Listening to customers carries obvious importance for any customer experience (CX) program. Employee and marketplace perspectives are important too, make no mistake, but customer feedback is an incredibly meaningful source of intel on where your brand experience is at, what’s great about it, and what could be better. Because of this, analyst firms like Forrester have begun more critically examining how to achieve intentful listening.
Intentful listening is where customer experience and Experience Improvement (XI) intersect. Experience improvement allows brands to create fundamentally transformed experiences that connect to customers on a deep level, enticing them to return to your brand for more even amid fierce competition or other marketplace conditions. Thus, it makes sense to constantly evaluate how to better listen to customers. Our three-step guide to better listening can help you achieve that goal:
How to Achieve Intentional Customer Listening
Go Beyond Survey Ratings
Contextualize Feedback
Identify Changing Attitudes
Step #1: Go Beyond Survey Ratings
Survey ratings can be a quick source of customer sentiment, but they also run the risk of being too superficial. Or, put another way, numerical ratings and scales are great for rapidly letting brands know whether customers had a great experience or not… but that’s about all the information they provide. Thus, survey ratings are not the best means of listening intently.
To solve this problem (and to delve into deeper listening) brands need to provide customers the chance to express feedback and sentiment in their own terms. This means building surveys that include open-ended questions and utilizing platforms that can effectively analyze the sentiments hidden in that written feedback (also known as unstructured data). This approach, unlike ratings, gives brands actionable feedback that they can work into improvement plans.
Step #2: Contextualize Feedback
Letting customers provide unstructured feedback is a great start, but it’s only the first step toward more intenful listening. To truly understand customer sentiment, brands must also consider the context in which that information is being presented. For example, which element of the experience are customers referring to? Was there a particular step they found praiseworthy or unwieldy?
Contextualizing feedback is just as important as collecting it in an unstructured format if brands want to meaningfully improve the experiences they create. Much like allowing for unstructured data, context goes a long way toward helping brands create specific action plans and, subsequently, meaningful improvement. This is yet another arena that ratings-based questions aren’t always as useful for.
Step #3: Identify Changing Attitudes
Unstructured, contextualized feedback is important enough on its own, but its ability to help brands see the writing on the wall (i.e., identify changing customer tastes and attitudes) cannot be understated. As every experience practitioner knows, customer tastes are anything but static. They evolve and change in response to everything from world events to product trends. Brands that hope to become or remain successful must tune into those changes as they happen, which is why being able to identify changing customer attitudes is so important.
By staying on top of customer tastes and responding accordingly via meaningful experience improvement, brands can demonstrate that they are committed to both improving interactions with customers and staying well aware of the important factors that keep those individuals coming back to them instead of the competition. This constant awareness is the crown jewel of listening intently to customers, and it means the difference between being an industry leader or a follower.
Want to learn how to get more out of your customer listening efforts? Check out our eBook, “How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback” for free here!
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Since the inception of customer experience (CX), the conversation about feedback and listening tools has largely revolved around data collection. Many brands have emphasized turning listening programs on immediately, gathering feedback from everyone, and using that feedback to inform both metrics and strictly reactive experience management.
Is there not a deeper layer to experience, though? Top-tier analyst firms like Forrester certainly seem to think so. That conversation about gathering feedback, about experience management, is being taken a step further to a new paradigm: Experience Improvement (XI).
Rather than being about reactive management and just watching metrics like NPS, experience improvement encourages brands to amp things up by creating meaningful, emotionally connective experiences for each and every customer. What follows are five steps to getting your program to that level.
Five Steps to Improve Experiences
Design
Listen
Understand
Transform
Realize
Step #1: Design
Until now, most experience program frameworks encourage brands to turn listening posts on immediately and use gathered feedback to shape eventual goals. However, with experience improvement, this model is inverted to great effect. Rather than getting feedback first, forming goals later, brands should carefully think about what objectives they want their program to accomplish and design their listening efforts around those goals.
For example, does your brand want to reduce customer churn by a given percentage? What about increasing retention or acquisition? Whatever your company’s goal, your experience program can help you get much further toward it if you spell out concrete, numbers-driven goals before turning any listening posts on. Frankly, some audiences are also more worth listening to than others, and completing this step can help your brand better decide where to tune in and why.
