-bust.”

– Vala Afshar, chief digital strategist at Salesforce

First, diagnose what is causing your silo problem using the 5 Whys cause and effect analysis.

5 Whys ExerciseThe idea is to find the root cause of the surface problem. The surface problem, for example, might be that marketing isn’t qualifying leads before passing them on to sales. The reason for that might be that marketing isn’t sure what the success indicators are for leads who convert. The reason for that might be because that data is stopped up – it’s kept by sales.

We’re already at the third ‘why’ question and we’ve just gotten to the middle problem of the data silo.

The answers to ‘why’ #4 and ‘why’ #5 will reveal the core cause that’s creating the silo in the first place.

Why use the 5 Whys? Because you might find that a data silo isn’t the root of the problem, or that the reason for the silo isn’t what you think it is. There may, in fact, be an underlying issue that runs deeper than investing in a new data gathering and analysis program can fix.

Second, get management buy-in.

Once you’re armed with the problems the data silo creates, as well as a thorough understanding of the underlying issues contributing to those problems, take your findings to management. You’ll need total buy-in from the top to address those deeper issues and find a data-busting solution that works perfectly for your company.

To get that buy-in, you’ve got to present a strong case that freely shared information will help each individual department, and the entire organization, essentially offering them a unified vision. In addition to bringing up current problems free-flowing information can fix, also consider how it can aid your company’s long-term goals and department objectives.

Third, align behind your North Star (the customer)

It’s not going to be easy to change long-standing habits in your organization, so to do it successfully, you’ve got to have whole-company alignment behind the real purpose of your proposed changes: The customer.

Your customers will tell you what impact your changes are really having. But, you need a metric to track, so everyone can see that breaking down silos (and all the work and training that go into it) are worth the effort.

We call this a “North Star metric,” like Net Promoter Score (NPS). When you see NPS scores rise, proving that customers are indeed happier (so happy they’re willing to recommend you to a friend or colleague), it’s proof positive that what you’re doing makes a difference.

Fourth, find the right tools.

Better tools lead to better collaboration, and what you’ll want to look for are data gathering and analysis tools that integrate with your CRM software (which will also solve the vendor lock-in problem, if that’s the source of your silo).

This is going to be your “single source of truth” database. Salesforce is a perfect example.

It’s key to make sure that data is shared with various functional systems of record so everyone has what they need at their fingertips. At Wootric, for example, we sync customer/prospect data from our product, Intercom (for Success) and HubSpot (for Marketing) to Salesforce – and from the Wootric survey platform, we integrate with Slack, Intercom, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

For us, this means:

  • The way we put NPS into Intercom so that if a customer reaches out about a conversation, someone can see the entire history of that customer.
  • You could have a different conversation with a promoter than someone who ‘dinged you’ the last time – having that context shifts the conversation.

Segment Product Manager Chris Sperandio says customers come to his company for better alignment through data.

The key is the desire to align all of their departments around a shared customer context. The way they achieve this is ensuring each department’s tools are running on a common data set. This way, they can run more cohesive campaigns and they can operationalize their insights and predictions.

Fifth: Invest in cross-functional training – together.

Once you have diagnosed your core problems, obtained management buy-in, and choose a metric that measures progress, and have the right tools – it’s time to bring everyone together for training.

Not only will everyone need training on how to use the new tools, they’ll also need training on how they can best work together to create better customer experiences through sharing information. Silo-busting is a multi-team effort, but when teams have traditionally been kept separate and sovereign, it can be a challenge to build bridges and relationships.

Try hosting a meeting with everyone to establish a shared understanding of each team’s goals, challenges and pain points.

Then, have everyone get together to find areas where insights and abilities from one person can help another person with their challenges and goals.

Finally, have everyone fill out a “communication builder” questionnaire that asks:

  • Basic contact information: phone/email/Slack etc.
  • What is their job title/function?
  • When and how do they prefer being contacted (ie. by phone before noon, or via email – but not available on weekends for immediate response).

