I recently wrote a blog post focused on how companies are using social CRM. Everyone seems to be using social customer service to gauge customer sentiment, manage product and service issues, and follow up with customer service complaints. The focus on social media strategies is overwhelming to many organizations but of even more significant is the lack of Social Media Business Intelligence. Why are you monitoring and gathering all of that consumer data if you cannot do anything valuable with it? For any business project don’t you need to prove the value of the effort and investment?
Along with your consumer data gathering, consider text analytics to help you organize unstructured text-based data in your CRM systems (and in social media), survey and emails into a form that can be analyzed to uncover patterns or trends. Do you notice a spike in online customer complaints about the lifespan of one of your new products? What do you do to prove the need for action? Text analytics supports, for example, the need for the manufacturing department to reevaluate the intended use for the product and the Warranty/Finance Department to alter the current product warranty.
Many companies may offer the complaining customers a quick refund or replacement to stop further brand badgering. Dealing with one vocal and hostile customer at a time is not harnessing the power of the customer intelligence available. Digging deeper into the mountains of information with text analytics or text BI uncovers the larger issues and builds a business case for a successful remedy, instead of putting a band-aid on one customer at a time. Continue reading “Text analytics makes the most of consumer data.” »
It’s time to get a new TV so I went to my local electronics store see the choices. I wanted to compare the options and then select which model, brand and type would best suit my needs. I found a store salesperson that walked me through the choices and we focused on several models that would be ‘perfect’ for me. We talked for about 15 minutes and I was left to make my decision. It was only a minute before another customer came up to me and told me the exact opposite of what the salesperson had said. The customer told me the model the salesperson recommended was about to be discontinued because of a quick bulb burnout, surmising that the salesperson ‘was probably just trying to move excess product’.
Delaying my purchase so I could do more research, I located a whole slew of communities and customer comments talking about the bulb problems with warnings to future customers that ‘they’d be disappointed’. I also found suggestions of like brands and models that had better bulb life. I was able to post my own question and get several rapid responses.
I’d say that my TV purchasing experience was influenced by crowdsourcing, both online and off. I was able to get a straight answer from those using the products themselves instead of only relying on a salesperson that had a stock pile of about-to-be-discontinued TVs. In the store, a helpful customer steered me in the right direction and online I found confirmation with literally hundreds of customers in the ‘crowd’ confirming the issue with the bulb. Continue reading “Are customers using crowdsourcing to find your products?” »
Everyone is abuzz over the ‘new’ Big Data trend and while most companies are floundering to analyze the data they already have, not to mention the data they have yet to capture, some big brands are setting the bar of customer analytics excellence pretty high.
So what are these brands doing right? Have they identified the proper analytics people to exploit their data in a useful way instead of falling prey to the skills-gap issues that plague other companies? Is it the data itself – what they are analyzing, when and how much? Or are they just internally and departmentally sound and settled thus allowing them to look at the big picture of Big Data?
When companies can look at their data and deduce the relationships between the data sets, it’s the customers that are reaping the immense benefits. To take a big data for marketing example, I’ve been a card holder at a particular clothing store since 2004. Because I’m spending money with their credit card they are easily able to track my purchase frequency, what departments I shop in, and can predict what I am likely to buy in the future. What this means for me is tailor-made marketing including rewards and discounts I’ll actually use. It’s not just the credit card data; they are looking at my social media habits too. I ‘like’ their page on Facebook and by pairing my profile information with my city, and crossing that with my credit card billing information and spending, they sent me an email that my local mall was having a sale on sweaters and gave me a discount if I want to take advantage of the sale. Result – they are getting more of my business than before. Continue reading “Big Data done right can benefit brands and customers.” »
Here’s a hint: it’s not your company’s web site.
We’ve all been there. Frustration after a poor IVR or call center agent experience makes it seem simpler to go online to see if you can solve your product or service questions yourself. Studies show that frustrated customers turn to social media channels to look for help. From swapping unregulated home fix-its or publicly venting about frustrations, more often than not customers are going online – and not to your web site.
Now here you are tracking, monitoring and responding to social media attacks. Where is all of this negative sentiment coming from that is making you chase smoke? Few companies take an inside-out approach about the customer experience and social media so they get the negative social media chatter to chase. Your dial-to-disconnect call analytics should be telling you what is causing the failed IVR experiences or the failed interactions with your agents so you can deal with these internal issues (like being wrongfully disconnected, routed to an agent ill-equipped to answer the questions, unable to trouble shoot, etc.). Social media venting is not a customer-focused service channel.
