These reactions to your products and services are critical data points to help you gain insights to inform your business strategy. However, good quality customer feedback is only gained from a well-structured and targeted customer feedback strategy.

Knowing what your customers want and understanding how to keep them happy not only maintains customer satisfaction, but also helps you grow your business as word spreads that your products, services, and customer service is totally on point.

So, what constitutes a good customer feedback strategy? Let’s find out.

Understanding Customer Feedback Strategies

Imagine having x-ray specs to see inside your customers’ minds so you can discover what they really think about your products, services, and business. A well-structured customer feedback strategy achieves this. Ask the right questions, and you can gain valuable insights to help inform your strategy and keep your consumers happy.

A strong feedback strategy involves collecting and analyzing feedback to improve your products and services. For instance, you can get feedback to ensure your website meets your customer’s needs. Alternatively, it can help you keep your pricing competitive, identify issues with product delivery, and customer service, and help you understand how your brand stacks up against the competition.

In short, developing a good customer feedback strategy helps you understand what you’re doing well, where you need to develop, and how to improve your service to grow your business ultimately.

How to Optimize Your Customer Feedback Strategy

Your customer feedback strategy is nothing without gathering feedback. There are several forms your data collection can take. For example, customer feedback surveys are an excellent way of gathering details on how customers feel about your products and services.

These can be psychographic survey questions or simple yes/no questions. Surveys can take different formats. Email surveys, website pop-ups, chatbot tools, telephone surveys, online forms, and text messages are the most common.

When devising your customer feedback strategy, consider who your customers are. Would they prefer to answer a survey via a mobile device or phone call? To maximize the responses you get, provide your consumers with the proper channels to answer the survey, and don’t make it too long.

It can help to play the role of the customer yourself. Consider whether your questions allow them to express their thoughts about the products or services thoroughly. Ensure the survey will enable customers to select options and provide free text comments clearly and logically. Also, the survey’s functionality should be tested to ensure that it is user-friendly and fit for purpose.

The type and format you choose may depend on your business sector, brand, customers, and precisely what you want to know.

For example, online clothing stores often have a short pop-up survey asking customers to comment on whether they found the style, size, and type of item they were looking for. Similarly, a company providing a VoIP phone service like KrispCall may enquire about the call quality and usability of the system.

Another consideration is whether your survey will be limited or extensive. The scope of your questions will depend on whether you’re looking for specific information in one particular area or trying to gain more generic data, which you’ll sort through and make observations about once it’s been gathered.

Creating an Actionable Feedback Plan

Your feedback strategy should be coordinated, coherent, and carefully crafted. In a sense, it should be as precisely worded as a contract, and just as you might benefit from enterprise contract management software, it can be worth looking at your competitors’ surveys and some survey templates to get a feel for how to put yours together. Here are some important bases to cover:

Importance of Clarity in Customer Feedback Surveys

The most important thing to remember is that good answers can only be provided if you ask the right questions. By this, we mean clear, specific, and targeted questions.

Vague questions produce vague answers. For instance, if you want to know what customers think of a new product, think carefully about what product features you should ask about. Does the design, style, quality, or cost matter to you? Pose your questions in a manner that focuses the customers’ minds on the relevant aspect of your product.

In addition, don’t overload customers with complex questions that attempt to answer several things simultaneously. Target one thing at a time; don’t confusingly cluster topics.

For example, ask: How satisfied are you with the quality of the Patreon Telegram Bot integration? Rather than: Is the Patreon Telegram Bot integration good quality and value for money?

Vary the Questions

Varying the different types of questions you ask helps you gain different information. For example, open-ended questions will give you different outcomes than closed questions. Yet, both questions are valuable in various ways. Again, it will depend on the answers you hope to gain.

Closed questions, which supply a yes/no or simple answer, help make comparisons. Data gathered from these questions can show concrete percentages you can put in a spreadsheet or chart and see clearly.

Open-ended questions, however, can provide more nuanced information that requires more effort to analyze and process. Nonetheless, answers to open-ended questions can effectively show tendencies and general themes.

A solid customer feedback strategy usually includes a combination of both types of questions. For instance, a closed question could be: Would you shop with us again? Meanwhile, an open-ended question could be: Can you tell us what you think of our visual voicemail service?

Maintaining Consistency Across Survey Questions for Clear Insights

If your questions require your customers to rate a product, service, or your business itself, be consistent and logical with the options you provide. Having smiley faces on one part of the survey makes no sense, but words, numbers, or percentages on another.

“Consistency in survey design not only helps in maintaining the integrity of the data but also respects the respondent’s time and effort. When customers see a consistent format, they engage more thoughtfully, providing more reliable and actionable insights.”
— Shep Hyken, Customer Service Expert and Chief Amazement Officer at Shepard Presentations

Similarly, the format of the questionnaire should be consistent too. Asking customers to click on one question but tick, circle, or select from a drop-down list in another is messy and confusing. Moreover, it will make the data you collect harder to process and compare.

If you have to vary the format, group similar formats into groups so that the responses can be compared easily. At the same time, consumers see the logic behind the survey layout.

Never Forget To Ask to Follow Up

It is essential to ask customers if you can follow up. It’s better to establish this when the consumer is surveying since they’re far more likely to give permission at this stage than if you ask them later.

Okay, perhaps don’t follow this meme, but following up on survey questions can help you gain deeper insights into the questions you’ve asked. You can also be selective and follow up with consumers who have provided the most helpful information. For example, you might want to gain more detail in response to negative feedback to help you fix the problem.

Be open to contacting customers via their preferred method. Some customers may be open to a video call or a quick chat via your Canadian business phone number. Meanwhile, others would be happier with a follow-up via email or SMS.

Creating actionable steps based on different types of customer feedback

Once you’ve collected your customer feedback and generated insights from the data, it’s time to prioritize your response.

Look at your customer’s suggestions. Is there anything that chimes with ideas you’ve considered before? Are there any surprising but revealing insights? Are there any repeating patterns? Pay particular attention to these; recurring themes, comments, or answers are usually the most illuminating.

Crunch the numbers and convert the responses into hard figures. What are the numbers telling you? Is a new product popular or failing to hit the mark? Are customers planning on using your services again, or do they prefer a competitor? Do they want access to something like a PayPal transfer Telegram integration? Convert this data into actional plans for your business.

The right customer feedback analysis tool can help quickly identify the chief drivers impacting your CX metrics. Understanding these drivers – the items that have the most significant impact on your NPS and CSAT – allows you to spend less time on analysis and more time on improving your product and customer experience.

If your current CX tool stack doesn’t make this easy, try using a feedback prioritization matrix to determine where you should take action. A prioritization matrix scores possible actions you should take based on two criteria:

1)      The potential value for your business

2)      The complexity or level of effort involved

Each potential actionable step’s place on the matrix shapes your decision to move forward. Every business has limited resources, meaning you must choose how to spend your time and money.

For example, your customer feedback shows a strong appetite for improvement in your email marketing tools. However, there’s an equally strong appetite for a brand-new reporting feature.

How do you decide which projects to work on?

If the new feature requires more effort (because it’s a brand-new development) and delivers less value (because your core product is your email marketing capability), it becomes easier to deprioritize that initiative.

Similarly, customer feedback can help guide your business in a different direction. It might lead you to change your customer service procedures, find ways to drive more traffic to your online store through an affiliate marketing template or take a hard look at pricing.

While a feedback prioritization matrix doesn’t identify the key drivers of your customer experience in quite the same way as a CX tool, it’s still a potent tool in your customer feedback strategy.

Emerging Trends in Customer Feedback 

Recent trends in customer feedback strategies include embedding AI technologies to automate manual data collection and analysis services to help businesses gain actionable insights faster.

With 83% of customers feeling loyalty towards companies that respond to and resolve their concerns and 78% of customers having a more favorable view of brands that actively seek feedback, acting on customer feedback is paramount to businesses wishing to increase customer retention rates, attract new customers, and grow.

AI chatbots are becoming increasingly widespread as a customer feedback tool, allowing customers to interact in real-time to have common queries resolved quickly. In addition, customers can use free text bots to provide feedback, which is then analyzed by AI technology employing machine learning, natural language processing, and sentiment analysis to extract valuable data, analyze it, and provide actionable insights.

Similarly, AI analysis tools allow businesses to look into enormous datasets quickly, extracting valuable data that helps inform an organization’s CX activities and broader product and service strategy.

AI technologies are likely to play an increasingly important role in the CX industry, meaning that businesses that embrace early adoption of AI to help inform their customer feedback strategies can gain a head start on their competition.

Best Practices in Customer Feedback

Proactivity is the watchword when collecting customer feedback. Actively encourage customers to share their thoughts through reviews, social media, and, most importantly, feedback surveys.

Understanding how to design your customer feedback surveys to gain maximum insight is essential.

Begin by identifying the end goal. What is it you want to find out from your customers? Is it feedback on a new product or service or do you want to understand what your customer prefers? Understanding this will help you decide who you need to interview and the questions you need to ask.

In addition, keep simplicity in mind when designing your survey. Quick, concise surveys will maximize response rates and make analyzying the result a fast, simple exercise. Beware of survey fatigue and keep questions relevant.

Avoiding bias is also an essential part of designing a survey. Questions shouldn’t lead participants towards a particular answer, nor should the answer to any question be influenced by previous questions or statements made in the survey.

Finally, optimize your survey to gain the best possible insights. In most cases, you be able to solve a question with a KPI and a “Why” question. For instance, by asking “How satisfied are you with our website, and why?” you can quickly understand customer sentiment towards your online footprint, while also gaining valuable insight about what they do and don’t like about it.

Remember that collecting pointless feedback that adds no value serves little purpose. Take time to structure your surveys to ensure you only collect helpful and valuable data and see it as an opportunity for your business to mature and grow.

Conclusion

It can be challenging to take the plunge and be prepared to find out exactly what customers think of your brand and what it offers. However, a clear picture of your organization’s offerings can only benefit your business.

Ultimately, the aim of gaining feedback and having an effective customer feedback strategy, like using HubSpot integrations, is to grow your business and boost sales. However, a customer survey needs to be well planned to reach this goal, and how your customers will respond is anticipated.

The phrase, knowledge is power may be overused, but it’s very appropriate when it comes to receiving customer feedback. A good customer feedback strategy will give you the information you need to nip problems in the bud and strengthen and grow your business. Think you’re ready for moe customer feedback strategy? Check out our webinar on ‘The future of Customer Surveys (and how to prepare for it)‘ and learn a thing or two in enhancing your strategies in gathering customer insights.

The post Mastering Customer Feedback Strategy: Essential Steps to Enhance Your Business and Service Quality appeared first on Lumoa.

The uptake of AI in customer experience is very visible in its use across diverse industries, from manufacturing to telecommunications. We then concluded that AI is changing the way businesses engage with their customers.

Moreover, with AI-driven personalization expected to significantly impact market growth, it’s clear that AI is not just a supplement but a cornerstone of modern customer experience strategies.

On the downside, relying solely on it, such as a known AI technology which is Generative Pre-trained Transformers GPT presents limitations. Challenges such as loss of the nuanced human touch in customer interactions are notable, with a significant portion of users expressing concerns over the technology making content for example feel less authentic. (Master of Code Global)​.

This article will talk about the comparative effectiveness of using Lumoa and GPT, and a hybrid approach integrating both. By analyzing real feedback across these scenarios, we aim to uncover not only how each performs in isolation but also how they complement each other to deliver superior customer insights and operational excellence.

The Rising Importance of AI in CX

Let’s rewind a bit and check out what’s happening. In our State of AI in CX findings, a notable 70.7% of businesses already utilize AI within their CX strategies, and an overwhelming 86.5% plan to increase their use of AI in the coming years.

This growth is driven by AI’s ability to streamline operations and offer personalized customer interactions, significantly enhancing efficiency and customer satisfaction. For instance, AI-powered chatbots have become crucial in managing customer inquiries, dramatically reducing response times from minutes to mere seconds.

However, integrating AI into business processes presents substantial challenges. Nearly 30% of companies have yet to adopt AI, often due to technical and logistical hurdles or concerns about data security and privacy.

Now let’s talk about GPT. While it plays a role in modern business ecosystems, relying solely on GPT for capturing customer feedback often falls short. GPT’s generalist approach may overlook nuanced insights that are crucial for targeted action. How’s that possible?

Our Approach: Real Feedback, Real Scenarios

Using real customer feedback, we conducted a quick study to uncover the best ways to leverage GPT capabilities with a focus on insights gathering. The study was designed to compare three distinct approaches:

1. Using GPT Alone: This scenario tested the capabilities of Generative Pre-trained Transformers (GPT) in analyzing and categorizing customer feedback without additional support. The goal was to assess how well GPT could handle the data in terms of understanding and insight generation.

2. Using Lumoa Alone: In this setup, we utilized Lumoa’s proprietary AI to analyze the same set of customer feedback. Lumoa’s strengths in data precision and its ability to derive actionable insights from customer data were put to the test, showcasing its effectiveness in a standalone capacity.

3. Integrating Lumoa with GPT: The final scenario combined the data processing power of GPT with the targeted analytical precision of Lumoa. This hybrid approach aimed to demonstrate how the integration of general AI with specialized CX analytics could lead to a richer, more actionable understanding of customer feedback.

Each piece of feedback was processed under these three scenarios to not only evaluate the performance of each tool individually but also to explore how they could complement each other in a real-world application. We carefully selected a diverse range of feedback examples to ensure that our findings would be comprehensive and applicable across various customer interactions.

The 3 Feedback Problem

In our study, we analyzed a dataset of 10,000 public shopping app reviews using the three distinct approaches described earlier. This analysis allowed us to compare the effectiveness of each method in building categories to surface relevant feedback and extract actionable insights that a business could act upon.

To better illustrate our findings, we will focus on three distinct public reviews and observe how they are categorized depending on the method chosen. Below are the public reviews we will use:

1. “Easiest to use, works the best with zoom feature I use as a severely sight impaired person. Love how easily it works with the Clubcard feature as well. It’s great.”
2. “Totally rubbish, keep asking for valid phone number although I had put the correct number in three times.”
3. “Does not give delivery updates as stated.”

The Findings: Clarity, Actionability, and Efficiency

GPT Alone

tl;dr – Almost 65% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. This is true also for the 3 feedback above, even though they highlight completely different problems.

GPT’s application to topic modeling revealed its limitations in handling nuanced categorization. By testing it against the 3 feedback samples, we discovered that GPT primarily grouped all of it under a ‘General’ category. With  6492 (64.92%) of the total feedback similarly classified, highlighting significant challenges:

• Clarity: The clarity of GPT’s feedback categorization is notably low. Its approach, which broadly sweeps diverse feedback into a ‘General’ catch-all, lacks the granularity needed to distinguish between different customer issues and concerns effectively.

• Actionability: The insights derived from GPT’s categorization are critically limited due to its generic grouping. Businesses seeking to address specific issues or enhance particular aspects of the customer data may find this level of generality confusing and adds more manual work, as it provides little concrete direction for targeted actions.

• Efficiency:  While GPT is capable of processing the data, its approach to topic modeling is often less efficient in terms of outcome relevance and operational utility. GPT tends to group a substantial portion of feedback into a broad category. This tendency highlights an inefficiency in achieving the depth of categorization necessary for targeted business strategies.

As you can see from the visual above, each piece of feedback, representing a range of customer experiences and issues, was indiscriminately lumped together which highlighted these samples within the expansive ‘General’ category. Such merging into a singular, vague category shows a significant drawback of using GPT alone for customer feedback analysis.

Without the capability to finely parse and categorize feedback, GPT falls short in providing the depth of insights necessary for targeted business strategies. This highlights the essential need for more sophisticated tools like Lumoa that can complement GPT’s broad capabilities by providing the necessary detail and precision in feedback analysis.

Lumoa Alone

tl;dr – Only 24% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. The 3 feedback have been assigned to their proper category.

Lumoa, on the other hand, demonstrated its categorization capabilities by specifically assigning feedback to distinct topics like ‘Usability’. (See visual below)

Unlike the broad ‘General’ category prevalent in GPT’s approach, Lumoa’s AI excelled at drilling down into the details of each feedback piece, accurately assigning them to specific and relevant topics. For instance, issues regarding ease-of-use, which GPT had lumped under ‘General’, were identified and grouped by Lumoa into a dedicated ‘Customer experience’ category along with 3290 similar feedback entries.

• Clarity:  The clarity with Lumoa is markedly improved, with specific customer issues being categorized correctly, thereby facilitating a more focused approach to understanding and addressing customer concerns.

• Actionability:  With feedback correctly slotted into specific topics, the potential for businesses to take targeted action skyrockets. For example, the ease-of-use issue feedback can directly inform IT and support teams, enabling them to prioritize and address this specific area of concern.

• Efficiency: Lumoa enhances operational efficiency by enabling quicker and more effective decision-making. With its more accurate categorization, teams spend less time deciphering feedback and more time implementing solutions that directly address customer needs.

Let’s see what the other two feedback looks like:

This more accurate categorization by Lumoa offers businesses the clarity and actionability they require for direct and impactful responses to customer feedback. The rest of the feedback samples are also in their own categories. With the ability to classify feedback accurately into distinct topics like ‘Quality’, and ‘Delivery, Option and Clothes’, businesses can now channel their resources more effectively, ensuring that every piece of feedback is utilized to its fullest potential to enhance the customer experience. While this is already impressive enough, we didn’t stop here. Let’s see how well can Lumoa + GPT work together. Let’s check out what they look like when we use both Lumoa plus GPT.

Lumoa and GPT Together

tl;dr – A little less than 24% of our 10,000 app reviews ended up in the category “General”. The 3 feedback are assigned to their own proper category, and the category is easier to understand.

The combined use of GPT and Lumoa AI enriches the customer feedback analysis beyond what is possible when each technology is used separately. While the integration does not significantly reduce the ‘General’ category more than Lumoa alone, it enhances the comprehensibility and relevance of the categorizations. Let’s check out the ‘ease-of-use’ feedback and what it looks like now.

The combination of GPT and Lumoa AI has elevated customer feedback analysis to a new level of sophistication. The feedback that was once relegated to the ‘General’ category from GPT alone, and the ‘customer experience’ category from using Lumoa alone, now finds its place in a well-defined topic that resonates with genuine cx and concerns; in this case – Process topic.

• Clarity: The integration of GPT’s natural language processing capabilities with Lumoa’s precise analytics significantly enhances clarity. This synergy allows the system to produce topics that are not only accurately categorized but also phrased in ways that are easily understandable, aligning closely with how humans

• Actionability: By leveraging both technologies, this approach maximizes the actionability of insights. In addition to similar findings from using Lumoa alone, It also enables businesses to swiftly identify and act on specific areas of customer feedback, aligning interventions closely with customer needs and sentiments.

• Efficiency: While the combination of Lumoa and GPT may involve more complex processing, which can extend the time taken compared to using Lumoa alone, the quality of the output justifies this approach. The system efficiently processes and refines feedback into well-defined categories that significantly aid decision-making processes.

The nuanced understanding of “human language” and the interconnectivity of themes that GPT brings to the table, combined with the precision of Lumoa’s topic modeling, translate into topics that reflect a natural, human-like grasp of the feedback content. Let’s see what the other two feedback look like with this combination.

The ‘GPT + Lumoa’ method demonstrates how the fusion of AI and specialized analytics can create a harmonious and potent tool for businesses. This hybrid system doesn’t just process data; it interprets it in a way that aligns closely with human reasoning, setting a new standard for what businesses can expect from AI in customer experience optimization.

This hybrid approach may set a new benchmark for what businesses can expect from AI in optimizing customer experience, making it a compelling choice for those seeking to enhance their analytical capabilities and customer insights.

Addressing Security in AI Feedback Analysis

You can’t ignore the potential risks when implementing AI technologies, especially in sensitive areas like direct customer feedback. Even with its own security measurements and protocols, using GPT directly with customer data presents specific security and privacy challenges that need careful consideration and management.

Potential Risks of Using GPT with Direct Customer Feedback:

• Data Privacy and Security: GPT processes vast amounts of data, including potentially sensitive customer information. Without proper safeguards, this can lead to data breaches and privacy violations.

• Bias and Accuracy: GPT models can inadvertently learn and perpetuate biases present in their training data, which could lead to skewed or unfair outcomes when analyzing customer feedback. Perhaps they don’t really train their GPT models with your data, but are you willing to take that risk? Maybe not.

• Transparency and Control: There is often a lack of transparency in how AI models like GPT generate their conclusions, which can make it difficult for businesses to understand and control how customer feedback is interpreted.

The Advantages of Partnering with a Vendor Like Lumoa: Partnering with a vendor like Lumoa, which is equipped with ISO certifications (ISO 27001) and GDPR compliance, offers substantial benefits in mitigating these risks. Lumoa’s commitment to data protection and ethical AI use provides a robust framework for safely implementing AI in customer feedback analysis.

• ISO Certifications and GDPR Compliance: Lumoa adheres to international standards and regulations, ensuring that all customer data is handled securely and in compliance with the strictest data protection laws. This adherence helps prevent data breaches and ensures that the privacy of customer information is always maintained.

• No Model Training on Customer Data: Lumoa does not use direct customer feedback to train its models, which means the data remains untouched and unmanipulated. This reduces the risk of exposing sensitive customer information and ensures that the integrity of the data is maintained.

• Anonymization of Sensitive Information: Lumoa offers options to anonymize sensitive data, removing personally identifiable information (PII) from customer feedback before it is processed. This not only protects customer privacy but also helps businesses comply with data protection regulations.

Final thoughts

There you have it! Using both GPT and Lumoa, we showed the impact of integrating a powerful AI into customer feedback processes. It not only improves the efficiency and clarity of data processing, but also makes the insights generated highly relevant to specific business needs.

Superior Balance of Comprehensibility and Business Relevance: The combination of Lumoa and GPT provides a balance of comprehensibility and business relevance. Lumoa’s specialized analytics refine the broad capabilities of GPT, ensuring that the data processed is not only comprehensive but also closely aligned with the strategic objectives of the business. This balance is needed for companies aiming to leverage customer feedback effectively, as it allows for a nuanced understanding that is both deep and wide-ranging.

Security and Privacy Benefits: Using a specialized vendor like Lumoa for sensitive data processing offers significant security and privacy benefits. Lumoa’s adherence to ISO standards and GDPR compliance ensures that all customer data is handled with the highest security measures. Furthermore, Lumoa’s commitment to not training its models on customer data and providing options for anonymizing sensitive information ensures that customer privacy is maintained at all times. These practices are essential in the digital age, where data breaches and privacy violations can severely impact a company’s reputation and customer trust almost on a daily basis.

The Importance of Ethical AI Use: Companies are increasingly integrating AI into their operations, so ethical AI usage becomes increasingly important. The combination of using Lumoa with GPT serves as a model for how AI can be used responsibly in customer experience strategies. Transparency, data integrity, and privacy can help companies avoid the pitfalls associated with AI technologies.

For businesses looking to enhance their customer experience through AI, the insights from this article provide a clear message. The integration of GPT with specialized CX analytics like Lumoa offers a powerful combination for turning raw data into actionable insights. We invite businesses to consider this hybrid approach not just as a technological upgrade but as a strategic necessity for staying competitive in a customer-centric market.

It’s both exciting and challenging to integrate AI into customer feedback analysis. But, with the right tools and approaches, businesses can navigate this path successfully, leading to enhanced customer satisfaction and business growth. Interested in learning more about Lumoa’s capabilities? Book a demo now and we’ll help you achieve your goals and KPIs

The post Lumoa and GPT: How Lumoa Complements GPT for Actionable Insights appeared first on Lumoa.

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.

Here’s our promise: We’ll keep things as straightforward as possible. Think of this as a casual chat where we unravel the complexities of ML testing, making it digestible for everyone, regardless of their technical background.

In this article, we will dissect the unique challenges of testing machine learning-enabled software and introduce you to Booktest – a revolutionary tool that connects the agility of Jupyter Notebook with the traditional unit testing. It’s an innovative approach that’s changing the game in data science and AI development.

So, let’s start this journey together. Whether you’re a seasoned data scientist or just curious about the field, we’re here to make this topic as accessible and engaging as possible.

How to Improve the Data Science and LLM Development Process

People who have worked in data science recognize instantly the following scene: A clever data scientist 1) copies code from the Git-repo to a Jupyter notebook, 2) tests some changes and 3) copies the changes back to Git and pushes them toward the production. This is an event, that will raise any prudent software engineer’s eyebrows. You can almost hear him mumble. “Copy-pasting code to production. It cannot be happening.”

Yet it happens.

It happens — unfortunately, but it happens for three very good reasons, which help highlight the fundamental differences between data science and software development. Understanding these reasons helps also highlight why the data scientist is actually quite clever to follow this process, and how the current QA tools are failing the data scientists.

Right/Wrong Testing vs. Good/Bad Testing

The first reason for the disconnect between software engineering and data science lies in how quality is measured. In software engineering, quality is often about something working correctly or not. This can be seen as right/wrong testing, where tests yield clear positive or negative results. Most testing is based on simple assertions.

However, data science operates differently. Errors are expected, and the goal is to have fewer errors rather than none. Data science uses various metrics like precision, recall, rank, log likelihood, and information gain. These metrics don’t always align with each other or with user experience.

Often, results need to be reviewed visually in the user interface. Especially in unsupervised learning, useful metrics are rare. Therefore, data science results are evaluated on a good/bad scale, which often requires expert judgment.

Statistical, competing and subjective measurements and visuals create a completely different setting for quality assurance, when compared to traditional unit testing or regression testing. In such settings, the quality is impossible or impractical to test and regression test with purely algorithmic means.

This subjective nature of data science drives review-driven quality assurance. Experts need detailed information to decide if new results are better than old ones, identify imperfections, and guide further development.

While software engineers may rely on assertions and unit tests to verify system quality, they might find these methods slow and not very useful for ensuring quality in AI systems.

Unit tests don’t help in understanding the underlying system and its results. In contrast, data scientists use Jupyter Notebooks to create visualizations, metrics, and analyses to get a comprehensive view of results and the system.

By examining results, data scientists can identify issues like overfitting or missing features and make improvements. This better visibility reduces the number of iterations needed, increasing productivity. Clearly, this approach is more effective.

Iteration Speed and the Roman Census Approach

Understanding the iterative nature of development is key: you make changes, test them, and observe the results. Often, to create a solution, you need to repeat this cycle a hundred times. If each iteration takes 10 seconds, 100 iterations take about 15 minutes. But if each iteration takes 10 minutes, the full task stretches to 3 to 4 days, drastically reducing productivity.

For an iterative task, the productivity is greatly determined by the number of iterations and the time per iteration. In data science, each iteration can take many magnitudes longer than in software engineering, because of much bigger data, much heavier processing, and bigger states.

Workflow significantly impacts productivity, and data scientists prefer Jupyter Notebooks for their faster iteration cycles. This preference is closely tied to the “Roman Census approach” central to Big Data. Instead of moving large data sets to the code, you move the code to the data, because big data is cumbersome to move.

When a data scientist prepares gigabytes of data or a large model, it might take seconds or minutes. Creating a model can take minutes, hours, or even days. On the other hand, a software engineer’s unit test setup might take milliseconds.

However loading gigabytes of data and creating an expensive model can make a single test take ten minutes, severely impacting iteration speed and productivity. The savvy data scientist uses Jupyter Notebooks to cache data and models in RAM, GPU, and disk.

This means that when code is modified, it can run in seconds using the already loaded and prepared data and models. This is the Roman Census approach in action: keeping the data warm and updating the code.

In the Roman census approach, the data is kept prepared and loaded, while the code is sent to where the data is. This makes operations faster in situations when transferring and reloading the code is faster than transferring and preparing the data. 

Another productivity boost from Jupyter Notebooks is their ability to cache intermediate results, speeding up iteration on small pipeline parts. If a full 10-step pipeline takes 10 minutes to run, iterating on just one step might take only a minute. This 10x faster iteration leads to significantly higher productivity.

The number of iterations, diagnostics, and visibility of results

The third reason data scientists prefer Jupyter Notebooks is the enhanced visibility into results and system behavior they provide.

Jupyter Notebooks encourage users to print intermediate results and create visualizations throughout the development process. These outputs not only help monitor application quality but also highlight issues like overfitting or specific cases where the system lacks the necessary data to infer the correct result.

This better visibility into results and system behavior helps identify issues early and spot opportunities for improvement, such as introducing new data sources.

This improved visibility reduces the need for additional iterations to pinpoint root issues, allowing data scientists to achieve the desired quality in fewer iterations. Instead of needing 100 iterations to reach the necessary quality, a data scientist might only need 50.

Perfect for Purpose, Except That…

This approach sounds ideal and effective. The data scientist appears to be the hero, finding an efficient workflow. The review-driven approach to quality assurance, faster iteration cycles, and reduced iterations due to better system visibility lead to higher quality results and increased productivity.

Reduction in the number of iterations and time per iteration can drive a drastic decrease in the total time invested in a project.

Yet, there are some drawbacks. First, the data scientist still resorts to copy-pasting code between systems, introducing extra steps that consume time and can cause bugs.

Second, there’s no regression testing. If someone makes a change, the chances of system regression are high without retesting through this error-prone process. Additionally, the review process can be costly.

Do we need the data scientist to review the entire setup every time something changes?

Jupyter Notebook provides a superior process when developing data science solutions, but falls short, when productizing, maintaining, and regression testing the system.

Book test and review-driven testing

Introducing book test

Booktest is a review-based testing tool, that aims to combine the best sides of Jupyter Notebook with classic unit testing. Mainly, book test provides 3 main services

1. Easy snapshotting and easy snapshot reviews and diffs to power review-driven development
2. Internal build system providing RAM and FS caches
3. Classic regression testing with easy CI integration

In more practical terms: Booktest could be characterized as a ‘diff tool’ that allows you to quickly run tests, use extensive caches, and see the result’s differences compared to the previous snapshot.