This step sets up co-workers for success by setting expectations and letting everyone receive requests and information in the way that works best for them.

Alternately, you might consider creating a cross-functional “tiger team” who ‘owns’ the progress of the North Star metric (like NPS) and has a C-suite sponsor who helps them get things done.

Collaborative training is a good start, but will need to be nurtured over time as the human tendency is to fall back into familiar behavior patterns. To help break those patterns, you might even consider physically moving people so employees from different teams work next to each other, building relationships.

Measure and improve customer experience at scale.

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9 Empathy Exercises that Help Product Teams Improve CX

What is Empathy?

Empathy is the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. For Product Managers looking to improve customer experience (CX), that definition translates to doing more than understanding the user’s pain points, but also looking at the emotional landscape of what it’s like to use the product – when it is working, and when it isn’t working.

Empathetic Product Managers ask themselves:

  • How does using the product make the customer feel?
  • How does the customer want to feel when using your product? What would be the best possible emotional outcome for them?
  • How do I ensure the product developers understand and take the customers’ needs into consideration in their process?

The answers to those questions affect every facet of business, from acquisition to retention. It’s how, through CX, you can generate rapid growth through word-of-mouth recommendations, and sustain your success with customers who never want to leave.

Tying Empathy into CX

Empathy is a soft skill, and while those are typically difficult to measure, the effects of empathetic product development can be seen in every CX metric: Customer satisfaction (CSAT), Customer Effort Score (CES) and Net Promoter Score (NPS).

Sinead Cochrane, Senior Product Researcher at Intercom, wrote “For product teams, empathy building activities such as observing research or doing customer support is often not considered ‘real work’. However, product teams that consistently keep customer needs in mind are able to maintain and evolve their products in ways that won’t negatively impact the user experience.”

For her, empathy for product departments means “When a customer tells you something is broken, you are able to imagine the impact it’s having on the job they’re trying to get done,” and, “you realize the emotional impact the problem is having on that person.”

But I think we can go further than just recognizing the emotional impact of problems. That’s scratching the surface of what having empathy for customers can mean for producing superior customer experience.

Because empathy shouldn’t be reduced to realizing customers feel bad when a product isn’t working for them. A whole new world opens up when you also consider how you can design your product, updates, and expansions to enhance positive emotions as well.

Here are the questions that lie at the heart of empathetic product management:

  • How can you get more emotionally in sync with your customers?
  • Which are the most important negative emotional outcomes to manage?
  • Which emotions should you seek to heighten (and how?)

To answer these questions, try these empathy building exercises.

Empathy Building Exercises for Product Managers and their Teams

  1. Listen actively to discover underlying needs and emotional motivations

Often relegated to customer service and customer success departments, ‘active listening’ to find out why your customers use your product and what they really want to achieve is very important. You can’t get the depth and honesty of answers by just sending out a survey – this works much better if you do phone, Zoom or in-person interviews. In fact, Roman Pichler recommends product managers meet real users on a regular basis. You may find that your assumptions of why customers use your product aren’t accurate, or don’t tell nearly enough of the story.

“At first, our assumption was that they wanted to make more money. That often was true, but frequently we heard something different. Many simply wanted to maintain the business but run it more efficiently so they could have more free time (we heard about golfing on Fridays more than once). Others wanted to build a sustainable business they could pass on to their son or daughter.” – Jim Semick, Founder & Chief Strategist at ProductPlan

To get down to customers’ real motivations, ask open-ended questions beginning with “why” and “how.” Then make sure to record their answers in their own words (you can hand those assets to your copywriters for later use).

  1. Use your own product

Empathy is often described as ‘putting yourself in someone else’s shoes’ – and there’s no better way to do this for a product manager than to actually use the product, just like any user would. You’ll empathize with users’ frustrations as you experience your own product’s shortcomings and hopefully find moments where it’s possible to create more delight.

