The pressure is rising for businesses to step up their CX game. More than 80% of business leaders see customer experience as a growing priority in 2024. If you’re reading this blog post, you are probably one of them. 

But how can you support your customers on all the different channels they reach out on and offer a personalized yet unified response? That’s where customer experience platforms come in. They offer you one space where you can collect all the customer feedback, analyze it, report it, and adjust your cx insights strategy by collecting.

If you are looking for a customer experience platform that fits your needs, we compared three major tools to help you find the right one: Medallia, Qualtrics, and Lumoa.

Why You Need a Customer Experience (CX) Platform

Your business has to operate in a world of many channels: email, social media, phone calls, or chat. At the same time, your customers expect to get the same level of support, no matter if they reach out on Facebook or via email. Customer experience platforms make it possible to manage all the customer data in one platform and reach out to them when they need it. 

In your CX platform dashboard, you can see how your customers behave across all touchpoints and can personalize your interactions with them based on their behavior and preferences. You reach them where they are with the messages that resonate with them. 

You can even find opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, or personalized promotions by using real-time insights and trends generated by AI. 

If you are still not convinced and are looking for arguments for your new software purchase, here are three statistics to prove why CX platforms can significantly affect your business: 

1. Increased Customer Lifetime Value: Customers are 2.4 times more likely to stick with a brand when their problems are solved quickly.
2. Sales through Word-of-mouth Marketing: People are 90% more likely to trust and buy from a brand recommended by a friend. 
3. Higher Revenue: 64 % of customers will spend more if a business resolves their issues where they already are.

Platform Overview 

Medallia is a cloud-based CX management software that provides survey features, sentiment analysis, social listening, and AI-powered insights. Medallia is known for its robust analytics and reporting capabilities, providing in-depth insights into customer feedback and trends. 

Qualtrics is the giant when it comes to CX platforms with around 18.000 customers and 3 million users worldwide. The company started out as a survey tool for academics and has grown into a multi-product feedback software. Their versatile platform goes beyond CX and offers solutions for employee experience, market research, and product feedback. 

Companies use surveys, NPS, CSat, and reviews to gauge customer sentiment but often base improvements on intuition. Despite efforts to collect and analyze feedback, employees frequently struggle to pinpoint what affects these metrics.

Lumoa turns the traditional approach upside down. Now, every employee can ask relevant questions and receive detailed, real-time answers directly from customer voices, no matter where the feedback is given. And they can make timely decisions that will improve KPIs up to three times. For example, Lumoa is the first customer experience platform to offer generative AI insights.  

Which Platform Fits Your Needs?

Customer Experience Platforms in Detail

Pricing and Value for Money

If you’re looking for the right CX platform for you, pricing will play a major factor. But the price is not the only determining factor, it matters what value you get for that money. 

Let’s take a deeper look into the cost of each platform: At the moment, neither Qualtrics nor Medallia offers pricing information on their website. You will need to reach out for a consultation first. 

For Qualtrics, the pricing structure is on the higher side, especially for advanced functionalities, and will be based on the number of feedback, users, and features you are using.

Their pricing structure can be complex to understand and the cost will be quite high if you do not need such a versatile solution with many features. However, if you are looking for a one-shop-stop solution for customer and employee experience and you have the budget of a large-scale enterprise, Qualtrics can be the right solution for you.

Similarly, the pricing for Medallia is definitely on the higher side, especially for smaller businesses or organizations with budget limitations. Medallia charges for both “units” and “users”: Units are defined as named individuals in surveys but they do not have log-in privileges such as customer service agents or business consultants. 

Lumoa is the only provider that offers the same pricing no matter how many users you have. There are no hidden fees and you can transparently look at their pricing models and features for each tier on the website. Compared to Qualtrics and Medallia, Lumoa is on the lower end of the pricing structure while offering many of the same core features. 

Implementation 

When we talk about return on investment, one additional factor is the implementation time or “time to money”. How fast can you use the tool that you just bought? 

If you want to test out the software before buying, both Qualtrics and Lumoa offer free trials. Once you have decided to purchase a solution, they will have different timelines for implementation. 

Qualtrics and Medallia are versatile solutions with a lot of features. However, this also means that it can cost a lot of time and effort to migrate and implement. Qualtrics setup process requires an implementation partner who will be involved for several months. 

Lumoa is known for its simple yet powerful solution. It has a set-up time that is months faster than its competitors. Your time to value is shorter and you will get insights from your data typically within one month from the contract start.

Features 

To find the right solution for your needs, you want to take a closer look at the features they offer to ensure that the solution has what you need. If you want to learn more about the AI capabilities of each platform, you can jump to the next segment. 

Qualtrics has been praised for its strong data integration and analysis capabilities. You can create feedback surveys, monitor the responses, design workflows, and assess the quality of the customer experience. Since Qualtrics is a rather versatile solution, you can also do advanced statistical analysis such as regression, cluster, and correlation analysis. Additionally, it allows you to scan text responses for sentiment analysis, trend alerts, behavior forecasting, and research data reports. 

Medallia expanded its capabilities with its acquisition of Mindful, the global leader in contact center callback technology in 2022. Customer service representatives can use Medallia to hear and respond to customer feedback, report the action taken, and whether or not the issue has been resolved. Its omnichannel text analytics feature comes with Natural Language Processing and is supported by AI (more about this in the next segment). 

Lumoa is more specialized than Medallia and Qualtrics. If you are setting up more complex research projects that require features such as branching and randomization, Lumoa, now part of Netigate, has a survey tool that can make complex rules and logic. Additionally, Lumoa focuses on core features to ensure that your customer feels seen, heard, and understood. You can calculate exactly how much different topics impact your KPI (e.g. NPS) and use deep dive features such as highlighting correlations between insights and background variables.