The example project

Booktest development is best described through an example. Let’s imagine a simple project containing a prediction engine called a predictor, which predicts whether an animal is a mammal based on its number of legs and wings and which provides an explanation for the inference. The predictor is stored in predictor/predictor.py and it looks like this:

To set up the booktest, you need first to create a directory for the tests. This directory can be named for example ‘book’ or ‘test’. In this example, we use the directory name ‘book’ to leave out the namespace for the traditional unit testing. In the book directory, we create a file called predictor_book.py’, which looks like the following:

In this test case, we assume the Predictor object to be ‘a big state’, which is expensive to create and load. For this reason, we return it as a test result and declare dependency with ‘depends_on’ decoration in the second test to that result. This allows caching the predictor in RAM and in FS for faster reuse when iterating the ‘test_predict_dog’ test case results.

The tln() method prints a message with a new line for review. The tool generates Markdown content, which may also contain headers, links, lists, tables, and images, and which can be viewed visually during review and also in Git.

Running booktest

Now that we have set up the test, we can run booktest in interactive (‘-i’ flag) and verbose (‘-v’ flag) mode:

This will print the results of the first test case for review with a prompt about whether we are happy with the outcome.

By typing ‘a’, we can accept the results. We can similarly review and accept the results from inference.

Now, if we make changes, we can rerun a specific test with:

If there are changes, then we can review the differences easily and re-accept them. A cache of the possibly expensive engine object is automatically loaded and used:

Once we are happy with the results, we can run book test in non-interactive mode locally or in CI like any regression test suite:

If a test case failed, the test run can be reviewed in interactive mode with ‘booktest -w –i’ or the failures can be printed (e.g. in CI) with ‘booktest -w –c –v’, where –c is used to only run/review the failed test cases.

As a summary, book test provides 1) review driven development flow, 2) powerful multi-level caching and 3) CI compatible regression testing.

Booktest in real-life use

The quality to assure

While simple examples are educational, the real benefits are best understood in the context of real data science projects. Here, I’m going to use Lumoa text analytics engine as a real-life example, of using booktest to develop a complex machine learning system and assure its quality.

Here, Lumoa provides text analytics services for numerous stakeholders like customer insights professionals and — also — for product teams. The goal of the system is to take the user from a mountain of textual data into a view to the data, that is sensible and comprehensible. Here’s an example of the result for banking mobile application data for the July-September range in 2018.

It demonstrates well 2 key aspects of the text analytics engine, that are the AI generated topic model on the left side with topics like Finance, Transactions and Identification. Another aspect is the ‘actionable insight’ view on the right with the top insight being the internet connection issues with HSBC mobile bank.

While the raw AI topic model itself looks superficially good, it does contain its flaws evident on deeper examination. Some of the topics have clearly AI generated names. Customer service subtopic is positioned under Quality and it contains not so useful ‘helpful’ keyword.

And truly, topic modelling is a hard problem. Lumoa’s experience is that the traditional textbook algorithms don’t really fit the purpose and — in practice — they don’t provide sufficient quality.

To deal with these challenges, we are employing a rather complex AI system, which includes LLM, knowledge base, supervised component, user preference modelling, and a statistical component based on a distributional hypothesis.

Also, to deal with AI’s mistakes: Lumoa has employed a ‘Hybrid AI’ approach, where the user can freely modify/curate the AI model, and AI can further build its changes/suggestions on top of manual changes.

With such a complex system, quality assurance plays an emphasized role.

Topic modelling and review driven testing

In Lumoa, the topic model quality is guaranteed by an extensive suite, which runs the topic model for about a dozen different data sets in a few dozen separate test settings. We have some metrics to measure the resulting topic model quality, yet the final quality assurance is done — you guessed it right — via an expert review.

The banking data test suite set itself contains 17 separate test cases:

In the test suite the ‘topics’ test run is used for creating topic modelling and reviewing results. As an experiment, we can recreate the impact of introducing the large language embeddings to topic modeling by first disabling it and then by enabling it again. When running book test it will fail, with the option to run a ‘diff tool’ for review:

Diff opens Meld for comparing topic tree before (left, without LLM) and after (right, with LLM) the change. The topic trees are similar to what is visible in the UI and give a feel about what the result will look like for the user:

In the review we can see the distinct effects of the LLM embeddings:

• It helps merge long phrases with similar semantics into coherent topics (e.g. fingerprint-related phrases in the Account Management / Login topic)
• It also helps to deal with typos and different ways of writing words (e.g. bofa and boa)
• Still, LLM similarity metrics are not always very precise, and its generated topic structure does not resemble one built by a CX expert. Here preference modelling typically does a better job, as it seeks to mimic the way actual users/experts organize and construct topic structures.
  For example, AI shouldn’t create a separate topic for fingerprint, but instead keep it inside a larger login/authentication topic). The overall topic structure may have — in fact — become worse.

While LLM provides mixed results in this data set, it provides a much clearer improvement with smaller data sets, with rarer words, and with domains and languages, that are not well covered by our knowledge base or our user preference data.

These benefits are revealed by other test cases and also by evaluation tests, which measure accuracies and also information gain for the predicted merging probabilities based on a curated ground truth.

Review-driven testing for insights

Besides topic modelling, one of the key functionalities in Lumoa is called ‘insights’, which tests demonstrate the benefits of the review approach and the MD format. Here, we can see the actionable insights for the banking collection with a simple command:

We are looking at one test case result, which shows insights for August 2018. The above results demonstrate how headers, tables, and visual icons can be used to display results and mimic the UI with booktest and Markdown

Now, because the data and date selection are similar to what we had in the previous UI screenshot, the results also look similar. In the ‘combos by actionability’ part, we can see the familiar ‘barcode’ issue with the Nordea mobile bank.

As an addition to the issue and its relevance score, we can also dig deeper into why the system thought the issue was ‘relevant/actionable’ and why it deserves a high score.

In the scoring field, you can see 3 sub-scores for the insight that are:

a) looking glass for the level of detail/concreteness,

b) uptrend icon for the trend

c) and unhappy faces for impact.

Looking at the row, we can see that the issue has a massive uptrend (from 0% -> 1.2%), it’s highly impactful, and it’s pretty concrete as its description contains both the problem (‘barcode’) and diagnostical information of its location (‘Nordea bank app’).

The overall test suite now contains 268 tests, which cover high-level results tests, measurement benches, tests for smaller components/units, and tests for various languages, scales, and contexts. The major part of the tests is run parallel with coverage measurement in the CI, though the heaviest testing is omitted to avoid too slow CI runs.

This testing approach has proven itself to be effective in supporting the data science development process and guaranteeing the system’s quality.

Conclusion

You’ve made it to the end—congratulations! As we’ve explored, data science results aren’t simply right or wrong; they exist on a spectrum of good and bad. This nuanced nature demands a unique approach to quality assurance. Through our journey, we’ve highlighted how integrating the agility of Jupyter Notebooks with the rigor of traditional unit testing fosters a review-driven testing methodology.

Booktest stands at the forefront of this innovative approach. Though it’s a relatively new and straightforward tool, it offers essential functionalities:

1. Easy Snapshotting and Review: Markdown files, tools, and workflows tailored for continuous reviews, enabling clear and comprehensive documentation of results.
2. Internal Build System: With dependency tracking and robust RAM+FS caches, it ensures efficient handling of large data sets and models.
3. Regression Testing: Capable of parallelization and coverage measurements, it integrates seamlessly with continuous integration (CI) processes.

But don’t just take our word for it—experience the power of review-driven quality assurance firsthand. We invite you to try the Lumoa free trial and witness how Booktest can enhance your data science and AI development projects.

Thank you for sticking with us through this deep dive. Whether you’re a seasoned data scientist or a curious newcomer, we hope you’ve found this discussion insightful and engaging. Ready to revolutionize your workflow? See the difference for yourself! Try Lumoa Free

The post Machine Learning Development: A Comprehensive Review of Booktest and Testing Tools appeared first on Lumoa.

Last year, the CX management market was already worth $11.4 billion. With a 12.2% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), it is expected to reach $20.4 billion by 2028. 

Companies are investing serious money into CX because excellent CX is quickly becoming a key expectation of consumers. A survey by Gartner found CX drives 66% of customer loyalty, making it more influential in deciding where customers shop than price and brand name combined.

Whether you operate a physical or online store, developing a winning CX strategy is one of the best ways to ensure your business thrives. Grow your customer base and your company’s bottom line by delivering the best retail CX in your segment. And if you need a little help, you can always reach out to the experts.

What is Customer Experience in Retail, and Why is it Important?

The customer experience (CX) is a customer’s impression of an organization or brand based on their interactions with you. It is the sum of all customer interactions with a company or brand, from their first contact to post-purchase follow-up.

While customer experience is still important, the way someone interacts with you is different from what it was a decade ago. Technology, mainly eCommerce, has changed the way people shop. There are now multiple touchpoints for your customers–websites, apps, and newsletters in addition to your physical space (and they may never even set foot in your store!).

Because of this complexity, the retail customer journey must be consistent across all touchpoints (website design, apps, physical space, etc.). Consistency is what customers want and expect, providing them with a great experience. 

Customer experience can make or break relationships between companies and customers. A positive experience builds loyalty and trust, increases sales, and improves customer satisfaction. A bad CX can motivate customers to abandon the brand altogether.

Distinguishing Between CX and Customer Service

It’s common to think of CX and customer service as interchangeable concepts. But even though both fields are concerned with keeping customers happy while benefiting the brand, there are some important distinctions between the two. Knowing what falls under which category will help develop a CX strategy that adds real value to your business.

Customer service is the direct interaction between a company and its customers. Customer experience is about a customer’s perception or feeling of the company. Let’s put it another way. Customer service focuses on specific interactions, like resolving complaints or answering questions. You can think of customer service as a point on a timeline. 

Customer experience is the line itself. It takes into account all touchpoints during the purchasing process. CX includes product quality, ease of use, pricing, delivery speed, and more.

Impact of Global Events on Retail Customer Experience

The global pandemic of 2020 flipped the retail industry on its head. While the economy entered a collective recession, the eCommerce industry saw a boom as online shopping replaced physical purchases.

While the 2020 recession is the shortest on record, there is no doubt that inflation has become a major concern for consumers across all industries, including retail and retail accounting. Experts believe the modern retail industry will follow a similar pattern as it did during the 2009 recession. 

Even as the global economy recovers from the pandemic, certain consumer habits, like a newfound preference for shopping online, are here to stay. That means if brands want to retain the customers they’ve gained by growing their digital stores, it’s time to spend on CX. A post-pandemic report from 2021 by Forrester, a market research firm, found that satisfactory CX contributed to 2.4 times higher customer loyalty for brands.

Innovative Strategies to Enhance Customer Experience in Retail

It’s one thing to say, “We’ll give our customers a great experience!” It’s another to make a strategic plan and put it in place. Reaching your goals of customer loyalty and increased revenue requires a mix of proven strategies and experimental approaches.

Five Proven Techniques for CX Success

Here are a few reliable methods for creating the best CX possible:

• Know Your Customer

Understanding your customers is essential to any business’s success. Knowing who your customers are and what they want means you can create better products to meet their needs. When you meet their needs, they enjoy the experience. 

One of the most important ways to understand your customers is by collecting data about them. This could be data like demographics, sale history, website visits, and more, as this information provides businesses with valuable insights. Businesses can then tailor marketing strategies and product offerings for the greatest customer satisfaction.

• Create a Consistent Customer Journey

Consistent journeys allow retailers to ensure that customers have the same experience regardless of which touchpoint they interact with. This will increase customer satisfaction and loyalty and help build trust between your brand and your customers. Retailers can create an environment where customers feel comfortable and valued through this process. This helps customers make purchases more often.

Increased conversion rates are another benefit of consistent customer journeys. Customers will more easily identify each step they take and are less likely to make a snap decision. This process creates new sales opportunities like up-selling, cross-selling, and impulse purchases. 

• Modernize Your Technology

Many exciting new developments in consumer technology have revolutionized the retail experience in 2024. Some notable features consumers are becoming used to interacting with are AI retail assistant chatbots and retail mobile apps, which provide personalized and interactive online shopping experiences, and augmented reality (AR) shopping.

• Measure Customer Satisfaction

Tracking key metrics is vital to improving your CX performance. This information helps improve the quality of service you provide, which, in turn, will lead to higher levels of customer loyalty and retention. Some important metrics that indicate how you well your CX is performing include:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• Customer Satisfaction Rating (CSAT)
• Voice of Customer (VoC)

• Implement a Loyalty Program

Loyalty programs, as the name implies, are specifically designed to increase customer loyalty. And it’s one of the easiest and most effective ways to do so. A loyalty program can reward customers for their frequent purchases and encourage them to come back for more.

These programs can be used to reward customers with discounts, special offers, freebies, or other incentives that will make them feel appreciated. Additionally, loyalty programs can also help businesses track customer data so they can better understand their needs and provide tailored services accordingly.

New CX Strategies for the Digital Age

In one of Lumoa’s webinars – Transforming Customer Experience in Retail: From Insights to Actionable Metrics and Back, Matthieu Bonelli explores the power of integrating insights and actionable metrics to enhance customer experience in the retail sector. Highlighting the critical role of breaking down silos between digital and physical retail spaces, Bonelli provides practical examples of how unified team efforts and customer journey mapping can create consistent and memorable brand experiences.

This segment not only reinforces the importance of leveraging technology as outlined in the introduction but also exemplifies the application of these new CX strategies in a real-world context, offering a comprehensive roadmap for businesses aiming to thrive in the digital age.

Your business needs to use all the tools at its disposal. Using the latest technology and software solutions, your brand can build a next-generation CX that builds loyalty and drives sales. Here are some of the latest trends in CX that can have a positive impact on your business:

• Personalizing the Retail Experience

Giving customers a personalized shopping experience is one of the best ways to keep them returning to your store for more. A survey found that 88% of all online shoppers prefer buying from websites that offer a personalized experience. 

• Phygital Retail

Despite the rise in online shopping, some consumers still prefer buying from brick-and-mortar stores. Your company can enrich their retail experience by offering digital upgrades to their physical journey through the store, such as QR codes displaying product information, enabling online purchases through a digital catalog and store pick-ups, and contactless payment options.

• Measuring and Improving Customer Experience Across Channels

To deliver a seamless shopping experience, CX needs to remain consistent across channels. Your customers should be able to pursue their requests through whichever mode of communication, either on social media, the company website, or any other platform. Additionally, you can create an online FAQ page to provide readily available answers to common questions, reducing wait times and empowering customers to find solutions independently.  Alternatively, you can collect their email addresses and send a feedback form to gather their feedback.

Having a clear omnichannel messaging strategy also helps your business reach more consumers in different segments, bringing your brand greater exposure and the opportunity to see more sales conversions.

The Future of Customer Experience in Retail

The retail industry is changing rapidly, and customer experience is at the forefront of this transformation. Over 45% of companies believe customer experience will be their top priority for the next five years. It’s not an exaggeration to say that your future depends on your customer experience strategy.

As customers become more informed and demanding, retailers are turning to data-driven marketing strategies to deliver personalized experiences that keep customers coming back.

Customer experience analytics help retailers gain insights into their customers’ behavior and preferences. This data is powerful. It allows you to create targeted campaigns that get better engagement. Your customers will take more interest in these campaigns. And that’s more likely to drive sales and increase customer loyalty.

Having a CX strategy that works for your business is an ongoing process. And Lumoa is the perfect partner for your journey. Check out our cx solutions, and we’ll help you start managing your CX today.

The post Customer Experience in Retail Guide: Strategies and the Future of CX appeared first on Lumoa.

A multi-dimensional CX strategy can be much more beneficial for your brand than one-dimensional customer service. But, developing a CX strategy that works is much more challenging than simply fine-tuning customer service processes. This is because CX involves many factors that are outside your direct control. 

Even so, devoting time and resources to planning your CX strategy is worth the investment because giving your customers sub-par experiences is one of the most effective ways to drive them away. The Salesforce State of the Connected Customer Report found that 88% of buyers say their experience is as important to them as a company’s products or services. 

So, how can your business win over this growing contingent of experience-focussed customers? Reviewing your existing CX strategy is a good place to start.

The Constant Evolution of CX

We already know that CX is an evolved form of customer service with a broader scope. It starts even before a consumer has their first interaction with your company and is an ongoing process that continues even after a sale has been made. Thanks to its expansive nature, CX strategies are constantly in flux. Watch the webinar replay of Redesigning CX programs: Enhancing the Way We Listen, Analyze, and Engage with Customers to learn more.

External factors like market demand, pricing trends, or competitors’ initiatives can arise at any time, setting off a chain reaction that affects your overall CX. Against this shifting backdrop, your business needs a clear and consistent CX strategy to hold on to. 

Hubspot’s annual State of Service Report found that 90% of surveyed CX professionals felt that customer expectations have increased to an all-time high. Adapting your CX to meet these higher expectations can differentiate your brand and the competition. 

One critical step in doing this is to identify key performance indicators (KPIs) that you can track while tweaking elements of your CX. From lead conversion rates (CVR), click-through rates (CTR), and Net Promoter Scores (NPS), companies use multiple metrics to analyze the effectiveness of their CX strategy.

How to Spot Gaps in Your CX Strategy

Tracking this data through CX management software gives companies the freedom to tinker with other aspects of CX, like the number of customer touchpoints or level of personalization, with measurable KPIs to judge the results.

Fine-tuning your CX elements is a constant exercise. While your customers should find familiarity in their interactions with your company, the relationship should never stagnate. That’s why it’s essential to continuously iterate new approaches to see what works best and integrate those into your CX strategy.

How customers experience your brand is more important than ever before. In Hubspot’s 2022 State of Service Report, 85% of the customer service agents agreed customers are more likely to share both positive and negative experiences. Your customer experience strategy can make the difference between having an advocate or a critic who can influence other buyers in their circle.

Is your CX strategy up to the task of meeting customers’ expectations going into 2024? Today, 73% of customers want companies to cater to their unique needs and expectations. Naturally, delivering this kind of personalized service at scale will require a well-crafted plan. 

Since you’re already considering upgrading your CX strategy, it’s quite likely you’ve already covered the basics. That is, you’ve conducted diligent research on your customers to understand their motivations, created buyer personas for each demographic, and solicited inputs from all the CX stakeholders among your company colleagues and business partners (customer service reps, shipping partners, CX software providers, etc). 

Now, it’s time to drill down into the details.

Define Your Brand’s Core Value

When auditing your CX strategy, the first step is to define your brand’s value asset. This is the quality that draws people to your brand. Your new CX strategy should emphasize your brand’s value to your target audience.

Once you’ve answered this all-important question, the answer will give you a better idea of what shape your overall CX should take.

Identify Customer Journey Pain Points

The goal of this CX audit is to identify and hopefully eliminate all of a buyer’s potential pain points in their customer journey. To do so, you need a detailed list of all the potential touch points in the customer journey. Then, use metrics like churn rate, CSAT, and CVR to gauge which touchpoints are negatively impacting CX. 

Benchmark Against Competitors

Competitive analysis is also highly insightful during a CX audit. There’s always something to be learned from your industry peers, especially if they enjoy the support of a large customer base. 

What value are they delivering to their customers that your company is not? Comparing your current CX strategy to brands that enjoy a reputation for great CX will highlight areas where you can improve.

Implement your Customer Experience Strategy

With your CX friction points now clearly visible, the time has come to start smoothing them out. A viable solution and new direction for your CX strategy will look different depending on your findings during the audit. Some companies might need to bring in an external CX agency to affect change, while others might realize that their in-house team is capable of leading the transformation. 

In some scenarios, upgrading the CX means upgrading the company’s tech stack. Multiple CX software as a service (SaaS) solutions like Lumoa are available, which automate many CX tasks, offer a granular perspective for in-depth analysis, and streamline upgrading your CX strategy.

By the way, we also made a Definitive Guide to Creating a Standout Customer Experience Strategy Template with an editable template itself! 

Five Ways to Improve Your Existing CX Strategy

Every company’s CX solutions will be unique. With that said, there are best practices in the CX industry that you should consider when developing a strategy for your own business. These include: 

1. Reduction Friction
   

   Your CX vision should include making every interaction with the customer as smooth as it can be. When you require extra effort from your customers, you risk turning them off the experience. Try not to prolong interactions or resolution times by providing extra services. 

   In 2020, Zendesk’s Customer Experience Trends found that 69% of consumers attempt to solve issues on their own. Clearly, people prefer minimal interactions, even with brands they love. So, your CX strategy needs to ensure your customer journey is smooth, with as few touchpoints and channel switches as possible.

2. Set Clear Expectations
   

   Don’t make the mistake of trying to stand out from competitors by promising customers the world. When communicating with potential buyers or long-term clients, the golden rule is to under-commit and over-deliver. Nothing can harm your standing in a customer’s eyes than making a promise but failing to live up to it.

   Also, your customers will feel more at ease on their buyer’s journey when they know what to expect. By clearly communicating the terms of your shipping policy, returns and exchange policy, and support coverage, you remove doubt from the customer’s mind. This makes them more confident about doing business with your company.

3. Express Appreciation
   

   When customers feel valued by your brand, they will want to keep coming back to relive that experience. They are the ones keeping you in business, and letting them know you are thankful for their support fosters loyalty toward the brand. A thank you note or a freebie sent along with a shipped order is a great way to show gratitude.

   Another key way to let your customers know you appreciate them is to come right out and say it. Highlight your most valuable customers on your social media and website. Make their importance to your business clear by acknowledging their contributions to your success. When you share the love with your customers, they will love you right back!

4. Personalize the Services
   

   Nowadays, CX is all about personalization. Research from Deloitte found that companies that focused on personalization improved customer loyalty 1.5 times more effectively than brands that did not devote resources to it. A growing number of consumers now expect companies to be able to service their requests according to their preferences without having to specify them every time.

   “Warm transfers” are a huge help in this area. This is where customers can switch to a new channel without needing to repeat themselves to a new agent. Don’t let your customers feel like just a number; add a human touch to your interactions.

   AI and ML will be able to offer customers a degree of personalization they have not yet experienced because of their ability to:

   • Deliver individualistic, personalized experiences by analyzing each customer’s purchasing history, browsing habits, and demographic information
   • Offer 24/7 customer support through AI chatbots and interactive guides.
   • Provide valuable insight into customer journeys by mapping each customer interaction
   • Eliminate the possibility of human error impacting a customer’s interaction with the company.
     
     
5. Embrace Technology
   

   It might seem counterintuitive to champion technology as a game-changer for CX since having a human touch plays such a big part. But that doesn’t mean that automation has to feel cold or unwelcoming. If used correctly, CX SaaS can help make customers feel like they are receiving special treatment.

   Automated services like chatbots allow customers to schedule their own self-service appointments. Your customers will appreciate having access to company resources at their convenience. 

   Automation can also be extremely useful for communication services. CX software can be used to conduct automated surveys that gather helpful information about your customers. Automated emails help find new customers, bring back lapsed ones, and build brand awareness among your target audience. To enhance the effectiveness and legal compliance of these efforts, incorporating email disclaimers in automated communications is a smart practice.

Future Trends to Incorporate into Your CX Strategy

The tips above are evergreen advice; they always have and will always positively affect customer experiences. But in CX, for every piece of timeless wisdom, there is a trend-based development that is very much a product of its time. 
In the coming months, as 2024 brings new changes and trends, the CX industry is going to be shaped by the following movements. Being mindful of them can help you optimize several aspects of your CX strategy.

Increased Use of AI

As AI technology increases its capabilities, it will directly impact chatbot quality. Newer AI language models use Natural Linguistic Programming (NLP) to authentically replicate human speech patterns and have advanced sentiment analysis capabilities that let them register emotion. All these upgrades will lead to a new generation of chatbots that sound just as human as yours or I!

Also, data analysis in CX will become much more exhaustive as customer relationship management (CRM) software becomes adept at gathering data. This CRM software will need AI and machine learning (ML) features to present a meaningful analysis of all that data.

If you’re curious to know the role of AI in customer feedback analysis, we’ve got it covered with a practical guide and explain how you can be more successful using AI-powered tools.

More Data-Driven Analytics

Advanced analytics is enhancing the CX industry.. Gartner’s 2023 Top Priorities for Customer Service & Support Leaders Report identified customer data and analytics as integral for success. 

Many customers are also willing to share controlled amounts of personal data if it can help personalize their experience. Finding the right CX solutions is going to need a lot of data crunching in the coming year.

Renewed Emphasis on Safety and Privacy

Today, more than half of all consumers (57%) prefer to engage with brands over digital channels. This puts the onus on brands to provide a secure online environment for their customers. Also, since customers voluntarily share personal data, brands need to handle it responsibly in order to respect their customers’ privacy. 

Combining Online and Offline Channels

Shopping today has become a hybrid experience, unfolding in the virtual world and physical world simultaneously. Brands use virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) to let customers browse their products before buying them from a store or website.

Finding ways to let customers seamlessly switch between online and offline channels will be crucial for brands looking to up their CX game in 2024.

Investing in Customer Loyalty

Improved customer service and hyper-personalization are two tactics that are going to be used frequently in CX strategies across industries. The Deloitte report titled “Embrace Meaningful Personalization to Maximize Growth” has 71% of CX leaders saying that personalization plays a significant role in their CX strategy. 

Your CX initiatives should be considered investments, with customer loyalty and repeat business being the outcome.

Use Customer Insights to Enhance Your Customer Experience Strategy

Most business owners see customer feedback in binary terms, as either negative or positive. But CX very rarely deals in absolutes. 

In its original, unfiltered form, customer feedback might come across as merely negative or positive. But after meaningful analysis, you might have a nuanced enough perspective to see silver linings in the bad reviews and spot concerning warnings in the good ones.

When you promptly respond to customer feedback, it lets your audience know you take their needs seriously. Even critical reviews should receive a response, one where you announce the steps taken to correct the issue faced by the customer. A proactive approach to inviting customer feedback and then taking decisive action based on it can lead to a more free-flowing exchange of ideas between the company and its customers.

Benefits of Upgrading Your Customer Experience Strategy

An effective CX strategy is essential to your brand’s success. You can save costs by eliminating redundant touchpoints and under-utilized channels. Customer behavior patterns can be predicted, allowing you to plan your operations and identify growth opportunities. Better CX means happier customers, which in turn leads to positive word-of-mouth coverage as well as third-party coverage. If the triple blessing of customer satisfaction, increased sales, and lower costs haven’t yet convinced you to relook at your CX strategy, consider the following points:

• CX promotes cross-functional collaboration between departments
• CX gives all stakeholders a common goal and KPIs to achieve
• CX increases positive brand awareness among potential new customers in your target audience
• CX empowers employees to act independently in order to achieve the common goal

Choose the Right Tools for CX Management

Customer experience strategy today is highly data-driven and analytical. You need a dedicated team that works to ensure the quality of your customers’ experiences never slips, but they can’t do it without the right kind of assistance. Modern workplaces need modern CX solutions, which usually involve sales CRM software and AI- and ML-enhanced analytics.

To find the right CX software, you must first outline exactly what you need in terms of reporting capabilities and analytics features. Even if you think you’ve found the SaaS solution that matches your requirements, don’t jump on it right away. Stop to consider how the software will integrate with the rest of your tech stack.

One CX software that works well for most companies is Lumoa. It allows CX teams to see all the sensitive feedback and track every important metric on its clutter-free, easy-to-read dashboard. 

With Lumoa collecting and collating a wealth of data, it’s possible to conduct deep analysis that leads to actionable insights. Lumoa is a new way to manage every aspect of CX, from customer surveys to social media monitoring.

Once you’ve found the right software, you will notice a difference in the quality of your data and the resulting insights. All the benefits of an effective CX strategy will be within your reach. Invest in your business’ growth by adding the CX solution you’ve been missing all this while.

The post How to Upgrade to an Advanced Customer Experience Strategy appeared first on Lumoa.

Well, there is a common answer to all these questions- customer insights!

If you have used customer insights data to know what your customers want then you also understand that it holds the key to growth, right? 

But here is the catch- knowing is not enough! The real key lies in the art of leveraging customer data. Effectively using customer insights to grow your business may be not as easy as it sounds but it is not rocket science either.

You just need a good strategy to do so. A powerful customer insight strategy or framework helps you map your customer journey, enhance products or services, and provide a better customer experience. 

Improved customer experience, in turn, strengthens customer loyalty, creates a broader user base, and increases profitability for any business. 

In this article, we will discuss why using a customer insight strategy is valuable and how to create an effective one for your business growth. 

And if you haven’t taken the time to learn what your customers want, then this is high time that you did that.

If you are new to the world of customer insights and the art of leveraging it, let’s start from scratch.

What are customer insights?

Customer insights are not just customer feedback. Customer feedback is direct responses received from customers and are often obtained through surveys or reviews. 

Even though customer feedback data provides detailed and specific information regarding their satisfaction level or complaints, they do not offer a deeper understanding of factors like customer behavior, market trends, personalization needs, etc. 

On the other hand, customer insight goes beyond individual feedback!  

Technically speaking, customer insights refer to a deeper understanding, analysis, and interpretation of customer data points. Those data points typically include information like buying behavior, needs, wishes, preferences, and motivations. 

Customer insights are crucial for building lasting brand-customer relationships and staying competitive.

And from where these customer insights are derived? They come from various data points such as customer feedback, purchasing patterns, social media interactions, website usage, and other communications with the business. 

Let’s explore more with some examples-

Understanding Customer Behavior: Wants, needs, and wishes

Here’s a recent trend to give you an insight into what’s going on in various industries. Capgemini conducted research and found that brands and retailers are leveraging technology and generative AI to become more consumer-centric, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency to adapt to shifts in consumer behavior. Understanding customer behavior is central to these efforts. In addition to exploring new revenue streams through social commerce and influencer partnerships, particularly targeting Gen Z, they are also striving to balance affordability with sustainability efforts, such as reducing food waste and educating consumers about sustainable shopping.

Brands that actively listen to customer feedback and enhance their product create stronger customer relationships.

Imagine a big clothing brand like Levi’s. It listens to its customer feedback and discovers that more people are interested in eco-friendly clothes. 