But always keep in mind – you are not the average user. You’ll still need to listen to your users to get a complete picture of how they feel, and what problems they perceive as being severely aggravating.

  1. Share verbatim comments

Someone, somewhere, is tracking customer experience metrics, sending out surveys, and collecting the answers. That someone might even be you. When reading users’ written responses, don’t just look for problems to solve and ignore the positive comments. Read them for emotion and see what conclusions you can draw about what people are feeling, and want to feel.

Pick a few relevant verbatim comments to bring to the rest of the product team. Reading these comments often helps engineers and designers feel the same joy or frustration as their users. This new emotional understanding will help you evangelize CX as a priority with everyone.

  1. Mine your qualitative data and quantify customer sentiment

Those open-ended response answers are a goldmine for user research that can alert you to problems – and give you hints into the customer’s emotional state of mind. However, once you are getting more than a hundred comments a month, seeing the forest for the trees can be a difficult exercise. Qualitative feedback is notoriously tough to quantify, but it is now possible and easy to quantify sentiment with the help of machine learning.

AI-powered platforms, like InMoment CXInsight™, automatically sort your customer comments into themes while simultaneously assigning positive or negative sentiment. This provides you with a big picture understanding of how customers feel about your product and why. Categories of feedback vary by business sector and business model–payment processes & delivery for e-commerce, perhaps, while UX and usability may surface for SaaS products. Quantifying the sentiment of what your customers are talking about can help you track emotional trends over time. Presenting this kind of data alongside verbatim comments connects customer emotion with real business consequence.  

Feedback categorized by theme with sentiment breakdown
Example of auto-categorized NPS comments with sentiment assigned in a dashboard. Source: Wootric

  1. Set empathy KPIs

What gets measured gets done, and adding empathy into your product development work is no different. The KPIs for empathy may look a little different than your typical performance indicators, but the good news is: They’re not difficult to get. You’ll find key performance indicators like NPS, CES and CSAT are a good start, and comments in the open-ended questions can give you insight into the metric. Start identifying what kinds of ratings and qualitative answers correlate to genuinely happy customers – and frustrated customers likely to churn.

  1. Chart out an empathy map

You’ve done your user journey, but even though it’s part of the buyer persona building process, you may not have done an empathy map.

  • What your user sees – on competitors’ websites, common visuals in their industries, maybe what they enjoy watching or reading
  • What your user says – how they measure success, what they say they want, what they say about your product
  • What your user hears – what their influencers are saying, not just about your product, but about their jobs and what constitutes success, what they enjoy, what they don’t like about their experiences with your competitors, etc.
  • What your users think and feel – worries, aspirations, what they really want, what really annoys them

Notice how the empathy map includes business/industry-specific observations, but also branches out into the user’s personal life and larger environment. People are not their jobs – or even their ‘jobs to be done.’ For true empathy, you have to look at the whole person.

This is a great activity to get other teams involved in – consider hosting a meeting with Customer Success, Sales, Marketing and Customer Service for a wider scope of insights.

Activities involving multiple teams help to build a shared understanding of your customers’ experiences that can strengthen the whole company.

  1. Add happy moments to your Customer Journey Map

You’ve probably mapped out your customer/user journey, but you probably didn’t include this: Happy moments. See if you can take your old customer journey map and mark the points where positive, fun, delightful things happen. Can’t think of any? Then you have some serious CX work to do!

And of course, also note points where you’ve observed friction, difficulties, and problems, and address those in the order of biggest impact + easiest to implement.

  1. Work in Customer Support for an afternoon

Whether that means answering the live chat questions, picking up the phone, or monitoring your product’s customer Slack channel, try out being the Customer Support agent for an afternoon to and put yourself on the front lines! There’s no better way to find problems than to let customers tell you exactly – and in great detail – what they are. And they’ll likely throw in how frustrated it makes them feel too.