Integrations

All three solutions offer integrations with other tools to collect data for the platform. Medallia integrates with a wide range of data sources such as CRM systems, social media, contact centers and many more. Their integration capabilities are extensive and designed to meet the complex needs of large organizations. 

Qualtrics offers extensive integration features allowing data to be gathered from various systems and platforms such as CRM systems, web and feedback tools, employee engagement systems and more. Like Medallia, Qualtrics is geared towards large enterprises and can offer customer integrations depending on the chosen subscription plan. 

Lumoa can integrate data regardless of the source and offers a high level of flexibility. Most common integrations are similar to Medallia and Qualtrics such as CRM systems, social media or review platforms. 

All three platforms are suitable for enterprises with large data sources. However, your decision might come down to your specific integration needs, data volume and the complexity of the desired analyses.  If you want to find out if each platform has the right integrations for your business, you can have a look at the integration sites of Qualtrics, Medallia, and Lumoa. 

Generative AI capabilities

There is no getting around generative AI in the 2020s and all CX platforms have added generative AI features in the last years.  

Qualtrics launched their generative AI XM/os2 in 2023 and announced that they are investing $500 million in AI innovation over the next four years. AI empowers its users to deliver personalized content and real-time recommendations and to drive automated actions. The work of support agents becomes more productive and the tool helps them to understand the customer’s history. 

Medallia’s AI feature is called ‘Ask Athena‘ and uses machine learning to discover data trends such as sudden increases in negative customer feedback. You can ask Athena questions and get quick answers. Athena can help you respond more appropriately to customer conversations and score the effort you will need to retain them.

Lumoa is the first customer experience platform that uses generative AI. It can help you with creating summaries of feedback and weekly email reports. You can also analyze support tickets and the emotion behind what your customer is saying. Lumoa also launched ‘Ask Lumoa‘ where you can simply ask the AI any questions and get insights based on your data. Think ChatGPT but for your customer insights.

Usability 

When it comes to usability, Qualtrics has some of the most extensive customization options. While this offers a lot of personalization, customers have mentioned that it can be overwhelming for users who prefer a more straightforward approach. If you want to manage more advanced and complex survey projects, you might also need additional calls with support to figure out the interface. 

Medallia is praised for its simple and intuitive user interface. Everyone from the CEO to team members can use it. But just like Qualtrics it can suffer from its own complexity and users might find it tricky to set up some of the more intricate feedback and analytics processes. Customers have reported that you need an IT resource on staff or pay a premium to a 3rd party to manage the solution for you. 

Lumoa may not be the best in terms of visual appeal, but its setup is straightforward and its interface is user-friendly. The UI is designed so that anyone without an analytics background can use it making it accessible to users with varying levels of technical expertise. 

Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are sometimes overlooked but necessary to consider to find the right platform. You want to think about the sensitivity of your data, and regulatory requirements in your industry or region. 

When it comes to compliance, GDPR is especially important if you are operating within the European Union. For businesses operating in the US, HITRUST/HIPPA compliance (healthcare sector) and FedRAMP can be important. 

For security, ISO 27001 is the world’s best-known standard for information security management systems (ISMS). With cybercrime on the rise, an ISO 27001 certification gives the security that an organization meets international best practices. Medallia, Qualtrics, and Lumoa are all ISO 27001 certified.

Qualtrics prioritizes data security with features such as data encryption, access controls and audit logs. As an enterprise customer, you can also use advanced security options. Qualtrics complies with GDPR, HITRUST, and FedRAMP.

Medallia offers robust security features to protect customer data including encryption in transit and at rest, role-based access controls, and regular security audits. Like Qualtrics, it is GDPR, HITRUST, and FedRAMP compliant.

Lumoa is committed to data protection employing encryption, access controls, and secure data storage practices to safeguard customer information. Lumoa adheres to GDPR guidelines and has their servers hosted in Western Europe.

Customer Support and Community

When you are using software, you want there to be great and easily accessible customer support in case something goes wrong. 

Qualtrics and Medallia’s service model leans toward managed services rather than self-service. You will spend a lot of time talking to your Customer Support team to do surveys, make changes in your dashboard, or customize your reports. Both solutions offer consulting services if you struggle with how to set up a survey or want additional strategic tips. 

Lumoa’s dedication to customer experience is not only visible in its user-friendly setup and interface but also in the more personal touch you will experience compared to the larger enterprise solutions. While Lumoa provides support and customer success managers, there are no-in house consultants which the more expensive solutions offer.

Customer Success Stories

Qualtrics: BMW “The XM platform is the right technology to match our vision of making every experience as good as our product experience.” – Craig Westbrook, VP, BMW of North America 

BMW invested in Qualtrics to reengineer its CX program and to drive increased repurchase and return service rates. Through text analysis, integrations, and personalized, mobile-friendly dashboards now every leader in the organization is empowered to act on feedback

Medallia: Best Western   “Medallia enables us to hold hotels accountable and help them manage their online presence directly.” – Michael Morton, VP member Services Best Western

Best Western teamed up with Medallia and Tripadvisor to focus on integrating the TripAdvisor review form into the guest satisfaction surveys Medallia sends to recent hotel guests. As a result, they received 76% more reviews for Best Western and their average rating went up from 3.98 to 4.28.

Lumoa: Huel “Lumoa isn’t just a system that allows you to ask the question. It’s a system that allows you to answer the question.” – Olivia Chambers, Customer Insights Manager 

Huel wanted to use NPS as a more strategic business metric but the current process was manual and difficult to scale. When they found Lumoa, they knew it was the right solution. It enabled them to not only collect data but to also create strategies based on the insights the platform provides. Lumoa also easily integrated with their existing tools such as Zendesk. As a result, their NPS score went up by 10pts and they increased their response rate by 164%. Read the full story. 