So, the brand now relies on Water Less Technology to reduce water usage in their jeans production, offering customers an option to choose what they care about. 

Personalizing services and marketing communication

Think about a popular streaming service like HBO Max. It feels like they know your taste so well. It is because they pay attention to what you watch and what you like. 

Then, they send you suggestions based on your interests. It is like they know you so well! 

HBO uses customer insight analytics and machine learning to process its customer data. Afterward, the insights are unified by their data science teams to sync with HBO Max’s different teams and their goals. The end goal of all this is to offer personalized viewing suggestions to the customers. 

HBO Max’s recommendation service also uses voice-enabled language processing through Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. If a user says ‘Alexa, play something romantic’. The users are probably going to get romantic movie recommendations when they open HBO Max.

Customer Personalization, as exemplified by streaming services like HBO Max, contributes to higher customer retention and satisfaction. A study by Segment states that 44% of consumers are likely to become repeat buyers when offered a personalized shopping experience.

Allocating resources wisely

Suppose a SaaS-based company notices its customers are increasingly asking questions about a specific feature. So, they decided to make that feature better. 

It means happy customers who got what they asked for. 

Companies that invest resources in enhancing specific features based on customer needs align with changing expectations. 

A report by Salesforce says that 68% of customers say the pandemic has raised their expectations of companies’ digital capabilities. 

Assessing Marketing ROIs

Businesses that recognize the impact of social media ads can allocate budgets more effectively. According to a report by Hootsuite, 73% of marketers believe social media marketing has been effective for their business.

A baker in your hometown notices that ads on social media bring more customers, as opposed to regular banner ads. So, she decides to spend more on social media ads. 

It is a win-win situation for both. You discovered yummy cakes because you found that ad on social media.

Keeping up with changing market trends

It is amazing to note that the global mobile banking market is estimated to reach $1.36 billion by 2028. Based on such estimations, banks that had embraced digital transformation to offer their services made more evident progress than their peers. 

This highlights the importance of strategically following future trends based on customer insights.

For instance, Singapore’s leading financial establishment DBS Bank has been recognized as one of the forerunners of digital innovation in banking and financial services. Their investment in technologies such as artificial intelligence and data analytics delivered an economic value of SGD 180 million, comprising a revenue uplift of SGD150 million and SGD30 million from cost avoidance and productivity gains.

All of these examples suggest one thing- customer insights carry information that can transform the way we do business. 

But simply analyzing the insights will not work. You will need a strategy to leverage those insights so that teams can chase common KPIs and businesses can make informed and strategic decisions. 

So, why is having a customer insight strategy a big deal? In the next part of this article, we will discuss that.

What is a customer insight strategy?

Think of it like a mind game and only with accurate answers! So, it’s all about finding what customers want and how to use customer feedback to make your business thrive.

Once you have figured out how to gather, understand, and put all the customer feedback data to good use, you can make business decisions that keep you ahead of the crowd.

Going by the definition, a customer insight strategy means a comprehensive plan for systematically leveraging customer insights to drive profitability. 

And how does it help? 

A good customer insights strategy creates magic and transforms your products or services into popular ones. In addition to increasing your revenues, this also adds an extra glitz to your overall customer experience.

From a webinar – Customer Support: Using Insights to Hear Your Customers Engage Your Employees, and Improve Your Profits, Taru Aalto had a one-on-one conversation with Richard  Jeffreys concerning the changes in the landscape of customer expectations.

“Are you caring about me and my family? Are you keeping your employees safe?… There’s a real shift to people looking at companies that meet their own values and doing business with those.” – Richard Jeffreys

When you offer unmatched customer experience, it broadens your customer base, enhances customer loyalty, and eventually your overall business grows. 

A customer insight strategy typically explores ways a business plans to collect, analyze, and leverage customer data to make informed and strategic business decisions. 

However, comprehending what customers are saying has gotten tricky. With the overflow of feedback and online chatter, companies are hustling to create personalized experiences. A well-planned customer insight strategy is the solution for this issue.

The business value of having a smart customer insight strategy

We are listing down a few pointers below to elaborate on the business value of having a workable customer insight strategy-

1. Data overflow: Businesses strategically leveraging customer insights are better equipped to handle the data overflow in the digital age and make smarter decisions.
2. Personalization: Businesses that employ customer insights to tailor products and services tend to see increased customer satisfaction and engagement.
3. Real-time insights: Businesses using customer insights in real-time can respond promptly to feedback and capitalize on immediate opportunities, contributing to enhanced customer satisfaction. 
4. Multi-channel juggling: A customer insight strategy helps businesses create a seamless customer journey across various digital channels, improving overall user experience.
5. E-commerce Magic: Businesses, especially e-commerce sites, using a customer insight strategy often witness improved online sales, optimized digital storefronts, and enhanced user experiences.
6. Predicting Trends: Businesses that stay ahead of trends through customer insights tend to be more innovative, meeting customer expectations even before a trend hits the market.
7. Customer Journey Mapping: Fancy, Right? Companies using customer insights for journey mapping can enhance, identify, and address pain points, resulting in a more satisfying user experience.
8. Staying quick and ahead: Businesses utilizing customer insights can adapt more quickly to changing market conditions, fostering an agile and responsive approach to challenges.
9. The ‘cool’ factor: While measuring the “coolness” index is a tricky business, companies with a top-notch customer insight strategy often gain a competitive edge because they understand and meet customer preferences better than their competitors.
10. Loyalty rate: A robust customer insight strategy helps businesses identify and implement strategies to retain their customer base, building long-lasting and loyal relationships.

Now that you understand the impact of having a customer insight strategy, the next step is to see how to achieve that for your company. 

Every company has a different customer base. The ways you measure data may be different from your peers. But it is okay! It just means that your strategy will be different as well.

Creating a customer insight strategy should be aspirational but grounded in your resources and capabilities. 

First, You need a clear picture of what you are trying to fix and understand how that will impact the future. To do that, you will need your customer metrics at your fingertips, see what else is required, and decide who will be responsible for it. 

Let’s find out more.

Develop Your Customer Insight Strategy

Let’s quickly go over how you can create a workable customer insight strategy in 10 steps to make it more comprehensive.

Here we go-

Step 1: Define objectives and goals

1. Identify business objectives: Outline your business goals and what you aim to achieve through customer insights as clearly as possible.
   You may include objectives like improving customer satisfaction, increasing retention or launching successful email marketing campaigns.
2. Establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): Define your KPIs, see if they are measurable, and align them with your objectives.
   These might include customer satisfaction scores, retention rates, conversion rates, and others important to your business.

Step 2: Develop a data collection strategy (Source and method)

1. Identify data sources: Determine and list the sources of your customer data, including CRM systems, social media, website analytics, surveys, and customer feedback.
2. Choose data collection methods: Select and Implement various methods to collect data, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, and social media monitoring.

Step 3: Segment your audience and create customer personas 

1. Segment your audience: Analyze collected data to identify customer segments based on demographics, behavior, preferences, and other relevant factors.
2. Build personas: Develop detailed personas for each segment, including their needs, challenges, preferences, and communication channels.

Step 4: Analyze and interpret data insights

1. Use analytical tools: Use data analytics tools to interpret and analyze customer data. Identify patterns, trends, and correlations to gain valuable insights.
2. Map customer journey: Understand the end-to-end customer journey, from awareness to conversion. Identify touchpoints and pain points.

Step 5: Implement personalization

1. Tailor products and services: Use insights to customize offerings based on customer preferences, behavior, and feedback.
2. Implement personalized marketing: Develop targeted marketing campaigns and communications that resonate with your desired customer segments.

Step 6: Enhance customer experience

1. Address pain points: Identify and address areas where customers may face challenges or dissatisfaction. For example, improving processes or communication can be one way to enhance the experience.
2. Optimize customer service: Use insights to enhance customer support by understanding common queries, concerns, and preferred channels.

Step 7: Implement real-time feedback mechanisms

1. Use feedback systems: Use real-time surveys and feedback mechanisms to capture immediate customer sentiments and experiences.
2. Act immediately: Develop a system for addressing urgent feedback promptly. It demonstrates responsiveness to customer needs.

Step 8: Foster a customer-centric culture

1. Promote customer-oriented values: Encourage team members to prioritize and value customer insights. Ensure that a customer-centric mindset is a part of the company culture.
2. Train your team: Offer training to employees on the importance of customer insights and how to leverage them in their respective roles.

Step 9: Measure and iterate

1. Regularly measure performance: Continuously monitor KPIs and assess the impact of your customer insight strategy on business objectives.
2. Iterate and improve: Based on performance metrics and evolving customer needs, refine and adjust your strategy to stay ahead.

Step 10: Stay informed about trends

1. Research and stay updated: Regularly research and keep your teams informed about evolving industry trends, technologies, and customer behaviors.
2. Embrace emerging technologies: Explore and adopt new technologies, such as Artificial Intelligence (AI) in customer feedback analysis , to enhance the effectiveness of your customer insight strategy.

By following these steps, you can develop and implement a powerful customer insight strategy that meets your business objectives and positions your company as customer-centric and adaptable in a dynamic market.

Conclusion

Trying to leverage every detail of customer insight might be a challenge, but with good strategy, it becomes a practice that contributes to organizational success as well as creating better customer experience programs.  

When used effectively, a customer insight strategy can improve brand loyalty, expand user base, and increase profitability. 

But before acting on it on an impulse, first, analyze what your company wants to achieve and set up your strategy accordingly. Assess how feasible are your goals with your current company structure, scope, and budget. Then, assess your customer needs and desires to determine the level of your current product experience. 

Once you have a hang of it, you can start to branch out into innovative and exciting new customer insight strategies to inform product, marketing, support, and everything in between.

The post Creating a Powerful Customer Insight Strategy appeared first on Lumoa.

Have you ever traveled to a country where you didn’t speak the language? If you have, you must know how exhausting it can be to get help with the simplest of requests. I remember spending over 40 minutes trying to get change for a €20 bill in Paris until a kind stranger finally understood what I was asking for.

After that frustrating experience, I had a newfound appreciation for customers who have to deal with unresponsive customer experience (CX) teams that fail to act on customer feedback!

Just like a hapless tourist, customers are eager to share details of their experience. CX professionals know they can share it as constructive feedback (if you’re lucky) or harsh criticism (if you aren’t).

Whatever shape the feedback takes, it contains valuable information that can be used to improve your business’ performance. However, first, you have to know where to look!

That’s where text analytics in customer feedback proves to be one of the most valuable tools for any business. If you want to satisfy—or dare I say, delight—your customers, you need to understand their wants and needs. That will give you a clear goal to work toward and guide your organization’s decision-making processes.

The Role of a CXO in Leveraging Text Analytics

All businesses share one common goal, no matter how different they are in terms of scale or industry: Customer satisfaction.

Customer satisfaction drives key metrics like your Net Promoter Score (NPS). Satisfied customers are also paying customers, so keeping them happy also helps your bottom line. In 2024, delivering quality CX is so critical to business success that no Customer Experience Officer (CXO) can afford to overlook it. In fact, a report from 2020 found 95% of senior marketing executives agreed that CX roles were essential for business growth.

As the CXO, your world revolves around understanding and enhancing the customer experience. You have to dig deep into your customers’ minds to understand their behavior. And if you want to become a real change-maker in your organization, you need to learn how to extract insights from customer feedback.

When to use text analytics

This situation is where automated text analytics in customer feedback is brought in: it can help in sorting out the key topics talked about and reveal the general sentiment per topic.

If there’s a lot of data, the categorization can be a very detailed one: instead of personnel, the categories can separate customer support personnel from sales personnel or divide the feedback about personnel into comments about their behavior, knowledgeability, responsiveness, etc.

Careful and well-implemented text analytics can easily reveal dozens of improvement ideas. Based on the customer experience analytics you would know that people talk negatively about your customer service response times, the information available on your website, the behavior of your agents, the features of your latest product release, etc.

Transforming Analytics into Action

Remember that the true value of text analytics in customer feedback can only be realized when it impacts decision-making and actions within a company. Thus, basic text analytics is just the first step toward transforming data into value:

1. A better, more insightful text analytics tool to understand the most relevant drivers of customer experience improvement. Results must be meaningful from a business perspective and reveal areas for improvement.

2. Making informed decisions that consider both the impact of proposed actions on the customer experience as well as the cost and benefit of the proposed measures.

3. An organization that can act on feedback.

4. Most importantly, the company needs to improve in various areas.

A CXO’s Perspective on Text Analytics in Customer Feedback

Customer experience (CX) operations aren’t left to any one department. Every employee, from the product designer to the in-store salesperson, all the way to the after-sales customer service rep, has a role to play. Essentially, CX is intertwined with every aspect of a business. When one improves, the positivity rubs off on the other.

For a Customer Experience Officer (CXO), dedicating resources to analyzing text feedback from customers can have several benefits:

• Dissecting Customer Segments: Text analytics in customer feedback allows you to delve into the nuances of different customer groups, understanding their unique preferences and expectations.
• Harvesting Rich Data: With this tool, you get more than just numbers; you get stories. Large volumes of qualitative data turn into actionable insights.
• Enriching the Customer Journey: Every piece of feedback is an opportunity to refine the customer journey, making each interaction more meaningful and satisfying.
• Pattern Recognition: Spotting trends in customer behavior becomes easier, helping you anticipate needs and tailor experiences.
• Personalization at Scale: This technology enables you to treat each customer as an individual, offering personalized experiences that resonate and build loyalty.
• Problem-Solving: Identifying and addressing issues within the customer journey becomes more efficient, ensuring a seamless experience for every customer.

Mastering the basics of text analytics gives CXOs more context and information, which they can then use to drive data-driven decision-making and process optimization for the business.

Strategies for CXOs to Implement Text Analytics in Customer Feedback

Ultimately, the CXO has to use customer feedback to better the business. That means they need to be able to pick out potentially valuable information from a vast pile of data as if they were picking a needle out of a haystack.

You’re likely to encounter all sorts of data when going through customer feedback: Quantitative and qualitative, structured and unstructured, and most importantly, insightful and non-insightful.

Your role involves discerning which data points can be transformed into actions that enrich the customer experience and drive business value.

Here are some CX strategies to refine your ability to spot and utilize valuable data through text analytics:

• Amplify the Voice of the Customer (VoC): Place a stronger emphasis on understanding and responding to the VoC. This means not just listening but also interpreting and acting on what customers are communicating.
• Action-Oriented Data Discovery: Seek out meaningful data that can lead to concrete actions, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
• Engagement Through Feedback Surveys: Implement feedback and feature request surveys. This direct line of communication allows customers to express their needs and desires, providing a rich source of data for analysis.
• Social Media Insights: Keep an eye on social media channels for both positive and negative mentions. This real-time feedback is a goldmine for understanding public perception and immediate customer sentiments.
• Entity Analysis: Identify related entities such as competing brands, different product models, or packaging materials mentioned in customer feedback. Understanding these relationships can provide insights into customer preferences and market trends.
• Metric-Driven Improvement: Regularly measure and track key metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS) and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). Use these metrics to gauge the effectiveness of your CX strategies and guide continuous improvement.

Does that sound like a lot to handle, especially for someone with a CXO’s busy schedule? Well, thankfully, software from Lumoa simplifies every aspect of customer experience and feedback analysis.

This AI-powered CX tool can truly do it all: Gathering customer feedback no matter the source, processing it, and preparing reports based on the processed data.

Lumoa gives CXOs a detailed look at the inner workings of their company’s CX, letting them make informed, data-driven decisions.

Lumoa’s software is also enhanced with cutting-edge technology.

Along with its perfect record-keeping and feedback-gathering features, this platform also boasts generative artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, allowing it to prepare smart, actionable customer feedback reports for CXOs to act on.

Challenges in Standard Text Analytics Practices

Clearly, text analytics is a powerful tool that can transform customer feedback data into action plans that benefit the business. But nothing good comes easy. If you want to enjoy the benefits of customer feedback analytics, you need to prepare for the challenges that come with text analysis.

Semantic Confusion

Traditionally, text analysis has always been more challenging to execute than numerical analysis. Numbers have fixed values, but the meaning of words changes depending on the context. For example, the word “star” could either mean a heavenly body or a major celebrity, based on whether you’re reading a scientific journal or a tabloid.

Since text is more open to interpretation, organizing it into reliable data comes with its own set of challenges.

Noise in the data

Smartphones are truly amazing devices. More people are using their phones to access the internet than ever before. In 2024, over 55% of web traffic is from mobile devices.

But for all the advanced features manufacturers pack into phones, the touchscreen keyboard refuses to be tamed. Typos are rampant in text messages, comment sections, and emails everywhere you look. It’s a classic case of perfect machinery being wielded by imperfect users. Spelling errors, odd abbreviations, and misused expressions can make text data hard to process.

All the noise must be eliminated from text data before any analysis can begin.

Data Volume

Customer text data comes in so many forms that it can be hard to keep track of them all! Feedback forms, customer service tickets, online reviews… the list can go on.

Frankly, if you are diligent about gathering text data for customer feedback, it will be far too much for any employee to sort through. It’s essential to find an analytics solution that can scale with the volume of data; otherwise, valuable information could slip through the cracks.

Language Barriers

When it comes to text data, overcoming language barriers is one of the most challenging problems to overcome. Many companies cater to diverse, multilingual demographics, but since their analytics team only speaks one language, feedback in other languages is not given the same weight. Automated translation can be a potential solution to this issue, offering a quicker and more cost-effective way to understand multilingual text data.

However, one possible solution—hiring professional translators—is both time-consuming and expensive. Perhaps that’s why many companies prefer working with numerical data over multilingual text data for customer feedback analytics.

Overcoming Text Analytics Challenges with CX Platforms

Today’s businesses run on data. Despite the challenges in processing text data, the benefits that can be gained are too valuable to pass up. The search for a solution will bring most decision-makers to CX software with the ability to perform powerful analytical functions on large volumes of text data.

AI-enhanced software can process huge datasets much faster than human workers. Add in the way ML lets computer programs learn and improve with every interaction and the way NLP has improved AI’s comprehension of spoken languages.

The result? Data processing efficiency you have never seen before!

Even the problem of multiple languages can be easily solved by training AI to translate to the CX team’s primary language.

Tools and Technologies Driving Advanced Text Analytics for Customer Feedback 

Finding the right CX tool to take your text analytics to the next level is an important decision. Many developers on the market currently offer robust CX software that aids in processing customer feedback. Here’s a selection of three that you could use at your company:

• Lumoa: The first-ever CX platform to come with an in-built Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), Lumoa is well-suited for advanced text analysis. Users can ask the software qualitative questions and expect to receive detailed answers in real time. Lumoa lets you track VoC across multiple channels and monitor customer journeys as they progress.
• Qualtrics: If you’re looking for CX software with comprehensive text analytics capabilities, Qualtrics could be a good choice. Its features include sentiment analysis, language detection, and AI-driven insights, which cater to a wide range of business needs.
• Medallia: With multilingual support, omnichannel text analytics, and AI-driven insights, Medallia is a versatile tool for handling customer feedback in all its myriad forms.
• AskNicely: One of the best ways to track important metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES, AskNicely lets brands create customizable email, web, or SMS surveys. It allows you to close the loop with customers by prompting them to post positive feedback as a review, and it also supports over 15 languages.
• SurveyMonkey Enterprise: Customer surveys are one of the best ways to gather in-depth feedback from your target audience. SurveyMonkey Enterprise is an easy-to-use tool that lets you dig out insights from large volumes of survey data while also protecting sensitive information with robust security measures like data encryption.

Turn Text Analytics Data into a Competitive Advantage

There’s a reason customers are so vocal with their feedback. They genuinely want a good experience. The Future of CX report from PwC underscores the need to focus on customer feedback analysis. Among today’s customers, 32% are ready to stop supporting a business after just one bad experience.

But on the bright side, many consumers are willing to pay prices up to 16% higher for an elevated experience. The company that best prepares to deliver what the market wants will be in a position to reap major rewards.

Encourage Your Organization to Invest in Advanced Text Analytics

If you want to grow your business in 2024, you must transform how you approach CX. For a CXO, this involves not just envisioning but actively leading the charge in crafting and implementing a forward-thinking CX strategy.

The goal of switching up the CX must be clearly stated, whether it be raising your NPS or attracting more customers through referrals. Establish exactly how achieving those goals will add value to your organization, either through increased revenue through sales or by increasing your market share.

What CX success looks like is different for each company, and you can only come up with an effective strategy if you’ve already done your homework by analyzing customer feedback. Incorporating conversational analytics into this phase enables a deeper understanding of customer needs and preferences by analyzing customer interactions across various communication channels. This analytical approach can uncover insights into customer sentiment, frequently asked questions, and common issues that might not be apparent through traditional feedback methods.

Once the plan is in place, executing it might require wholesale changes across the organization. Any new tools required, like CX software, need to be brought online, and employees should learn how to use them. As you improve your company’s technology and capabilities, the CX experience will also improve.

Conclusion

Once your CX strategy starts yielding results, every department in the organization can enjoy the benefits. The marketing team finds it easier to reach the audience, customer service reps are more empowered to contribute positively, and salespeople find leads easier to convert.

Watch “Redesigning CX Programs: Enhancing the Way We Listen, Analyze, and Engage with Customers,” to truly maximize these outcomes. Learn techniques for listening to your customers, analyzing their feedback with a new level of sophistication, and engaging with them in ways that truly resonate and drive enduring loyalty.

The post Text Analytics in Customer Feedback: The CXO’s Secret Weapon appeared first on Lumoa.

Welcome to the ‘digital-everything’ era. AI tools are changing the way we analyze customer feedback. They’re not just speeding up the process; they’re enriching it with deeper insights, making it smoother and more efficient in terms of resources. This is where stepping up to text analysis software or a comprehensive customer experience platform becomes a big move for your business. It’s about making a strategic leap, not just keeping pace.

Understanding Text Analysis Software: A Brief Recap

The internet and social media are buzzing every second. There’s an avalanche of text data out there. Think about all the customer feedback we see – tweets, reviews, comments, surveys. It’s full of insights, but only if we can effectively gather, structure, and analyze it. That’s where text analysis, or text mining, comes into play.

To remind you a bit of what it is and what it does, text analytics uses and transforms unstructured text into structured data that’s actually useful for business decisions. Integrating customer experience analytics and conversational analytics into this process enhances our ability to understand and improve the customer journey by analyzing direct interactions and feedback in real-time

Whether it’s a tweet, a customer email, or a product review, text analysis software digs in, using Natural Language Processing (NLP) to identify key phrases and customer sentiments. Is the feedback positive, negative, or neutral? What’s the intensity of these sentiments?

To put it in a real-world scenario, take Amazon as an example. Imagine the sheer volume of reviews it gets daily. Text analysis software categorizes these into positive, negative, and neutral, picking up on language cues and common phrases. And for them, this isn’t just about numbers; it’s about understanding the ‘why’ behind customer opinions.

Key Features and Benefits of Text Analysis Software

When you’re in the market for text analytics software, it’s not just about slick interfaces (UI) or smooth user experiences (UX). It’s also about finding a tool that meshes with your business’s heartbeat – including your KPIs, budget, data processing goals, and, importantly, your CX strategy. Just focus on the features and benefits that will help your decision-making more efficient and cut through the clutter.

• Sentiment Analysis: Picture this – Let’s say Apple launches its newest iPhone. The market reacts, and reviews pour in. Sentiment analysis steps in, swiftly categorizing these reviews as positive, negative, or neutral. This isn’t just data; it’s an immediate, clear-cut view of customer reception.

• Language Detection: This one is self-explanatory. We know Apple’s global. Their customers? Speaking a myriad of languages. This feature automatically detects and analyzes these languages, making global customer support and feedback analysis a breeze. It’s about understanding your customers, no matter where they are.

• Entity Recognition: This is about getting a grip on the specifics, the nitty-gritty details that paint the full picture of the data and its significance. This means recognizing “Apple” as the brand, “iPhone 15 Pro” as the model, and “iOS” as the operating system.

  Sometimes, it can take it further – identifying key components in customer reviews like “battery life,” “camera quality,” and “ease of use.”

• Keyword and Relationship Detection: Here’s where it gets interesting. This feature doesn’t just pick up on terms like ‘battery life’ or ‘camera quality.’ It takes the connections too – how these terms relate to sentiments like ‘disappointing’ or ‘impressive.’ It’s a deeper dive into the customer psyche.

• Summarization: With generative AI getting more recognition, having this is almost a must on any platform. This feature distills lengthy feedback into concise reports. Imagine summarizing the sentiment on ‘camera quality’ across thousands of reviews with a click of a button. Ain’t that powerful?!

• Topic Modeling: This is the opposite of digging deeper into the sentiment. Topic modeling is about seeing the bigger picture. Identifying overarching themes like ‘Camera Performance’ or ‘Battery Life’ helps categorize feedback into meaningful chunks, offering a bird’s-eye view of customer opinions.

• Customizable Taxonomies: Every business is unique, and this feature should be able to adapt to the business needs. This kind of feature helps a user create and customize categories like ‘Feature Enhancements’ or ‘User Experience’ to tailor the analysis to your specific needs.

• Real-time Analysis: In a fast-paced market, staying updated is key. If there’s a sudden spike in negative feedback about ‘camera quality,’ you’ll know instantly. It’s about being proactive, not reactive.

• Advanced Reporting and Visualization: Data can be dry, but not with this feature. It turns analysis into visually appealing reports, making them easier to grasp and act upon.

• Contextual Grasp: Context matters right? This feature goes beyond mere keywords, understanding the sentiment behind phrases like ‘battery doesn’t last long’ versus ‘impressive night mode camera.’

• Multichannel Integration: To put it simply, this is a don’t miss a beat feature. This ensures no valuable insight slips through the cracks, whether it’s social media comments, email feedback, or survey responses.

• Machine Learning (ML) Integration: Stay ahead of the curve. As language evolves, so should your software, adapting its analysis to new feedback patterns and trends.

• Efficient Market Research: An in-house market research feature? why not! This will grant you cost effect and rapid results revealing customer behaviors, thought processes, and even purchasing probabilities.

  It’s like giving Apple a crystal ball, that will help them make data-driven decisions that not only enhance the iPhone’s market share but also keep them ahead of their competitors.

• Product Development Insights: Spot trends and customer preferences, guiding your next product iteration to align with market demands and expectations.

Now you might say, that’s a lot of things to consider. Well, choosing the right text analysis software isn’t a decision to be rushed. It’s about finding the perfect fit for your unique business needs and goals. Remember, one size doesn’t fit all.

Questions to Ask Before Choosing Your Ideal Text Analysis Software

Now that we’ve explored the advanced features and benefits of text analysis software, it’s time to ask, “What is the right tool for me?” When Choosing Your Ideal Text Analysis Software, you want to have a solution that resonates with your unique business needs. To guide you through this crucial decision, here are some key questions to ponder.

1. Advanced Features: Does it have features like sentiment analysis, entity recognition, and machine learning integration?

2. Customization: Is it possible to tailor the software to your specific requirements?

3. Integration Capabilities: Is it compatible with existing tools and systems that you are using?

4. Language Support: Does it offer multilingual support to process diverse data sources?

5. Real-time Analysis: Does the software offer real-time insights for quick decision-making?

6. Ease of Use: Does it have a user-friendly interface to allow seamless integration into your company workflow?

7. Reporting and Visualization: How easy is it to comprehend the interpretation of insights in terms of reporting and visualization?

8. Filter Comparison: Does it have comparison features to identify differences between different departments, products, countries, or survey sources to find root causes of problems?

9. Set Up Time: How long does it take for the software to be up and running so you save resources and time?

10. Cost and Value: Is the pricing structure cost-effective for your company? Maybe a freemium, trial period etc. is available to test it first?

11. Feedback and Reviews: Are the reviews in the market satisfactory and positive?

12. Training and Support: Does it offer training resources and customer support?

13. Scalability: How big can the software handle large volumes of data as your business evolves?

14. Data Security: Does it practice robust security measures to protect sensitive information?

15. Compliance: Does the software comply with relevant data protection and privacy regulations in your or customers’ location?

Each of these questions is a key piece of the puzzle in selecting a text analysis software that not only meets your current needs but also grows with your business.

At a Glance: A Few Prominent Text Analysis Solutions to Consider

There are various text analysis software options out there and it can be daunting to check them out one by one. To give you a clearer picture, we’ve put together a comparison of three Customer Experience platforms:

1. Lumoa: Lumoa is the first CX platform to offer a Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) and is known for its advanced text analysis. 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.
2. Qualtrics: Qualtrics is recognized for its comprehensive text analytics capabilities, including sentiment analysis, language detection, and AI-driven insights, catering to a wide range of business needs.
3. Medallia: Medallia is recognized for its omnichannel text analytics, AI-driven insights, and multilingual support, making it a strong contender in the text analysis software market.

Think of this as your quick guide to understanding how different solutions stack up against each other, especially in choosing the right text analysis software for your business.

Below are comparisons designed to help you pinpoint what matters most for your feedback program. Keep in mind, though, that this is just a snapshot for illustrative purposes – the real-world capabilities of these platforms might have even more to offer.

Conclusion

Choosing the right text analysis software can be a maze. There’s a lot to mull over – features, accuracy, customization, you name it. The key? Do your homework, set clear goals, and ask the tough questions. It’s about finding the perfect puzzle piece to drive your business.

Your business is unique, and your software choice should reflect that. Don’t hesitate to use resources like G2 Crowd and Capterra for the latest insights and user experiences.

We’ve compared Lumoa, Qualtrics, and Medallia to give you the insights you need. Each platform has its own flavor of genius and areas ripe for growth.

Lumoa, for instance, really shines with its top-notch features, being the first platform to offer GPT, user-friendliness, and a pricing model that’s hard to beat. Plus, their commitment to being a one-stop-shop for customer experience management? That’s the cherry on top.

Here at Lumoa, we’re more than just a platform; we’re your co-pilot on this journey towards a data-driven, standout customer experience platform. If you’re ready to step up your CX, with the right text analysis software, we’re all ears and ready to roll.