  1. Build a prototype to test your emotional hypotheses

By now, you probably have a few ideas on how you can improve the customer experience, and it might be time to test those theories. Create a prototype for a select group of qualified users to try (and react to). And, if possible, have them test the prototype in a testing facility that allows you to observe their reactions as they use your product.

If there is a Golden Rule for empathy, it’s a simple one: Forget your assumptions and be genuinely interested and curious about what people are feeling (not just what they’re doing) while using your product. Empathy is a learned skill that needs practice so don’t forget to try out these empathy exercises on a frequent basis for enhanced customer experience.  

To quote Maya Angelou: “People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

Be the customer experience champion at your company. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with InMoment.

5 Sneaky Biases That May Affect Your Customer Insight Analysis

Data is the beating pulse of business, but customer data is more like DNA. Customer data, if we’re using it right, directs how we grow and what we develop. But what happens if that customer data becomes corrupted by our own bias?

We can’t grow or develop in the ways we need to.

But what is bias exactly? Where does it come from?

The most prevalent bias is, perhaps, confirmation bias – seeking out data that confirms our existing beliefs.

In an early study of confirmation bias, young children were asked what features in a sports ball are important to the quality of a player’s serve. Some said size, others said material, some dismissed color as a factor – but once they’d made up their minds, they failed to acknowledge evidence that was contrary to their theory – or explained away evidence that didn’t fit.

But what’s worse, especially for those of us using data to steer our businesses, is that confirmation bias caused them to not generate alternate theories unless someone asked them to. They missed exploring and finding other possibilities.

There are other types of bias too, including:

Algorithmic bias – When the data used to teach an AI machine learning system reflects the implicit values of the humans involved in collecting, selecting and using that data. You might remember the 2015 uproar around Google’s image recognition AI algorithm that auto-tagged photos of black people as gorillas? Yes, that happened. And in 2009, Nikon’s image recognition algorithms consistently asked Asian users if they were blinking.

Survivorship bias – When the data analyzed only comes from success stories.

Sample bias – When the population you collect data from doesn’t accurately reflect the population you’re trying to learn about.

Avoiding bias when gathering, analyzing and acting on data is impossible. Bias creeps in with assumptions, instincts, guesses, and ‘logical’ conclusions – and mostly, we don’t even know they exist until someone without those particular biases point them out.

But, while we can’t escape biases, we can try our best to account for them when we collect, analyze and interpret data.

“The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance – it is the illusion of knowledge.” – Daniel J. Boorstin

How to fight bias in your data

In Forrester’s The illusion of insights recording, Forrester Vice President and Research Director Sri Sridharan makes three recommendations to reduce bias in data.

She says to “triangulate insight” by using multiple methods of arriving at an insight, and cross-validation. For example, pairing behavioral data with feedback from customer surveys to see if you arrive at the same or similar answers.

Her second piece of advice is to create a “self-correcting system of insights” that connects customer data with an effective action to create a closed loop of action, learning, and optimization. Essentially, this means testing the data by taking action and iterating based on how well you succeed in addressing the issue.

Tracking a ‘North Star’ metric like NPS or CSAT over time can be very helpful in confirming whether the changes you make are having the desired effect.

Sri’s third piece of advice is to “show your work to build trust” both internally and with customers. Your customers will be quick to correct you if your insights don’t hold true for them – and you have the bonus of showing them how hard you’re working to make sure they have what they need to succeed.

But there is also the potential for bias to happen before any of these fixes can be made – especially in Customer Discovery.

Bias in Customer Discovery, Before You’ve Even Gotten to the Data

Bias in whom you ask

Who you survey, interview or meet with can bias your results. This is called “sample bias” – but it can also turn into confirmation bias. Sample bias happens when some members of the intended population are less likely to be included than others. Think of all of the different segments of users you have – what would happen if you only surveyed one of those segments? You would get responses that don’t work equally well for all of your customers.

This can slide into confirmation bias if the population you select is more likely to give you the answers you want to hear.