Choose the Right Platform for You

When you start evaluating various platforms, Lumoa stands out as a particularly compelling choice for medium to large enterprises focused on efficiently managing teh voice of the customers.

Built by industry experts who recognized a gap in translating customer feedback into actionable insights, Lumoa simplifies what is typically a complex process. It automates collection, processing, and reporting and provides unique AI-driven insights tailored to improve your business’s KPIs. This enables every employee to engage with customer insights effectively and drive substantive change.

While Lumoa offers a streamlined approach, there are other platforms like Qualtrics and Medallia, especially for very large enterprises requiring extensive, multi-faceted tools that extend beyond customer experience management.

Qualtrics is well-suited for those looking for a platform that also covers employee experience, market research, and product feedback. Its comprehensive features come with a complexity and price point that may necessitate additional technical support or resources.

Similarly, Medallia is ideal for large organizations that can allocate resources to fully leverage its capabilities, particularly if seeking an omnichannel CX management tool supported by advanced AI analytics.

The implementation process and cost associated with Medallia, however, are significant factors to consider, as they may impact the time to value and overall return on investment.

Returning to Lumoa, its use of Generative AI further distinguishes it from the competition. This technology not only enhances the platform’s usability but also enriches the quality of insights available.

Employees can ask specific, role-relevant questions and receive real-time answers that draw from comprehensive customer feedback, regardless of the channel. Lumoa’s pricing model, which does not charge per license, ensures that these advanced capabilities are accessible to all within your organization, supporting widespread adoption and maximum impact.

Having served 14 countries and demonstrated significant improvement in customer satisfaction metrics, Lumoa’s global reach and effectiveness are clear. This includes up to 3x in KPIs for businesses that put the customer first.

As you consider the right CX platform for your needs, Lumoa offers a unique combination of simplicity, power, and cost-effectiveness that is hard to match. Discover how Lumoa can enhance your customer experience strategy. Sign up for a demo today.

The post Medallia vs. Qualtrics vs. Lumoa: A Buyer’s Guide appeared first on Lumoa.

Companies are finding that innovative technologies can make collecting voice of customer analytics more effortless than ever—and these technologies have opened up exciting new possibilities for improving customer experiences.

In this article, we’ll go over what  Voice of Customer data analytics is and the different types. Plus, look at how to create a VoC strategy from scratch in five simple steps.

What is Voice of Customer Data Analytics?

Voice of Customer Analytics (often abbreviated as VoC) is a process of understanding the needs, motivations, and challenges customers face in their encounters with your business. It allows you to identify gaps in customer satisfaction and take corrective actions.

Collecting feedback from customers gives you powerful data to improve performance, making it one of the most valuable and cost-effective business tools. But you have to do more than listen. You must understand their needs and motivations.

VoC analytics improves products, services, and processes to meet consumer expectations better.

You can apply the data to every part of the customer experience. Think marketing, sales, service, and support.

To use VoC correctly, you need to listen and identify customer needs, then take action and repeat.

For example, a business insurance company can use VoC analytics to determine which industries they should target. They can do this based on the feedback they get in a survey asking email subscribers which one they work in.

You can also use VoC to understand your customers’ pain points, then address them by providing valuable content.

For example, a personal injury law firm could survey current clients to determine which topics they were most confused about, making them seek professional help. Say the most popular answer was, ‘What is the response time to expect when I send a demand letter?’—they could then write an informative blog post or create helpful social media content to attract more potential clients.

Types of Voice of Customer Analytics

The type of Voice of Customer analytics you’ll use depends on your audience and the questions you want to answer.

Getting Started

There’s a variety of survey tools you can take advantage of, like the one we offer at Lumoa.

Lumoa is a customer experience analytics platform that lets you look at customer data in real-time so you can make better decisions for your business. Its automation technology takes the time-consuming manual work out of collecting, analyzing, and implementing VoC data. 

As a result, you can prioritize closing the loop with customers as soon as possible.

If you decide to move forward with Lumoa, the platform also helps you see data from all of your customer feedback channels, whether that is from surveys, phone calls, chat conversions, or online reviews. 

It essentially gives you a bird’s eye view of what your customers are saying about your business which is the most valuable data a company can look at to improve.

Customer Surveys

You need to listen first to gain insights into your customer’s experience.

These one-off surveys provide more comprehensive insights into how customers feel about their experience with a brand.

They tend to be longer than other VoC gathering methods and may require participants to spend more time answering questions. Like “what was your favorite part about using this product?” and “how likely would you recommend this product to someone else?”

For example, take a look at this customer satisfaction survey from Capital Bank:

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They’re asking for more than a simple five-star review and identifying specific areas on which they want to receive feedback—such as how long it took to handle transactions and the usability of the digital banking options.

There’s also a free space for customers to leave their own suggestions at the bottom.

You can collect VoC data through surveys like Capital Bank’s, social media monitoring, customer service interactions, or other qualitative sources.

You can also use quantitative data such as website analytics or app usage patterns. Combining both types of information gives you a complete picture of how your customers feel about your business and its products more than a single method.

For banking and telecommunication companies, customer surveys will likely be your largest pool of customer feedback. Most of the interactions customers have with you are either…

1. On your website or mobile app
2. On the phone with a customer service representative,

This is why surveys that pop up on-screen while a customer is using your product work so well for brands like Capital Bank–it could very well be the only time they interact with the customer after their purchase.

For telecom brands, you can also take this a step further by asking your customer service team to call existing or past customers to conduct surveys for feedback. Record these calls (with the consent of the customer, of course) and review them later to analyze the results and implement the feedback.