No matter which path you choose, remember this – it’s a big move for your business. Leveraging data insights isn’t just smart; it’s a total game-changer. Get in touch with us and see how we can help improve KPIs up to three times.

The post A Guide to Choosing the Right Text Analysis Software for Your Business appeared first on Lumoa.

In this article, we will go over how AI has transformed customer feedback analysis in detail while throwing some light on the trends, challenges, and the future. 

Enhancing customer experience via AI

A company’s ability to offer remarkable Customer Experience (CX) greatly determines the competitive advantage it has in the world of business. When it comes to increasing profitability and retaining a loyal customer base, the ability to smartly source, analyze, and use customer feedback data to enhance services and products makes all the difference.

But it is one thing to claim that a business values customer feedback and another to sift out the actionable data.

AI tools can help automate and analyze customer feedback with much precision and uniformity while saving time and resources for companies. With such tools, it is easier to analyze customer behavior patterns, needs, expectations, preferences, and pain points. AI tools can also highlight correlations between different data sets that are not visible otherwise.

Because of the use of AI in customer feedback analysis, companies do not need to shell out large sums on market research, a practice that is also very time-consuming.

The advantages of using AI in Customer Feedback Analysis

At a glance, here’s how the use of AI has transformed customer feedback analysis and customer experience-

• Efficiency: AI tools can help companies efficiently categorize and analyze customer feedback data through an automated data processing system. This reduces manual work and the long hours generally put in by the team to process large volumes of data.
• Accuracy: For processing the feedback data and making judgments based on it, AI tools help reduce human errors and oversights delivering accurate analytics. 
• Consistency: While processing data with efficiency and accuracy is essential, results may vary without consistency. Inconsistencies affect results and decision-making. When automated to collect the same sets of data to study growth and behavioral changes over a certain period, the data can lead to helpful insights.
• Detailed insights: in the age of fierce competition, knowing whether the customer is happy or not is not enough. Deeper insights into their buying patterns, preferences, opinions, and thinking processes help a company improve services and predict future consumption patterns.
• Improved decision-making: AI tools used in customer feedback analysis ensure a data-driven decision-making culture which in turn helps enhance the products and services because such tools help every member of the team choose what sort of data they need to efficiently function in their role.
• Better customer experience: With the correct insights on what customers want and what they are likely to use and purchase, it has become easier to improvise products without spending a lot of time and money on market research. The result is a happy customer who is likely to buy again or return for services.

Let’s talk a bit more about how the use of AI tools transforms customer feedback analysis in the next part of this blog.

NPS Versus AI tools

Typically, NPS (Net Promoter Score) is the most widely used customer experience metric. It can provide all the necessary ingredients for actionability. With additional queries, this metric can offer some fruitful insights into what drives the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of customers. When the score is good, it generally implies that the business is thriving.

Contrarily, panic sets in when the number goes down. No one seems to know how to improve the metric. In such situations, it is difficult to pinpoint the causes and often leads to conflicts within various teams in a company.  

Thankfully, the most relevant AI development technologies evaluating customer feedback rely on sentiment analysis. It is a technique that uses Natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning (ML) to scour emotions, opinions, and perspectives.

For example, it can offer predictive analysis to understand how some people with specific characteristics or demographics are likely to make a purchase, what they could buy next, or what would be the way to convert them to returning customers. Apart from using human-like language, it helps bots to learn and improvise their responses based on their actions. It also involves exploring human psychology and the thought processes of a customer or a potential buyer.

Successful businesses using AI-powered tools

Starbucks’ Predictive Analytics and machine learning tool called Deep Brew is one of the finest examples of the power of AI in customer feedback analysis and how it is transforming customer experience. It helps Starbucks to personalize their communications, marketing, loyalty programs, and even keep a tab of in-store inventory.

The Starbucks app can swiftly suggest a drink based on location, the current weather, and other spending habits. And this was just one example. 

The use of AI tools in customer experience is no longer a ‘nice-to-have’ but a ‘must-have’, even for small businesses. The big brands that had jumped into it much earlier are already reaping the benefits.

Another case in point would be the popular streaming platform Netflix’s use of AI and machine learning not only to suggest movies and programs to its viewers based on their watch history, ratings, preferred genre, etc. but also to produce future content that may bring better revenues.

The possibilities have grown in many folds since the development of the generative AI chatbot developed by OpenAI. In fact, it has transformed the world of Customer experience like never before. It has become so easy to process customer feedback, identify improvement areas, and even generate new product ideas just by using interactive chat sessions.

Moreover, customer support teams can now use OpenAI’s GPT to create message prompts without having to spend time composing the response or having any programming and technical knowledge.

Gathering customer feedback with AI

• Feedback Tools like surveys and automated forms: Creating super interactive customer feedback surveys or forms has become so easy with AI that companies can use them to quickly ask their customers specific questions to steer the feedback towards a certain direction.

With such tools, they can focus on selected products or choose specific demographics for the survey. After the survey, the same tools can tell the intention and sentiments behind the feedback to help companies enhance quality.

• Chatbots for interactions and real-time feedback: Integrating chatbots into a company’s app or website can help companies quickly find solutions to their customers’ problems, answer their queries, and even get instant feedback. Chatbots are capable of being developed to provide more useful responses because they’re trained on large language models and can go through LLM fine-tuning.

This real-time interaction method not only saves time and money but ensures that the customers feel heard and important which is a major influencer for a customer’s buying decisions. 

• Social media monitoring: With the smart integration of AI and social media platforms, it has become a breeze to gather information about product mentions, positive and negative chatter about the business, and future trends in markets.

Analysing VoC (Voice of Customer) from the customer feedback acquired through AI-powered surveys, feedback forms, chatbots, phone calls, and even social media further helps in understanding what is negatively affecting the customer experience and what can be done to improve it.

The challenges of using AI in customer feedback analysis

In some cases, automated response is the key to dealing with the most typical complaints and suggesting solutions to routine problems. However, it is not just about technology. Inaccuracies may occur due to intrinsic biases in feedback despite algorithms and AI bots, equipped with text classification capabilities, bringing down errors to a minimum. Some errors can even incur losses to businesses.

Human judgment is essential for strategic decisions and understanding the sentiments in full context. Therefore, the most optimal analytics solution is to merge machine learning and human intelligence. While machine learning brings in speed, cost-effectiveness, and the ability to process massive text volumes in a split second, human ingenuity is needed to interpret and make decisions. Lumoa’s analytics is built on top of this philosophy. 

The platform combines machine learning and other AI technologies with human-built rules specific to each industry and is sometimes also tweaked to match the business requirements of our biggest customers.

In other words, we help you strategize how you use AI to improve your customer experience by helping feed the bots the right algorithm because it is crucial to know where to focus your efforts. The results are always relevant to the businesses we work with.

Lumoa is also the first CX platform to integrate with GPT. In a fast and secure environment, every employee in a team could ask questions relevant to their roles and get answers drawn from what customers actually say in real-time. Lumoa’s integrated GPT insights can instantly summarise different feedback while highlighting the positives and negatives.

When using a CX platform, one still needs to sift through the feedback and check the content. GPT helps you to find that answer without asking what is causing it. Lumoa helps you to strategize the use of these tools for best results.

Managing your customer experience with Lumoa

Here’s how you can manage your customer experience with Lumoa- 

Get an overview of your customer journey:

Lumoa’s dashboard helps you get a quick and easy overview and manage different customer journeys, touchpoints, and data sets in real-time. We help you create cards in your dashboard that represent a specific touchpoint, location, or channel. Then, you can compare the performance between cards and analyze fixed insights related to that card. Lumoa also helps you to find performance gaps by comparing different data sets. 

Know what impacts your customer experience:

Lumoa shows the trends and topics that impact your customer experience and can quantify the impact. It makes it easy for companies to identify their focus area. You can get access to data sets that show correlations between your impact drivers and only see the feedback relevant to your case. Lumoa analyzes and detects the sentiment of customer feedback regardless of the language used.

Get automated and actionable insights:

Let’s explore how Lumoa uses automatic detection of actionable insights to point out the issues that need immediate action.

• Phrase detection: Lumoa’s phrase detection tool helps find frequently used phrases in customer feedback and generates concrete ideas of improvements for your metrics based on those phrases. 
• Prioritized feedback: Lumoa helps companies prioritize feedback by calculating the impact so that they can act on the most important impact drivers first.

Swiftly turn insights into action:

Focusing on actionable insights has never been easier. Lumoa helps you to do it more methodically and fast by creating events.

• Create automated events: Act on feedback in real-time by creating automated events that get triggered when you receive a certain type of feedback.

• Assign responsibility and track progress: You can take action and assign tasks to a specific team or a person depending on the importance of the metrics with Lumoa’s dashboard. Additionally, track the development of those tasks and see if the matter is resolved. 

Focus on what matters more:

Monetary values can also be added to tasks to sort them based on their impact or importance. Manage and follow the development of ongoing events to ensure that the right action is initiated.

Find performance gaps:

Sort your performance by touchpoints, agents, or customer segments and swiftly uncover performance gaps.

Tap on individual feedback:

 All feedback under specific topics and insights can be checked on Lumoa UI. You can also create events for single feedback, act on them automatically or manually and sort feedback in different ways such as most positive or negative first.

Ask relevant questions with Generative AI:

With the help of Generative AI, you can now ask questions and get real-time answers on your customers’ preferences, challenges, and expectations. After asking a question, one can get an overview of a long conversation over email or phone at the click of a button.

The results also throw light on the reason for those conversations, the emotions behind what is being said, and what is causing a problem. So the information shared with a support agent is no longer limited to that specific agent but can be assessed by the whole team. The feature also tells how the issue was resolved, points out the closing emotion, and offers recommendations to the agent for future conversations.

The future of AI in customer feedback analysis

The future promises even more seamless integration of AI in customer feedback analysis. As customer data becomes more valuable, the focus will shift towards data privacy and ethical practices. Customer consent will play a vital role in the process as well. A few less explored or untapped areas are Neurofeedback analysis, Augmented Reality feedback analysis, and combining AI with bioinformatics.

The possibilities are limitless. The journey towards deep leveraging AI for a better understanding of customer feedback is changing the dynamics of the business world in unprecedented ways. 

Conclusion

As we’ve explored, AI in customer feedback analysis is not just a trend; it’s a critical tool for modern businesses. With this technology, which we’ve focused on extensively, you can get an accurate picture of customers’ opinions. 

However, it’s important to remember that AI in customer feedback analysis works best when paired with human insight. Combining these two ensures more accurate, context-aware results.

Lumoa’s approach to AI in customer feedback analysis demonstrates this balance. By integrating advanced GPT technology, Lumoa enhances businesses’ interaction with and understanding of customer feedback.

Truly, AI in customer feedback analysis is key for those who seek a deeper understanding of their customers. And Lumoa is at the forefront of that technology, providing tools essential for businesses to stay connected and responsive to their customer base. As AI in customer feedback analysis continues to evolve, it promises to bring even greater insights and opportunities for businesses to thrive.

The post What is the Role of AI in Customer Feedback Analysis? appeared first on Lumoa.

Ask most business leaders and they’ll tell you customer experience (CX) is essential. Everyone and their mother knows that keeping your customers happy and investing in the relationship they have with your business will help you grow.

But customer feedback and insights are often the least accessible information in a business. 

Companies rarely have processes in place to regularly collect feedback. When they do, it’s usually scattered across multiple platforms, seen by only one or two teams, and rarely has a big impact.

Listening to the voice of the customer sounds appealing in theory. But how do you do that in the real world?

One of the easiest (and smartest) ways to start is by implementing a customer experience platform. 

What is a customer experience platform?

A customer experience platform is a set of tools designed to help a business manage and improve—you guessed it—the customer experience they provide. These tools typically include features such as customer data management, analytics and reporting, automation, and personalization. 

The purpose of a CX platform is to create a big-picture, comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Say a customer contacts your support team because they run into a problem. Another customer reaches out to your sales team to get a demo. A third customer sends you a LinkedIn message to ask about your pricing.

Typically, information about each customer would be stored only in the tool with which they interact.

A CX platform combines all of that.

Having a full view of customers across all touchpoints and from every channel means that you can better understand customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. Feedback from all of these sources is gathered in one place. It gives you a holistic view of your customers. 

With a modern CX platform you can now create more personalized customer experiences across the board, while also streamlining your customer feedback collection. 

The result? Actionable insights and learnings that help your business grow. 

Benefits of using a customer experience platform

CX platforms benefit your business in many ways. Their ultimate goal is to enable you to improve the customer experience. Improving your CX can result in:

• Better customer retention. 81% of customers make a second purchase after a great experience. 
• Increased lifetime value. 70% of consumers spend more with companies that offer seamless and personalized experiences. 
• Higher brand loyalty. 95% of customers report that customer experience is essential to brand loyalty.  

Improving your customer experience always pays off for your business. There’s one big question though: how do you know what to improve?

Most companies have a good gut feeling about the top issues customers care about, but it’s hard to quantify and prioritize those issues. That’s why a CX platform can make all the difference. 

A CX platform offers:

• Improved customer engagement. Having a 360-degree view of customers across all touchpoints means you can understand them better. You can tailor your interactions with them—across support, sales, and marketing—based on customer behaviors and preferences. 
• Personalization and targeting capabilities. It enables you to leverage customer data to provide personalized experiences. 
• Increased sales and revenue. Better targeting and customer engagement results in more sales. Real-time insights into customer preferences and trends makes it easier to identify opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and personalized promotions.
• Streamlined customer journey mapping. Having one centralized place where all customer data is tracked makes it easier to identify gaps and see how the customer journey develops. 
• Centralized data management. Feeding all data into one platform creates a single source of truth for customer data, making it more accessible and enabling faster decision-making. 

Potential drawbacks of using a customer experience platform

Any time you’re adding a new tool to your tech stack, it’s important to keep in mind the potential drawbacks. Customer experience platforms bring a ton of benefits, but a few potential drawbacks or challenges to keep in mind include:

• Integration challenges. A CX platform is most powerful if it integrates with all of your data sources. If integrations aren’t available or you can’t connect to the right systems via API, a specific CX platform might not be ideal for you. 
• High costs. CX platforms—especially those targeted at enterprise organizations—can be expensive to implement and maintain, especially for small businesses with limited budgets. 
• Dependence on third-party providers. Some tools require customization to be set up for your company in the best way. That immediately makes you more dependent on the provider and reduces the flexibility you have to manage customer insights internally. 
• Data privacy. CX platforms collect and store sensitive customer data, making them vulnerable to security breaches and privacy concerns.

Again, remember that every new tool brings potential risks and drawbacks. The important point to keep in mind is that as you’re doing your due diligence and evaluating tools, to see how each tool stacks up against the others. 

The trick is to select a CX platform that works best for your situation. 

How to choose a customer experience platform

Choosing the right customer experience platform can feel daunting. There are so many options available in the market.

Use this quick guide to help in your decision-making process:

1. Identify business needs. Defining your business objectives and the goals you want to achieve is essential. If you want to improve customer satisfaction, focusing on a platform that offers great personalization and real-time analytics might be best.
2. Evaluate features. While most platforms have some features in common, prioritizing the features most important to you is a great starting point. 
3. Consider customization options. Going for a robust platform that can integrate with all the tools you currently use (such as your survey software or helpdesk) makes sense, but you might have additional needs to consider. For example, some tools might let you download the data to run your own analytics, while others might not. 
4. Evaluate vendor support and expertise. Reliable customer support is often essential in getting the most out of your investment. Some vendors will even offer a one-on-one onboarding experience until their system is up and running.

You probably don’t invest your money in the stock market without some thought and reflection. The same approach pays off when investing in new software. Be strategic and you’ll increase your odds of success!

6 Customer Experience platforms to consider in 2024

Lumoa

Lumoa is a feedback analytics tool with functionalities that expand into customer experience management, such as surveys, impact calculation, alert notifications, and task assignment.

While most businesses today use NPS, CSAT, and other numbers to assess how happy their customers are, they miss a way to tell what actions will move the numbers up or down. That’s exactly what Lumoa is for.

Lumoa’s customer experience platform helps you get from raw feedback to meaningful insights. | Source

Pros of Lumoa

• With 60+ integrations, Lumoa can pull customer feedback from everywhere, both text and speech, in multiple languages.
• Lumoa’s proprietary AI analyses all feedback and points you to the items that have the biggest impact on your KPIs. The nice touch is that you have full control on AI model and can adapt them to your needs.
• Lumoa does not charge by seat, so you can share feedback, insights, actions with all colleagues at no additional price.

Cons of Lumoa

• Survey capabilities may not meet the needs of complex research projects that require more advanced features such as branching and randomisation.
• Companies that process less than 300 pieces of open text feedback per month might not be getting the most value out of the solution.
• Lumoa provides support and customer success managers, but no in-house consulting unit that other more expensive solution can afford.

Price: Lumoa pricing page

Free Trial: Available with own-data and one-click integrations

Clarabridge

Clarabridge (recently acquired by Qualtrics and rebranded to XM Discover) is a customer experience management platform that helps businesses collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. Its top features include sentiment analysis, text and speech analytics, personalized insights, real-time feedback, and machine learning.

Clarabridge/XM Discover allows for easy text and speech analytics | Source

Pros of Clarabridge

• Clarabridge was nominated a “leader” in The Forrester Wave.
• Having been around for quite some time, Clarabridge can leverage 150+ out-of-the-box industry models that can help you analyse customer feedback.
• Clarabridge offers advanced capabilities for text and speech analytics, making it possible for businesses to understand customer sentiment and identify trends.

Cons of Clarabridge

• While the industry-related topic models come from Clarabridge experience, they might not fit all needs and they can be rigid at times.
• Main focus is on feedback analysis, and features that are more typical of a customer experience platform might not be available.
• Since it is now part of the Qualtrics family, the brand and its capability are gradually being absorbed by the Qualtrics family of products.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Its features include survey creation, data analysis and reporting, customer journey mapping, and online reputation management.

Qualtrics offers a powerful survey creation and analysis tool | Source

Pros of Qualtrics

• Qualtrics is the market leader and has a strong reputation, particularly with enterprise companies. It is the safe choice.
• Surveys are Qualtrics’ bread and butter, and there is probably not a logic that Qualtrics surveys cannot manage.
• The breadth of features that Qualtrics offers makes it tick most boxes for most needs a business might have.

Cons of Qualtrics

• Being the market leader, Qualtrics does not come at a cheap price. The pricing structure (based on # of feedback, # of users, and features) can also be complex to understand.
• Its core focus is on collecting and analysing survey data, it was originally built for academic research, and as such analysing customer feedback from a variety of sources can be challenging.
• The product is complex, and for people who are not familiar with research practices, it might have a steep learning curve.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Create your 30 day free trial account

Aiwo

Aiwo specializes in customer contact intelligence. Analytics derived from customer contacts are used by the company to reduce costs, identify operational inefficiencies, and improve service for large B2C businesses. AIWO’s CX platform gathers data from multiple sources and integrates them into one platform to provide accurate insights into a business’s current situation.

Aiwo CX SaaS tool gives you an understanding from multiple angles. | Source

Pros of Aiwo

• Aiwo is one of the most affordable solutions in this group.
• The interface is user-friendly and that makes it easier for users to navigate the platform and get acquainted with it.
• Aiwo has a good presence in Finland, which makes it a good option for brands who process customer feedback in Finnish.

Cons of Aiwo

• Aiwo’s solution comes with little customisation, both in terms of dashboard and reporting, and in terms of topic models.
• It is a pure analytics solution, and as such it does not process KPIs scores (such as NPS, CSat, etc.), and does not evaluate the impact of different topics on said KPIs.
• Aiwo does not provide information on associated words, trends, type of customers, and this might limit the possibility to get insights that can translate into action.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Zenloop

Zenloop is a Customer Experience Management Platform that helps businesses turn customer insights into action. As a result of its evolution into an operating system, Zenloop has been able to address key issues associated with customer experience, including efficiency, analytics paralysis, and low ROI. Dissatisfied customers can be identified using real-time analysis and aggregated reports.

Zenloop UI shows NPS score and focuses on customer insights that can be translated into meaningful initiatives. | Source

Pros of Zenloop

• Zenloop’s core is on NPS, so it’s a good option for business interested in measuring NPS only.
• It provides value also for companies who process less than 200 pieces of feedback per month.
• On top of the NPS functionality, Zenloop provides automatic task assignment, which makes it an interesting option to drive action from insights.

Cons of Zenloop

• The breadth of features is quite limited, yet arguably the cost of Zenloop is not very different from other options on this list.
• While it provides analysis of open text feedback, Zenloop users might have to edit the topic models manually to ensure that it captures relevant and actionable feedback.
• Zenloop does not provide information on associated words, trends, type of customers, and more, that other solutions instead do provide.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Medallia

Medallia is a cloud-based customer experience management platform for analyzing customer feedback across multiple channels. Its primary features include survey creation, sentiment analysis, social listening, and AI-powered insights.

Medallia’s analytics can be viewed across the customer journey | Source

Pros of Medallia

• Medallia UI is visually appealing and gratifying.
• The breadth of feature is vast (including a mobile app to keep management in the loop) and it meets most of the needs a business might have when it comes to customer experience.
• A part from the solution, Medallia boasts a high quality in-house consultancy service that can help companies with their CX challenges.

Cons of Medallia

• The cost of the solution is on the high end of the spectrum.
• Obtaining insights from the analysis of open text feedback might result in a slow process, as it often needs input from an insight professional and some additional clicks that might hinder the efficiency.
• The use of Medallia is not always intuitive, and to make the most of it, users might have to go through extensive training.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Choosing the right customer experience platform for your business

Selecting the right CX platform depends on what you want to achieve.

Some CX platforms try to build solutions that work across many business areas, which makes it easy for you to centralize and simplify your tech stack. These tools can be great if you’re just getting started, but can cost a lot of time and effort to migrate to if you’re already using other tools.

If you’ve already invested in tools for managing customer interactions—like telephony, a helpdesk, and live chat software—you’re better off building on that foundation. Take a close look at more specialized customer experience platforms that shore up areas of opportunity, be it customer journey mapping or in-depth analytics.

Lumoa helps separate the signal from the noise to identify truly meaningful insights that will drive your business forward. Book a free demo with us today!

The post Guide to Choosing a Customer Experience Platform in 2024 appeared first on Lumoa.

Customer feedback is a precious resource for understanding what’s effective and what needs improvement. However, manually sifting through and evaluating this feedback can be incredibly time-consuming.

Around 30% of IT professionals worldwide have reported that their organizations are witnessing time-saving benefits thanks to implementing new AI and automation software.

In this article, we’ll explore five innovative and creative ways to leverage AI for sentiment analysis. From enhancing customer support experiences to predicting market trends, AI empowers businesses across industries to make data-driven decisions that resonate with their audience.

Traditional sentiment analysis

Traditional sentiment analysis, often called manual sentiment analysis, relies on human analysts to evaluate and interpret text data to determine the sentiment expressed within it. This process involves reading and assessing the content to classify it as positive, negative, or neutral. 

Analysts might also assign a numerical score to indicate the intensity of sentiment. Traditional methods often use sentiment lexicons or predefined lists of words and phrases associated with specific sentiments.

However, this manual sentiment analysis has its limitations and challenges. Firstly, it is time-consuming and labor-intensive, making analyzing large volumes of data impractical. Human analysts can also introduce bias, as their interpretation of sentiment can be subjective.  

AI-driven sentiment analysis can be a valuable tool for businesses that seek more accurate and scalable sentiment analysis solutions.

Types of sentiment analysis

Within sentiment analysis, various types are tailored to specific use cases:

• Aspect-based sentiment analysis. This type focuses on breaking down text into specific aspects or features and assessing sentiment towards each one. Regarding a product review, it can analyze sentiments related to various product attributes, such as design, performance, and price
• Fine-grained sentiment analysis. Fine-grained sentiment analysis goes beyond the typical positive, negative, or neutral classifications. It aims to provide a more nuanced understanding of sentiment, often categorizing it into multiple levels, such as very positive, somewhat positive, neutral, somewhat negative, and very negative.
• Emotion detection. Emotion detection involves identifying and categorizing the emotions expressed in the textual content. This type of sentiment analysis aims to understand whether specific emotions are involved, such as happiness, frustration, or sadness.
• Intent analysis. Intent analysis delves into understanding the intentions or objectives behind a user’s text. For example, it can determine whether a customer’s comment implies a purchasing intent or help from customer support.

AI and machine learning are key in performing sentiment analysis using two primary approaches: 

• Rule-based approaches use predefined linguistic rules and patterns to classify sentiment, making them useful for simple cases. 
• Machine learning-based methods, like deep learning algorithms, utilize vast datasets to train models that can automatically identify sentiment. These machine-learning models can handle more complex language nuances and adapt to different domains and languages, making them a preferred choice for sentiment analysis tasks.

Five creative ways to use AI for sentiment analysis

AI has opened up opportunities for sentiment analysis beyond its conventional applications. Here are five creative ways to use AI for sentiment analysis:

Use AI to detect emotions and provide better support experiences

AI tools can assess emotions conveyed in substantial text inputs, such as customer reviews or feedback. These algorithms classify the sentiment as positive, neutral, or negative, providing valuable insight into customers’ feelings.

Traditional manual analysis of extensive text data is impractical and time-consuming. With its natural language processing capabilities, AI excels at quickly processing large volumes of text. 

It can help companies pinpoint areas for improvement within customer feedback. This information can later be used to assist and train chatbots to provide more human-like experiences.

Once emotions are detected, AI chatbots and virtual assistants can assess customer sentiment during conversations and tailor responses accordingly. For instance, if a customer expresses frustration in their feedback, an AI-powered chatbot can be trained to respond with empathy and understanding, offering solutions that align with the detected sentiment.

Detect liked or disliked product or service features 

AI for sentiment analysis is a game-changer, not just for marketers. Developers and UX professionals can also tap into its potential to enhance products and services. This aspect of AI sentiment analysis can pinpoint product features that receive praise or criticism.

Let’s say a mobile app receives positive sentiment regarding its user-friendly interface but negative comments about slow loading times. AI can flag these issues, clearly defining where the focus should be. Dev teams can make targeted interface changes and prioritize enhancements directly impacting customer experience.

Unveil and predict market trends

AI goes beyond customer data analysis. Using NLP algorithms like RNNs and LSTMs, it analyzes vast textual data from social media and news to spot emerging topics and sentiment shifts.

Businesses can extract these insights to adjust their strategies according to market trends and consumer preferences. AI has become a vital tool for navigating the ever-changing landscape of consumer behavior and market dynamics.

Here are three examples of AI applications in unveiling market trends:

• Social media sentiment analysis: Some AI-powered tools can analyze social media conversations and identify trends and shifts in customer sentiment related to specific products, brands, or industries. For example, companies can track brand mentions on X, formerly known as Twitter, to track public opinion and identify emerging trends.
• News and content analysis: AI can process vast amounts of news articles and online content to detect emerging topics, keywords, and sentiment changes within specific industries. This allows businesses to stay informed about the latest trends and adapt their strategies accordingly.
• Customer behavior analysis: AI-driven data analysis can reveal patterns in consumer behavior by examining large datasets of customer interactions, purchasing histories, and online activity. This information helps businesses anticipate market trends and make data-driven decisions, such as launching new products or adjusting pricing strategies.

Monitor and understand brand perception 

Monitoring and understanding brand perception is critical, and AI-driven sentiment analysis has revolutionized this process. Applying AI-powered sentiment analysis to market research gives companies a multifaceted view of how customers perceive their services or products. This involves analyzing information from various sources, including customer reviews, surveys, and social media conversations.

AI-driven sentiment analysis can assess whether a brand’s messaging aligns with customer perceptions. This alignment check empowers companies to refine their communication strategies, adopt a customer-centric approach, and cultivate a brand image that genuinely connects with its audience.

Product and employee satisfaction surveys

Through sentiment analysis, AI can determine whether the feedback is positive, neutral, or negative and identify specific product or service aspects that are being praised or criticized. This allows businesses to gain valuable insights into customer perceptions, uncover emerging trends, and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Here are some case studies to show how AI is making this happen:

• Bank of America employs AI-driven sentiment analysis to capture VoC and identify customer pain points. Erica, their advanced virtual financial assistant, has had over one billion client interactions. This award-winning AI technology, launched in 2018, has assisted almost 32 million clients with daily financial tasks. This data-driven approach allows Bank of America to proactively enhance its services, ultimately improving the overall banking experience.
• Ford uses advanced AI-driven sentiment analysis to carefully study customer feedback, helping them gain valuable insights into vehicle performance. This real-time feedback analysis has empowered Ford to identify concerns and implement necessary vehicle enhancements. As a result, Ford continues to deliver an improved driving experience to its customers while staying ahead in the automotive industry.
• T-Mobile developed Natural Language Understanding machine learning models that extract meaning from vast textual data. They manage an extensive dataset comprising hundreds of thousands of daily customer requests and a knowledge repository containing answers to potential customer inquiries. These machine learning models forecast the information required to address specific customer needs, like bill payments or adding phone lines, and then present it to customer service agents. T-Mobile employs AI-powered sentiment analysis to detect and resolve issues, reducing customer complaints.

AI for sentiment analysis extends its utility beyond customer feedback to internal processes. It can be used to evaluate workplace satisfaction and understand the employee’s voice within the company. 

By analyzing employee feedback, whether through surveys, performance reviews, or other channels, AI can help identify areas where improvements can be made in the workplace.

Benefits and challenges of using AI for sentiment analysis

Using AI for sentiment analysis comes with substantial benefits, including:

• Efficiency: AI algorithms can swiftly assess sentiment across numerous texts, making it ideal for handling large-scale data, such as social media comments, reviews, or feedback strategies.
• Scalability: AI systems can effortlessly scale their analysis capabilities to handle an increasing volume of data. Whether a business is dealing with a small customer base or a massive global audience, AI can adapt and accommodate the workload.
• Accuracy: AI algorithms continuously improve their accuracy by learning from large datasets. This enables them to identify subtle nuances, providing more precise and reliable results over time.