Step #2: Listen
Once you’ve established your experience program’s goals and audiences, you can then turn your aforementioned listening posts on. Having determined which audiences to listen to before doing so can help your brand consolidate experience program resources toward much more helpful groups. For example, if you’re looking to boost customer retention, it makes more sense to focus on your established customer base than anyone who interacts with your brand in any context. This approach saves your brand time and resources hunting down helpful intel.
Step #3: Understand
After gathering more focused, relevant feedback through your program, take time to carefully digest it and sort out what might need improvement. An experience platform armed with capabilities like sentiment analysis can be a huge help here. Additionally, it bears repeating that understanding your feedback means more than scoreboard-watching NPS—it means diving deep into customer feedback to understand common themes, praises, problems, and possible solutions.
Step #4: Transform
Understanding your customer feedback is one thing; using it to meaningfully transform the business is another. This is arguably the most work-intensive step of the experience improvement framework… and one of the most important. Meaningful transformation means sharing CX intelligence with leaders across the business (especially in the departments most relevant to the feedback) and working closely with them to outline and implement process improvements. Desiloing data is always a good idea because it gives employees a holistic view of the brand’s purpose.
Step #5: Realize
Realizing experience improvement means circling back to the goals you set forth in the design stage to ascertain how things shook out. Did you meet your program numbers? Perhaps more importantly, have the improvements implemented as a result of your program resulted in positive cultural changes? Having an initial goal to compare your outcome to is vital to realizing experience improvement… and simplifies proving ROI to request more resources for additional efforts.
By following these steps, organizations can transcend managing experiences and start meaningfully improving them. As we mentioned up top, Experience Improvement leads to the sorts of deeply connective experiences that keep customers coming back no matter what, leading to fundamental brand success.
To read more about these five steps—and brands who have found success with them—check out this article for free today!
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We recently touched on the importance of employee experience (EX) programs and how your brand can get a powerful, effective EX initiative off the ground (or dust off an existing one). Starting your EX program is a big deal, but how can companies keep the momentum going once they’ve turned on the listening posts and gotten the first bits of employee feedback?
Today, we’re going to go over three ways to supercharge your EX program (and keep it that way) to help your brand’s experience be the best it can be:
Method 1: Stick to The Plan
Method 2: Lead Across Teams
Method 3: Take Action
Method #1: Stick to The Plan
It’s important to design your program with the end in mind before you even activate any listening posts. Designing with the end in mind means taking the time to consider which goals you want your program to accomplish—reducing employee churn by a given percentage, for example.
However, it’s just as important to make sure your team sticks to that plan after you activate your program. This isn’t to say you can’t consider new goals or aspirations if your feedback points to them; it just means checking in regularly to make sure your program is hitting KPIs, financial goals, and other hard numbers. That way, you can quantify your program’s success, which makes asking the ELT for additional resources much simpler.
Method #2: Lead Across Teams
It’s common for brands to leave EX programs solely in the hands of a dedicated team or the HR department. Both of those groups should be included, of course, but true EX success comes from sharing program ownership and leadership opportunities across the company. Encourage business unit leaders across your organization to collaborate with their teams and each other. This makes meaningfully acting on employee feedback much, much easier.
Effective program leadership also means continuing to involve the people to whom you reached out at the very beginning. Every experience program requires executive sponsorship, employee buy-in, and keeping those folks in the loop as your program matures. That responsibility can’t fade into the background once your initiative takes off.
Method #3: Take Action
Sticking to your program plan and encouraging your organization to collaborate on it are both powerful means of ensuring one thing: that action is taken upon your initiative’s gathered intelligence. When everyone is working together and your plan is hitting milestones at a steady drumbeat, your brand can create a meaningfully improved workplace culture and thus a better experience for all.
Successful EX Program = Successful CX Program
That better employee experience correlates directly with an improved customer experience. Although seamless transactions are important, customers seek emotion and human connections with their experiences. Employees who feel passionate and driven about their work can provide that, and it all begins with adhering to your plan, desiloing it across the organization, and taking action to transform your experience into something wonderful.
Want to read more about the importance of employee experience programs? Our expert Stacy Bolger has a new article out walking you through the foundations of a world-class program. You can read it here!