Listen to what they say about your products or services and how they talk about their experience with you. Also, pay attention to what they don’t say. For example, negative expressions like “I hate how long it takes for…”.

Then identify the customer needs that are important to them. These could be:

• Functional (i.e., better mobile app)
• Emotional (i.e., friendly staff)
• Status-related (i.e., feeling like VIPs)

Once you’ve identified these needs, prioritize them based on their impact on business outcomes such as sales revenue growth or market share.

Direct Customer Feedback

To gain a deeper understanding of customer needs, you must collect feedback from every touch point in the journey.

Direct feedback is a simple form of VoC that relies on an ongoing conversation between customers and your company.

It can be a suggestion box, an email address or phone number, or even social media channels like Facebook Messenger or Twitter direct messages (DMs).

Establishing a process for collecting feedback is important, then using it as a conduit for continuous improvement. A successful feedback program allows for ongoing conversations about emerging themes and emerging trends. In the same way, be sure to regularly discuss successes, challenges, and lessons with team members.

Always note that feedback is a two-way conversation between you and your customers.

As you start out building your voice of customer analytics program, keep these tips in mind:

• Feedback should be an ongoing dialogue, not a one-time event
• The goal of collecting feedback is to improve products/services/processes continuously

Salesforce is a prime example of customer feedback done right.

Salesforce created IdeaExchange, a forum where they can collect feedback and review suggestions made by their customers.

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Their product development team monitored the forum and reviewed customer suggestions, implementing those that had widespread support, which was demonstrated by the number of votes the entry received.

After taking action on a suggestion, they thanked the original customer who made the entry.

Social Media Analytics

Most social media platforms offer analytics tools to help brands track mentions by geography, sentiment analysis (positive vs. negative), sentiment comparison over time or against competitors, and more.

These tools then help you understand what your followers say online about you.

You can also look at your website analytics. Pay attention to KPIs (key performance indicators) like social shares to figure out which web pages and blog posts your readers engage with the most and bounce rate to pinpoint which needs a better user experience.

Not only will your VoC strategy benefit from these insights, but also your SEO strategy.

Social media is a customer feedback goldmine for retail companies in particular. This is because unlike other industries like banking, your target audience likely already follows their favorite brands on social platforms.

According to DataReportal, 75% of people use social media to research products as of 2022.

Keep a close eye on your tags, mentions, and direct messages—these will be your prime sources for collecting feedback.

Why You Should Use Voice of Customer Analytics

Voice of Customer analytics can help you improve customer experience and make better business decisions by collecting a large amount of data on how customers use products or services.

It helps you understand how customers think, what they want and how to improve products, services, and processes.

It’s especially important as a telecommunications, retail, or banking brand, as you deal heavily with customer service.

The key is to identify trends, patterns, and relationships in your data that lead to actionable insights.

Insights like why customers are buying your product or service by helping you answer the following questions:

• How can I make my product better?
• How can I improve customer experience?
• How do I convert more leads into sales?

Or you could provide exceptional customer service as this company did….

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How to Build a Voice of Customer Strategy and Program

Understand the Problem/Question Before Solving it

One of the most common mistakes people make when they start a Voice of Customer program is assuming they know exactly which problems need solving and how they can be fixed.

Before you begin to solve a problem, it’s important to define what the problem is. Pinpoint the exact problem you hope to solve through VoC data.

You may be tempted to use other organizations’ programs as inspiration or guidance for yours, but don’t feel pressured into copying them wholesale.

Your unique circumstances require unique solutions and methods. One organization might have more resources, another might have different values, and another might have different cultural norms and expectations about how things should be done within their business environment.

As such, you must define what success looks like before you begin building out any part of your program.

Answer the following questions:

• What do you hope to accomplish?
• Which parts of your business/product need the most improvement?
• What do you want customers to start saying about you instead?

A prime example of this is the retail brand Timberland.

Their former Brand President revealed that in the first few years, the brand didn’t have a way for customers to share feedback or provide suggestions. On top of that, they had no real core values or mission statement, resulting in years of failed marketing campaigns.

They broke this cycle by asking for feedback from 18,000 customers. And after reviewing the results, they decided to add a review option on each page as well as a live chat feature.

In the end, these actions made tracking product performance astoundingly easier.

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Gather Data About the Problem/Question

You can gather data to help you understand the problem in various ways, the most common being the three we discussed earlier. Of course, the most direct method is to ask customers directly by conducting surveys and interviews.

You can also use indirect methods, such as analyzing social media conversations about your brand or customer service data (e.g., recording calls). For example, call center representatives who interact with customers may have the opportunity to record their interactions later.

Similarly, you might review customer support calls where the caller couldn’t resolve the issue without assistance from someone else within your organization (such as a supervisor or department head).

Finally, you can review feedback forms that customers fill out online or through physical mailings or email campaigns.

These forms often request specific information about what they liked and disliked about certain products/services you provided and any suggestions they might have for improvement.

If you are running an email campaign, you will need to invest in a good email marketing tool. Narrowing down on the right platform will depend heavily on what type of business you run. For example, Klaviyo is an email marketing service geared towards eCommerce brands. 

However, researching Klaviyo alternatives would make more sense if you run a service-based business.

If possible, it’s helpful if multiple data sources are being used simultaneously so that patterns emerge across different types of sources rather than just one. This helps ensure accuracy while guaranteeing all available information has been collected before moving on to step three, which involves creating hypotheses based on the results.

To summarize: the ways to gather data can be put into two main categories- indirect and direct methods. 

A direct method would be running an email campaign that asks for feedback from customers and an indirect method would be using data from company experience (such as social media conversions or customer service data).

Synthesize Voice of Customer Feedback Through Analytics and Insights

Analyze that data for insights regarding what, why, and how customers are experiencing your product or service in today’s marketplace.