Challenges associated with AI sentiment analysis include:

• Context understanding: AI sometimes struggles to grasp the context of language, leading to misinterpretations of sentiments. This is particularly challenging when dealing with sarcasm, irony, or cultural nuances.
• Data privacy: Gathering and analyzing customer data for sentiment analysis raises concerns about data privacy and security.
• Bias and fairness: AI models may inadvertently incorporate biases in training data, which can lead to unfair results. Efforts must be made to reduce bias and ensure fairness in sentiment analysis.

Final thoughts

When it comes to understanding customer feedback, AI-powered sentiment analysis can be a powerful tool. AI enhances analysis accuracy and efficiency by delivering real-time insights. However, ethical concerns, including bias, privacy, and transparency, require consideration.

Exploring these innovative approaches in your domain can be rewarding. AI sentiment analysis trends will include natural language processing, multimodal analysis, contextual analysis, explainable AI, and real-time analysis. Embrace these innovations for a competitive edge and improved customer experiences.

The post 5 Creative Ways to Use AI for Sentiment Analysis appeared first on Lumoa.

Gone are the days when businesses could afford to sit on piles of survey data, waiting for end-of-quarter reviews to make sense of them. Today, customer feedback is immediate, public, and powerful; not to mention louder. It’s out there shaping opinions about your brand before you’ve even had your first coffee of the day.

It’s true, collecting feedback is one hurdle, but analysing it? That’s another level. Because let’s face it, the volume of feedback is overwhelming. In this sea of opinions, valuable insights often slip through the cracks — the kind of insights that can steer your business in the right direction or send it off the cliff.

So, what’s the secret to analysing customer feedback in real time? How do we sift through the noise and spot the gems that can guide our next business move? Stick around. This isn’t just another article; it’s going to be your playbook for understanding the real value of real-time feedback analysis.

Why a Structured Approach Matters in Feedback Analysis

Before we jump into the ‘how,’ let’s talk about the ‘why.’ Why is it so crucial to have a structured approach to analysing customer feedback? Well, as mentioned earlier, opinions are formed in seconds and shared just as quickly; businesses can’t afford to be slow. But speed without strategy? That’s just noise without direction.

We found out in our research on the state of customer experience (CX) that more companies are focusing on CX than ever before. Primarily because customers now demand more from their brands. Astonishingly, 4 out of 5 customers today believe that the experience a business provides is as significant as its products and services.

Furthermore, 66% expect brands to understand their unique needs. However, there’s a gap: 54% feel companies fail at providing the right information, and a staggering 66% feel treated like mere statistics.

The challenges companies face in implementing a solid CX strategy are multifaceted:

• Budget and Profitability: Investing in a strategy, deploying solutions, monitoring metrics, and converting insights into actionable plans requires significant resources.
• Technical Variables: Overcoming ineffective data silos, outdated tools, and inadequate personalization options remain daunting tasks for CX-driven companies.
• Human Interactions: Instilling the value of consistent CX best practices in team members is challenging, irrespective of the budget size or advanced technical solutions.

Moreover, customer expectations are increasing: 76% anticipate consistent interactions across departments, 74% use multiple channels for transactions, 52% expect always-personalized offers, 88% want companies to speed up digital initiatives, and 61% feel they’ve lost control over their personal data.

Customer feedback is everywhere – in your survey responses, online reviews, social media comments, and more. You can find valuable insights, but only if you know what to look for. Without a clear, structured method, you’re not just missing out on valuable input; you’re potentially misinterpreting the feedback you do manage to catch. And let’s not even get started on the data overload!

That’s where a structured approach comes in. It’s not about collecting feedback for the sake of it; it’s about gathering insights you can act on. Insights that will not only meet but exceed the modern customer’s expectations, and in doing so, propel your business forward.

Timing is Everything: How to Collect Customer Feedback at the Perfect Moment

In understanding the ‘why’ behind real-time feedback analysis, we recognize the need for immediacy and relevance. Now, let’s explore the ‘how,’ starting with the element of timing. Customer stories, experiences, and what motivates them are the best ways to get to know them. And timing is everything.

How does this work in the real world? If you send out a feedback request long after the customer has interacted with your product or service, you’re not just getting stale news; you’re missing out on the heat-of-the-moment insights that could drive your business forward.

So, how do you nail the right timing? Here are some practical steps.

1. Be Proactive with Prompts: Implement systems that automatically ask for feedback after key customer interactions. Whether it’s a purchase, a customer support call, or a product return, that’s your cue to jump in and ask how it went.

2. Make it Easy and Immediate: Feedback tools should be a no-brainer to use. Think of one-click ratings, short surveys, or quick polls right on your app or website. The easier it is, the more likely customers will share their thoughts on the fly.

3. Keep it Relevant: Tailor your feedback questions to the specific interaction. Generic queries get generic answers. But ask about their recent experience? Now you’re getting the good stuff.

4. Respect Their Time: Don’t bombard customers with requests. You need to be strategic about when and how often you reach out. You will lose their attention if you do it too much. Not enough, and you’re flying blind.

Word of advice: there’s no one-size-fits-all strategy here. The best approach is the one that fits your customers’ journey. Additionally, there are various customer feedback practices that you can follow. Practicing it will grant you actionable feedback. This strategic approach is a significant step towards achieving success.

Data to Action: Efficient Strategies for Analysing Customer Feedback

After establishing the importance of timely feedback collection, we must address another core challenge: transforming this abundance of data into actionable insights.

Picture this: you’ve just rolled out a new product or service, and you’re on pins and needles waiting for the feedback to roll in. But we already know that collecting feedback is only half the battle. Sifting through it all and figuring out your next move fast is the real deal.

Here’s our game plan for this part:

1. Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize: Not all feedback is created equal. You can use text analytics tools to identify trends and urgent issues. That way, you’re not just putting out fires; you’re making strategic improvements that matter.

2. Empower Your Team: Build a CX team that has access to real-time feedback and the authority to act on it. Whether it’s a customer service rep who can offer an instant apology discount or a product manager who can fast-track a bug fix, immediate action can turn a critic into a fan.

3. Measure the Impact: Be aware of how your changes will impact customer satisfaction, retention, and profitability. Remember, the goal here is strategic growth.

4. Choose the Right Tools: Invest in CX platforms that don’t just collect feedback but analyse it in real time, providing clear, actionable insights that your whole team can access and act on.

Before we move on: Don’t (and shouldn’t) react to every piece of feedback whether you’re doing it manually or not. Build a system that helps you filter out the noise and find the critical insights. That’s how you stay agile, informed, and ahead of the curve.

Beyond Listening: How to Effectively Respond and Act on Customer Feedback

We’ve all been there — a bad experience leads to a complaint, which sometimes disappears into the void, followed by a generic apology way too late.

It’s not just about haircuts gone wrong; this applies to any customer experience, from downloading software to waiting on a service technician. The point is, a delayed or insincere response can turn a small hiccup into a deal-breaker.

So, how do you ensure feedback doesn’t just get collected but gets acted on in a way that wins back hearts? Check out these 4 points to remember:

1. Personalize the Follow-Up: A generic apology won’t cut it. Personalize your responses based on the issue and the customer’s history with your company. Make sure they know you care about them.

2. Take Action and Communicate: Fix the issue, of course, but also let the customer know what you’ve done. This communication is important; it turns a closed loop into a continuing conversation.

3. Check Back: Don’t be afraid to follow up again later to confirm the customer is satisfied or to ask for more feedback. It shows your personality and commitment.

4. Learn and Improve: Use this feedback to make systemic changes in your product or service to reduce the likelihood of the problem recurring.

Closing the feedback loop isn’t just damage control; it’s an opportunity. Handle it right, and you’ll retain customers and possibly turn them into your biggest advocates.

Methods in Analysing Customer Feedback

There are multiple ways to analyse customer feedback. And with these methods, you can uncover trends, emotions, and quantify your customers’ expectations. Let’s look at the top ways in analysing customer feedback:

1. Sentiment Analysis: It’s the emotional tone behind the words. Using AI, it interprets feedback to categorize responses like happiness, frustration, and disappointment. It’s like having a mood ring for your customer reviews, but way more accurate.

2. Text Analytics: Go beyond surface-level responses. This technique examines open-ended feedback, identifying common keywords, phrases, and topics. It’s about seeing the forest and the trees, understanding not just what terms are popping up, but also how they’re interconnected.

3. Conversation Analysis: Look into customer conversations. This allows you to see the entire dialogue, helping you understand the customer’s journey and experience. By focusing on keywords and categorizing feedback, you can identify patterns and issues that need immediate attention. What an excellent way to listen to your customers!

Automation for Real time Analysis

Generative AI exploded like a bomb this year and is rapidly branching out. With 4 out of 5 customers demanding more personalized, immediate interactions, businesses are scrambling to adapt.

The rise of self-service and automated customer processes reflects more than a trend; it’s a loud and clear message from consumers craving efficiency and authenticity. Generative AI tools like GPT don’t just process feedback; they understand it, diving into the emotional undertones and subtle hints hidden in your customers’ words.

Considering the world is racing toward deeper, more meaningful customer experiences, you have to ask yourself: are you keeping up, or are you lagging behind?

Conclusion

Okay, let’s wrap this up: Analysing customer feedback in real time will level-up your customer experience. Imagine knowing what your customer thinks right at the moment they’re thinking about it. That’s powerful stuff.

With customer experience analytics tools today, you can sort through this feedback fast. This process helps you determine what requires immediate attention and what can wait.

But remember, collecting feedback is just the beginning. Start engaging in a dialogue with your customers. Had a hiccup with a customer? Reach out, extend a genuine apology, and address the issue. You’d be surprised how a simple, sincere ‘we’re on it!’ can turn a critic into a fan. In fact, studies, like the one from Carey School of Business, show that a heartfelt apology can skyrocket customer satisfaction by up to 74%.

Sure, you’ll receive an array of feedback, and while it’s tempting to dive into action mode, the real art lies in stepping back, pausing, and connecting the dots. You have to look at the big picture, discerning patterns, and understand what’s enhancing the customer experience and what’s pulling it down.

Setting up a real-time customer feedback system seems daunting, and yes, it does require resources. But consider this: the insights you’ll gain aren’t just about fixing what’s broken; they’re also about forging stronger, more meaningful connections with your customers. And the beauty of it? You’re not in this alone.

There’s a whole arsenal of guides and tools designed to help you design your CX strategy. The bottom line is that analysing customer feedback in real time doesn’t just fix problems; it develops communities around your brand. Get it right, and your customers won’t just stick around; they’ll become your most powerful advocates.

The post How to Analyse Customer Feedback: A Real-Time Approach appeared first on Lumoa.

In customer experience, as with any other business endeavor, failure to plan is planning to fail. That’s why customer experience strategy plays such an essential role in determining how well a business performs. It involves creating a plan to elevate every customer’s experience across every touchpoint they have with your company. 

Customer experience is a wide-ranging phenomenon that comes to life the moment a potential consumer becomes aware of a brand. Consider the following scenario: A customer learns a new airline will be operating flights in their city. Their customer experience will begin long before they board their first flight with the new airline. Booking tickets through the website, checking in online,  and attractive introductory offers – all these contribute to customer experience even though the passenger hasn’t even reached the airport. 

This is the secret ingredient to retaining customers, increasing sales, and succeeding as an organization.

Having a customer experience strategy template helps companies formulate actionable plans that deliver results for both the customers and the business.

Understanding Customer Experience Strategy

Before we examine the finer points of developing a customer experience strategy, let’s take a moment to cover the basics. In the simplest terms, a customer experience strategy is a comprehensive set of plans that are put into action to ensure meaningful, positive, and repeated interactions with customers. Each customer experience strategy requires clearly defined goals. The steps needed to achieve those goals should also be documented when preparing a strategy.

Back in the day, customer experience wasn’t always given this much importance. In the 1970s and 1980s, when the field was still in its infancy, customer experience was hardly a factor in determining which goods consumers bought. Instead, the “Four Ps” (Product, Price, Promotion, and Place) were the key elements in determining purchase.

The development of the internet helped put customer experience on the map in the 1990s, and now we live in a time where many companies are putting more effort into it. With customers willing to pay higher prices for quality service, many companies are looking to upgrade their customer experience capabilities. 

Before developing a customer experience strategy, you need to identify the metrics that will measure your performance. You can’t blindly implement a strategy without seeing if it works right? Criteria like Net Promoter Score (NPS) or Customer Satisfaction Score (CSat) will give you a fair idea of what customers’ opinions are like. Creating customer personas and mapping customer journeys is another vital facet of customer experience strategy, which we will explore in more detail later on.

Customer experience is the responsibility of every department in the company, not just the client-facing ones. It requires cross-departmental cooperation to put together a truly effective customer experience strategy. It should include inputs from all stakeholders within the organization and take into account factors like:

• Competitor behavior
• Consumer research
• Marketplace data
• Company vision and mission

Differentiating Customer Service from Customer Experience

Customer service is the tip of the spear when it comes to customer experience. But that doesn’t mean the two are interchangeable. Customer service is merely one aspect of a larger whole: Customer experience.

Picture a Venn diagram, where a smaller circle (customer service) is nestled entirely within a larger circle (customer experience). That’s the perfect visual representation of the relationship between customer service and customer experience. While they do seem superficially similar and appear to have overlapping areas of interest, there are some important distinctions that must be made between the two.

• Degree of Control

Customer service can be tightly managed, but customer experience is more challenging to control. A company can have the best, trained customer service team providing the highest level of service, but they have no influence over how a customer perceives their brand. All the company can do is try to ensure that its products, services, and marketing are conveying the right message and delivering value to customers.

• Key Metrics

There are many metrics that can be used to measure the level of customer service and the quality of the customer experience. Customer effort score (CES), CSAT, and NPS are examples of metrics applicable in either case. But since customer experience has a broader outlook than customer service, additional data like repeat sales figures and customer retention rate are also taken into consideration.

• Accountability

Whether your organization refers to them as customer support executives, relationship managers, or any other appellation, the task of customer service falls squarely on the shoulders of one team and department. Customer experience is not so insular. Every department across the organization — from marketing to product development to sales — shares the responsibility of providing customers with the best experience.

Why Customer Experience Matters

The importance of customer experience in long-term success cannot be overstated enough. Having loyal patrons who do the work of converting new customers through word-of-mouth publicity (and at no extra cost, too!) is invaluable when it comes to increasing your brand’s market share. And it’s not just wishful thinking; this assertion can be backed by research.

The Customer Experience Report from PwC’s Consumer Intelligence series found that 73% of its surveyed customers made purchasing decisions based on their experience with a company. A rewarding interaction with a company is usually much more effective in winning over a customer compared to an advertisement.

Today, customers consider their experience with a company just as important as pricing when buying products. And if you offer a premium experience, people will be willing to pay. Those surveyed in PwC’s report were willing to pay anywhere from 7% to 16% more for a product from a company that offered a good experience.

The Foundation of a Customer Experience Strategy

A clear vision is at the heart of every effective customer experience strategy. This vision entails having clear goals. When setting goals for customer experience strategy, remember that each of them needs to be SMART: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. With this framework, you will be able to define exactly what is missing in your customer experience strategy and come up with steps to replace it. 

For example, imagine 15% of your customers leave an unsatisfactory rating after calling your customer support helpline. In this context, reducing that number to 5% would be considered a SMART goal.

Once you’ve identified your goals, it’s time to get to work. One of the most critical aspects of creating a customer experience strategy is creating buyer personas and mapping their customer journeys.

Creating Buyer Personas for Customer Experience Strategy

The whole point of a customer experience strategy is to be able to anticipate your buyers’ needs. And to know what the customers need, you must first understand who they are. That’s why every customer experience strategy needs to include buyer personas.

A buyer persona is a theoretical customer- a character if you will- created after going through market research and consumer data. Personas act as stand-ins for your target audience, with each distinct persona representing a different demographic. Simulating how each persona will interact with your company prepares you to handle the demands of actual customers in the market. For example, a busy working mom might not have time to participate in a customer survey, but a college student might.

This exercise of creating buyer personas is critical. It lets you identify the demographic makeup of your customer base. How many segments are they spread across? Are they all facing the same pain point that can be solved with your product, or does it vary from segment to segment? Can solutions developed for one segment be applied to others? These important questions are answered when you create at least four buyer personas.

Along with buyer personas, you also have to map the customer journey. Every point of engagement between your company and the customer needs to be plotted on this journey. Then, each of them must be inspected for potential pain points to the customer before appropriate adjustments to improve the experience are made. 

The Four Pillars of Customer Experience Strategy

Along with buyer personas and customer journeys, a comprehensive customer experience strategy only comes together once the following bases have been covered.

• Competitive Insight

To deliver a unique customer experience, your company needs to stand out from the competition. Carry out an analysis of industry leaders and your closest competitors’ customer experience strategies. Compare your NPS and CSAT against those of your competition to see how you match up. The advantage of diligently performing competitive analysis is that you can learn from your rivals’ successes while steering clear of their mistakes.

Customer reviews and mock tests of the customer support system are ways to learn about your competition. Once you’ve gathered information about competitors’ strategies, perform a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) analysis to identify areas for improvement. 

• Consumer Research

Your work in creating buyer personas is just one part of your consumer research. You also need to engage with real customers in the market. Connect with your existing customer base through surveys and feedback forms. Digital technology makes gathering inputs from large sample groups of customers a simple matter of sending out emails. 

When working with buyer personas, put yourself in your customer’s shoes. Approach your own customer support infrastructure as an outsider, and look for problems that could derail your experience. 

• Market Trend Data

Look out for new customer experience trends sweeping the market. Currently, many companies are finding ways to incorporate artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots in their customer support network. Platforms like Lumoa have already integrated GPT features to help users with text analytics and feedback summaries. 

• Mission & Vision

One quality all customers look for is reliability and consistency. Knowing that your company upholds a certain standard of customer experience will encourage satisfied customers to give you repeat business. In order to promote a cohesive customer experience across your organization, each department must share the same mission and vision. Communicating this mission and vision to every stakeholder will guarantee that your customer experience strategy stays on track at every stage of the cycle.

Steps to Create a Customer Experience Strategy

Delighting your customers to the point that they continue to support your business over the competition isn’t easy, but it’s certainly worthwhile. Creating a customer experience strategy is a multi-step process, which unfolds as outlined below.

• Review Your Current Strategy

If yours is an established business, it will likely already have a customer service team engaging with your buyers. This provides a great starting point. When you review your existing customer service pipeline, any deficiencies it contains will turn up. 

Your company needs to focus on more than just customer service, with an eye for the overall customer experience.  To effectively transition from mere customer service to a holistic customer experience, ensure there are no holdovers from the defective system. Out with the old, in with the new. 

• Aligning With Company Goals

The best way to grow your business is to admit that there’s always room for improvement. 

The goals you set for your company will paint a fair picture of what you imagine the ideal customer experience to look like. 

For example, maybe your online clothing store’s goal is to outsell your competition next quarter. With that company goal in mind, your customer experience strategy needs to work toward prompting customers to add more items to their cart every time they shop. This would mean revamping the recommendations on your website to offer more relevant results to shopping customers. 

Whatever your goals, ensure they are realistic, achievable, and, most importantly, aligned with your company’s overall vision.

• Understanding Your Audience

How many audience segments is your product intended for? The answer to that question can only be found in some consumer research. To ensure you design an experience that all your customers can enjoy, you must segment your audience based on behavior, feedback, and preferences.

As mentioned above, one easy way to develop an understanding of your audience is by creating buyer personas who act as fictional representatives of very real audience segments. When you know the likes and dislikes of the different groups you’re selling to, that’s when you can best serve the demographic.

• Mapping Out Different Touchpoints

How does a consumer go from never having heard of your company to a loyal, repeat customer? This transformative arc is their customer (or buyer) journey.

Right from the moment buyers first come across your company’s advertisements to long after they’ve made their first purchase, they will interact with your company and its representatives multiple times. Each of those interactions is a stop on their customer journey, whether it occurs online, offline, on social media, or on any other platform. Once you’ve identified the sequence of interactions that lead to repeat business, it’s time to fine-tune the process by finding ways to reduce the pain points and problem areas that crop up within them.

• Setting Goals and Budgeting

For best results with customer experience, you need to be hitting your targets regularly. Your chief goal should be broken down into more manageable objectives that can be completed according to a timetable. For example, your main goal is to increase your customer satisfaction score by 20% over four months. That means you need to see a monthly rise of at least 5% to achieve consistent results.

Focusing on smaller, easily accomplished targets allows a company to smartly use its resources at each stage of the customer journey.

• Action Planning for Each Journey Stage

Remember customers may not work for your company, but they are the most crucial element of the entire customer experience. Once their journey is mapped out, find ways to elevate the customer experience at every touch point.

Take the example of an auto repair shop. Customers dropping off their cars will be happy to have an informed agent guide them through the required work. When it’s time to pick up the car, they won’t want to wait for a long time. Training agents able to answer all the customer’s questions and to reduce wait times for outbound vehicles are essential additions to the customer journey in this example, and similar ones can be seen across industries.

• Team Objectives and Responsibilities

Customer experience is the shared responsibility of your entire organization, not just those in client-facing roles. Right from the office custodian keeping the meeting room clean and tidy for client visits to the corporate leader making a speech at an industry event, every employee of the company is a stakeholder when it comes to providing a stellar customer experience. When the strategy for customer experience is clear and shared with all team members, working together to achieve targets becomes far simpler. 

• Measuring and Evaluating Objectives

When you set goals, identify the main metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that you will use to gauge success. Having a quantifiable, tangible representation of their efforts will motivate your team to do better.

In making a customer experience strategy, metrics like Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) are important to evaluate performance. Also, look at industry trends and your ranking compared to competitors to measure how well your customer service strategy is working.

• Continuous Improvement

Your company’s relationship with its customers is dynamic and constantly changing. Once the customers have become accustomed to a standard of service, they will naturally expect more from your company. Your customer experience strategy should reflect these dynamics. Constant improvement is the only path to sustainable customer satisfaction.

Implementing Your Customer Experience Strategy

Just as technology has made doing business more convenient, it has also opened up new frontiers for customer experience. This, in turn, has led to the rise of products like Lumoa, a software designed to cut through the clutter in customer feedback. Using Lumoa lets you identify performance gaps and actionable insights in your customer experience strategy. With the power of Lumoa’s predictive analytics capabilities, you will be in the driver’s seat when it comes to anticipating customer needs and trends. 

It comes packed with tools that have a positive impact on your customer experience, including downloadable customer experience strategy templates to help you get started. As more companies start to realize the value of providing quality customer experience, tools like Lumoa will become even more widely used.

How Lumoa Helped Johnson Outdoors Raise Their NPS

Johnson Outdoors, an American retailer of fishing equipment, camping gear, and other outdoor recreational goods, was struggling to handle its NPS feedback manually. With two teams struggling to cope with approximately 300,000 consumer contacts per year, there was a massive backlog of uncollected feedback.

Switching to automated NPS collection and analysis proved to be the game changer. Lumoa surveys automatically collected NPS results and shared them with Johnson Outdoors’ customer service team, allowing them to analyze the feedback and follow up with customers more efficiently. The new customer experience strategy worked, and Johnson Outdoors was able to comfortably meet its goal of having an NPS score over 50.

Start Building Your Customer Experience Strategy Today

The importance of customer experience will only increase in the coming years. The Customer Experience Management Market Report from Markets and Markets, published in 2021, predicted steady growth for the sector over the next five years. From a global market worth $9.5 billion in 2021 to a predicted market worth of $16.9 billion in 2026, it’s clear that investing in a customer experience solution like Lumoa is worthwhile.

Having a solid customer experience strategy in place delivers returns on investment over time. Impressed first-time buyers become repeat customers, who then go on to become brand evangelists of their own accord. This attracts new customers, grows sales, and solidifies your brand as a force in the market. 

Every aspect of the customer experience is carefully considered in Lumoa. The first CX platform to offer GPT. Now, all employees can tap into any customer feedback, get clear answers, and take actions with a positive influence on KPIs. Try it for FREE.

The post The Definitive Guide to Creating a Standout Customer Experience Strategy Template appeared first on Lumoa.

Customer Experience (CX) hinges upon customers’ sentiments. Happy customers are satisfied customers who will return to help your business. One surefire way to deliver happiness to customers is to create a culture of happiness within the company.

This article addresses the importance of happiness in customer experience, explains how happiness can drive growth and become a competitive advantage, and is inspired by the fireside chat “How can we use the science of happiness in CX?” that Carlos Del Corral, Lumoa CEO, had with Rosaria Cirillo, a renowned customer experience professional and a certified happiness expert.

Happiness and Customer Experience

Weaving happiness into your company’s customer experience strategy requires a change in perspective and leadership. Rather than being purely transactional, your strategy and leadership should focus on the following three elements that Rosaria defines as the basis of HCX (the future of CX) and Happiness Driven Growth:

• Human-Centered Experiences: Build a business model that acknowledges and encourages the desires of customers and employees to live a peaceful and sustainable life.
• Happiness-Contributing Experiences: Create and deliver meaningful and life-enriching products and services that make customers and employees feel empowered.
• Heart-Connecting Experiences: Since people tend to make decisions driven by emotion before justifying them with logic, find ways to connect emotionally with customers and create a work culture that allows them to lead from the heart.

When your approach to customer experience incorporates these three elements, customers and employees come away feeling pleasant and enriching emotions. Understanding emotions and what triggers them is at the core of every customer experience strategy.

Based on the learning from Marshall Rosenberg NVC, Rosaria invited us to see (customer) emotions as the consequence of meeting needs or not and to simply see emotions as “pleasant/enriching” or “unpleasant/depleting”, instead of labeling them as positive or negative, which includes judgment and is less empowering.

When considering that “unpleasant” emotions are mainly a result of unmet needs, your customer experience strategy can promote happiness by proactively meeting your customers’ needs and by empowering your employees to address these needs.

Linking Happiness and Customer Needs

American psychologist Abraham Maslow introduced the concept of the “Hierarchy of Needs,” a pyramid with five levels that lead to human fulfillment and are foundational to customer understanding.

A customer experience that focuses on cultivating happiness needs to follow a similar model. It starts with recognizing that customers also have a hierarchy of needs in their dealings with a company. We will look at consumers’ hierarchy of needs in more detail below.

• Level 1 Basic Needs: Involves giving customers access to a company representative who can understand their requests and take steps to solve them.
• Level 2 Safety Needs: Taking steps to ensure customers can easily access the company’s representatives, like having a toll-free number, prominently displayed contact information, and being transparent with customers.
• Level 3 Efficiency and Consistency Needs: Being able to meet customers’ requests in a short amount of time and maintaining the same level of service across all company touchpoints.
• Level 4 Attention and Cooperation Needs: Enter the realm of personalization with agents who can recognize customers and recall what issues they’ve experienced earlier.
• Level 5 Proactive, Self-Actualization, and Connection Needs: Forge a connection based on empathy between company agents and customers, where customer needs can be anticipated and met even before an issue arises.

A company should set out to meet each level of consumer needs in ascending order to build a happiness-centric customer experience. As you climb the ladder to higher levels, you might also notice metrics like your NPS rising in synchrony, as there is a correlation between Net Promoter Score and Maslow’s needs hierarchy.

Exceeding Customer Needs to Achieve Happiness

Our emotions do not exist in a vacuum. Rather, they are in a constant flow state, moving from pleasant to unpleasant and back again. It would be foolish and exhausting to expect an individual to be happy all the time. Instead, we should link our emotional state to how we feel when our needs are being met versus when they are not being met.

This allows us to act on unpleasant emotions by identifying unmet needs and taking steps to meet them.

In customer experience, this is a practical piece of advice that can help companies reduce customers’ pain points. Angry or difficult customers usually have urgent needs that need to be met, and companies can adapt their approach to address those needs proactively.

When you understand your customers’ needs, you can focus on adding value to their experience and making them happy, and sprinkle your customer understanding with the knowledge from the science of happiness to reach the top of the pyramid and proactively contribute to both customers’ and employees’ happiness.

The Nine Factors of Happiness

Happiness in customer experience is not limited to just the customers. Employees play an equally important role in creating a product or service that spreads happiness. Happiness trainer, educational speaker, and author of Yellow Factor: Happiness in Business, Rosaria has put forth a simple model for companies to apply the science of happiness to exceed both customer and employee expectations and achieve happiness-driven growth.

Based on the analysis of over 300 trailblazers cases and findings from neuroscience and positive psychology, Cirillo’s “Sunflower of Happiness” nine factors we can nurture to design and deliver HCX experiences. Let’s break down each of the nine petals, which conveniently fit the acronymous HAPPINESS.

Health

Being in good physical and mental health is the bedrock of happiness. Promoting practices that prioritize the health of employees and customers alike is essential for every company, not just those that work in healthcare.

Autonomy

Giving employees a degree of control over their actions lets them feel empowered. Having a say over their work-life balance and responsibilities makes employees feel positive about their role in a company.

Purpose

Working toward a worthwhile goal makes people feel happy about putting in effort. Companies should give employees a chance to contribute to something larger than themselves and help meaningfully. Customers can also be brought on board by offering them the chance to participate in company initiatives for the greater good.

Play

Cultivating a sense of fun is vital in a culture of happiness. Qualities like creativity and adventurousness should be encouraged in an environment that is free of any judgments. Play can extend beyond the workspace to customers as well, engaging them in activities that stimulate their sense of fun.

Integrity

In order to create a positive customer experience, companies need to make a positive impact on society. Employees feel proud, and customers feel comfortable being associated with businesses that take steps to improve communities, contribute to society, and protect the environment.

Nature

Being connected to nature promotes a feeling of holistic well-being. This could be as simple as allowing natural light into workspaces and creating experiences that simulate the sense of being in nature. Companies can also commit to preserving nature and allowing their customers and employees to enjoy their bounties by promoting initiatives that protect the environment.

Empathy

Shared connections bring people closer in business and their personal lives. Companies should convey their sense of empathy through their communications with clients, offering assurances that they understand their problems. Fostering better working relationships between employees also contributes to a culture of happiness.

Simplicity

Customers and employees alike would like to conserve their energy. Reducing the amount of demands on them and simplifying their transactions lets them remain energetic and happy.