We talk a lot about dial-to-disconnect call analytics as an effective means to proactively direct an organization and that is even more important now. Pay attention to how you will handle the trend that has emerged – when callers fail to get the answers needed through the IVR or the call center, they go online. And, when using social media as a self-service channel the result is often erroneous information that lands them further down the rabbit hole of customer dissatisfaction.
Where do you think these customers went next? Twitter? Facebook?
“I don’t understand the point of speaking my selections to your automated service if it gets me nowhere but disconnected. Twice I dialed your service line, spoke my selections and was met with, ‘Thank you, good-bye’. What a waste of time.”
“I called my car insurance agent directly to speak to him about my pending claim only to be continually re-routed back to the main customer service line. Not sure what the point of having a ‘dedicated agent’ is, if I can never reach them.”
“You have an apparent problem with your dryers overheating and burning clothing, as stated by many forums on the internet. I will never buy your product again and I will spend more time reading reviews online before I buy anything over $200”.
“I was simply trying to return an item I purchased online but every time I called to get information on where to send it back to, I could never reach a live agent and was continually disconnected by your automated service. I finally went online to do a search for my nearest store location and had to return it in person.”
Happy Wednesday!
Last week I told you about my alarm vs. phone company customer experience drama and raised the question of what part of each dollar spent on your products and services is needed to fund your company’s dysfunction. I bet it’s more than you thought.
To last week’s point, I just received my phone bill. I usually skim my bills and just pay what’s required. This time my paranoia of dysfunction got the best of me and I started reading the bill line by line. The bill was littered with this fee and that fee. Hard line fee? Gross receipts surcharge? Fees that I’m now convinced are disguised to cover the phone company’s dysfunction because they cannot just raise the base monthly cost without everyone noticing. Then I study the alarm monitoring company’s invoice and try to calculate what the monthly fee SHOULD be – I think I have to pay the fully loaded dysfunction fee of $39 when it should be more like $29 without the dysfunction subsidy.
Is your company so heavily process-reliant that you’ve squashed common sense? Common sense that’s needed to solve simple customer issues? Is one department setting up another to fail because of lack of communication or information that then leads to bouncing your call-in customers around without a clear path to call resolution? Are your analysts running around creating reports that no one is reading when they should be reviewing the company’s speech analytics to uncover the real customer pain? Continue reading “Just how much customer experience dysfunction am I paying for here?” »
Mining and analyzing customer comments to understand sentiment is no longer a wish. It’s a must. Based on years of experience, I suspect many of you are like the business partners I work with: you understand the value of the activity, would love to be able to get your hands on the insight, but don’t have the resources to do the work.
But there is good news. Using basic business intelligence approaches, it is possible to get a quick start on sentiment and text analysis to better understand what your customers think and say about your business. This information can then be leveraged to better serve customers and ultimately, improve the bottom line.
The rate at which customers provide commentary in customer experience surveys in itself can be very telling. Below are examples of insights that can be gained simply by examining the relationship between key real-time survey metrics and the propensity of customers to provide verbal feedback.
For the business partner depicted in the chart below, customer comments and real time alert rates were highly correlated. The more likely a customer was to comment, the more likely alert rates were to increase, and vice versa. This suggests that dissatisfied customers who required a follow up call from a manager were more likely to leave negative comments than positive ones.
While this may seem troublesome at first blush, understanding customer complaints is often an untapped gold mine. Reading and mining these comments could offer significant intelligence and gains for this business partner which can then be woven back into continuous improvement initiatives. Continue reading “Your quick start to the customer experience gold mine.” »
Every year around this time I find myself reflecting on the months that have passed and what I wish I would have done, not done, done better or done differently. At the risk of appearing like a new-year’s-resolution-gym-rat that is rarely seen past February, I’ll share my list of 2012 professional resolutions to include dumping reports that aren’t used, carving out creative time, looking for best practices in other industries that I can apply, and focusing on preventing the damage caused by not leveraging customer sentiment.
1. To focus on the things that matter. We all have a “to do” list that we likely dread looking at because of its sheer volume / length. There’s nothing quite as satisfying as scratching an item off the list, even if you know it’s not the most important item, or even a value-add item, right? In 2012, I resolve to minimize the number of tasks on my to do list by only including the items that offer insights into the business, add value to my customers or provide direct benefit my organization. The things which are likely to fall off the list in 2012 as a result? Reports that no one looks at, reports that people look at yet do nothing with, and presentation decks that are so repetitive month to month that even I get bored creating them, etc, etc, etc.