Analytics and insights are the foundation of a successful VoC program. Analytics provide the raw data that shape the customer experience, while insights help you understand what is driving your customers’ behavior.

The first step in this process is to identify what metrics you should use to measure how your business is doing. You should then track these metrics and analyze them to identify trends that support or refute hypotheses about what drives customer satisfaction.

For example, if you hypothesize that better product design leads to higher customer satisfaction with your products, tracking and analyzing performance across multiple dimensions will help you find evidence for or against this hypothesis.

You may discover that improving one aspect of product design doesn’t lead customers to rate it more highly overall but does lead them to recommend purchasing it more often than other similar products on the market—which would be an indication that improving one dimension of product design could improve overall brand loyalty (and therefore profitability).

Create an Action Plan Based on Insights to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Next comes creating actionable insights from those analytics by asking “why” questions until there’s nothing left but answers. Which in turn, can be used directly as guides for decision-making within your organization:

• Why do our salespeople have trouble reaching their quotas?
• Why are certain features not being used?
• Why do only 20% of our customers respond positively when asked about our social media presence?

As you can identify and understand your customers’ key issues, concerns, and frustrations, you can begin to form strategies for how to solve them.

For example, suppose you were to learn that a common difficulty for your customers is finding information about how your company works.

In that case, it may be useful to create better internal communication tools or handouts that explain how you operate.

If many people mention the price of your products being too high or low quality compared with competitors’, then perhaps there’s an opportunity to improve both factors.

Letting this all sink in while drafting an action plan will help ensure that when you’re ready to start implementing changes based on what you’ve learned from VoC research, it will be as effective as possible, and more importantly, will lead to an increase in profits.

Share your action plan with the participating customers

To close the loop with your customers, regularly share findings from VoC analysis with them. They need to know that you value their feedback and are actively working to improve their experience.

Plus, it allows them to reflect on their own needs, values, and expectations by prompting questions like:

• What were their expectations when they first started using a product or service?
• How did those expectations match up against reality?
• What did they learn along the way that might help them in the future?

Conclusion

Voice of Customer data will make a powerful addition to your arsenal. There are many ways to get started with it, regardless of the business you run or the industry you work in. With this knowledge, you can make better decisions about what customers want and where your product needs improvement.

The post Voice of Customer Data Analytics: What, Why, and How to Do It appeared first on Lumoa.

According to our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022, technical variables have a huge impact on customer satisfaction levels – but the list of factors that users take into account doesn’t stop there. 

Our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 breaks down the customer satisfaction performance of the top shopping apps in the Google Play Store as well as the Apple App Store. In addition to the overall performance analysis, we also detail the specific variables that have the biggest influence on customer satisfaction across three statistical categories.

What’s Inside Our State of the Shopping Apps Report

The digital revolution has brought a myriad of changes to the retail industry, including the birth of online shopping. While effective feedback collection mechanisms have been in place for some time, retailers of all sizes still encounter difficulties when analyzing this data. In many cases, this is due to the format of the feedback or the sheer volume of reviews that need to be assessed individually. 

Through our ecommerce apps ebook, we aim to establish a connection between factors that impact the customer experience and the influence that these variables have on satisfaction levels. 

However, we’re also tackling one of the industry’s biggest challenges to date: transforming tens of thousands of customer reviews into actionable data that can be used to make business decisions.

Our shopping apps performance report includes.

• An explanation as to why users have a better experience on Android mobile shopping apps than on iOS platforms.
• How usability elements and technical variables influence the shopping experience.
• What factors separate leading shopping apps from bottom performers.
• The different elements that are essential to a good mobile shopping experience.
• Insights about the top performing shopping app categories (spoiler: beauty and grocery apps).
• Textual examples of customer reviews that illustrate their pain points.
• Non-app related variables that impact customer experience.

The Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty

All ecommerce companies want customers that purchase products on a regular basis, are loyal to the brand, and share their experiences with their inner circles.

Ensuring high customer satisfaction levels can help you achieve these goals and place your retail business on a growth trajectory. Here are some of the benefits that, according to PWC, are associated with high customer satisfaction levels.

A Higher Price Premium

Customers are willing to pay up to a 16% price premium across all industries when subjected to a great experience, and this statistic doesn’t factor in higher loyalty rates. Loyal customers can result in more referral sales and a higher loyalty program subscription rate.

More Recurring Customers

Generating sales from existing customers is more affordable than attracting new clients. A great customer experience means that customers are more open to trying additional products and services from your brand. This is because consumers evaluate a company’s overall quality, in large part, from its customer service.

Better Resource Allocation

It’s estimated that 3 out of 5 consumers in the US are willing to share personal data with companies that make them feel valued. This data can be used to create detailed marketing campaigns and to allocate resources to the more profitable channels.

Download the 2022 State of the Shopping Apps Report

Do you want to learn the true impact of customer reviews and understand the elements that impact client satisfaction levels? Download our State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 today.

The post The State of the Shopping Apps Report for 2022 appeared first on Lumoa.

Nevertheless, learning how to use customer feedback to drive action poses a significant challenge, especially for organizations that leverage multiple channels to collect mass feedback.

At Lumoa, our goal is to look at customer feedback to tell companies what to do next to grow their organizations. In one of our latest webinars titled How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action, we pose a sustainable strategy to solve the challenge of transforming mass reviews into information that can be used while making key company decisions.

This webinar was organized in partnership with customer experience pundit and CXMania founder Matthieu Bonelli, so we’ll be including some of Matthieu’s most valuable insights in the form of quotes edited specifically for this piece.

Three Key Elements to Effective Customer Feedback Collection

It’s difficult to analyze feedback without a strategy, so the first thing that companies need to do is develop an assessment process that starts with effective customer feedback collection.