Smiles

Our brain responds to our body’s signals, and smiles signify happiness. Turn milestones into moments of celebration, and share the joy with customers to spread happiness all around.

Achieving Lasting Growth with Happiness

Investing in a culture of happiness can yield positive returns for a company. Promoter scores, sales, and revenue all go up when your customer base is happy and satisfied. Learning about the benefits of happiness is only the first step.

Through repetition and consistency, you can hardwire happiness into your customer experience, which builds customer loyalty and employee motivation. And it all starts with nurturing your very own happiness to blossom like a sunflower. Turn happiness into your business (and personal) superpower!

As a special gift for Lumoa’s attendees in the fireside chat between Carlos and Rosaria and the readers (YOU), she has provided a free extract of her book “Yellow Factor: Happiness in Business” Enjoy.

The post Happiness in Customer Experience: A Competitive Advantage appeared first on Lumoa.

Welcome to a guide that’s all about making sense of those stories hidden within your survey data. Whether you’re a seasoned CX professional or just dipping your toes into the waters of customer feedback, this article is your friendly companion in turning those responses into actionable insights.

We’ll walk through the essentials and gradually go a bit more detailed in survey analysis, ensuring you’re well-equipped to elevate your customer satisfaction, boost sales, and fortify brand loyalty. From uncovering the basics to tackling common challenges, we’re here to help you navigate through the fascinating journey of customer feedback analysis.

Why Voice of Customer (VoC) Matters

To kick things off, we should first understand why Voice of Customer matters and how it affects your business. Customers are an integral part of any business’s success. Obviously, businesses wouldn’t exist without them! So it’s important to listen closely and understand what customers want from brands – that’s where the voice of the customer comes in.

Whether it be through surveys, focus groups, or even social media, businesses have access to valuable feedback on their products and services. This feedback helps inform how they operate going forward. And remember, feedback isn’t just about addressing criticisms—it’s also about recognizing and building on what you’re already doing well.

In one Gartner research, leveraging the data obtained from direct customer feedback can increase the chances of upselling and cross-selling by 15-20%. This shows the tangible, bottom-line benefits of listening to your customers.

Additionally, a well-executed VoC initiative also helps enhance customer retention, resulting in higher customer loyalty scores, reduced customer turnover, and increased customer lifetime value through repeat purchases. A ripple effect will occur – those businesses able to stay in tune with customer desires will have an advantage over their competitors. After all, if you know what your audience wants before they do – you’ll be miles ahead!

Why Analyzing Survey Results is Essential: Addressing Common Business Challenges

Imagine you’re running a bustling café in a busy city center. You pride yourself on the quality of your coffee and the ambiance of your space. To understand your customers better, you conduct a survey asking for feedback on everything from the coffee to the service. But what happens next is crucial. If you merely collect these responses without thorough analysis, you might miss key insights that could drive your business forward.

For instance, let’s say many customers subtly mention that they love the coffee but find the seating uncomfortable. Without proper analysis, you might overlook this feedback, focusing only on the positive comments about your coffee. This oversight could lead to a decrease in repeat visits, as customers choose other cafes with more comfortable seating.

This scenario highlights a common pain point for businesses: the gap between collecting customer feedback and effectively analyzing it to uncover actionable insights. Just as a chef needs to skillfully combine ingredients to create a gourmet meal, businesses need to adeptly analyze survey results to transform raw data into strategies that enhance customer satisfaction and drive growth.

When you know how to properly analyze survey results, you’re uncovering the story behind your customers’ experiences. It is this insight that enables you to make informed decisions, such as rearranging your café’s seating arrangement or tailoring your services to better suit your customers’ needs.

Categories of Questions to Ask in Your Survey

Okay, so now you understand the importance of not just collecting but also effectively analyzing your survey results. But where does this process start? It all begins with asking the right questions. Let’s shift our focus to the heart of any survey: the questions themselves. When creating surveys, asking the right questions is the key to unlocking meaningful insights from your customer feedback.

By asking relevant and targeted questions, you can create a comprehensive picture of customer sentiment and gain valuable insights into what customers want from your brand. Let’s check out the types of questions that can supercharge your VoC surveys.

Net Promoter Score (NPS) question: This is a popular metric used to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction. This particular question seeks to gauge how likely a customer would be to recommend a company’s products or services to their friends, family, or colleagues. Customers are asked to rate the company on a scale from 0-10, with higher scores indicating higher customer satisfaction.

A high NPS score is a strong indicator of customer loyalty, which can drive repeat business and positive word-of-mouth referrals, thereby contributing to your company’s growth and reputation.

Customer Satisfaction questions: are designed to assess a customer’s overall satisfaction with the product or service they received, as well as their entire customer experience. How customers rate these questions can provide insights into how effective a business is, at meeting the needs and expectations of its customers.

In a nutshell, high CSAT scores often correlate with customer retention and loyalty, directly impacting your bottom line.

Demographic questions: These questions gather information about the respondent’s age, gender, income, education level, and other demographic information that can be used to segment and analyze the data. Knowing the demographic makeup of customers can help identify trends and correlations between certain demographics and customer satisfaction.

When conducting a survey, it’s essential to avoid any questions that could be seen as discriminatory. We should also make sure the collected data is relevant and our respondents understand how their information will be used; all while adhering to legal/ethical guidelines around demographic info collection!

It can be tempting to ask a ludicrous amount of demographic questions, to truly understand your customer and where they are coming from. Unfortunately, these can be tiring to fill out from a user’s perspective.

Remember that each additional question you have in your survey will decrease the amount of responses you get, sometimes only by a little bit, but they add up! Try to ask questions for things that you aren’t already tracking in your CRM or other business tool so that the information is important and the survey is kept light.

Behavioral questions will give you the bigger picture and help you assess how customers interact with a given product. This includes how often they use it, how much they spend, and how long they have been a customer.

What’s more, behavioral type of questions can help you customize your products and services accordingly.

Examples of some behavioral questions:

• How do you go to your workplace?
• How often do you buy travel tickets?
• Do you pay by card or cash?

Open-ended questions on the other hand, help you understand customer sentiment. It provides insights into customers’ thoughts and feelings that would otherwise remain hidden.

With these questions, customers can express their opinions and frustrations in more detail than with a structured question. The most exciting part? It may reveal underlying customer sentiments, helping you identify potential areas for improvement and innovate your offerings based on real customer feedback.

Examples of some open-ended questions:

• What were the main reasons you chose our product?
• How would you describe your experience with us?
• How can we make our product better for you?

Common Ways to Analyze Survey Data

Now that we’re all on the same page in the kind of questions to ask, let’s discuss the ways to analyze it. Analyzing survey data can be an overwhelming task, but with the right approach, it’s possible to extract meaningful insights from customer feedback and develop actionable strategies for improvement.

One such tool that can help is Lumoa, the first CX platform to offer GPT. thanks to its propriety AI, employees can now tap into any customer feedback, get clear answers, and take actions with a positive influence on KPIs.

In this section, we’ll explore some of the most common techniques used to analyze survey results, all of which can be easily performed using Lumoa. We’ll also provide screenshots from the Lumoa platform to give you a visual understanding of how these techniques work in practice.

From basic analysis methods to more advanced techniques, you’ll gain a better understanding of how to unlock the potential of your customer feedback.

1. Frequency analysis: This involves counting the number of times a particular response is given to a question. It helps to identify patterns and trends in the data, such as which options are most popular or least popular.

   In the visual above, we see the frequency of responses to a question like “What region are you from?” This illustrates how frequency analysis can provide a clear snapshot of the distribution of responses, revealing patterns and trends.

   For instance, you can easily identify the most and least represented regions among your respondents. This logic can be replicated for each question in your survey, helping you understand the most and least common responses.

   Understanding these patterns can help you prioritize improvements and capitalize on what’s working well.

2. Sentiment analysis: This is a method of using natural language processing and text analysis techniques to determine the emotional tone behind a customer’s response. It can be useful for identifying positive, negative, and neutral sentiments in open-ended survey responses.

   In the visual above, we see Lumoa’s AI in action, determining whether parts of a comment are positive, negative, or neutral. In this example, the AI has identified a portion of the comment as “positive.”

   With this information, you can address specific areas of concern and build on what’s working well to enhance customer satisfaction.

3. Regression analysis: This method is used to identify relationships between different variables in the data and can help to identify patterns and trends over time.
   Here, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing regression analysis. In this case, the AI is determining that when people use the word “Price” in their open text response, they often do so when they are from regions like “Mexico” or when speaking to certain team members through support.

   This information will help you identify specific factors that influence customer feedback, enabling you to tailor your strategies and responses accordingly. For instance, you might decide to provide additional training for certain team members or review your pricing strategy for specific regions.

4. Cluster analysis: This method groups similar responses together, which is useful for identifying patterns or segments within the data.

   In this case, Lumoa’s AI is showing us that when people mention “price” in their open text response, they often use the words “account” and “banking” in the same comment.

   The smileys represent the sentiment when those words are used. This insight identifies common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if customers often mention “price,” “account,” and “banking” together in a negative context, you might decide to review your pricing strategy or improve your account management and banking services.

5. Text mining: This method extracts useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses. It’s used to identify common themes or keywords in the data.

   In the visual above, we see an example of Lumoa’s AI performing text mining. In this case, Lumoa has created overall groupings of themes found in open-text responses. These groupings, called “Topics”, can be managed and edited by your organization.

   This is beneficial in identifying common themes or issues in customer feedback, enabling you to address specific areas of concern.

   For instance, if a particular topic frequently appears in negative feedback, you might decide to focus your improvement efforts on that area.

6. Data visualization: This method displays data in a graphical format, such as charts, tables, and graphs. It can be used to make the data more understandable and to identify patterns and trends that may not be immediately apparent in the raw data.
   In the visual above, we see one example of how Lumoa can help you make sense of your data.

   Lumoa offers a variety of graphs and charts for different purposes, such as determining trends and recurring issues, as well as tracking issues over time.

   By presenting data in a visual format, you can gain a clearer understanding of your customer feedback, making it easier to identify areas for improvement and monitor the impact of your actions over time.

Best Practices for Interpreting and Utilizing Survey Insights

Having the right approach to analyzing survey data is essential for unlocking its potential, but it’s also important to know how to interpret and utilize the insights you uncover. Check out some best practices for interpreting and utilizing survey insights.

From understanding customer sentiment to developing actionable strategies, we’ll go over all the key steps involved in creating a successful VoC program.

1. Clearly define your research objectives: Before beginning the survey, be sure to establish clear research objectives that will guide the design and analysis of the survey.

2. Use a representative sample: Make sure that the sample of participants is representative of the population being studied in order to ensure the validity of the survey insights.

3. Use open-ended questions: Open-ended questions allow customers to provide detailed feedback in their own words, which can provide valuable insights into their thoughts and feelings.

4. Use data visualization: Use data visualization techniques such as charts, tables, and graphs to display the data in a way that is easy to understand and identify patterns and trends.

5. Use statistical analysis: Use statistical analysis techniques such as frequency analysis, cross-tabulation, and regression analysis to identify patterns and trends in the data.

6. Use text mining: Use text mining techniques to extract useful information from unstructured text data, such as open-ended survey responses.

7. Look for patterns and trends: Look for patterns and trends in the data that can help identify areas for improvement or opportunities for growth.

8. Identify key drivers: Identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior that can be used to improve the customer experience.

9. Prioritize your findings: Prioritize your findings based on their importance and potential impact on the business.

10. Act on your findings: Use the insights gained from the survey to make data-driven decisions that will improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

To illustrate the practical applications of analyzing survey results and implementing changes based on VoC insights, let’s look at a real-life example.

Huel, a popular meal replacement company, recognized the need to better understand their customers’ experiences and improve their Net Promoter Score (NPS). Before, they tracked NPS without taking any significant action. However, as the company decided to make NPS a key business KPI, they needed a scalable and efficient way to analyze and act upon customer feedback.

This led Huel to adopt Lumoa, a platform that enabled them to analyze NPS data, answer customer questions, and create targeted strategies. Lumoa’s intuitive interface and text analytics allowed everyone in the company to better understand customer sentiment, making NPS a more accessible and successful KPI.

One of Lumoa’s most impactful features for Huel was the ability to segment NPS data by different customer segments. This allowed them to track customer lifecycles and understand how perceptions and pain points evolved over time. As a result of implementing Lumoa, Huel saw their NPS score increase by 10 points and their global response rate increase by 164%, which significantly improved their customer experience and decision-making capabilities.

This example illustrates the power of effective survey analysis and the impact it can have on a company’s success.

Creating an Action Plan

Creating an action plan based on survey results is an effective way to turn customer feedback into meaningful insights. This will drive your business forward. It can help you identify key drivers of customer satisfaction, loyalty, and behavior so that you can make informed decisions and create strategies that improve the customer experience and achieve organizational goals.

1. Identify Key Insights: Start by reviewing your survey results and identifying the most important insights. Look for patterns, trends, and key drivers that stand out. You can find out where customers are most satisfied or dissatisfied, what common themes are in open-ended answers, and what correlations there are between them.

2. Prioritize Based on Impact: Not all insights will have the same potential impact on your business. Rank your findings by their potential to drive customer satisfaction, loyalty, and business growth. Consider the number of customers affected, the severity of the problem, and the potential for improvement.

3. Set Clear Objectives: For each priority insight, set clear objectives. These should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). For example, if customer service is a common complaint, you could aim for a 25% reduction in wait times within six months.

4. Develop Strategies: Next, develop strategies to achieve your objectives. It may involve improving processes, investing in new tools or training, or making changes to your products or services. Consider investing in more customer service staff, implementing a new platform, or improving self-service options to reduce wait times.

5. Assign Responsibilities: Assign responsibility for each strategy to a specific person or team. In this way, accountability is ensured and a clear point of contact is provided.

6. Create a Timeline: Develop a timeline for implementing your strategies. To keep everyone on track, you should set key milestones and deadlines.

7. Monitor Progress: Regularly monitor your progress toward your objectives. Tracking metrics, doing follow-up surveys, and getting feedback from customers and staff could be part of this process. Be prepared to reassess your strategies and make changes if you’re not making the progress you expected.

8. Communicate Your Plan: Finally, communicate your action plan to all relevant stakeholders. This includes not only your staff but also your customers. You can build trust and improve customer satisfaction by letting them know you’re taking their feedback on board.

Wrapping up

Customer-centric businesses need to understand their customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points. Surveys are great tools for collecting this information, but their real value comes from analyzing and acting on it.

Throughout this comprehensive guide, we’ve explored why Voice of Customer (VoC) matters, the importance of analyzing survey results, the types of questions to ask in your survey, and the common ways to analyze survey data. We’ve also covered how to interpret and use survey insights, as well as how to create an action plan.

Remember, the goal is not just to collect data, but to transform it into actionable insights that drive your business forward. Getting the right approach to your survey data can boost customer satisfaction, sales, and loyalty.

Now, armed with this knowledge, you’re ready to take your survey analysis to the next level. No matter where you’re at with customer feedback, these strategies and techniques can help you get more value out of it.

So, don’t wait! You’ll see the impact it can have on your business when you apply what you’ve learned today. Remember, every piece of customer feedback is an opportunity for growth and improvement. Take it on, act on it, and watch your business grow. If you need more ways to boost your CX strategies, how about you check out the State of Customer Experience 2023? Download your copy now!

The post How to Analyze Survey Results: A Guide to Mastering Customer Feedback Analysis appeared first on Lumoa.

Today, businesses must continually evolve to address the needs of their customers. Embracing new technology solutions and digitizing customer experience has become a crucial part of this evolution. It is no longer a competitive advantage but a necessity.

If you’re wondering how to get started with your digital transformation and what aspects to prioritize, this article is the perfect starting point!

The Connection between Digital Transformation and Customer Experience

The term digital transformation refers to integrating digital technology into all aspects of a business. The goal is to change how you operate and deliver value to your customers. As part of the change, organizations need to challenge the status quo, experiment, and of course, become comfortable with failure. Sometimes this means getting rid of long-standing business processes that companies were built on in favor of newer, still-developing ones.

Digital transformation has emerged as a critical factor in the evolution of business models, with customer experience at the forefront. Companies must be able to adapt to a dynamic market environment in order to stay competitive and retain customers. 

There are many studies that highlight consumers’ rising expectations regarding service quality. For instance, according to Salesforce, 57% of users prefer online communication channels, while 83% expect immediate assistance when contacting a company. Moreover, the same source says that 56% of consumers anticipate entirely personalized offers. 

In order to meet these demands, you have to adopt and implement innovative technological solutions that cater to your client’s needs and preferences, ensuring a seamless and satisfying digital cx.

Meeting Customer Demands: How Digitizing Customer Experience Drives Digital Transformation Success

Before embarking on your digital transformation journey, you first need to confirm whether your customers genuinely need it and then identify the most effective approach for implementation. Start by focusing on areas where digital solutions bring the most significant benefits and drive a successful transformation.

Understand your customers’ pain points

To enhance your digital customer experience strategy, you should begin by collecting and analyzing customer experience. This is a crucial step that will enable you to make informed business decisions later on, tailoring your products and services to better meet customer needs.

Decide which processes need to be digitized

Digitizing an enterprise is a significant task, but you don’t have to tackle it all at once. We recommend going about it using the small-steps method and focusing on the processes that require digitization the most.

Research digital solutions

You don’t need to do everything yourself or reinvent the wheel. Nowadays, there are numerous ready-made solutions and systems available for you to implement in your enterprise.

Be prepared to adapt and change

Success in today’s world requires flexibility. When planning your digital transformation, be aware that at any moment, you may need to innovate further.

Constantly monitor changes to track the success of digitizing customer experience

Try to regularly track every individual task to ensure you’re moving in the right direction. For this purpose, you can use key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the progress of your digital transformation.

Key Drivers of Customer Experience Digital Transformation 

1. Optimizing your online presence

In most of today’s companies, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role. With over 200 ranking factors at play, Google continually strives to provide its users with the best results in terms of information quality and customer experience. Google’s Page Experience signals emphasize the importance of various issues, such as loading speed, visitor data security, and mobile-friendliness. To effectively communicate your website’s SEO strategy and performance to stakeholders or potential investors, incorporating this information into a well-structured pitch deck can be invaluable. It allows for a clear presentation of how your SEO efforts align with overall business objectives and how they contribute to improving online visibility and user engagement. A strong link-building strategy is also essential for improving search rankings. While many businesses focus on traditional methods like guest posting, infographic links are a highly effective yet often overlooked strategy. By creating engaging and informative visuals, websites can attract natural backlinks from other sites, boosting their SEO efforts.

To check your website against these criteria and monitor any changes, you can use a tool like Website Audit Tool by SE Ranking Website SEO Checker by Sitechecker. It allows you to track all your website pages and detect any potential technical issues that could negatively impact website performance or user experience.

If you want to rank high, it’s also a good idea to stay updated on upcoming technologies, such as MUM (Multitask Unified Model). This Google technology is designed to offer the most accurate understanding of videos, images, and texts. MUM aims to comprehend users’ feelings, abstractions, and intentions by thoroughly assessing their queries and analyzing the context of proposed content options. If you want to avoid an SEO ranking drop, it’s also a good idea to stay updated on upcoming technologies.

2. Keeping the human touch

One of the drivers of digital transformation that can positively impact digital cx is the implementation of artificial intelligence solutions, such as chatbots, into businesses. For example, the CX Trends 2022 report by Zendesk shows that 26% of companies surveyed in 21 countries currently offer AI- and chatbot-guided self-service, with 25% planning to add this capability.

However, in order for the implementation of a chatbot not to backfire, you cannot forget about the human experience. According to Userlike, at least 60% of respondents would prefer to wait in line if it meant they could talk to a human immediately. However, if given the opportunity, more than half of respondents also said they would be willing to initially talk to a chatbot, and be transferred to an agent later. So the conclusion is simple – a chatbot is an excellent option for simple questions, but customers should always have the opportunity to talk to an agent.

One example is Tiobi, a chatbot offered by Vodafone’s mobile network. It provides 24/7 support and helps users with various issues, such as recovering account login credentials and explaining bills and charges. If customers prefer to talk to a human, Tiobi can connect them with the appropriate team member.

3. Personalized digital journey

Personalization is the key to success today when it comes to digital customer experience. And the digital transformation has made personalization easier to achieve. A Zendesk report indicates that more than 90% of customers are willing to spend more money with companies that offer personalized and streamlined experiences.

However, to meet the expectations of today’s customers, it is no longer enough to simply insert a customer’s name in a cold email. Customers want more, such as unique product recommendations and proactive suggestions. They expect brands to anticipate their needs and provide a tailored experience.

But that’s not all. According to Accenture Interactive’s Pulse Check report, 91% of consumers are likely to shop with brands that recognize them, remember previous transactions, and provide relevant offers and recommendations.

As companies interact with digital customers through various channels, from mobile to social, providing a personalized and seamless customer journey for each customer is becoming increasingly important.

Amazon is a prime example of a company that has mastered personalization. Regardless of the device you use to log in, Amazon delivers offers perfectly tailored to your browsing history (regardless of the device you use to browse), purchases, preferences, and more. You can also view past orders, manage payments, and easily complete orders.

4. Seamless experiences

With the aforementioned multi-channel personalization comes another factor: the ability to offer an omnichannel experience. This enables the customer to communicate with the team in their preferred way, whether through self-service or live chat. The critical difference between a multichannel and omnichannel customer experience is data synchronization and continuity, which ensures that communication remains seamless as customers switch between different media. The omnichannel experience contributes to customer satisfaction by allowing the customer to interact with a company on their preferred medium.

However, according to Zendesk, only one-third of companies are omnichannel, which means there are still many opportunities for companies to adopt channels and provide experiences that foster loyalty. It is critical to offer a brand-consistent experience across all channels, as customers expect a consistent look and feel across content and processes, regardless of where they interact with the brand.

A great example of this is Sephora. The leading beauty giant offers a seamless omnichannel experience connecting customers’ online purchases with in-store visits. The company provides various options, such as:

• in-store beauty workshops,
• complimentary makeovers,
• access to their “Beauty Insider” account on in-store tablets.

With an account, customers can view item details, virtually try on products using digital software, and add them to a wish list for later purchases through the app. Sephora’s integrated Beauty Insider feature encourages customers to make purchases by simplifying the selection process from their extensive range of products.

5. Utilizing Artificial Intelligence solutions

Artificial intelligence has been in the spotlight recently for its potential to enhance efficiency. However, its influence on user experience should not be overlooked. AI solutions are becoming vital in improving customer experience during digital transformation.

By harnessing AI capabilities, companies can offer highly personalized experiences tailored to individual customer needs and preferences, thus elevating the overall customer experience. We mentioned AI earlier in this article, and how it’s used to build chatbots and generate personalized product recommendations.

As AI technology advances, companies can anticipate even more sophisticated features that enrich customer interactions. Beyond communication, AI can optimize various elements of the customer experience across multiple channels.

Regarding customer attitudes towards AI, Salesforce indicates that 69% of customers are open to using AI to enhance their experience. As customers recognize the value of AI, they are becoming more receptive to its potential benefits. It’s crucial to reassure customers that your business employs AI ethically so as to address any concerns and reinforce trust.

A prime example of AI’s impact on the customer experience is the interactive fitting rooms created by American Eagle. These rooms allow customers to scan items they want to try on, explore available inventory, and request different sizes or colors without leaving the room. Store employees receive notifications for customer requests, and the technology can even suggest products based on customer selections. This seamless integration of AI into the retail environment demonstrates how technology can significantly improve customer experience across industries, combining the previously mentioned omnichannel capabilities.

By introducing these fitting rooms, American Eagle can effectively alleviate customer frustrations, acquire valuable insights into consumer shopping behaviors, and streamline in-store operations.

Businesses also directly benefit from adding AI to employee workflow. Everything from bookkeeping to project management can be automated and improved with AI. Not only that, but this technology can even save them money. For example, businesses can make photo edits with Picsart’s AI tools instead of hiring a graphic designer. And with all that money and time saved, businesses can invest more in the customer experience.

6. Immersive experiences

Let’s discuss another advanced technology – augmented reality (AR). It combines real-world images with digital elements such as graphics or text overlays to create an interactive experience. As it turns out, AR also provides numerous opportunities to improve the customer experience.

For example, Augmented Reality (AR), which blends digital images with the real world, can greatly improve the shopping experience. Brands can use it to complement customers’ experiences by displaying product information as they shop. By scanning a product with a smart device, customers can access reviews and details, thus streamlining the buying process and helping them find the perfect product or service.

Another popular AR trend is the “try before you buy” experience. In the case of online businesses, customers can test products using an AR version on their computer, effectively eliminating the need to purchase or request a sample physically, only to return it later.

AR has the potential to bring many benefits, such as:

• Improved purchase accuracy: AR experiences provide detailed product information, allowing customers to visualize items in their desired location.
• Reduced decision-making time: AR helps resolve doubts, speeding up the purchase decision process.
• Reduced customer returns: Trying on products virtually results in more confident purchasing decisions and fewer returns.
• Enhanced user experience: Unique, functional, and compelling AR experiences attract new customers and increase sales.
• Increased customer engagement and loyalty: Immersive AR experiences promote a sense of personalization and connection to the brand.

AR technology has significantly impacted online shopping, as demonstrated by the IKEA Place app, which allows customers to preview furniture in their homes through 3D visualizations.

It caters to customers who don’t want to waste time visiting the store to purchase products they may not like and showcases how AR can significantly improve the customer experience.

7. User interface feedback and qualitative surveys

To ensure your clients are satisfied with your digital products, it’s essential to understand how they interact with them. Understanding your User Interface (UI) can help you with that. A well-designed UI that responds intuitively to user interactions contributes to a positive experience, minimizing friction and increasing conversions. In the digital age, CX touchpoints, such as chatbots and online forms, are crucial in shaping customer perceptions. Thus, it is vital to create a seamless and delightful online experience that meets the needs and expectations of your target audience.

Collecting qualitative feedback through surveys helps identify pain points, such as navigation issues or conversion obstacles. Open-ended questions and qualitative customer feedback give a comprehensive understanding of the digital customer experience. Offering passive feedback options makes it easier to gather feedback from customers without disrupting their experience.

Gathering qualitative and quantitative data will allow you to see the bigger picture. Sample questions may include:

• How easy is it to find the information you need on our website or app?
• Which features of our website or app do you find most useful?
• Are there any elements of our website or app that you find confusing or difficult to use?
• What, if any, improvements would you suggest to enhance your digital experience with us?
• How likely are you to recommend our website or app to a friend or colleague?
• How satisfied are you with the level of personalization and customization available in our digital channels?

With these questions, you will know how to improve the user experience.

Digitizing Customer Experience: A Key Step to Make Your Company Competitive

In today’s fast-paced digital landscape, businesses must continually evolve to address the needs of their customers. Embracing innovative technology solutions has become a crucial part of this evolution. It is no longer a competitive advantage but a necessity.

Initiating the digitizing of customer experience is essential for businesses to thrive in today’s competitive environment. If your company prioritizes customer needs and embraces innovative technologies, it will enhance the overall digital customer experience. Remember that the market is still evolving, so you need to be responsive to emerging trends to gain loyal clients and successfully navigate the challenges of the digital age.

The post Customer Experience Digitization: 7 Strategies to Get The Best Results appeared first on Lumoa.

In fact, several companies, ranging from media to finance, are already investing in an omnichannel customer experience to boost their sales and revenue. 

For example, Target, one of the top US retail chains, improved its pickup sales with an omnichannel campaign. Nike, another well-known retail brand, achieved higher annual revenue by investing in multiple channels.

You can also achieve similar figures by building an omnichannel customer experience tailor-made for your business. This article tells you all about omnichannel marketing, its benefits, and the top ways to boost your customer experience.

But first, you need to understand what an omnichannel customer experience is.

Distinguishing Omnichannel Customer Experience and Omnichannel Marketing

Omnichannel marketing customer experience is a strategy that integrates all marketing touchpoints – both offline and online – to create a seamless customer journey. 

Buyers will get a connected brand experience throughout all channels, including physical outlets, e-commerce stores, social media pages, and even through SMS and push notifications.

Consider a customer looking to buy sports shoes from a popular brand. In a single-channel strategy, they need to visit a physical store and purchase from the limited options available.

However, in an omnichannel experience, the customer can browse the brand’s website for multiple options, try-on styles virtually, and place an in-store pickup to get a perfect size fit. 

Or, they can scan products in physical stores to instantly check online reviews and user images before making a purchase.

But a connected user experience isn’t the only advantage of an omnichannel marketing strategy. You can also leverage customer feedback using an Omnichannel Survey App to manage the overall experience of your customers. Here are some more ways omnichannel marketing can benefit both your buyers and your business.

Benefits of omnichannel customer experience

Today, most customers prefer using multiple channels for shopping. Brands that adopt an omnichannel approach attract more such customers that are looking for seamless experiences across various channels.

Apart from higher customer acquisition and retention rates, omnichannel customer experience provides the following benefits:

Acquire high-value customers

With an omnichannel experience, you get customers who are willing to spend more and have a generally higher worth for your brand. Customers who shop through multiple channels also have a higher lifetime value when compared to single-channel shoppers. 

These customers repeat their purchases, are more brand loyal, and generate higher revenue for your brand at the same acquisition costs.

Build strong customer relationships

Today’s buyers want omnichannel customer service. They want to browse online, pick up offline, and tag your brand on social media. By creating an omnichannel presence, you value customers’ opinions and create shopping channels aligned with their requirements.

Customers not only get multiple ways to access your brand but also feel respected and seen, creating a better brand image. 

Leverage personalized marketing

Personalized marketing is generating big numbers, with 76% of consumers preferring brands that personalize. To achieve this, you need information on customer behavior, interests, and trends.

Building an omnichannel experience helps you access customer data from all your touchpoints. You can see popular searches, clicks, likes, scans, and other online and offline behavior to assess their interests.

