Gearing up for customer experience management

Text Analytics News’ Ritesh Gupta recently spoke to Sid Banerjee, chief executive officer of Reston, Virginia-based Clarabridge, about the utility of text analytics.
 
Before we delved into the significance of text analytics, Banerjee chose to highlight how companies should approach text analytics from an organisational standpoint.
 
“From what we’ve seen in working with customers across a variety of vertical markets, text analytics as a technology has a huge impact on customer experience management. And though companies address this within different parts of their organisation, the job is important enough to create a new functional area, led by a chief customer officer,” pointed out Banerjee.
 
The cross functional team beneath this C-level executive would be responsible for capturing and interpreting the voice of the customer and ultimately ensuring that it’s heard across the organisation – in marketing, operations, service and IT.  
 
“Ultimately, the feedback acquired using text analytics technology is interesting to any executive with customer or operations responsibilities. A customer focused executive will be concerned with the overall customer experience, while an operations focused exec will be concerned with matters related to product quality and efficiency of the operations,” added Banerjee. 
 
On why do organisations need text analytics:  The VP Operations/VP Customer Service are driven to ensure smooth operations, increase profitability and maintain customer satisfaction, all while expanding their customer base.
 
In order to achieve these goals, they need quick and easy access to the insights provided by their customers.
 
Unfortunately, the information used to get these insights, like quality of customer operations at the store level, e-commerce operations, call centre transcripts or online customer feedback, is typically captured in a variety of ways from a variety of sources. All of it is very text heavy, if not exclusively so, and unfortunately most executives don’t have the time or means to collect and act on this data in a meaningful way. This is where text analytics is playing a critical role.
 
Text analytics technologies, like the Clarabridge platform, offer an automatic approach to accurately capturing the ongoing experiences of customers. We have one customer that took 2 weeks of a 5 person team to manually sift through 10,000 comments. Using text analytics and the Clarabridge solution, we did the same thing in 1 day and were able to come up with the same conclusions they did and a few more. That’s a pretty dramatic display of the power of text analytics to save time by an order of magnitude, while still being sure you get the insights you need to head off issues before they become problems.  
 
Overcoming challenges via text analytics: As an operations executive, it’s not simply about fixing the problems you know about, it’s also about fixing the problems you don’t know about, heading things off at the pass so they don’t explode into full blown crises.
 
Understanding this paradigm is what sets apart great executives from simply good executives, and one of the richest and most important sources of information for identifying these problems is the customer feedback, most of which is unstructured data, not easily accessible. This information can give early warnings on things like problems with product quality, store performance or even employees. It can also identify things that are working, so they can be replicated across an organisation.
 
Quite simply, you have three choices in handling this information. Ignore it because it’s not easily accessible and you don’t want to devote the resource and dollars to understanding how to mine it. You can try to read it/code it/act on it manually, which entails devoting significant amounts of man-hours to the task, and still, you’ll only be able to go through a fraction of the data, and each person will have slightly divergent interpretations of what might be important or not, making classification difficult. Or, you can utilise text analytics which offers a quick, efficient and less costly way to listen, analyse, act and measure all your data, and do it on a daily and even hourly basis.
 
What problems do new users find and how can they get the nod for the same from their management? Often the biggest problem for new users is getting overwhelmed once other departments and business managers see what’s possible with our tool. Buy in is a relatively quick process as the reports give managers immediate and actionable insights. The difficulty lies in prioritising the increasing demands for insight from other departments. This is why it’s so important that companies create new groups within their organisation that specifically address customer experience management. 
 
An example of how a user benefitted by using text analytics: Almost any problem can be helped by looking at customer (both internal and external) feedback in its different forms.
 
One such problem is product quality, which is critically important to the VP operations. As an example, we’re working with a leading retailer who has been using text analytics in their jewelry segment. By mining customer feedback in open ended responses, they’re able to identify trends in the desires of customers and offer products based on  those requirements in real time. This allows them drive customer sales dynamically and on-the-fly.
 
Another example is our work with Wendy’s International.
 
A customer’s experience in the restaurant industry is affected by everything from cleanliness to the speed of service to the taste of the meal. Utilising Clarabridge’s text analytics and alerts, they are monitoring customer feedback continuously to be alerted to product and store issues, often times before they become major problems.  This helps them avoid costly mis-steps, maintain quality standards and avoid potentially worse situations at the store, regional or corporate level. 
 
Lastly, we are working with Choice Hotels International, which is using text analytics to focus on franchisee performance. Large amounts of unstructured data are analysed on a regular basis from hotel guests providing commentary in guest relations case notes, emails, guest satisfaction surveys and other channels. The insights are used proactively by franchisees to make property improvements on a timely basis, by customer relations teams in coaching underperforming properties, and by marketing teams to understand the effectiveness of advertising and promotional campaigns, partner programs and overall brand health. In this way, they can concentrate their efforts in the “right” places for maximum impact, and ultimately avoid being delisted. 
Text analytics in these cases provides three key benefits: increased loyalty which often translates into increased sales, crisis aversion which avoids costly product recalls and litigation, and improved customer experience which increases brand loyalty and ultimately customer retention.  
 
New trends and what should one be wary of: As companies become more and more successful with text analytics, it’s likely they’ll fall into the exciting upward spiral of collecting more data, from more locations (social media, call centre, email, Facebook, online review sites, etc) and wanting to do more and more complex analysis. It’s essential to gather as many sources of feedback as possible, so be sure your selected platform can scale to accommodate large volumes of data, to support users from across the enterprise and to provide quality security and storage capabilities. It’s also important to consider your text analytics provider as a partner in your customer experience initiative. They should have experience in your industry, understand the path to providing you business value based on a co-developed ROI plan and have the partner ecosystem to coexist with your other CEM installments. 
 
Assessing the adoption of text analytics going forward: Adoption is exploding and third party analysts from alta plana to 451 group have projected growth at 30-40%. Here at Clarabridge, we’ve seen double the demand in the customer experience management space. And it will only accelerate.
 
I see three main factors driving this adoption.
 
First, there is more and more unstructured data both inside and outside of a corporation that contains valuable insights, critical to keeping them competitive.
 
Second, leading companies in vertical market (i.e. telecommunications, banking, hospitality, etc) are adopting text analytics, which is creating competitive pressures for those that don’t use it.
 
Lastly, the economy which has spent the last couple of years in global recession is stabilising, freeing up budgets and encouraging the adoption of new technologies which give companies a strategic advantage.
 
 
6th Annual Text Analytics Summit
 
6th Annual Text Analytics Summit is scheduled to take place in Boston (May 25-26). Sid Banerjee, chief executive officer of Reston, Virginia-based Clarabridge, is scheduled to speak at the two-day event.
 
For more information, click here:
 
http://www.textanalyticsnews.com/text-mining-conference/view-the-agenda.shtml
or
contact:
 
Ben Satchwell
Text Analytics News
T: +44 (0) 207 375 7163