And, there’s also the risk of “survivorship bias,” if the people you’re surveying are the customers who are still with you, rather than the users who have churned. Current users are much easier to collect data from, and while they can give you important insights, they can’t tell you why your churned customers left.

Bias in how you ask

How you frame questions can have a dramatic effect on the responses. In fact, by the wording you use in a survey, or even your tone of voice in a phone interview or facial expressions in an in-person interview, you can effectively steer the conversation to deliver exactly the answers you’re hoping to hear. Many of the words we use have positive or negative associations that cause people to react accordingly.

Biased question: How much do you like the color blue? (This presupposes they like the color blue at all)

Unbiased question: How does the color blue make you feel? (A much more neutral phrasing)

Or, if you aren’t specific enough about the information you want, you risk confusing your respondent and getting answers that aren’t at all helpful. Unless you have a professional market researcher on staff, you may want to stick with established questions like NPS and CSAT.

Bias in what you ask first – and last

The order of the questions you ask can also bias your results, and you’ll need to review your question order carefully to make sure the sequence doesn’t cause biased responses. Typically, you should ask general questions before specific ones, ask positive questions before negative ones, and ask questions about behavior before questions about attitude.

Bias in when you ask

Holidays and the summer months, when families often take their vacations, can be problematic for both response rates and sample bias. For example, if you send a survey during religious holidays, you’ll likely get different responses rates from different groups of people, who may or may not be taking that time off.  Be aware of your timing, including if you’re sending surveys during deadline rushes, before or after holidays, or other significant patterns that may affect who responds and how they respond. To be on the safe side, don’t send your survey at the same time every year – send a few, at different times, to get the most accurate feedback.

Objective Data Leads to More Accurate, More Valuable Insight

Sherlock Holmes famously tells Dr. Watson that he never forms a theory before he gathers all of the facts. But he’s much better at disassociating himself from the results than most of us are (and he’s fictional). Bias has a way of seeping into our results, and how we view and react to our results. But, when we put bias-countering measures in place, like gathering data from different sources, using different types of data, and checking our work through a process of action and iteration, we can get to the truth in the end.

Get immediate insight from comments using text and sentiment analytics.
Learn about Wootric CXInsight™

Our Machine Learning Journey: From Zero to Customer Value in 12 months

PART 1

At Wootric we collect hundreds of thousands of NPS, CSAT and CES  survey responses every week. We do this across different industries and product categories. Our customers then use our various integrations such as Salesforce, HubSpot, and Slack to route this feedback to relevant teams. Some of these customers like DocuSign and Grubhub have huge user base. This means even with a conservative sampling strategy they get hundreds of pieces of feedback daily.

The Challenge of Analyzing Qualitative Feedback

The quantitative aspects of feedback — NPS, CSAT scores, for example — are relatively easy to aggregate and analyze. It is the qualitative comments that provide rich insight into customer experience, but analysis of unstructured feedback is hard. Someone could read each piece of feedback one by one, but having a human read each comment obviously does not scale. If you can’t or don’t review what customers are telling you, then why have CX program to begin with? This is where machine learning saves the day.

Here is a concrete example of problem we needed to solve:
CXI-classification of customer feedback using ML

We set out to solve this multi-label classification and  topic sentiment analysis problem for our customers. We knew that doing it at scale would require some sort of automation using machine learning (ML) and natural language processing (NLP).  Machine learning requires lots of training data — in our case it meant we needed thousands of survey responses manually labeled into different categories. Luckily our customers have had the ability to manually categorize survey responses in our dashboard.  In the last 3+ years, they have categorized thousands and thousands of comments. Fortuitous, but sometimes we would like to think we saw it coming. 😉 At this point, we have significant volume of training data, now we just needed to find the right machine learning algorithms to take a stab at the problem.