According to Matthieu Bonelli, the feedback collection process should be developed using three key concepts.

Focus on Sentiment Rather than Quantitative Ratings

“There’s no need to ask 50 questions and there’s no need for all of these to be quantitative. You know, asking customers to rate satisfaction on a scale from one through five,” says Matthieu.

“What is important is to use sentiment analysis in order to determine what customers have to say about the experience they just had. The goal is for them to show you the pain points they are experiencing right now, that they may not share later.”

Time Your Questions Properly

According to Mattieu, “it’s also important to ask the right questions at the right time and to have everything as open and unbiased as possible. We’re performing sentiment analysis and that means a lot of qualitative feedback.”

In other words, time your survey questions right in order to get feedback about a specific topic. Customers should have the ability to provide feedback after every key interaction so that they can express opinions about their individual experiences, rather than a general rating that holds less value.

Develop an Effective Analysis Process

“There will be a lot of comments coming into the system so you don’t want to have a free-response survey with ten thousand replies in an Excel sheet. You need to time questions properly and have a tool that allows you to categorize the feedback in order to perform a quick analysis,” says Matthieu.

The idea here is to find a mechanism that allows you to accurately parse and understand qualitative or free-response questions on a large scale. Manual reviews are not a sustainable strategy, even for large corporations. So, it’s necessary to look at your resources and the tools you have available to develop a tailored system to manage online reviews and understand the feedback you collect.

How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action

Once you’ve created a plan to collect and assess customer feedback properly, it’s time to transform this data into actionable information.

In short, Mattieu’s process is designed to drive action through feedback by understanding feedback, prioritizing the biggest pain points, and sharing the steps that need to take place with the team.

1. Get the Full Picture

“Customers will tell us what is important to them in their own words. The analysis tool should categorize the comments and help us understand what reviewers are saying in a more general sense. At this point, you can have positive as well as negative sentiments because users will want to speak their minds whenever they get a chance to be heard,” says Mattieu.

Matthieu continues by adding that “you need to figure out what feedback you want to hear first. This will reveal what you’ve done as well as the steps you should take to further focus on satisfaction and give customer importance throughout the entire journey.”

Implement Tools that Accurately Categorize Sentiment

Having a powerful feedback analysis tool is the only way to categorize sentiment property when assessing a large number of reviews. “This allows you to link what’s important to consumers and what they are satisfied with. We mentioned these two elements before, satisfaction and importance, so it’s crucial to guarantee both at every touchpoint,” continues Matthieu.

Consider Different Touchpoints

It’s necessary to gather reviews from all the touchpoints because it gives users the ability to rate experiences individually. Besides learning how users feel at each touchpoint, it also helps customers stay unbiased when evaluating each experience.

“When you send a survey to consumers you’re giving them the ability to speak. If they haven’t had another opportunity, they will take this chance and tell you about everything. This is why it’s very important to collect feedback from all the touchpoints. If you check in at different stages, you can create a voice of customer map that tells you how users feel at every touchpoint and use these as queues to figure out what areas need work.”

2. Find Out the Root Cause of the Problem

Collecting and categorizing feedback is a great step, but according to Matthieu, this is just the beginning.

“You need to go deeper because this will allow you to get to the root cause of the problems. The good news is that we are in 2022 so you don’t need to read every review to find out what’s wrong. Thanks to tools like Lumoa, you already have categories and filtering options as well as other features to help you,” continues Matthieu.

Here are a few steps that can help you zero in on the root cause of the negative feedback.

Remove Biases and Avoid Making Assumptions

“I ask clients ‘what do you think are the three main pain points you have within your company?’ you know, the pain points that customers are most vocal about?” says Matthieu.

“A lot of times I get answers like delivery times. But, after assessing the feedback, shipping is what customers are most satisfied with because they have the expectation that ecommerce takes a few days. We need to remove biased logic and take the picture for what it really is.”

Leverage the Most Valuable Feedback

“When the customer completes the buyer’s journey, we go from getting payments, to seeing a list of customer pain points and reading ensuing comments. This part, reading the comments, is key to everything we’re trying to do, in my opinion. By analyzing the most valuable feedback, you’ll motivate your team and connect the negative sentiments with the appropriate factors,” says Matthieu.

3. Prioritize the Most Important Obstacles

“If you do a great job collecting feedback, you may end up with 40 or 50 pain points. How do you prioritize these? That’s the goal after all,” says Matthieu.

Assess the Impact of Each Blocker and Create a List of Priorities

“The objective is to get specific actions from the entire customer experience. If a pain point is so big that it will break the user experience, it needs to be addressed. If it’s annoying, it needs to be worked on, but it can be prioritized later on after the major problems have been addressed.”

“In order to assess the impact of each negative variable, you should create a rating scheme. The simplest is the following: if a negative factor is big enough to break the experience and result in a lost customer, it needs to be prioritized right away. No questions asked,” continues Matthieu.

“More basic issues that hinder the experience, but are not big enough to completely disrupt the purchase process, are second priorities. For example, if you notice that customers complain about a slow payment page, but continue to purchase from you, it’s an issue you need to address but it doesn’t necessarily have to be right now. And that‘s how the prioritization process works.”

4. Share the Message with Your Team

“After completing the work, the last step is to tell the story to your team. In one project, we presented the analysis from customer feedback in a group meeting called international meeting day. It was basically designed for us to share specific pain points and show data around them,” says Matthieu.

Set the Right Goals and Expectations

According to Matthieu, “it’s fundamental for companies to set goals and expectations because these serve as a basic premise for their teams. As a business, it’s important for employees to know the areas that they should exceed in because it simply sets the right tone.”

