The mystery of your customer is being solved in pieces.
It’s time to put those pieces together.

Data Divided

Because businesses are divided into departments, so is business data. Although more and more companies are figuring out how to use analytics technology to understand their data, they continue to do it in silos. One team analyzes customer experience data, another team analyzes transactional data, and yet another analyzes operational data.

The Silhouette Method

This is like having each department cast their own light on your customer and learn from the shadow it produces. The basic shape and size of the customer can be obtained from this “silhouette” method, and these individual dimensions can be useful for providing direction to decision makers. Simple, department-specific insights are a good start, but adding more dimensions to your customer view is critical to future success.

For example, using customer survey data alone, your company can build out a strong plan for improving customer service and increasing customer satisfaction. The benefits of department-specific plans like this are real and important, and each department can do something similar.

This helps companies progress via smaller, department-specific strides.

Adding Dimensions

To perform like a top brand—and to gain every advantage you can—departments must stretch beyond their own data. Customer experience leaders shouldn’t just be able to measure and improve the customer experience within survey results—they should be able to quantify the experience-related impact on multiple facets of the business.
Some quick examples:

Reduced Operational Costs

• Storefront/Retail: Integrate payroll, real estate, transactional, and VoC data to identify whether the extra staffing you are throwing at a particular store—or store type—is, in fact, translating into a better customer experience or better sales.
• Contact Center: Integrate service levels, hold times, and VoC data to identify whether or not there is a positive impact from staffing up to meeting stricter service levels. If there is no incremental improvement in the customer experience, you are wasting money.

Revenue Generation

Integrate customer segmentation, product, and VoC data to better understand the experiences of your different customer segments. If you find that particular segments are responding better than others to certain services or products, take that data to your marketing partners and launch a more targeted campaign to increase the penetration of those services/products within the most receptive customer segments.

These examples illustrate very simple, but powerful, relationships between multiple data sets. When combined, they can drive improved customer experiences, along with strong business results.
Lead your business out of the shadows and step into the 3D world. Modern display optics have changed. Technology has moved beyond shining a light and casting a shadow, and the same needs to happen with customer experience–related insights and analytics. Today’s most advanced displays rely on a series of lasers and lenses to produce a highly detailed holographic image. That’s essentially what broader data integration does for your company.
By focusing the light of each department and combining compartmentalized data into a common analytics with holistic data visualizations, you will begin to see a more lifelike image of your customer.

Opportunity for Advantage

Today, very few companies are analyzing their data holistically and simultaneously. The opportunity and true potential of analytics technology lies in the integration of multiple streams—customer feedback data, operational data, segmentation, transactional data, etc.—to gain deeper operational insights, incremental gains in ROI, as well as more predictive measurements from the perspective of both action and inaction.

Action, This Day!

The quality of analysis and insights available to companies is not limited by technology. It is limited by data. If you can bring the data together, the insights are yours to use. So do it. This blog post is a call to action. Better yet, this is a flat-out plea to businesses out there in Business Land that are limiting their competitive advantage by maintaining siloed data and analytics.

Step up and start using your data the way it can—and should—be used. Mindshare’s Analytics Team is here to help.

We’re living in an age of massive change.

The word “recession” has gone from describing a quarter over quarter decline in GDP to describing the “new normal” ongoing economic outlook.

At the same time, a group of new technologies has gone from novelty to pervasive in the blink of an eye. It was only a few years ago that the original blue Blackberries were the symbol of being a high powered executive. Today everyone from teenagers to seniors are lining up to get their hands on the latest iPhone or Android devices. How everyday people are using these devices to connect and communicate has also gone through a massive change. Facebook has in just a few years gone from a novelty for college kids, to a Hollywood blockbuster, and has now amassed a user base exceeding 1 billion people.

These trends have left many brands reeling.

In fact, the past few years has even seen the demise of some of the most storied brands in business. Changing consumer sentiment and a challenging economy has in some cases caused core customer bases to drift away.

A term that’s emerged to describe this phenomenon is “digital Darwinism”; an age where technology and society have been evolving too quickly for some brands to adapt. The list of casualties is an impressive one. Borders, Blockbuster, Polaroid, Kodak, HMV and others have been unable to keep pace with rapidly changing consumer behaviors and expectations.

An argument could be made that the inability to keep up with drifting customer needs could have been avoided with an increased focus on keeping current with customer sentiment. Dealing with that particular challenge has always been the core objective of any customer feedback program.

However, customer feedback programs themselves must evolve also.

Lead the conversation…

Surveys will always be a key touch point for soliciting feedback from customers.

When it comes to surveys, the feedback you get from customers is only ever as valuable as the questions you ask them. The challenge with gathering the right kinds of data and insights from customer feedback is asking the right questions in the first place. Subtle changes in wording and structure can have a big impact, especially when it comes to driving the focused actions and behaviors that lead to a great customer experience. Often this requires going beyond generic functional questions to more nuanced emotional questions that seek to differentiate the experience from competitors.