One of the most important elements of a customer experience (CX) program is a customer journey map. These maps serve as visual guides to the interactions customers have with your brand, including product purchases, talking to employees, and more. Customer journey maps can help brands hammer out the steps customers take on the road to a better experience and, just as importantly, do so from the customer’s perspective.
Today, we’re going to walk you through how to quickly create an effective customer journey map that touches on elements like key evaluation points, positive and negative experience components, and more. Let’s jump in.
A Certain Point of View
Though a customer journey map focuses heavily on seeing your brand’s experience through customers’ eyes, it actually starts with a different perspective: yours. The first step to building an effective customer journey map is considering that journey as your organization sees it.
First, identify the key interactions that customers have with your brand. Are these interactions limited to one-step transactions, or are they a bit more involved? The answer to this question varies from company to company—it’ll even vary between the different stakeholders that you bring in to help just at your brand. This can make creating a shared framework a more involved process, but brands can’t build a truthful, effective customer journey map without it!
The Next Level
Once you, your team, and stakeholders from other departments have agreed upon your customers’ steps, it’s time to expand on every step by identifying some key elements. These elements include: the customer’s desired outcome; time or duration; attitudes and thoughts; emotional responses and needs; customer pain points; strong and weak areas; and the importance of and satisfaction with the step.
At first glance, hammering these details out for every step in your customer journey map may seem a bit overkill. However, similarly to getting everyone’s opinion on what those steps actually are, doing this legwork enables a more educated approach to your customer journey map. This, in turn, will give your brand a greater understanding of its experience, the strengths and weaknesses of that experience, and what you can do to meaningfully improve it.
Bridging The Divide
Now that we’ve talked about building out the customer journey and the elements of its every step from your brand’s point of view, it’s time to circle back to what we talked about up top: understanding the journey as your customer sees it. Starting with your brand’s perspective on the customer journey is important because it gives you a perspective to compare and contrast to your customers’.
The Value of Understanding the Customer Journey
In short, a customer journey map encourages brands to consider what makes their experience great while also giving them a means of seeing why customers may (or may not) agree. Brands then have a better chance of knowing how to bridge potential divides and work toward a more connective, meaningfully improved experience for customers, employees, and the organization itself.
Want to read more about uncovering the real customer journey? Check out our eBook on the subject here, where we break down the process in five simple steps!
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Over the last decade or so, countless companies have fired up their own experience initiatives. These companies set out to create happier customers and employees, as well as a stronger bottom line—all through the power of experience programs! However, even after a brand’s CX practitioner(s) has gained program sponsorship, launched listening posts, and gathered data, it’s not uncommon for them to hit a wall when it comes to taking action on customer feedback
Gathering metrics is all well and good, but executing an action plan is what makes the difference between measuring and transforming your experience. Today’s conversation covers how to take action on your experience program feedback in four steps.
Four Steps to Taking Action on Customer Feedback
Define Your Plan’s Stages
Identify Collaborators
Define Actions
Create a Timeline
Step #1: Define Your Plan’s Stages
Every CX practitioner knows that taking action isn’t as simple as A-to-B. That’s why it’s important to hammer out the concrete steps you need to take toward experience improvement and brand transformation. It’s important to first consider where you are and remind yourself of the program’s end goal. Then, collaborate closely with your team to figure out which actions you need to take. This process empowers your team to prioritize what to execute on first.
Step #2: Identify Collaborators
Once your team has mapped out action plan stages, it’s time to decide who else in the organization may be needed. This isn’t necessarily the same as returning to the execs or other stakeholders and sponsors—you may need to reach out to other teams who own processes that impact the experience, such as IT or user experience. Including individuals before you take action will make the transformation process smoother.
Step #3: Define Actions
You’ve drawn a line from feedback to improvement and have the collaborators you need at the table. Now it’s time to work together to define specific actions. This step is why it’s so important to reach out to collaborators whose teams or departments you see improvement opportunities for. You’re going to need their help to figure out the best way to solve a problem in their respective parts of the organization. You can share your experience data, they can share their perspectives, and meaningful action will soon follow.
Step #4: Create a Timeline
A timeline helps ensure that the actions become reality. It’s also a great way to hold your team accountable as they begin putting those actions into motion. Creating a timeline helps ground program expectations in reality and gives your team a firm timestamp at which to start monitoring implemented changes. Indeed, all of this makes creating a timeline perhaps the most important part of an action plan.