This data will help you create individual experiences for customers. For example, you can send offline purchase coupons through SMS for a most-searched product by a customer on your brand page. You can also send SMS surveys to post transactions or during purchases to measure customer satisfaction. 

Omnichannel customer experience has several benefits, but businesses often face roadblocks when implementing these brand strategies. Want to avoid these mistakes? Here are some common challenges businesses face when creating an omnichannel experience.

Common Challenges Faced While Building An Omnichannel Customer Experience

Building consistent customer experiences across channels is challenging for businesses. In addition to creating a cross-channel presence, brands have to consider timing, customer response, and other factors to tweak their marketing strategies.

If you want to build a positive omnichannel experience, you need to overcome the following barriers:

Unify fragmented data

Creating a customer-centric omnichannel experience includes regularly analyzing data and updating your strategy. But omnichannel strategies utilize data from more than one source, which is often unstructured, fragmented, and not ready for analysis. 

This data cannot be directly integrated and compared as they have different formats. You need to identify the right tools, structure data using similar schemas, and analyze depending on both campaign-related and platform-related factors.

Integrating backend functions

Consider a customer discovering your brand, placing orders, and receiving their product in a week. Now multiply these operations by the number of channels in your marketing strategy. Can you work with the same efficiency?

If seamless front-end functions are the aim for omnichannel, you need an integrated backend to keep track of inventory, logistics, sales, returns, and so on. Otherwise, it causes inefficiencies in order fulfillment and leads to customer dissatisfaction. 

For example, think about incorporating a sophisticated multi-stop route planner in your logistics processes. This can help manage possible shipping delays and enhance the efficiency of the entire delivery operation.

Staying Consistent with personalization

With customers demanding a high level of personalization, we cannot ignore it in omnichannel strategies. But with multiple channels, user identification and behavioral data integration become challenging.

To provide a consistent, personalized omnichannel experience, you need high visibility into customer journeys and a strong understanding of each touchpoint’s contribution.

Most omnichannel customer experience challenges can be solved by continually measuring customer satisfaction metrics and taking quick actions based on the insights. 

Key Metrics to Track Omnichannel Strategy Success

Customer satisfaction drives omnichannel strategies and influences the sales, revenue, and ROI of marketing campaigns. Here are the key metrics you can track to determine omnichannel strategy success:

1. Net Promoter Score – NPS

Net Promoter Score determines customer satisfaction by determining how likely they are to promote your brand among their peers. NPS uses a single-question survey with a scale of 0-10.

Depending on the data, customers are divided into promoters, detractors, and passives. A high NPS score indicates customer satisfaction, where they are highly likely to recommend your brand to others.

2. Customer Satisfaction Score – CSAT

Customer Satisfaction Score is a straightforward customer input approach that indicates satisfaction at a more granular level than NPS. A CSAT survey involves several questions about various levels of the buying journey.

Each stage can be separately rated by consumers, giving a more holistic view of customer satisfaction.

3. Customer Effort Score – CES

Customers expect easy processes when availing of a product or service. But some purchase processes are complicated, decreasing customer satisfaction and loyalty.

The customer Effort Score measures the level of effort customers need to put to use a product or service. A high CES indicates an effortless purchase process and is ideal for a successful omnichannel customer experience.

4. Customer Churn Rate – CCR

Customer Churn Rate is a measure of customers that leave your brand over time. A high CCR indicates an equally high level of customer dissatisfaction with your marketing strategies.

If your CCR is above average, you need to identify problem areas at various stages of the buyer journey instead of focusing on acquiring new customers.

Regularly tracking these metrics and optimizing your omnichannel strategy will help you create a satisfying customer experience across all channels. 

Not sure how to implement these strategies? Here are a few examples to build a highly successful omnichannel customer experience.

6 Ways To Improve Your Omnichannel Customer’s Experience

Omnichannel doesn’t just mean marketing on multiple channels. The experiences across all these channels should be integrated, connected, and consistent. Follow these below tactics to ensure a seamless, omnichannel customer experience.

1. Engage buyers at every step

Customers are constantly interacting with brands, whether through their social media pages or at physical stores. Brands that provide more interactive opportunities for consumers improve their visibility, boost revenue, and also build a loyal consumer base.

You can build engagement by hosting social media contests, creating an in-store loyalty program, or simply asking customers to like their favorite posts from your brand. This will help you generate a lot of more leads. 

Retail company Lifestyle has significantly  improved its retention rate by focusing on customer engagement. They analyzed buyer stages to determine drop-offs and used SMS and email channels to interact with customers at every step.

2. Build visibility by using a channel in multiple ways

Brands often confuse “visibility” as simply being present on a channel or platform. But just uploading posts or advertising on billboards won’t make your brand visible enough, especially when other companies are doing the same.

Instead, use a single platform to show your brand in multiple ways. You could use social media to start hashtag campaigns or display website-only deals apart from regularly posting. Or you can use email to send promotional campaigns and newsletters for the latest updates. You can even explore the best way to live stream events and promote your brand through engaging content and interactive Q&A sessions.

Marks & Spencer, a well-known retail brand, hosts live consultations on their website apart from displaying their products. The brand got a high response rate even in the initial days of the campaign.

3. Make it seamless for everyone – even your team

While customers love a seamless omnichannel experience, the strategy will only work if your team can access the platform with equal ease. 

Your front-end team should be able to interact with your customers on all channels in the same connected way. This means integrating all your communication channels, building centralized access to customer information, and creating an omnichannel interface for your team.

Zurich Insurance, a Swiss-based insurance company, created an integrated platform for all agents. The platform helped agents work seamlessly across devices such as smartphones, tablets, and computers. 

Agents could easily maintain user data and sell policies through a single platform. The result? Happy agents, happier customers, and a sharp rise in policy business.

4. Optimize for mobile

From browsing for products to shopping on websites, customers use mobile devices for everything. In fact, 84% of consumers use their phones for shopping, even when they are in a physical store. 

If you want to attract these consumers, optimizing the CX for mobile devices is crucial. You can do this by:

• Designing websites with mobile-friendly templates
• Creating dedicated brand apps for smartphones
• Ensuring your website, app, and other digital channels are integrated.

Chase Bank, a commercial banking company by JP Morgan, has an optimized website and a smartphone app to assist consumers with financial services. Users can send money, create budgets, check credit scores, and do much more with their mobile devices.

5. Focus on customer support

Providing customer assistance wherever possible helps your customers make better decisions and builds a strong brand perception. This can be in the form of product recommendations, query resolutions, or even post-purchase support.

With today’s technology, providing customer support is easier in an omnichannel scenario. You can leverage AI chatbots, knowledge base software and automated messages to solve customer queries. For in-store assistance, you can engage brand representatives or provide scannable codes to access online chatbots.

Sephora, a leading cosmetics retailer, has introduced a live chat where real beauty experts assist customers with queries. Through this platform, buyers can get advice, tutorials, and even place orders for same-day delivery.

6. Personalize all channels

Personalizing brand content for individual customers drives sales and strengthens customer relationships. This not only includes displaying ads based on customers’ search history but also curating every step of the buyer journey based on individual interests.

To create a personalized omnichannel experience, you need to integrate all customer data through offline and online channels. For example, you can link in-store and online purchases of a single customer through their phone number or email address.

This data can be further used to make recommendations and offer unique discounts based on their interests and purchase history.

Neiman Marcus, a luxury brand retailer, uses personalization to improve their online experience. They use customer data, specifically from search filters, to recommend products based on preference.

Their AI-based platform remembers search criteria, such as size, color, and brand, to create recommendation lists. They also use location-based data to send deals and coupons at relevant times.

Final Thoughts

From online sites to shopping malls – consumers are everywhere. If you want to acquire them and build a loyal customer base, your brand should reach them on every single platform.

You can ensure this by understanding what is an omnichannel customer experience and tailoring your brand’s strategy for the same. 

The above examples of ways to improve omnichannel customer experience are already tested by well-known brands with great results. Customize them for your business and build an omnichannel experience your customers will love.

Want to further boost your customer experience? Start mapping your customer Journey with Lumoa!

The post 6 Ways to Improve Omnichannel Customer Experience appeared first on Lumoa.

When it comes to gauging customer sentiment and loyalty, few metrics enjoy such widespread acclaim as the Net Promoter Score (NPS). Its lean and straightforward formula for measuring customer contentment has made this metric a veritable “gold standard” in the customer experience space. According to CustomerGauge’s 2022 report, NPS sports an impressive 41% trust rating among B2B businesses – higher than any other rating system of its kind!

Moreover, at least two-thirds of Fortune 1000 companies pore over their NPS results religiously, using the metric as a barometer of customer satisfaction and loyalty. Clearly, NPS occupies a special place in customer experience stardom, sitting atop the throne with its crown of glory firmly affixed.

But what happens when your NPS score isn’t quite as rocketing as you’d like? Or, more terrifyingly, when it’s plummeting into negative territory?

Does it spell doom for your business? Should you throw in the towel and brace yourself for the inevitable worse?

Well, not so fast. In this blog post, we’ll answer all these questions and more. We’ll explore the causes and implications of a negative NPS score while providing practical advice on fixing them.

So keep reading if you want to get your NPS score back on track and supercharge your CX efforts.

Causes of Negative NPS Score

You can’t get your NPS score back on track without understanding why it took a downturn in the first place. Before we dive into our remedies, let’s take a look at some of the root causes that could be behind your score going south:

Inadequate or Poor Customer Service

Many customers tend to be unforgiving if their support experience isn’t up to scratch. Whether that’s because of long wait times, an unfriendly attitude from staff, or a slow resolution of their issues – customers are increasingly becoming more and more intolerant of sub-par customer service.

Think about it. Would you ever return to a business that gave you terrible customer service? Or recommend them to your friends and family? Probably not. And you’re not alone in feeling that way. 

Zendesk’s research found that an overwhelming majority of consumers (nearly three out of five) stated that quality customer service is paramount in cultivating brand loyalty. Meanwhile, 50% of consumers will likely switch to a rival after just one bad support experience. 

In other words, failing to provide adequate customer service can be enough to trigger a negative NPS score and, consequently, drive customers away. 

Quality of Product/Service Falling Short of Customer Expectations

As consumers, we all have expectations from the products and services we acquire. We expect the product or service to meet certain pre-defined standards and deliver the promised value. 

But, if it falls short of those expectations, we’re often quick to voice our displeasure. After all, why would any customer want to stay loyal to a product or service that’s not delivering the expected value?

Microsoft’s Zune debacle is a perfect example of this. The product promised to do everything that Apple’s iPod could do—but failed miserably in delivering on that promise. 

And customers weren’t shy in expressing their disappointment, even going as far as to make the president-elect of the United States an unwitting recipient of their disdain. 

Now if a prominent tech giant like Microsoft can’t get away with underwhelming products, you can bet that your business won’t be able to either. So, if your product or service isn’t meeting your customer’s expectations, a dip to the negatives on your NPS score could soon follow.

Negative Online Reviews or Ratings

Your online review reputation goes a long way in shaping consumer opinion about your business. As per research, 79% of customers put as much weight on online reviews as they would on personal recommendations. 

If your business is attracting unfavorable reviews like flies to honey, the perception of your business can take a severe hit. And as those negative reviews mount up, so too can the chances of your NPS score slipping into negative territory.

To illustrate, let’s take the example of United Airlines’ reputation crisis. As a result of being continually subjected to scathing customer reviews, United’s NPS score has hovered around 10 since 2014. That was a far cry from its competitors like Southwest, JetBlue, or Virgin America, all posting scores in the high-60s and 70s. 

But since they’ve gone all out to improve their customer service and received more favorable reviews, United Airlines’ NPS score has improved significantly and currently stands at a much healthier 50. Likewise, if your business is plagued with negative remarks, you’ll want to take steps to fix it ASAP. Otherwise, your NPS score could plummet and carry your customer loyalty along with it. 

Impact of Negative NPS Score

A negative NPS score means your business has more detractors than promoters. 

Detractors are unhappy customers who are quick to vent their frustrations and spread the word about your business in a negative light. And that, of course, is bad news for any business – big or small. 

Everyone from customers to investors and stakeholders will be wary of associating with a company that can’t seem to get its customer experience right. But the damage doesn’t stop there. Here’s how detractors can ruin your business:

Decrease in Customer Retention Rate

The age-old axiom of ‘It’s easier to keep an existing customer than acquire a new one’ will ring true no matter how often you hear it. According to Harvard Business Review, acquiring a customer costs anywhere from 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one. This should be a good enough reason why customer retention is something your business takes very seriously.

Unfortunately, with a negative NPS score, you’ve already lost the loyalty of your detractors, many of whom will likely churn soon. Almost 40 to 50% of them, in fact. That’s a huge chunk of customers gone in the blink of an eye. If you don’t take action quickly, the number can get even higher, and you’ll be back at square one, trying to win over new customers. 

Negative Impact on Brand Image

Where positive referrals and reviews are like the breath of life for any business, negative word of mouth is like cancer, capable of spreading at an alarming rate and wreaking havoc in its path. 

A survey of over 3,200 random customers revealed that an overwhelming 75% would likely share their negative experiences with friends and family. In contrast, merely 42% said they’d recommend a product or service they enjoyed. That’s a huge disparity.

Plus, with the proliferation of social media and online communities, it’s become ever more convenient for customers to share their experiences with a larger audience. Your detractors can quickly go online and blast your business with a slew of angry testimonials, damaging your brand image and reputation beyond repair. 

A Decline in Revenue

It goes without saying that a drop in customer loyalty will result in a direct fall in revenue. A bad NPS score means you’ll have fewer loyal customers, which translates to fewer sales. That’s not to mention the additional costs you’ll incur in order to acquire new customers and the steps taken to restore your brand image.

Recent research by SimplicityDX shows that the cost of acquiring new customers has increased by 222% over the last eight years. That’s an alarming trend that you can ill afford to ignore. Plus, with 86% of people refusing to patronize businesses with negative online reviews, you’ll face a costly uphill battle in getting new customers on board.

Solutions to Improve Negative NPS Score

All is not lost, though. You can still take steps to stop the rot and turn your NPS score around. Here are some handy tips to help you get started:

Respond To Negative Reviews and Feedback

Too many businesses squander the treasure trove of information they get from negative customer reviews, consigning it to the dustbin of unheeded customer feedback. That’s a huge mistake. Because even though you can’t change a bad review, you CAN respond to it and use it to turn an unhappy customer into a loyal one. 

For example, Domino’s, one of the world’s largest pizza chains, was under fire because its customers weren’t happy with the taste of their pizza.

Instead of sweeping the problem under the rug, Domino’s took a revolutionary step by listening to the grumblings of its discontented customer base and addressing their concerns head-on. They revamped their entire menu, from the recipe to the ingredients, and even went so far as to launch a marketing campaign around their “pizza turnaround.”

This bold move paid off in spades and helped them return from the brink of disaster. Sales surged, and their stock prices skyrocketed. That’s the power of responding positively to customers’ negative feedback.

While positive feedback can be encouraging and gives you an idea of what to keep, it’s the negative comments that’ll help you make the real changes. Doing so will uncover where customer experience falters and reveals potential areas for improvement, empowering you to take your product to the next level. 

Elevate Your Customer Service Experience

Amazon. Netflix. Starbucks. What do they have in common? If you guessed ‘exceptional customer service’, you’re right. All these companies understand the value of customer service, and it shows in their soaring NPS scores.

Amazon is often hailed as the king of personalized, frictionless, and joyful customer service experiences, going above and beyond to ensure customer satisfaction. They employ a customer-first approach, offering generous return policies and letting customers keep items they accidentally ordered. For example, Amazon’s legendary customer service once again shone through when a customer’s Christmas gift package was stolen from their doorstep. Amazon shipped them a replacement free of charge – no questions asked. Such acts of generosity go a long way in earning customer loyalty.

Netflix, on the other hand, is no slouch, either. The streaming giant offers 24/7 customer support in multiple languages, including live chat and phone support. But that’s not all. Netflix also has a reputation for proactively addressing customer issues before they even have time to complain about them. This was one of the email messages a customer received from them:

This is the kind of customer service that creates and engrains a strong sense of brand loyalty. Another thing that this email makes evident is the witty and engaging tone of voice that Netflix adopts when communicating with customers. By inserting humor, wit, and enthusiasm into their customer interactions, Netflix shows that they are not only listening to customers but also engaging with them on a personal level. Even the CEO is known to take customer service calls every once in a while – talk about customer centricity!

Starbucks’ customer service strategy differs from both Amazon and Netflix but is equally noteworthy. The coffee chain encourages customers to feel like they belong by making them part of the Starbucks community. 

For example, in 2008, they launched ‘My Starbucks Ideas‘ – an online platform where customers could submit their requests and suggestions. This initiative not only gave customers a voice but also helped Starbucks gain a better understanding of its customer base. Over 300 ideas from the website have made it into Starbucks stores worldwide.

Starbucks also trains its baristas to remember customers’ names, creating an ongoing customer relationship. Such a personalized touch helps customers feel valued and appreciated, likely contributing to the high NPS scores that Starbucks has consistently enjoyed for many years.

By taking a customer-centric approach to customer service, these three companies have managed to set the bar for the industry and establish themselves as customer service champions.

So, if you want to take your NPS from negative to positive, start by taking cues from these customer service superstars. Go the extra mile for your customers – surprise them with offers, ask for feedback, and use it to improve their experience. When you focus on meeting and exceeding customer expectations, you’ll be rewarded with lasting brand loyalty.

Train your Staff to Become Customer-centric

How do you create a customer-centric culture? By starting from the inside. Your customer experience team is the first link in the chain of your company’s customer care journey, so they should be the ones to set the tone and lead the charge toward customer-centricity. Some things your customer experience team can do to show customers they are valued include:

Speed Up Response Times

Mckinsey’s research found that slow response times are one of the biggest frustrations for customers. Avoid letting an unaddressed issue fester for days or even hours. 40% of business buyers become highly disgruntled when response times drag on. 

Show Empathy

Statistics show that the vast majority – 79% – of consumers favor human-driven service over dealing with a chatbot or self-service options. The reason behind this preference is understandable; customers can often sense when an agent is following a script, leaving them feeling like just another problem to solve. When customers contact you, they want to feel like their concerns matter and that you understand where they’re coming from. Engage in natural dialogue and voice empathy to make the customer feel validated and understood.

Underpromise and Overdeliver

Nothing frustrates customers more than an unrealistic promise. Train your customer experience team to be honest with customers. It’s better to underpromise and overdeliver than vice versa. This way, you’re more likely to keep customer expectations in check and leave them feeling satisfied with the service they received.

Employ the Latest Tech Tools

You can’t douse the flames of customer dissatisfaction with outdated or inefficient customer service processes. The digital age has ushered in a host of incredible technological marvels, greatly enhancing the customer service landscape. Some of the latest digital tools you can employ to bring your customer experience up to speed include:

Task Management Apps

No matter how adept you are at steering the customer experience ship, eventually, you’ll reach a breaking point. It’s in times like these that task management tools can come to the rescue. Using them, you can streamline and organize customer service tasks, ensuring all customers get the same consistent service they expect from your business. You don’t even have to be tech-savvy to get up to speed with these tools. 

Most of them come equipped with easy-to-follow step-by-step instructions and many helpful resources to help you get started. But if you don’t have the time to learn all the bells and whistles or the budget to justify the premium price tag that comes with these apps, you can always rely on the miracle worker that is Google Sheets to get the job done without a fuss. Just find the right Google Sheet task management template that suits the depth of your projects, and you’re good to go.

Customer Insight Platforms

Customers often leave behind a trail of valuable crumbs in their digital journeys ripe for exploitation. These crumbs can provide invaluable insights into their purchase intent, customer preferences, and brand loyalty – if you know where to look. But, without an insight platform to help you pull all the pieces of a customer’s digital footprint together in one place, it would be impossible for you to take advantage of the data. 

Fortunately, customer insight platforms like Lumoa assist in making the customer data-gathering and analysis process a whole lot easier. With their sophisticated analytical and visualization capabilities, you can quickly identify and address any underlying issues causing customers to jump ship and make necessary changes to improve the customer experience.

Resource Capacity Planning Tools

Although resource capacity planning is commonly associated with dynamic company projects like product development or software engineering, it can also be applied to more static fields – like customer service. In recent years, sophisticated capacity planning tools have sprung up to help CX pros plan and manage their project workloads more efficiently.

Poor capacity planning in your customer service team can lead to overworked and understaffed agents, negatively impacting work quality and productivity over time. Inadequate planning also leaves no room for managing unforeseen events that could increase workload demand, such as a product outage. Deploying the right resource capacity planning tool can help you maneuver your way around such challenges and ensure your CX team is always ready to tackle customer service tasks head-on.

Customer Sentiment Analysis Tools

Gone are the days when you had to manually comb through customer feedback or comments to determine their sentiment. Disruptive tech trends like artificial intelligence and machine learning have spawned some very potent sentiment analysis tools capable of uncovering customer sentiment in real-time. 

These tools can help you gauge how your customers feel about your product or service, allowing you to refine and strengthen your customer experience before you lose their loyalty. That way, you can nip any potential customer dissatisfaction in the bud and ride the wave of disruptive tech advancements to position your business as a leader in the customer experience domain. 

Workflow Automation Platforms

Getting lost in the thicket of digital chaos is a common plight of most modern business verticals. That’s where workflow automation tools come in. These tools integrate seamlessly with your existing CX tools and technologies, allowing you to design automated processes that connect the dots between different pieces of your workflow.

With automation tools, your customer service team can rest easy knowing that the right tasks are being completed at the right time with minimal room for error. Moreover, many of these tools feature no-code or low-code configurations – perfect for busy CX pros who typically don’t have the time or resources to learn complex coding techniques. So, if you want to streamline your workflow and add an extra layer of efficiency to your customer service operations, workflow automation tools are the way to go. 

Use a Presentation to Present your NPS results

To help your team understand your current NPS score, its implications, and the necessary steps to improve it, consider presenting the NPS results through a presentation. An editable NPS presentation template can help you effectively communicate the importance of NPS and the changes you need to make within your organization and a C-level audience.

QR codes 

The comeback kid of 2020, QR codes, have impacted many business verticals – including CX. Quick Response codes are now popping up in retail stores, helping customers access product information and create a more seamless shopping experience. However, the power of QR codes extends far beyond retail: they can also be used to track customer service requests and provide customers instant access to relevant information, such as sharing customer support details or even making a call directly from the QR scan.

With QR codes, you can make the entire customer service experience more accessible and faster – bringing it closer to your customers and enhancing their overall engagement. What’s more, these 2-D codes are super easy to create and deploy. All you need is the right QR code generator tool, and you’re good to go. So start exploring the possibilities of QR codes to bring your customer service game to the next level.

Turn NPS Scores Around and Make Your Customer Experience Great Again

Few things are essential to the success of a business as the understanding of their customer’s sentiment and loyalty. And yet, achieving a top-notch NPS score isn’t always as straightforward as we’d like it to be.

But all hope isn’t lost. With the right knowledge and approach, you can easily turn a negative NPS score around and start seeing your business’s customer experience efforts take off. Start by recognizing the cause of your negative NPS score and then work your way up to developing strategies and solutions to address those issues. We hope this article has given you the information and inspiration you need to determine the best solutions for your unique situation. So what are you waiting for? Take the first step in turning your NPS score around today!

The post Understanding Negative NPS Score: Causes, Impact and Solutions appeared first on Lumoa.

So how do you ensure that all your customer experience (CX) initiatives are successful? In this article, Here are some practical tips to ensure that your CX initiatives successfully build strong relationships with customers.

Avoid Siloed Working

“The experience that a customer has with any organization is ultimately delivered by everyone in that organization,” shares certified CX Consultant Ian Golding. This means that everyone in the company is a critical component of customer experience, whether they work in support, sales, marketing, or any other department.

Siloed working negatively impacts both customers and employees, leading to the following:

• Higher operational costs
• Negative brand reputation
• Bad customer experience
• High acquisition costs
• High churn rates

It’s essential to avoid silos and ensure that all departments are working together cohesively and have a clear understanding of the overall customer journey. By breaking down silos, companies can understand what customers are going through and make sure their experience is consistent across channels.

Revisit Organizational Culture

Gaps in organizational culture often regrettably stem from a less-than-ideal leadership style. Some leaders can single-mindedly focus on numbers and goals, overlooking the essential role of customer experience in business success.

Employees are stretched thin, especially post-pandemic layoffs that left most teams lean. As such, most departments are pressured to meet goal after goal, often leaving CX as a mere afterthought.

Leaders should look at the big picture and recognize that customer experience is a priority rather than an afterthought. Leadership needs to focus on building an organizational culture where customer-centricity is at its core.

As such, leaders should emphasize the importance of providing exceptional service by investing in team training, creating a positive work environment, and empowering employees to make decisions that are best for customers.

Make Customer-centricity Everyone’s Responsibility

This is a common question that CX consultants always encounter: Who owns CX? Does the responsibility fall with sales, customer support, marketing, or another team?

The answer is simple: Everyone. Customer experience should be owned by everyone in the organization, from top to bottom. It’s not just a marketing or support issue – it’s something that every single team needs to focus on.

Ultimately, everyone is responsible for the customer experience. At the end of the day, no one team or person (even the CEO) can take charge of a customer’s end-to-end experience. 

It’s not just about having a CX department or a CX manager, too—it’s about empowering other departments to understand customer needs and ensure that their actions reflect customer-centricity.

Assess the Current CX Landscape and Address Key Issues

We often get so caught up behind the scenes that we forget to look closely at how things are for our customers. So if you feel your customer experience initiatives are not working, maybe it’s time to take a step back and assess the current CX landscape.

First, you need to identify any critical issues impacting your customer experience. This could include anything- from long wait times for support inquiries to confusing navigation on your website.

Encouraging collaboration and feedback between teams is also crucial at this stage so that everyone can provide their insights and ensure that the customer experience is tailored to customers’ needs.

From there, you can create an actionable plan that addresses these key issues and helps ensure that your CX initiatives are achievable and are making a difference. To help you keep track of everything, you might want to make use of a customer experience audit checklist.

Leverage Data and Analytics to Inform Your CX Strategy

Data and analytics should be leveraged to inform your CX strategy and ensure you are making data-driven decisions. Having access to customer insights can help you understand how customers interact with your brand, as well as any areas for improvement in the customer journey.

You can use these insights to create personalized experiences and stay ahead of the curve to anticipate customer needs and offer tailored experiences. 

By combining data with customer feedback, companies can more effectively identify opportunities for improvement in their CX initiatives and create a better experience for customers.

CX leaders may often encounter other leaders or teams that distrust data or do not see its value, especially if the insights run counter to what they’re used to. In such instances, it might be helpful to highlight that these insights are not based on emotion, insight, or conjecture—they’re based on facts.

It’s also essential to make sure that data is accessible and understandable for everyone in the organization so that they can use it to inform the decisions they make. Ultimately, demonstrating how data helps teams provide better customer experiences can help build trust in its value and encourage more collaboration across departments on CX initiatives.

Here’s a pro tip for CX professionals: Keep a library of resources (articles, studies, blogs, journals, etc.) that support the data-based insights that you have so that they can be readily accessed when needed. This can also help others get a better understanding of how data can be used to improve customer experience.

Conclusion

Creating an exceptional customer experience can be challenging, but it can be successfully done with the right strategies and leadership in place. By breaking down silos and revisiting organizational culture, companies can ensure that everyone works together to provide the best possible CX. 

Additionally, by assessing your current CX landscape and leveraging data and analytics, you can create a strategy that is tailored to customer needs. It may take some time to get the ball rolling, but the effort will be worth it when customers are happier and more loyal to your brand. 

The post Building Relationships Across Departments for Customer Experience Success appeared first on Lumoa.

This article explores how to augment the customer experience through feedback sentiment analysis, demonstrating the variety of actionable solutions it offers businesses.

You may be wondering how sentiment analysis can truly make a difference in your organization. As you read through this article, you’ll learn what role customer sentiment plays in business. In addition, you’ll learn how to use sentiment analysis to drive emotional impact. Furthermore, you’ll learn how cutting-edge technologies can help you overcome the challenges of delivering high-quality sentiment analysis.

Why is Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback Important?

In business, everything begins with the customer. All our revenue is voluntarily given to us by our customers. Most of our activities and expenses are all about creating value for the customer, spreading the gospel of that value, and convincing customers one by one about how products and services will solve their problems and improve their lives. Every day the customer gives, or take away, and his/her gratification or irritation can either make or break our business.  

At the same time, we – as humans – tend to be driven by our deep emotions. Underneath our motivations, there’s really nothing else. Joy, satisfaction, pain, frustration, and anger drive our behavior and drive our learning. Give one delight, and one wants more of it and may recommend it to friends. Deliver one frustration, and one will start avoiding you or – worse – resent you and harm your reputation.  

Our deep dependency on our customers and this deep emotional drive explain why sentiment analysis on customer feedback is so important in this overly digital world. You simply cannot act on the customers’ pains and frustrations if you are not aware of them and their causes.  You cannot intensify the good of your product either even if you cannot recognize the fundamentals and the details in your product that your customers truly love and cherish.

What is Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback and How Does it Work?

To better understand sentiment analysis’s practical applications, imagine its benefits in the retail industry. Let’s say a retail company uses sentiment analysis to identify customer pain points in their online shopping experience.

By analyzing customer feedback, they can discover recurring issues with website navigation and the checkout process. And with this information, the company may target improvements to their website by incorporating website navigation best practices. This will result in a more seamless and enjoyable online shopping experience for their customers.

This example demonstrates how sentiment analysis can be leveraged to pinpoint specific areas that need attention. This allows businesses to make informed decisions and enhance customers’ experiences.

Let’s do another one but this time, in a SaaS environment. A software company leverages sentiment analysis to prioritize bug fixes and feature updates based on customer feedback. They can find out what’s frustrating users and which features are most requested by analyzing user comments and reviews.

By doing this, the company can allocate resources efficiently and focus on improving things that will have the biggest impact on user retention and satisfaction.

Like the first example, this one illustrates how sentiment analysis can help businesses make decisions based on data and improve their products and services according to customer preferences.