Pointed questions can get to the heart of what you are doing right and what you are doing wrong. These types of questions provide specific, structured feedback that provides brands and locations with valuable analytical insight into customer feedback. This pool of structured feedback can be applied against various algorithms to produce a wide variety of specific performance scores. This scoring can act as a baseline to measure past success and forward-looking performance targets.

Follow the buzz…

Customers themselves have driven the growth of a new channel of feedback as well.

In contrast to the structured data provided by customer surveys, unstructured text comments can provide a qualitative view into customer sentiment. On the surface, these qualitative comments may appear more difficult to decipher than structured scored data but by applying appropriate analytical tools, these customer comments may uncover upcoming or unseen trends before the structured feedback. In addition, these customer comments can serve to validate scored data by providing additional qualitative insight.

Understanding these comments takes more than just reading through them one by one.  Natural language processing tools help to decipher what is happening across the full spectrum of feedback by categorizing and analyzing what topics are being discussed, which topics are most positive or negative and what co-occurring topics are being mentioned together.

Keeping pace with your customer’s needs should be a fundamental of business. It’s been said that any business that defines itself by product rather than by customer benefit has a limited lifespan. However, acting on that objective becomes harder and harder every day. A well executed and thought out customer experience management program could be the missing link in achieving that objective.

As I’ve discussed many times before, these days it seems like many brands are fearful of social media and the potential for it to be a channel for consumers to quickly share negative experiences, or one-off incidents of bad employee behavior. Nobody wants to be associated with the next viral video of employee bad behavior or a viral story of product quality issues. You could argue that some of this stems from the general cynicism that seems to have taken over much of the world since we entered this great recession. Lately though, I’ve been noticing an interesting trend of more good news than bad in my social streams. Perhaps people tweeting and sharing more good news than bad is a sign that the economy may finally be pulling out of this never-ending recession.

A case in point is a fantastic story that recently went viral about a simple good deed done by a manager of a Red Robin restaurant.

You can read about it here.

For those of you who may not be familiar with this story, here is the short version.

• An obviously pregnant woman visited a Red Robin location for dinner
• The manager noticed her pregnancy and gave her a free meal along with a nice message attached to the receipt wishing her good luck.

A simple gesture, but a gesture that created a story worth telling, and more importantly a story worth sharing.

The reality is that, in the restaurant world, incidents like this happen every day. The nature of dining out is that every restaurant visit should be a special occasion. Whether for the sake of not having to cook on a hectic weeknight, or to celebrate a special occasion such as a birthday, brands need to be able to make every dining experience feel special.

One of the challenges that local restaurant managers have is that with the hustle and bustle of day to day operations it’s difficult to stay on top of staff to ensure they are doing all the little things that make a difference all the time. That’s where the action driving capabilities of today’s CEM solutions can come in to play. These action driving tools are designed to be coaching tools rather than the reporting tools of the past. By providing not only a snapshot of current team performance, but also proactively suggesting the small front line actions that can add up to better guest experiences, these tools go from simply being reactive reporting, to proactive performance improvers.

When they are successful in providing all the little touches that can make these occasions feel so special, such as was done by the Red Robin manager, then it’s become increasingly important for restaurants to provide these happy customers with an easy way to share their stories with their friends.

Again, this is where a well thought out CEM solution can come into play. By their very nature, these solutions will be able to help you identify and filter out your happiest customers. By taking that as a starting point, and providing those same happy customers with an easy way to share great experiences, CEM can become an ideal platform to generate the type of positive social sentiment that most brands deserve, but unfortunately don’t get.

You should get credit for your efforts! After all, you work hard every day with the hope that your guests will share their great experience.

Siri

Chances are, you have already heard about Apple’s infamous iPhone personality. Through extensive marketing campaigns, Apple unveiled Siri, a feature that allows users to interact with their phone by speaking to it. Yes, that’s right, by speaking to your phone.

Say you wanted to know what the weather was going to look like, all you would have to do is say to your phone, “Weather.” Your phone then proceeds to reply with the weather forecast in your area. Want to check how busy your day is? Just ask, “What’s my day look like?” Your phone will then report your day. Is Siri the beginning of pocket artificial intelligence? It (she?) very well may be.

Why am I talking about Siri? Because Siri demonstrates the real-life application of some very cool speech-to-text technology. Speech-to-text is the ability of a computer to transcribe spoken language into usable text. This type of technological ability is very new but maturing rapidly.

Watson

Yet another famous piece of artificial intelligence that you’ve likely heard of, Watson is an IBM supercomputer that gained wide acclaim by appearing on Jeopardy! and defeating two of the game show’s top champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Over three days of trivia, Watson racked up $77,147, whereas Ken and Brad took in $24,000 and $21,600 respectively. As the Jeopardy! clues were being displayed visually to the other two contestants, Watson was receiving them through a direct text feed. Once the text was input, Watson didn’t just recognize the words, he (it?) understood how they related to each other. With that understanding, he analyzed 200 million pages of information to find the correct answer—all in the time it takes to sneeze.