Following these four steps will allow your organization to leverage what you’ve learned from your experience program. You can put those learnings to great effect creating a more emotional experience for customers, greater meaning for your employees’ work, and, consequently, a more robust market position for your organization.
Click here to read my full article on the importance of taking action to transform your business. I take a deeper dive into this vital process and provide additional tooltips on how to revolutionize your brand through the power of Experience Improvement (XI).
Few elements of customer engagement matter more than well-designed transactional customer surveys. You need feedback from your customers and they deserve a chance to provide it. And a well-designed survey can help everyone achieve these respective goals. With that in mind, we’re going to take you through a few principles that can turn any survey from a questionnaire to a conversation. Let’s get after it.
Key #1: Design With The End in Mind
Key #2: Keep It Short
Key #3: Invitations are Everything
Key #1: Design With The End in Mind
A lot of brands out there believe that the best way to get information from their customers is to throw a bunch of questions at the wall and see which ones stick. That strategy may get you some intel, but it’s nowhere near as effective as designing with the end in mind. This strategy is all about considering what you actually plan to do with the info you want to collect.
For example, do you want to better understand why retention is looking a bit down this quarter? Maybe it’s time to assess how well your employees and locations adhere to company standards? Whatever business goal you have in mind, designing your surveys around specific objectives will make them far more useful to you and your customers. You can gather information vital to accomplishing your goals, and customers can alert you to problems and process breakages that a more general survey wouldn’t have picked up.
Key #2: Keep It Short
One of the reasons customers either abandon surveys halfway through or outright ignore them is because they’re too long. The funny thing is that a lot of brands don’t mean for surveys to become long-winded. They usually start out short, but slowly accrue too many questions from other stakeholders over time.
A good rule of thumb for any transactional survey is that it should take no longer than five minutes to complete. That limit is important to bear in mind as you decide which questions to include and which to cut. Additionally, save ratings-based questions for the most important parts of the experience.
Finally, consider what data you may already have from other systems and listening posts. If you’re asking questions related to those areas, consider cutting those questions out.
Key #3: Invitations Are Everything
Creating an enticing invitation is one of the most overlooked parts of survey design. Recipients pay a lot of attention to how well invitations are designed and factor that into accepting whatever it’s for. Thus, it’s never a bad idea to put some time into making your survey link or invitation look good. Whether it’s a beautiful design or a funny one-liner, think about what your customers might appreciate seeing in a survey invite and act accordingly.
The Benefits of Transactional Customer Surveys
Keeping these three principles in mind can supercharge any brand’s survey design and create a noticeable uptick in customer responses. Armed with that new intelligence, brands can be more aware than ever of their strengths, their weaknesses, and how to go about both of these elements to create a peerless experience for their customers.
Click here to learn more about survey design best practices from expert Dave Ensing.
If there’s anything organizations aren’t hurting for these days, it’s CX data. Brands may have been avidly searching for it once upon a time, but nowadays, they face the opposite dilemma: having more data than they might know what to do with. This is particularly true for experience program data—a few listening posts here and there can quickly inundate even larger organizations with a ton of customer intel.
Today, I’m going to talk you through how to make sense of your data. Using the tips below will help you isolate signals, cut through all the white noise, and ultimately leave your organization more CX savvy.
All Data, No Decisions
Having a lot of data is not a bad thing in and of itself, but it is more challenging for brands to make data-driven business decisions when they’re not sure where to start. Should companies dive directly into customer feedback? What about employee surveys and financial metrics? The sheer amount of disparate data sources at play within most companies can make gleaning actionable intelligence feel overwhelming (if not flat-out impossible).
The first step toward overcoming this challenge is to take all of your data and pour it into one place. This includes customer feedback, employee intel, financial data, operational data, and other sources. Why? Because siloing data makes understanding your customers and their experiences much more difficult because it obscures the context needed to fully understand both of these business problems. Putting all your data together will help your company not only contextualize what is broken, but also illuminate the path toward solving those challenges.