Remember, to set the right expectations, you need to coordinate with other decision-makers and department heads and agree on the essential elements that will help you achieve success. Only then you’ll be able to set the right set of objectives for your team.

Create Best Practices

Creating best practices is essential and this process may be easier to assimilate if your team is involved in the development of these habits.

“During one of our meetings we showed the map highlighting the pain points and comments illustrating them. Most of the time there was no movement while feedback flashed. Until we got an email from an annoyed customer saying that some products were not available although they appeared in stock at the time of purchase. It said something like ‘in 2019 this is a rather poor and disappointing ecommerce experience, our issue is real amateur’ and a huge silence followed after I finished reading,” says Matthieu.

“The CEO was in attendance and he put his head up saying ‘I don’t care how long it takes, we have to drop everything and fix this’ and so next morning I had emails from team members asking for the responsibility or to get a project started to collaborate.”

Want to Drive Action Using Your Customer Feedback?

Transforming customer feedback into actionable steps requires an organized approach that allows you to get a full picture, find the root of the problem, identify key obstacles, and get your whole team on board.

We hope that the tips provided by Matthieu during our webinar help you on your quest to create a more effective system for using feedback to drive action.

If you want to learn more about implementing Lumoa as part of this mechanism, get in touch with us today and we’ll be glad to help.

The post How to Use Customer Feedback to Drive Action appeared first on Lumoa.

Not only has the world changed, but technology has improved, and companies have been finding new ways to provide customers with a great experience. Staying on top of trends means that your organization won’t fall behind. 

7 Customer Experience Trends to Know in 2023

Here are seven trends that will keep your customer experience strategy on top.

#1 Customer insights are a company-wide resource

Even just a few years ago, customer insights or feedback were collected and owned solely by the CX or marketing team. They’d organize surveys and listen to customers and then try to share these insights with other teams. 

But now, more organizations are realizing how essential customer insights are to developing a customer-centric business. From product and service design, to support, sales and management, more and more teams are starting to harness the power of customer insights. When everything you do is validated by your customers, you’ll create a business that retains customers. 

Check out our article “Customer Experience, whose business is it?” if you want to learn more about how different teams and departments within the organization can benefit by improved customer experience.

#2 Companies are using CX to create a competitive advantage

Customers have more options than ever before. When everyone is shopping online, the nearest competitor is only a search away. To stay relevant, companies are using CX to create a competitive advantage. 

In 2018, two-thirds of companies were competing solely on CX and that number is only expected to grow. That’s because it works. A positive customer experience directly correlates to a business’s success, yielding 20% higher satisfaction rates and 10-15% higher conversion rates. Zendesk’s report confirmed this, with 75% of customers reporting they would spend more to buy from a company that offers good CX.

One way to ensure your company stands out from the competition is by personalizing the customer experience. According to a 2020 study on personalization by Epsilon and GBH Insights, “the vast majority of respondents (80 percent) want personalization from retailers”. 

In fact, personalization is becoming so ubiquitous that customers rarely notice when it’s done right, but are put off when it’s missing or done wrong. 

#3 CX insights are captured in real-time 

Organizations can’t rely on annual or bi-annual survey data anymore… customers expect change much faster. By the time the survey has been sent out, responded to, and analyzed, customers have already moved on to the next big thing. 

Fortunately, technology is keeping up with these demands. In 2021, companies will need to focus on measuring the CX at each touchpoint along the customer journey. These results should then be analyzed in real-time so you always have the most up-to-date view of the current CX status.

Secondly, not only does this insight get funneled back into product and service design, but it also can be responded to in real-time. Customers want you to listen and take action immediately when they leave feedback. 

Up to 70% of customers who register a complaint will purchase from you again if their complaint is resolved. But that number of return shoppers increases to a nearly perfect 95% if they felt it was resolved quickly. While mistakes happen, closing the loop and addressing the issue quickly can prevent customers from walking out the door. 

#4 The value of CX is linked to financial growth

CX is not just about “doing the right thing” anymore. Rather than a cost center, CX has become as important as any other part of the organization, providing a positive impact on revenue and profitability. 

To participate in this growing trend, it’s become more important than ever that you can measure the impact of your CX improvements not only with CX-related metrics but also with business-critical metrics. 

Linking CX initiatives to financial growth is crucial – just like in any other department. Again, improvements in technology have made connecting the dots easier. 

A customer insights tool like Lumoa will reveal the drivers that have the biggest impact on your business, so you can understand how CX investment helps your business grow. 

#5 Voice feedback is analyzed for CX insights 

Voice conversations have traditionally been difficult to get insights from. Call centers could only rely on transcription or post-call surveys to understand what customers wanted – neither of which were particularly accurate nor scalable. 

Now, CX insights have moved beyond text feedback to analyzing and measuring the experience of customer service or sales calls. 

These conversations are full of rich insights that can help improve service delivery and product development. With new advancements in Natural Language Processing and speech-to-text recognition, organizations are seeing more value from analyzing their customer voice conversations – with less time and effort invested in the analysis. 

#6 Good data safety and processing policy is good CX

Providing your customers with a good experience also means taking good care of their private data. Not only is there a renewed interest in data safety, but there are also new data protection laws and restrictions that have come into force. 

While organizations must continue to adhere to GPDR, there are new rulings that impact data management as well, such as the EU-US privacy shield ruling of 2020 preventing data transfers from Europe to the US under most circumstances. 

However, data is often the fuel that drives CX personalization. Bain & Company accurately describes the balance companies need to achieve with storing and using data:

“Privacy concerns have become acute as companies, governments and other organizations collect more customer data. For most companies, data helps them to better understand their customers, so that they can provide customized service and distinguish themselves from competitors. However, some firms have been selling consumer data to third parties, prompting regulators to intervene.”