Is Watson the first step toward machines taking over the world? Quite the opposite, actually. The IBM technology that fuels Watson has the potential to be one of this generation’s greatest allies. It’s already being used to improve the medical diagnosis process by combining symptoms, family history, current medications, doctor’s notes, and other information to suggest a diagnosis.

Speech-to-Text

If you want the analytical powers of a supercomputer like Watson (and, trust me, you do), you need text. In a world that still communicates verbally first and written second, we need more than a computer with Watson’s brain; we need one with Siri’s ears.

That’s the role of Speech-to-Text. Combine an advanced speech-to-text engine with an analytical supercomputer and you have the key to immense possibilities. In an article written by Jon Gertner and published in Fast Company, the author builds on the words of IBM’s chief of research, John Kelly, to point out this very thing:

“IBM executives have come to believe that Watson represents the first machine of the third computer age, a category now referred to within the company as cognitive computing. As Kelly describes it, the first generation of computers were tabulating machines that added up figures. ‘The second generation,’ he says, ‘were the programmable systems—the mainframe, the first IBM 360, PCs, all the computers we have today.’ Now, Kelly believes, we’ve arrived at the cognitive moment—a moment of true artificial intelligence. These computers, such as Watson, can recognize important content within language, both written and spoken. They do not ask us to communicate with them in their coded language; they speak ours.”

InMoment

We live and breathe the voice of the customer (VoC) trade every day. We collect millions of surveys every month from the individual customers of our clients. We have held the benefits of speech-to-text and IBM Watson technology in our hands. And they are stunning.

Using these universal-grade systems, our ability to analyze customer surveys and reviews for real-time, actionable insights has leapt forward to include all unstructured, unsolicited feedback across multiple written and spoken world languages.

Let me walk you through just one scenario: a phone survey. Last year, we collected 113,000 phone surveys for one of our clients. To put that in perspective, it would take that client 1,000 hours a year to listen to every survey—that’s one full-time employee listening to surveys non-stop for six months, and that doesn’t even take into account the time involved with organizing, analyzing, and reporting the results!

Is this how you plan on hearing your customers? Is it even worth it to listen to your customers anyway?

Yes. It is. The reality is, you can’t afford not to. When business analysts are telling you to care about every single one of your customers, they are not just speaking ethically, they are speaking financially. The quality and quantity of research on the matter has now made it undeniable.

Using Forrester’s customer experience index (CXi), for instance, statistics bear out the fact that U.S. businesses maintaining above-average CXi scores make millions, if not billions, more each year than businesses maintaining below-average CXi scores. The key to a high CXi? Listening and responding to customer feedback (Forrester, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012,” referenced here). Recent studies have also shown that customer retention efforts are more profitable than those to acquire new customers (Bain & Company, “The Economics of Loyalty”).

At InMoment, we provide the tools to capture and use the voice of the customer in real time. This includes both speech-to-text and IBM analytics, two of the most powerful technologies the business world has ever seen.

Your customers expect to be heard individually and addressed personally. The Speech-to-Text and IBM content analytics we use at InMoment make that possible.

We live in an age of information. More than just an interesting sounding catchphrase, businesses today are sitting on vast amounts of data, more than any other point in history. Data tracking internal processes, data tracking supply chains, and data tracking customers amongst others.

Naturally, customer feedback is a part of that. While a simple feedback survey seems quite straightforward from the outside, when you think about the amount of data that can be generated through a typical customer experience management (CEM) program, the numbers can quickly become quite impressive. Most programs will receive 30 or more responses per month per location. For a brand with 250 locations that means close to 100,000 customer surveys each year. If you consider that most surveys will be made up of 20 or more questions, then suddenly if you’re a customer experience program manager you’re looking at 2 million individual points of customer feedback.

The question is – What insights are locked inside all of that data?

Some are obvious, location comparisons, average performance, overall scores, trending etc… answers to those questions have always been the biggest values of a CEM program. In fact if a program is well designed and the questions asked are of an appropriate nature, these are exactly the type of insights that can drive great brands to continue executing on a day-to-day basis.

But 2 million points of data are a lot. What else might be hidden in that data? Sometimes there’s more to the data than just the surface level trends, it just takes a bit of deeper analysis to get to it. Today’s technology tools allow anyone with a deeper level of curiosity to dig deeper and discover some of the additional layers of nuance within pools of customer survey data.

Some more nuanced questions that can be answered with customer survey data would include:

• Which factors in the experience hold the most weight when measured against overall satisfaction?
• How overall satisfaction is perceived across different demographic segments?
• How different product categories impact satisfaction?
• How can I measure a cross section of all of these questions looking at products and their impact against satisfaction across different demographics?

The challenge is being able to segment the data appropriately and easily. That’s where a flexible data analysis product can come in handy. Rather than having to rely on external resources program managers should be empowered to be able to quickly slice out interesting segments of customer feedback to make informed decisions. Or at least be able to use these slices of data to be able to follow a single train of thought through to some kind of conclusion or hypothesis.

In today’s world having data is no longer enough. We need to be able to harness the power of actually using it, to be able to effectively drive change.