Finding The “Why”
Desiloing data gives companies the chance to holistically understand their customers’ perceptions and experiences. This is important not just for making data-driven decisions, but also understanding the root of broken or underwhelming experiences. When brands connect experience data with financial and operational information, it becomes much easier to see where things might be going wrong and how badly.
Once brands gain this holistic view, it’s time to dive deeper with key driver analysis. This doesn’t mean sit back and watch your NPS—it means rolling up your sleeves and getting into exploratory analysis and customer profiling. These processes allow companies to learn exactly why their customers behave the way they do. Even more, they identify what experience strengths and weaknesses drive that behavior.
Don’t forget to ask your employees for their experience feedback as well! A lot of brands mistakenly overlook this step because the employee and customer experiences drive one another. There’s no better way to make an employee feel valued than to ask for their feedback. Moreover, it encourages employees to feel involved in and take ownership of customer experience.
The Next Step
Brands can make sense of their experience data by desiloing it, analyzing it within the context of additional data, and hearing employees’ side of the story. These are the first steps toward becoming a more data-driven (and customer-centric) organization, an endeavor that can make any company a leader in its vertical.
Click here to read my full article on the importance of understanding customers to transform your brand. I take a deeper dive and provide additional tips on how to revolutionize your brand through the power of Experience Improvement (XI).
Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?
Do you know what holiday shoppers need from you this season? What about what matters most to them in store? Or what is most important to them when it comes to their experience on your website?
If you’re unsure, don’t simply guess what your customers are looking for. Instead, check out this infographic we created based on a study we did that surveyed 5,000 North American customers about their expectations for the holiday shopping season!
The potential for machine learning to elevate the customer experience has everyone buzzing. AI-powered text and sentiment analysis can be an incredible solution for specific problems that CX pros face.
But how do you know when the time is right to move to the next level of CX? Are there new tools you can purchase to step your game up? How do you know they’ll be worth it?
There are clear signs that your CX program is ready for, and your company could quickly benefit from, text and sentiment analysis. And we’ll delve into them here.
Before we get going, some definitions:
Text analysis takes qualitative customer comments and determines relevant themes. Software companies might see themes such as ‘feature request’, ‘bug’, or ‘pricing’. This allows you to quickly see what your customers are focusing on, and then dive in to see what they’re specifically saying about each topic.
Sentiment analysis offers micro and macro insights into how your customers are feeling about your company and products. It determines whether the text received for each text theme is positive, negative, or neutral. It also analyzes the comment as a whole, assigning sentiment to the entire verbatim text.
Let’s look at the 7 signs text and sentiment analytics will be worth the investment for your company.
1. You have a mature or quickly-maturing CX program.
Those of you considering text and sentiment analytics probably already have a few key elements in place:
A customer experience strategy and a Voice of Customer listening system
A C-suite sponsor who has been fostering a customer-centric culture across the whole company with NPS as the guiding star
A system asking for feedback through the entire customer journey
Now that you have a relatively mature CX program, you’re wondering how to extract even more value out of it.
2. You receive 500+ comments per month (or you’re headed there.)
Ideally, you want to listen to all of your customers – not just a sample or the first to respond. In reality, at a certain point the sheer volume of incoming customer feedback is more than a CX program can handle without an upgrade. You know this is the case when:
You feel excitement and dread regarding the amount of feedback you receive.
You’re anticipating a whole lot more comments soon.
You’ve even had to cap the number of comments you receive in a day to avoid being overwhelmed with the task of organizing and responding to everyone.
Overwhelming amounts of feedback is an amazing problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. Using text and sentiment analytics, you can turn unstructured qualitative feedback, like NPS comments, into organized insight in a matter of minutes.
Text and sentiment analytics allow you to analyze customer feedback using Natural Language Processing, looking something like this:
By combining text and sentiment analytics, you can search negative comments and quickly assess, for example, that 80% of your negative comments are about pricing. Or 45% of your customers in the Northeast region are talking about slow delivery times. That summary lets you know where to focus resources, and how quickly you need to make the change relative to other company priorities.
3. You’re sitting on a goldmine of feedback, but unable to get actionable insights.
Do you have a backlog of comments waiting to be read and sorted? Or maybe you’ve skimmed a few comments to answer the urgent ones, but you keep putting off the others.