Therefore, it’s vital that the CX platforms you use to manage private data and customer information are always secure. 

Not just because it’s the right thing to do, but because it aligns with new data security standards, and because your customers rely on you to do so. 

This trend is only going to continue gaining momentum in the future. As it stands, 48% of customers have stopped doing business with a company because they were concerned about their data privacy — making data security a top issue when it comes to customer loyalty.  

#7 Companies are using AI for predictive analytics

AI has been on most CX trend lists for the past few years. And it’s not going away anytime soon. With the ongoing advancements in AI, this powerful tool is now more useful and widely available for CX teams. 

This is great news for teams that are looking to dig deeper into their Voice of Customer data. 

Rather than just describing how things are, AI analytical tools for CX can diagnose why things are the way they are, and provide suggestions on how to improve. McKinsey highlights predictive analytics as one of their top trends for 2021, because of the far-reaching effects these platforms can have: 

“Predictive CX platforms allow companies to better measure and manage their CX performance; they also inform and improve strategic decision making. These systems make it possible for CX leaders to create an accurate and quantified view of the factors that are propelling customer experience and business performance, and they become the foundation to link CX to value and to build clear business cases for CX improvement.” 

Looking ahead in customer experience trends

While trends and technology evolve, there is one thing that is never going out of style: listening to your customers. As their needs change, staying responsive will keep you on the cutting edge of CX trends.

The post Emerging Customer Experience Trends in 2023 appeared first on Lumoa.

This is a common pre-recorded message that I think we have all heard once or twice when calling a customer service department.

Some firms receive over 10 000 hours of calls per day and it would take several years for one person to listen to and transcribe those calls. Having a person listening to every call and transcribing them isn’t really an effective strategy. So how do you make the most out of your voice feedback?

With the modern technologies available today, such as speech-to-text and artificial intelligence (AI) it’s possible to automatically generate insights from calls, Interactive Voice Response (IVR) surveys, and post-call surveys.

In this article, we’ll explain what voice feedback is and how you can easily generate customer insights from your customer calls.

What is voice feedback?

Organizations often collect customer feedback from multiple sources such as social media, emails, chat, surveys or reviews. Usually when we refer to customer feedback, we think about feedback that someone has written down, e.g. answers to a survey. But feedback isn’t always given in a written format – you can also receive voice feedback from your calls with customers.

As mentioned earlier, some organizations receive huge volumes of calls every day. Although more modern ways of contacting support agents are available, such as chat and chatbots, calling is one of the most popular service channels, and is still widely used by customers.

Aircall.io tells us that the phone remains the most used (48%) and preferred (80%) method for reaching support agents. The benefits of reaching out to support agents via phone are that it’s immediate, direct and it gives customers the chance to ask and quickly get answers to any follow-up questions that they may have.

So the recent focus on having non-voice channels in place to help customers solve their problems doesn’t necessarily mean “the death” of regular phone calls, as for a lot of companies the ancient phone is still going strong.

As a consequence, many companies receive large volumes of customer data via phone calls. The data that they receive in these calls is generally just saved and never mined for customer insights, despite often containing a wealth of extremely valuable information.

The relationship between customer calls and customer loyalty

The customer experience is naturally affected by the performance of the customer service agents, although the customer experience is made up of all the interactions that the customer has with your brand, and not just from one specific interaction.

However, you can argue that some interactions have a bigger impact on the overall customer experience than others. If you as a customer compare a physical interaction with a service agent from a particular company, with seeing a billboard on the highway branded with that company’s name. Most likely it’s the interaction with the service agent that will leave the biggest mark, and consequently have a bigger impact on your experience as a customer.

Customer service staff have the important job of molding the relationship with customers and this plays a huge part in retaining customers and and generating loyalty. Loyal customers are the best customers as they will always come back to purchase and use your services. They are also the ones that promote your business to friends and colleagues through word-of-mouth.

95.7% of call center professionals believe that customer satisfaction is the most important metric to follow. This stresses the importance of being able to deliver a great customer experience to your customers. Organizations have to make sure to continuously improve their customer experience to keep their customers satisfied.

Making business decisions with voice feedback

So to sum it all up – organizations really shouldn’t ignore voice data as a source of customer insights, as compared to text feedback voice data often contains extremely detailed and useful feedback. This is because it requires less cognitive effort to tell someone your opinion than it does to write it down.

 How do you generate customer insights from voice data?

Voice-to-text technology is a technology that has risen to everyone’s lips lately. The most well-known examples are voice assistants like Alexa and Siri which are becoming more and more popular in households today. Voice-to-text has been found to be useful in a wide range of environments, such as in education and business.

In a business setting, it can be employed to transcribe calls automatically, reducing the need to have a person or a team doing this manually. If you receive several hours of calls every day, it could take a person several years (!) to manually transcribe, but with speech to text technology, this can take less than a minute.

By adopting this technology organizations can save money and allocate resources more efficiently. You can ensure that your employees focus on important tasks that actually require human intelligence – the type of work that they are better at and generally enjoy more.

When you want to generate insights from voice data the first thing you need to do is to transcribe the audio into text. This can be done using voice-to-text analytics, also known as speech-to-text analytics. This technology simply turns spoken words into written words. When the audio is transcribed you can treat the transcribed text as normal text feedback. The next step is to analyze using a text analysis software that provides actionable insights that will help you make business decisions.

Lumoa can do all of this for you, from transcribing voice data to analyzing the transcribed text. Lumoa’s intelligent CX platform uses AI, machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) and makes it easy to generate customer insights from voice feedback. Feedback can be analyzed in over 60 different languages, meaning that it is possible for organizations to generate customer insights from every market that you operate in.

The post What is Voice Feedback and How can You Generate Customer Insights From it? appeared first on Lumoa.