Sentiment Analysis

To get our feet wet in machine learning ecosystem, we thought we would start with sentiment analysis because there has been tons of research on this problem over last few years and there are several open source solutions claiming to solve this. We started with Stanford NLP library because it was and is still actively worked on and lots of great research papers have come out of this group. It took us about a week to get our heads around concepts of Tokenization, Lemmatization, Named Entity Recognition (NER), PoS tagging, Dependency parsing, Coreference Resolution, word embeddings and finally to embed the library into a REST API framework. The results were okay but not great for our use case.  We **think** it’s because feedback comments belong to different domain — these are responses to questions as opposed to news article, blogs and tweets. Most of feedback is short, ranging from a couple of words to couple of sentences. This does not give enough “context” for algorithms to find the sentiment. An alternative solution would have been to train our own model using Stanford NLP library but we did not have engineering resources and bandwidth at that point in time. But we had something working. It was a baby step, but a step in the right direction.

Categorizing Feedback Comments

For feedback categorization, we also first looked into a hosted service and open source libraries. The most compelling, trainable and easy to get started solution at that point in time (mid 2016) was Google Cloud Prediction API where you upload a CSV of training data and in few minutes you get a model and REST API to make a prediction. This sounded like a tailor-made solution for us. After all, we had lots of training data that our customers had manually labeled. We were able to quickly format our responses and training labels in order to meet the Prediction API requirements, and saw some initial results.

Results were better for some sets of feedback but horrible for other sets. Dissecting further we realized that the customer feedback set where prediction was more accurate belonged to DevOps, Data Analytics and similar developer centric and data analytics.  There was less success with feedback from e-commerce or other consumer-centric SaaS products. This made sense because most of our customers who spent their time manually labeling feedback had offerings catered to developers — such as New Relic, Docker etc. The bigger downside of Prediction API was that it was a black box so we did not have any ability to tune algorithms. Ironically, Google decided to deprecate Prediction API in favor of their Cloud ML Engine, driving us to improve our internal, customizable prediction methods instead.

Our experiments with Stanford NLP libraries and Google Prediction API gave us a good understanding of the complexity of problem we were tackling, provided more awareness of the ML ecosystem — people and research labs to follow, research papers to read — and finally helped us better understand the nuances of building machine learning models. It’s not as simple as having some training data, copy pasting some code from open source libraries and voila you have a ML solution. There are lots of hype and noise around what ML can do and how to go about doing it right.

At this point, we concluded that there was no shortcut and that we had to invest time focusing on high quality training data, going through various research papers, trying the algorithms in research papers using our training data and have nobs ( i.e. hyperparameters) tuned for our use case.

Delivering insights to customers

In April 2018, after six months in beta, we launched v1 of our product CXInsight™. The platform enables our customers to import and analyze customer feedback from any source. To date, we have analyzed 200,000+ comments pertaining to a wide spectrum of product categories and types of feedback — PaaS, SaaS, E-commerce, Mobile App reviews, employee reviews, social media, etc.

Of note, most of the data we’ve analyzed so far was originally collected using our competitors’ survey platforms. This is sweet validation of our goal: Regardless of how and where you collect customer feedback, Wootric gives you the best analysis.   

In our next series of blog articles, we will talk about how we have used and are using:

  • Bag of Words with Naive Bayes and SGD Classifier (Part II)
  • word2vec with PCA, Logistic Regression, SVM and SGD Classifier
  • Bidirectional LSTM
  • CNN
  • Custom word embeddings
  • Productizing — DevOps around ML
  • UX and UI
  • Online learning and Human in the loop

Our goal has never been to build a generic text categorization tool. Rather, our focus is to build the best customer feedback analysis platform. We are also aware that our system is never going to be 100% correct so we have made it easy for our customers and our own team to be human in the loop.

I would be remiss not to thank Stanford NLP, Richard Socher, Lukas Biewald, Sebastian Ruder , Google ML research whose research papers, blogs, tutorials, videos and guidance have directly or indirectly helped us build CXInsight product.

Please stay tuned to our Engineering Blog for next series of articles on this topic.  The Hacker News discussion is here.

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