One of our clients came to us with NPS survey comments from thousands of users. But rather than mining that information, they were running focus groups to prioritize feature requests because it was easier. They were duplicating efforts to get information they already had but couldn’t access and act on.
“The two biggest mistakes [in CX] are not doing qualitative research in the first place and then not putting it to use.” –Morgan Brown, Product Manager at Facebook and coauthor of ‘Hacking Growth’
If you’re feeling this pain, it’s time to automatically mine the insight from that pile of comments you’ve been sitting on. Turn anecdotes and hunches that you’ve got about your customer experience into evidence-backed insight by using. And do it quickly with text and sentiment analytics.
Source: CXInsight™ Dashboard
Sliced and diced organized feedback is easily available with many platforms that offer text and sentiment analytics. Doing this can help you understand the root cause of trends – like the needs of different customer personas or geographic regions – more comprehensively.
4. Manual feedback organization & categorization is insightful, but painfully slow.
While some customers duplicate efforts between data gathering and focus groups to get insight, other CX pros just bite the bullet and spend hours reading customer comments, labeling them, and funneling them into an unwieldy spreadsheet. They’re understandably frustrated by how difficult it is to get actionable insight.
By using text and sentiment analytics, humans can get huge quantities of customer feedback sorted and analyzed at the push of a button. Better yet, computers don’t have bad days or lose focus.
Once organized with tags, your time is freed up to look at the themes and trends that arise from the noise, then create actionable strategies based on those insights.
Now you can jump straight into action and the interns can work on more interesting, valuable projects!
PRO TIP: To get high quality insights at the push of a button, algorithms need to be trained. Be sure your feedback management software vendor has a team that will work with your data to ensure you get valuable insight from the start. With more data and occasional human guidance, you’ll get better and faster insight over time.
5. Your CX program lacks a real-time issue detection system.
An important element to providing a good customer experience is making sure any issues are handled quickly and efficiently. If you can detect and address them before your customer has a real issue, your CX program has paid for itself.
One of the benefits of having text and sentiment analysis is that your data and insights are updated in real-time. This means you have a new issue detection system.
Source: CXInsight™ Dashboard
This works best for a more mature customer feedback program with an established baseline, or status quo. For example, you know that on any given day, in any given geographic region, about 10% of your comments are tagged with ‘out of stock’ as an issue. When you check in and see that in Texas, 25% of comments coming in are tagged ‘out of stock’, that raises a red flag. You can immediately dig into specifics, read through the verbatims, and send those comments to the right people for follow up before the issue blows out of proportion.
The CX dream of being proactive in solving issues can be achieved with the help of automated organization of qualitative feedback.
6. Your internal teams aren’t agreeing on CX priorities.
It’s a given that successful companies focus on customer needs and experiences. The question is: is everyone at your company seeing the same information in the same way? If not, you’re wasting time and costly resources with competing priorities, and it is definitely time to invest in tools to fix it.
By having your CX tech parse the text and sentiment of your 1K+ daily inputs of customer feedback, you can democratize the information and insights across every team at your company. And that will ensure team leaders can quickly align to address the right priorities. So product development and customer support will be on the same page, and features will get developed (or possibly de-bugged) to meet the most important needs of the customer.
How does that happen? Feedback from every customer touchpoint is analyzed, from in-product surveys to emails. In this example, support ticket subject lines are auto-categorized and everyone from support to service to product to the c-level can see what issues are hot items to address.
Source: CXInsight™ Dashboard
Looking at the text analytics, it quickly becomes apparent that 15% of the support tickets are related to bugs that need to be addressed. On the proactive front, product could also delve into comments tagged “feature request” and focus on user concerns about UX/UI.
7. You need to demonstrate the ROI of your CX program.
Companies are eager to hop on the CX bandwagon, but it can still be a fight to get the proper resources to make a CX program thrive. You’ve probably already shown the C-suite the correlation between CX and revenue growth, but there’s pressure to squeeze a little more ROI out of what you’ve established.
Investing in a tool that pulls ROI from data is an expense. But it’s a more strategic spend than, and offers more immediate follow-up and action, than performing passive data review and organization. It’s also a moredirect value-add and much less expensive than hiring a third party human operation.
The cascading effects throughout the organization will increase ROI in the long-term as well.