2. To be even more militant about customer sentiment. The business partners that I work with often hear me use the phrase “the quantitative data tells you what is happening, the qualitative (customer comments) tell you why.” Customer sentiment cannot be ignored without foregoing the value that is needed for an organization to differentiate itself from competitors. Everyone has customer conversations but they are not analyzed. Many have customer feedback programs that do not include explanations from the customer about the numeric score given. And still more have customer explanations that are not analyzed. Customer Sentiment Analytics is on my list again for 2012, but with an even higher point of focus. This one should definitely be on your list! Continue reading “2012 resolutions for a better working me (take any that you need for your list!)” »
Services for homeowners are intertwined. I need a phone line for my alarm system to be monitored properly. What happens when the alarm system cannot connect to the phone and neither the phone service company nor the alarm company will cop to the issue or help me resolve it? The alarm company says it’s a phone issue, the phone company says it’s an alarm issue and the result is one frustrated customer with nowhere to turn for resolution. We are all paying for your dysfunction. What part of each dollar for your product or service is needed to fund your company’s dysfunction? This is a serious question that I am asking you!
The alarm company’s call center agent didn’t have access to the needed data, or the skills to help me troubleshoot the problem. I am paying toward the existence of the call center but there isn’t a process in place to help the agents in a situation like this. And while the phone company was able to connect me to a tech over the phone to help me troubleshoot the problem, it took over an hour before he asked to call me on my home phone line to test to see if the line was working. Geez, how much did that cost because no one asked that question in the beginning? Cha-ching to the Dysfunction Index money because the highly scripted agent didn’t use common sense to simply place a call to the phone line to check it. Continue reading “How high is your Dysfunction Index?” »
Tis the time of year when we’re all making resolutions both personally and professionally. This year, pledge to halt the risk to your organization by not effectively analyzing customer feedback and conversations. Your path is unclear and even treacherous without this necessary business intelligence. If you are not able to prove how these customer analytics have resulted in changes to your products or service strategy in 2011, then you dropped the ball last year. Don’t do it again in 2012. You just might not have the opportunity again in 2013.
Did you realize you have all of the raw data needed, so make the resolution to transform it correctly to be a better leader in 2012. Categorize and analyze the customer sentiment and proactively push the information through your organization and out to customers via the call center and social media. Be an assertive executive of positive sentiment and not a reactionary slave.
How would you leverage these customer comments? Continue reading “As the ball drops this New Year’s, don’t drop it again with customers in 2012.” »
Customer sentiment and text analytics are all the rage these days, as organizations aim to differentiate themselves from the competition with the only thing they have left: service. These activities can make the difference between an organization that thrives and one that crumbles against the competition. But in order to experience the values and gains, a significant investment in both people and technology is needed. Text and sentiment analysis is not a case of buy it and good stuff will automatically happen. A human—-a highly skilled and intelligent one at that—must “teach” the technology what to look for, and not just once, but on an ongoing basis.
Even text analytics on a smaller scale, involving customer satisfaction and voice of the customer survey comments, can be a time-consuming task. But the risks of not analyzing customer comments are immense, ranging from failure to recognize business/product/service opportunities, to making key decisions based on incomplete information. As I often say in my results review meetings with business partners, the quantitative (numeric) data we capture tells us what happened in the past, and can be used to predict what might happen in the future. Where the numeric data is less precise is in helping us understand that “why” behind the “what.” That’s where the qualitative (comments) data is invaluable! And while I suspect that companies understand this statement, failure to capitalize on customer comments is one of the top three failures in most all customer experience programs.
Below are two of an endless number of examples of the type of intelligence that would have been lost if customer comments were not analyzed and mined.
Example 1
Quantitative insight: Perceived value of the contact center was below our set target for the fifth month in a row.
Qualitative insights: 20 percent of all negative comments about the call center have nothing to do with the call center! These complaints are being generated by negative experiences customers have with other departments (underwriting, claims, pre-authorization). Another 12.37 percent of negative comments are being generated by a combination of technology issues and poor customer service (customers being immediately hung up on by agents). However, the remainder of all negative comments is directly within the call center’s control to improve (starred items), 33.89 percent of which are agent behavioral issues.
Risk associated with not mining customer comments: The call center has become the most important place where customer sentiment is captured. However, if relevant business insights are not discovered and shared with other departments (underwriting, claims, pre-authorization, technology), the organization is committing competitive suicide by “killing” these departments of an opportunity to improve, and “killing” the organization from elevating its service differentiation and brand strength. That is just dumb. Continue reading “What top three failure in your customer experience program are killing you?” »
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