Product teams can prioritize and build with evidence-based confidence.
Marketing teams will gain an understanding of different personas and see customers excited to spread the word about your business.
Support and operations teams will have early warning of potential issues and have more context when dealing with problems.
In the end, qualitative data is crucial to extracting value out of CX initiatives. Having more data from engaged customers should not be an obstacle.
Is this the point?
Are you seeing any of these 7 signs when you look at your company’s CX program? If so, do a cost benefit analysis. Typically, once your program has matured, the cost of tools that create actionable insights out of customer feedback are far cheaper than the cost of misaligned resources and long delivery times. Text and sentiment analytics make the resources you put into CX initiatives efficient, and turn the large quantity of unstructured data into an advantage by mining insight that would otherwise sit in limbo. Move this tipping point in your favor.
Get a first look at the trends that matter most and how they can impact your customer relationships, drive growth, and strengthen your overall strategy.
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Even if it’s just a quick trip to the grocery store, customers seek something more profound from brands than a mere product: meaningful customer experiences.
Conventional wisdom holds that customers shop the brands whose products and services best match their needs. But there’s more to the story than that. Even if it’s just a quick trip to the grocery store, customers seek something more profound from brands than a mere product: meaningful customer experiences.
There’s a lot for organizations to gain by orienting themselves around customers’ search for meaning. Experience programs can help them get there.
We’re going to go over exactly how companies can achieve that reorientation, create meaningful experiences for customers, and, ultimately, ride that heightened connectivity to the top of their respective verticals.
Right Audience, Right Problem
We touched on this in our last conversation about the importance of carefully designing your program before deploying it, but it’s worth saying again:
Some audiences are more worth brands’ time than others.
Sounds harsh, but let me explain. Some audiences offer context and solutions to problems that other groups may not even be aware of. Therefore, one of the first things brands should do to create meaning for their customers is consider the problems that can be solved by focusing on specific audiences.
This approach is vital is because it allows brands to hone in on customers’ “moment of truth.” This is the moment in which a customer finds significance in their interaction with a brand, not just a product or service.
What is preventing customers from finding their moment of truth? The answer to this question will dictate what you should design your listening program around.
Furthermore, that search will allow your company to create fundamental human relationships with customers. And those relationships will create positive buzz, build lifetime loyalty, and result in a much stronger bottom line.
Sharing the Love
Thinking how certain audiences can help solve business challenges is important, but it’s not the only step brands must take. Once a company’s experience team finds moments of truth, they absolutely must share the news across the organization! This sharing process is often called data democratization.
I really can’t say enough how important it is to share customers’ moments of truth. First, socializing that data across the organization gives every employee a glimpse of how their role affects the customer.
Second, sharing this intel makes it easier for brands to identify moments that matter out of mountains of experience program data. Ultimately, brands that intentionally democratize data from the beginning get so much more from their listening than companies who fail to design their strategy.
Listening Empathetically
The final key to creating meaningful customer experiences is on that is often overlooked: empathy. Empathy is the key to understanding moments of truth and, ultimately, business success.
Catering to customers’ search for meaning is neither a program luxury nor a saying you put on a wall sign. It’s a strategy that builds transformational brand success and the meaningful, emotional relationships that can sustain it indefinitely.
I go into greater depth about the importance of designing your experience program before listening in my article on the subject, which you can read here. Thank you!
ROI has been a notoriously fickle element of experience programs for years—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the difficulty of proving ROI stems less from experience programs being a financially elusive unicorn than many companies not tying their program to a quantifiable objective.
These days, it’s not uncommon for brands to take the term “listening program” to mean a series of listening posts set up across multiple channels.
Yes, those posts are an important part of listening, but experience programs can be so much more (and do so much more for your business). They can go far beyond listening in across channels and reacting to customer comments only as they come in.
Listening for, reacting to, and measuring customer sentiment in this manner is what’s commonly known as experience management. And honestly, it rarely moves the needle for brands or creates a better experience for customers. Experience improvement (XI), by contrast, allows companies to achieve both of those goals by connecting to customers in a very human way. Essentially, it pays for brands to have an experience improvement success framework.
Today, we’re going to touch on three ways a success framework can add unbridled power to any improvement effort:
Proving ROI
Listening Purposefully
Owning The Moments That Matter
Key #1: Proving ROI
ROI has been a notoriously fickle element of experience programs for years—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, the difficulty of proving ROI stems less from experience programs being a financially elusive unicorn than many companies not tying their program to a quantifiable objective.
This is why it is crucial that brands establish hard, specific goals for their experience program. An objective like “be more customer-centric” isn’t going to cut it, especially when it comes to proving ROI. Rather, experience practitioners and stakeholders need to work together to hash out program objectives that can be tied to financial goals.
Whether it’s acquiring X amount of new customers or lowering cost to serve by Y percent, creating goals like these and gearing your program toward them will make establishing ROI much, much easier.
Key #2: Listening Purposefully
ROI isn’t the only area a success framework can help companies stencil in. This setup can also help brands better identify who to listen to and why.
Conventional wisdom holds that companies should listen for feedback from anyone, but that isn’t necessarily true. Callous as it may sound to some, the truth is that some audiences are just more worth listening to than others. A success framework can help companies identify which audiences they need to listen to to achieve program goals.
This approach is also handy for cutting through the mountains and mountains of data that experience programs inevitably rake in. They also help programs get to the heart of providing a great experience, which leads us to our final topic:
Key #3: Owning The Moments That Matter
The moments that matter are the instances in which the needs of customers, employees, and businesses all connect. They’re the moments in which a customer journey transcends a transaction and becomes a profound emotional connection. Owning the moments that matter is vital to creating connections and inspiring transformational success across your business.
This final key is a culmination of establishing financial goals, listening purposefully, and taking action—ultimately creating meaning for customers. That capacity to create meaning is what sets the best brands apart from the competition and carries them to the top of their verticals. And it all starts with building an experience improvement success framework.
Click here to learn more about how to create a success framework and why doing so at the very start of your experience improvement journey will guarantee success for you, your customers, and your employees.
Whether you're a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.
Whether you’re a seasoned pro or just getting started in the world of customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX), you need to be fluent in the language of text analytics.
However, that’s more easily said than done. With technology evolving so quickly, it’s hard to keep up with the latest and greatest. That’s why we’ve put together this quick text analytics glossary. Check it out below!
Top Terms
Accuracy: The combination of precision and recall for a given tag or model.
Emotion: A measure of positive/negative feelings. Must be strong and clear-cut enough to be categorized as a specific emotion.
Human Translation: This translation method has a human translate each comment individually as the customer submits it.
Intent: Intent identifies what the customer is trying to achieve based on their response.
Keyword: A word or term that occurs in unstructured customer feedback data.
Machine Translation: Translation done by a machine that has been trained by humans.
Native Language Model: A text analytics model that is purposely built for a specific spoken language.
Natural Language Processing: A field of computer science and artificial intelligence that draws intelligence from unstructured data.
Precision: Correctness; represents how often a given concept is correctly captured by a specific tag.
Recall: Coverage; refers to how thoroughly the topics or ideas within a given tag are captured.
Sentiment: The expressed feeling or attitude behind a customer’s feedback. Categorized as positive, negative, or neutral.
Sentiment Phrase: Also referred to as a Sentiment Bearing Phrase or SBP. A phrase or sentence identified with positive, negative, or neutral sentiment.
Sentiment Score: A measure for both the polarity and intensity of the sentiment within a given comment.
Tag: A label generated from text analytics that groups together similar customer comments around a specific concept or topic.
Text Analytics: The methods and processes used for obtaining insights from unstructured data.
Text Analytics Model: A natural language processing engine that uses tags to label and organize unstructured data.
Theme: A dynamically extracted concept from a collection of comments, generated by an unsupervised machine learning algorithm.
Unstructured Data: Qualitative data or information that is not organized according to an easily recognizable structure. Can include comments, social data, images, or audio recordings
Making the Difference with Text Analytics
We hope this quick glossary helped you on your journey to find the best solution for your business. After all, text analytics make the difference between getting a meaningless score from your data and getting actionable intelligence. And without that intelligence, you can’t make experience improvements in the moments that matter. That’s why it’s so important to get your text analytics right!
If you want to learn more about world-class text analytics solutions, including new approaches like custom layered models and adaptive sentiment engines, you can check out our full eBook on the subject here!