Now you know how it works in the real world, let’s further explore ways how to use sentiment analysis to drive emotional impact in more detail.  

One needs to identify something that drives emotions and is actionable. The first step is what we call sentiment analysis. In its fundamentals, it’s about identifying the emotional tone – the sentiment – of a sentence. In practice, it’s about recognizing the text ‘I love the app’ as positive, ‘I saw the app’ as neutral, and ‘the app is driving me crazy’ as negative.  

This sounds nice and easy and for the user – easy it is. Lumoa’s user interface (UI) provides a clear and intuitive way to visualize sentiment analysis results. In the Lumoa UI, users can see a graphical representation of the sentiment scores for different categories or topics, as well as individual customer feedback with their corresponding sentiment labels. At the same time, the results can also be filtered by date, sentiment category, or other relevant factors, making it easy to find trends and patterns. Here’s a view of the sentiment analysis in the Lumoa UI.  

Yet, it’s quite a challenge to deliver high-quality sentiment analysis in a real-world application. This difficulty is raised by several factors. One core issue is the diversity of languages. For example, while Lumoa can deal with 120 languages through translations, it also supports more than a half-dozen languages as translation targets. It means that sentiment detection needs to operate over multiple languages. Another issue is the diversity of humane expressions.

The richness of emotionally loaded words that range from ‘good’ to ‘niggle’, different ways to express irony or negation ‘could have been better’ and plain typing mistakes ‘it was great’ mean that the machinery needs to master extremely wide vocabulary and nuance of expression. 

A third more practical issue relates to the unit of sentiment.

Many sentiment analysis solutions make the mistake of predicting sentiment on too high levels, or in a worst-case scenario, on the document level.

This makes it difficult to assign a sentiment to a specific theme. For example, the text ‘content is great but the app crashes’, has 2 separate sentiments: one related to the application content and another to its quality.  

Nowadays, the-state-of-the-art sentiment detection is typically done with pre-trained and large deep-learning networks. Lumoa is no exception, as we are using an XLM-RoBERTa, which is a large multi-lingual language model pre-trained with 100 languages and 2.5TB of text. For reference, that’s about 100 times the size of the 2023 English Wikipedia. The use of this model solves many issues. The cross-language nature of this model means that it can understand about 100 different languages without separate training.

Large language models contain huge amounts of individual details (270M parameters), which capture diverse vocabularies and human expression. Lumoa also has additional logic for separating text for sensible units for sentiment analysis, and for incorporating additional contextual data in predictions. As a result, Lumoa can reach 80%-85% sentiment detection accuracy across various languages, which is considered a highly competitive result in the industry. 

How to Use Sentiment Analysis to Drive Emotional Impact? 

While one needs to identify emotional context to drive emotional impact, this is only a part of the story. According to the Lumoa Actionability framework, for an insight to be actionable, it needs to have 3 different properties:  

1. Impact 

1. cause 

1. and novelty 

The reason why these 3 different aspects need to be present is somewhat obvious. Let’s consider a statement ‘recent update was ok’. Even if the insight has a clear cause (‘update’) and it’s a novel (‘recent’), if it doesn’t imply an issue or a pain it’s not something you can or need to fix. At the same time the statement ‘everything has become horrible’ may be impactful and novel, but if it lacks a clear root cause, you cannot really act on it. 

On the other hand, while the theme ‘price is still high’ implies a clear issue and its cause, if the same theme has been present from day 1 and no one has acted on it: one will likely act on it now. It’s quite typical that there is always someone complaining about the price or some other aspect of a service, which is less of a bug and more a feature of the business model. 

So, in practice, the sentiment can become an unactionable ‘vanity metric’ unless it’s bound to the cause of the sentiment and to some kind of trend analysis. For example, in Lumoa this coupling of the emotional impact of the cause and novelty is done in 2 places:  

1. On impact calculation  

1. And with insights, especially the ‘actionable insights’ 

The following screenshot demonstrates how the different aspects work when combined. The top left answers to questions: “What the sentiment is and how it has changed?”. There, you can see the total positive sentiment for November and that it has dropped significantly. The top right answers the question “Why has it dropped at a high level?”. There you can see for example that the sentiment has dropped by 0.23% points, because of the Price and Payment topic.

On the middle-left, you can find this answer more granularly and find that the main subtopic driving the change is Discounts and Promotions. On the middle-right, you can find the exact causes behind the Discounts and promotions negative sentiment. One example is the actionable insight related to the Pull&Bear application Setup and Registration topic. When you read the feedback, the problem becomes clear: customers are not getting the promised 10% discount for downloading the app. 

In this way, the sentiment analysis can be combined with cause and trend analytics to form a coherent overview, that leads you from the top-level change (-7.3%) to changes to the concrete actionable details, that drive the emotional impact. 

Conclusion 

Because emotions drive customer behavior, sentiment analysis on customer feedback forms a tool for driving improvement in customer sentiment, customer behavior, and the business itself. In turn, these can drive directly not just loyalty, but also conversion to paying customers by guaranteeing a better early-stage customer experience. Sentiment analysis can also help organizations become more customer-centric, by making it better tuned to the customers’ pain and delight.  

Still, sentiment analysis is not trivial, and it comes with its caveats and challenges, that need to be managed to deliver high quality. Sentiment analysis is often not enough alone to deliver value, but it needs to be combined with some kind of cause/theme analysis and trend analysis to provide insights that are interesting and actionable.

The post Sentiment Analysis on Customer Feedback: A Guide to Enhance Customer Experience appeared first on Lumoa.

Simply put, this process closely examines current and potential customers’ characteristics, traits, and preferences. Analyzing such data helps businesses learn the ins and outs of their target audience—and a company that knows its audience can further its own growth.

Even with such a simple explanation, it’s clear to see how conducting a customer profile analysis can result in business growth. But how exactly does profiling feed into this?

This article will explore five of the most notable impacts of customer profile analysis on your company.

Improves business profitability

Any company that wants to thrive has to keep profitability in mind—and a customer profile analysis is a gateway to boosted profitability.

Think of it this way: as a business, you have to optimize your resources to ensure you sell more products (or services) without increasing spending. Efficiently targeting your intended audience can decrease spending while increasing revenue.

Customer profiles and ERP (enterprise resource planning) systems work together to make this happen, which is why implementing an ERP system is such a good idea. ERPs help you find and access customer information efficiently, so you’re able to use profiles to their full potential.

It’s no surprise, then, that the ERP software market grew by nearly 10% in 2019 as more people realized how helpful this type of tool can be.

Optimizes marketing efforts

Imagine you’re trying to sell a watch to someone. You know which styles, colors, and brands that person likes, and you know how much they’re going to be able to spend on the watch. That information makes it much easier to complete the sale successfully.

On the other hand, trying to sell it to a stranger who might not even like watches will be significantly more difficult.

Customer profile analysis lets you similarly perfect your marketing strategy. As it relies on fully understanding information to market more effectively, customer profile analysis optimizes your marketing and sales funnel.

Boosts customer engagement

When you’re looking to increase customer engagement, one of the best things you can do is ensure everything you’re putting out is exciting and relevant to different types of customers. By analyzing their profiles, you can do just that.

Customer profiles contain details on the type of content your target audience tends to engage with and the platforms they prefer to see it on. This helps you craft posts, ads, videos, and other content they’re more likely to enjoy or find useful.

Enhances customer retention strategies

Customer retention is vital to businesses. In fact, increasing it by just 5% yields a 25-95% profit increase, which shows why it’s important to focus on.

Retaining customers is much easier when you understand their needs and preferences. Why? Because this insight allows you to tailor your retention strategies to observed realities rather than projected estimations. In other words, having precise data is better than guessing or making assumptions.

For example, your customer profile analysis might reveal that customers are frustrated with your shipping options. With this valuable insight, you can focus on improving or adding new options. In turn, this improves customer satisfaction and ensures customers won’t switch to a competitor.

Creates opportunities for business scaling

When you use your enterprise resource planning software to make your customer data available across all your departments, you can create a more cohesive approach to business growth. This makes it easier for your company to scale up effectively.

When the whole company has access to information on what your customers love, you can sustainably gear each department towards improving customer relations. This also makes it easier to create lasting connections with new customers and/or leads.

It’s clear that conducting a customer profile analysis has numerous benefits. Customers are at the heart of any business, so putting in the time and effort to get to know them will always pay off. Ultimately, this will help support your company and help it grow.

5 Best practices when profiling customers

It’s one thing to understand the benefits of adopting a new process such as customer profiling. However, it’s crucial to know how to implement it effectively.

Study customer buying behavior

A sure way to improve the customer experience is to make sure you’re fully aware of the patterns your customers follow when they want to make a purchase.

They may click on a product once and buy it straight away. More likely, they’ll do research first, compare choices, and then eventually make a purchase in light of the information they’ve gathered.

When you understand the driving factors that lead to this final decision, you can use that knowledge to improve your standing in customers’ minds.

 Identify customer demographic

Who are your marketing campaigns aimed at?

The more you know about your target customer or demographic, the better you can target them. Are you mainly aiming at people of a particular age or gender? Do your customers share preferences or values?

For example, you may want to target consumers who are searching for ethical and sustainable products. If that’s the case, highlight your company’s eco-friendly policies to better appeal to that demographic.

Perform customer surveys

It’s always a good idea to learn from what your customers tell you directly—and customer surveys are an excellent avenue for them to talk to you.

As you poll customers, be sure to ask the right questions and avoid open-ended ‘yes’ or ‘no’ questions. For example, you may want to know their opinions on a particular product. In that case, ask questions like ‘How would you rate this product on a scale of 1-10?’.

Research customer interests

You’re always looking to make your brand look more appealing to customers. What better way to do this than understand their likes and dislikes?

A company that only ever says “Our products are great” may sound biased. On the other hand, a business that can explain why their products are relevant to customers’ interests will leave a lasting impression on its customers.

Moreover, when you show your customers how your product makes it more fun to engage with their interests or easier to solve a specific problem for them, selling will become significantly easier.

Map out the customer journey

It can be difficult to understand your customers if you’re unsure about the steps in the customer journey. After all, you can’t put yourself in their shoes without knowing the path those shoes are walking.

That’s why you must understand what their journey typically looks like, from the moment they search for your products or services to after they make a purchase. 

The more information you have, the more you can understand their purchase intent, shopping behavior, and pain points. What’s more, understanding customer journeys helps you shape them.

And remember…

Customer profile analysis is your ticket to a deeper understanding of your customers. Anytime you focus on this analysis, you’re giving your company a chance to learn everything it needs to know to effectively market to your target audience.

This insight helps you learn how to make customers happier, which increases brand loyalty and reduces customer churn.

That’s why customer profile analysis drives business growth—and why it’s always worth performing.

The post The Benefits of Customer Profile Analysis for Business Growth appeared first on Lumoa.

Think about it. Your organization probably already collects data in many of these categories:

• Customer metadata (age, location, etc)
• Product and website usage patterns
• Survey data (Net Promoter Score, customer satisfaction, etc.)

Typically, this data lives in multiple systems and is only looked at by the teams that collect it ( and unfortunately, sometimes not even them!). Due to the sheer volume of tools used and data collected, it has become cumbersome and time-consuming—and sometimes near impossible—to generate useful insights at the pace necessary to stay ahead of the competition.

Enter Natural Language Processing (NLP).

NLP has made customer experience analytics way more accessible. Predictive modeling and real-time data analysis have created huge opportunities for companies to personalize the customer experience. Analytics was once the domain of a few experts, but today the power of analytics is available to a much wider audience. 

Let’s explore how you can use analytics to revolutionize your customer experience.

The Power of Customer Experience Analytics in CX Management

Customer experience has been seen as a differentiator in the market for years. And customer-centric companies have been using surveys to understand customer needs for even longer than that. 

Surveys are great tools because collecting Voice of Customer feedback is a vital part of understanding your customers better. But they’re only one small piece of the customer experience data puzzle.

CX Survey Sample

Your customers and prospects are constantly giving you data: Social media posts, sales calls, product usage patterns, emails, support tickets, product review pages, and so on. All of these data sources are things you can analyze to better understand your customers’ expectations and frustrations. 

It can feel like an overwhelming task, but once you’ve unlocked insights from that data it can revolutionize your business. 

The gap between those two—collecting data and understanding data—is where analytics and insights tools (this is where Lumoa comes into play).  

Unlocking insights from conversations with your customers is step one in unleashing the power of analytics to improve your customer experience. This power comes from being able to generate different types of insights by combining data in ways that manual effort simply couldn’t do.

Analyzing segments against one another 

It’s very likely you sell to more than one customer segment. A segment might be a location, company size, industry, contract value, or something else.

While individual data points are useful, combining data points across all channels and comparing the data against different segments will help you understand better ways to service each segment. You’ll be better positioned to remove friction from each segment’s use case. For instance:

• You may discover that your CSAT is way higher for enterprise customers when you respond in under an hour, but SMB customers are willing to wait longer much longer.
• Your technology segment may be willing to spend more money for additional customizations, whereas other segments aren’t interested.

In some cases, you may even discover segments that you didn’t know existed.

Receiving more precise observations

When metrics fluctuate, it’s often unclear what the root cause was. That makes it tough to know how to address those problems. 

Customer analytics gives you the ability to find the metaphorical needle in your haystack of data faster. By increasing the precision of your observations about your customers, you’re able to apply more effort on solving specific problems (versus spending time and energy on broad or poorly defined problems that are less likely to deliver an ROI).

Increasing value across the customer journey

Including more than just survey data enables you to spot problems across the entire customer journey. With a modern CX analytic tool, you can answer questions like:

• When do potential customers leave your website? 
• When do errors occur in product use? 
• Is your onboarding program setting clients up for success?  

An analytics tool enables you to find the pain points across all of your customer touchpoints, both pre- and post-sale. Once you’ve clearly defined the pain points, you can get super strategic about how you solve for them. 

In summary, analytics unlocks all kinds of abilities that make it far easier for you to iteratively improve your customer experience across the board.

A sample of Hotjar’s exit survey

Revolutionize customer experience

But exactly how are these analytics-driven capabilities revolutionizing customer experience? 

In short, they create an environment where you are able to holistically construct a seamless and holistic experience for your customers, from end-to-end. 

They make it easier for you to deliver a consistent delight.

Driving change from Voice of Customer feedback is a game changer in customer experience management. These powers enable remarkable changes to your customer experience, including:

• Pattern prediction
• Personalization
• Service customization
• Issue remediation and prevention

Pattern prediction

When it comes to serving customers, predicting when things are likely to need action leads to a smoother service delivery. With precise observations across specific segments of customers, analytics helps you recognize patterns and get better at predicting issues. 

For example, recognizing that a specific customer’s sentiment towards your brand is declining can be a predictor of future churn. Picking up on this signal early enables your team to take action to mitigate that churn before it happens. 

Analytics can combine data points from different sources in real-time. For instance, take the volume and sentiment of their support tickets, skipping their most recent business review, and recognizing a drop in product usage. On their own each of these factors is easy to miss or explain away, but taken together they’re a fairly strong sign that the relationship with this customer is unhealthy or at-risk. 

In situations like these, analytics is the red flag that lets you know you need to take action if you want to keep delivering value and retain your customer. 

Lumoa’s Topic impacts and Trending insights showing a drill down on what’s causing negative feedback regarding Updates

Personalization

Your customers want a personalized experience. They want to feel as if you know them and are catering to their needs. 

Analytics can help create this feeling of personalization. It can happen through small things, like automatically routing tickets based on their category, ensuring the right expert is always there to help. Or you can create custom marketing messages by segment that speak directly to the user and reference the things your analytics show they care about most. You can use product usage data to create tailored messages helping users be more effective at their work. 

Personalizing the message at the user level adds more value than a generic knowledge article or irrelevant marketing content. These personalized touches build trust and confidence that you understand your customers’ needs and business objectives.

Service customization

What if your products and services guided your customers at every step? 

Analytics help create that experience by identifying the behaviors that lead to a positive sentiment. Learning how your customers behave and what they like (or dislike) helps you deliver products and services which they love. 

Simple product changes—like suggesting more useful settings based on the type of customer or tool tips that remind customers of things that can help them achieve their goals faster—can have a big impact on your customer satisfaction. 

Analytics can also help you to customize workflows. For example:

• If analytics shows your enterprise customers are particularly sensitive to being passed around between multiple support agents, you can update your ticket routing so that inbound tickets from that segment are automatically escalated to a tier 2 agent.  
• If analytics shows your healthcare customers find more value from key features, you can adjust your onboarding process to highlight the things they’re likely to use most. 

While some of these changes may seem minor, having the customer knowledge to tweak products and processes creates a far more frictionless experience.

Issue remediation and prevention

When something does go wrong, analytics enable you to create better solutions. 

For example:

• Which help center articles are not working?
• What use cases need to be automated?
• Where can products be changed or in-product guidance be added?  

All of these can be answered through effective customer analytics. When an issue occurs and you can accurately drill down to discover the root source of the problem, you’ll be better positioned to both fix the issue and prevent similar issues in the future. 

Leverage analytics to create the best customer experience

The advancements in text analytics and NLP technology have made it possible for CX teams across the world to drastically improve their understanding of their customers.

Customer experience has been considered a differentiator for years—but it’s been hard to execute on CX improvement opportunities because of siloed and unstructured data. Thankfully, these days are behind us! 

Modern feedback analytics tools—like Lumoa—mean you’re no longer blocked by the amount of data or tools used across your organization. It’s now easy to integrate tools and understand what your end-to-end customer journey looks like. 

Learn more about how you can unlock insights from your customer conversations in this on-demand webinar.

The post Buyer’s Guide to Customer Experience Analytics appeared first on Lumoa.

Conversations with customers are the ideal way to get valuable insight and feedback into an organization’s performance. It allows companies to pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses and work on these issues quickly and flexibly.  

Garen Di Bernardo, Product Marketing Manager for Lumoa- a feedback analytics platform- provided some valuable tips on how to read customer conversations in an insightful webinar. The webinar showcases how companies can use the conversational analytics platform to see entire customer conversations, cut through the clutter, gain meaningful insights and act on these issues in real-time.   

Here’s a synopsis of the essentials from the webinar 

Why is Customer Conversational Analytics Important? 

Customer insights gleaned from feedback can be beneficial in several ways. It can help a brand innovate with new products; improve its reputation in the market; help outshine the opposition; and eventually, it can help increase sales and profits.

Apart from that, it can also help the brand refine the overall customer experience while giving them a better idea of its target audience and, thus, being able to customize its marketing strategies.

However, it isn’t enough to simply engage the customer in conversation to see these benefits. Understanding how to read this feedback is essential, so time isn’t wasted in guessing and sifting through unnecessary information.

Here is an easy step-by-step process that will help your organization streamline its customer insight process, basis the learnings of the webinar. 

Consolidate Feedback

The first and most crucial step in the process is gathering and storing customer feedback. This feedback could come from questions posed to customer support, reviews left on social media, or surveys answered by your most valued customers. Without this information, it’s impossible to know what customers are looking for, and thus leaves your product and brand stagnant.

Constantly keeping track of all the complaints and positive feedback left by your customers is the first essential step to understanding how your brand can innovate and market itself to potential customers better.

Focus on the Keywords 

After engaging with many customers, you’ll often be left with hours or even days of conversations that could be quite painful for an individual to sift through.

To save time and energy, focusing on only the most critical bits of these conversations is vital— questions explicitly related to a product, for instance, or requests for refunds. To get to the bottom of what the customer is actually trying to tell you, it’s important to cut out all the irrelevant bits and identify the most major talking points. 

Focusing on the keywords makes it much easier to sift through the noise and develop speedy solutions. 

Say, for example, you notice that the keywords “availability” features heavily in conversations customers have with customer support; this means you’re left with a concrete, identified problem that you can focus all energy on solving. 

Categorize Your Feedback

Once you have all the feedback consolidated by keyword, it can help to categorize these keywords further by topic. These broader buckets, such as “product,” “delivery,” or “shipping status,” can help you identify problems and positive feedback and allow you to work on them in a structured manner. 

Apart from topics, it could also be helpful to categorize the feedback by customer segments. For example, if you notice that some of your most highly valued customers are using a keyword very often, addressing those issues should be a top priority

Categorizing your customers by location could also be helpful in this regard, as it helps you deal with region-specific issues, such as a lack of product availability or problems with shipping in a specific area, for example.  

Identify Patterns

Once you have consolidated and categorized all the feedback by keyword, it’s time for the next critical step  — looking for patterns. There’s no point collecting all this feedback if it doesn’t help you find the right solutions, after all.

Do you find, for example, specific issues that constantly come up in customer conversations? Are there any common themes you should be looking out for but are currently ignoring? Are there Certain times of the year when some keywords appear more often than others? 

Once you start seeing patterns in your feedback and conversations, you’ll be able to gain quite a bit of valuable insight into what you could be doing better. 

Say, for instance, that customers often complain about the quality of a specific product but tend to praise related products. It’s a sure-shot sign that something needs to change. 

Use Analysis Tools 

Following through with steps one to four could require immense human effort and valuable time. So when trying to consolidate and understand customer conversations, it isn’t a bad idea to consider using tools like sentiment analysis or text analytics. Some of these tools are designed to specifically help you sift through large amounts of customer feedback- accurately and swiftly. 

These tools can help you identify common themes and sentiments and categorize them into neat buckets. They can further assist you in sifting through words that appear in both positive and negative contexts while compiling the frequency of keywords. 

Some platforms, such as the one offered by Lumoa, are easy to implement and offer real-time analysis that impacts key metrics. Once you figure out the insights that are actually relevant to your business and save a lot of time having to do all of the above manually, there’s no stopping innovation.

Final Thoughts

As most companies will probably already know, engaging with customers is an ongoing process, one that requires immense time, effort, and ongoing follow-up. However, as we’ve learned from the insightful webinar, simply engaging with customers isn’t the end goal. Learning to read insights from these conversations and finding solutions is. When organizations save time answering unnecessary questions and sifting through noisy material, it saves them a lot of time for innovation and customizing their product to the right customer.

The post How to get Insights from Customer Conversations & Analytics appeared first on Lumoa.

In the world of customer experience, “customer empathy” is not just a buzzword, it’s a game-changer. Put simply, it means genuinely caring about the experience your customers have with your brand. And when you master this skill, you can create an emotional bond that sets you apart from the competition.

Let me give you a real-life scenario of how it works in general.

Customer empathy is at the heart of Lush’s approach to building trust with its customers. By understanding that their customers care deeply about the products they buy and how they are created, Lush has taken steps to address these concerns.

The release of the “How It’s Made” videos is a perfect example of this. The videos provide customers with a behind-the-scenes look at the sourcing and manufacturing process of Lush’s products, giving them a sense of transparency and openness that is rare in the beauty industry.

This level of transparency shows that Lush is willing to go the extra mile to demonstrate to their customers that they care about what they care about. Lush’s approach is a great way to build customer trust through authenticity and empathy.

By understanding their customers’ needs and concerns, Lush is able to connect with them on a deeper level and create a loyal customer base that values the company’s commitment to ethical and sustainable practices.

Moreover, through its “How It’s Made” videos, Lush is able to showcase their commitment to transparency and ethical practices, making it clear to its customers that they are a company that values customer empathy.

So, how exactly does customer empathy impact the customer experience?

The relationship between customer empathy and customer experience

Empathy is a common term to hear in customer success, but it’s not always incredibly clear what empathy exactly is. According to Merriam-Webster’s dictionary: 

“Empathy is the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit manner”

If you think back on your best experiences as a customer they probably all have one thing in common: you felt in synch with the rep, or agent, you were working with. They understood your needs and you didn’t have to expend extra energy trying to explain the issue. 

The main way to be in sync with someone, and by extension provide a great customer experience, is through customer empathy. When you’re able to get to the core of what someone needs, you’re able to provide the best customer experience possible. 

Benefits of Customer Empathy

Did you know the Apple Genius Training Manual includes a basic guide to empathy? In some ways, that should come as no surprise. Apple’s customer experience is highly regarded and their focus on the details, like taking empathy into account, is a big reason for that. 

Since empathy is a soft skill, there are those quick to write off its importance. And, in fairness, it’s easy to do that. There’s no objective measure of empathy. Though that may be true, that doesn’t mean that empathy’s impact can’t be felt in other ways.

Stronger customer bonds 

Customer empathy creates stronger customer bonds because it encourages deep and meaningful connections between customers and businesses. By taking the time to genuinely listen, understand, and empathize with customers’ needs and concerns, businesses can create an emotional bond that goes beyond just a transaction. To further enhance this relationship, learning how to build a Customer Success process can be a crucial step.

This way, customers feel heard, valued, and appreciated—all of which are key elements in creating trust and loyalty with customers. For example, talking about that experience gives your customer the idea that you get their pain points and you’re the person they can rely on.

Studies have revealed that we tend to gravitate toward individuals who share similar qualities as ourselves. This is where highlighting your similarities with your customers can be advantageous in creating a stronger bond and enhancing their overall experience. Furthermore, when a customer develops a liking for you, they are more inclined to perceive you positively. This can prove to be a powerful asset in shaping the customer experience.

Additionally, studies have shown that customers who believe their needs are being understood and responded to in a timely manner are more likely to make repeat purchases from a business.

Customer empathy has also been linked to increased sales, customer engagement levels, customer satisfaction scores, positive brand recognition, employee motivation, improved customer service response times, and reduced costs associated with customer complaints. All of these benefits demonstrate why investing the time to practice customer empathy can produce long-term success for any business.

Solve Problems Faster

Wouldn’t it be great to have the ability to read customers’ minds? Things would go quicker and long back-and-forths could be eliminated. It would drastically improve the experience for everyone involved. 

Though having empathy doesn’t imbue you with the power to read minds, it does get you on the right path. When you have empathy, you’re more able to understand where a customer is coming from, which should help you understand their problem quicker. 

Let’s take a look at Buffer, a social media management company as an example. Buffer prioritizes customer empathy in their approach to customer service. They understand that managing social media can be stressful and time-consuming, and they aim to make the process as easy and enjoyable as possible for their customers.

Buffer sets the bar high when it comes to customer service – they don’t just sit back and wait for questions and issues, but instead demonstrate their empathy by proactively checking in on customers. They’re always ready with a friendly greeting around the clock, while clear communication allows customers to stay up-to-date on account developments or potential problems.

What’s more, is that this focus isn’t one-sided; through building strong relationships with their clients, an uplifting atmosphere of mutual support is created. And I believe that’s what’s called a win-win!

Better Insights

Did you know the better someone gets along with their doctor, the better health outcomes they have? On the surface, how well someone gets along with their doctor may seem trivial but if you think about it more, the more it makes sense. 

The real reason it improves health outcomes is that, the more someone likes and trusts their physician, the more likely they are to be open about any health issues they’re facing. Though most of us aren’t dealing with life-and-death situations, there’s still a lot of benefit to getting deeper insights from customers. 

When you employ customer empathy, just like with physicians, you’re showing you’re trustworthy. It doesn’t take a grand gesture either. Asking specific questions about their life and relating your own experiences back to them is a great way to start. 

Gaining more specific customer feedback means we can build better features and solve more of the issues that customers have. Both of which improve the overall customer experience. 

Empathy leads to understanding

We all want to feel understood. Though that’s true, when you’re in the day-to-day trenches of helping out customers, it can be easy to forget. When we show customers empathy it not only benefits them, but us as well. 

Empathy allows us to solve problems faster, build stronger bonds, and get better insights from customers. All of those add up to us being able to provide an overall better customer experience, which positively impacts us and our companies in many ways. 

The post The Power of Customer Empathy in Supercharging Your Customer Experience appeared first on Lumoa.

The good news is that there are still ways to get VoC programs back on track. The first step is to assess where you are now and then make an action plan. In our last webinar, Lumoa CEO Carlos del Corral sat down with Mark Barrett and Sian Kerr from Watermelon Research to discuss just that.

Here are some key insights.

Signs That a VoC Program is Losing Momentum

We can begin by looking at the program and remembering why it exists in the first place. What was its purpose? What has it recently or in the past helped your company with? From there, we can understand our present position and the indicators that our programs are running out of energy.

Focusing Heavily on Metrics

The first sign that a VoC program is losing momentum is when it becomes just another way to measure and report performance metrics. 

According to Mark Barrett, “at this point, we’re worrying more about whether the needle is moving in the right direction rather than what problems and challenges the VoC program is helping us identify or solve- and how it helps shape product and service development.” – says Barrett

When Things are Taking Longer Than They Used to

Mark Barrett shares another sign to look for: the amount of time it takes for things to happen. We must rethink how quickly we can get from data to an idea to an initiative to completion. The question is, how quickly or slowly is a change being applied?

We also need to consider whether we still have our internal stakeholders’ buy-in. This is critical because it allows us to progress from an idea to a complete initiative to launch a product or communication at the same rate that we used to.

Lack of internal support will affect how the program is used and implemented. It also lessens the program’s benefits to the company, which snowballs into even lower buy-in.

Barrett provided several additional questions for evaluating your VoC program:

• How well does the program keep up with other changes in the business?
• When was it last reviewed, updated, and refreshed?
• How is your organization using the program to drive change?
• How does it lead to new products and services?
• When did you last check in with your employees?

Barrett compares the VoC to a living organ. You must continue monitoring your VoC program to ensure that it adapts, changes, and evolves over time.

Primary Areas That Define the Impact of a VoC Program

Sian Kerr shared the three key areas to consider when assessing the impact of a VoC or CX program:

How Each Team Uses the Results

Look at how individual teams can use the insights and feedback they get from customers. How do they apply customer feedback to enhance and transform the customer experience?

According to Kerr, the tactical side of things comes first. This includes being able to successfully guide customers to different information resources or communication channels, as well as being able to resolve contact inquiries.

She explained that the second way to tell if an insight is effective is to look at the strategic side. It looks at how feedback from the programs is being used to shape, inform, and create initiatives that are then applied to transform customer service.

Insight is Used to Understand the Whole Customer Journey

It’s essential for everyone working in your organization to understand the entire journey from a customer’s point of view. When the various teams working on different parts of the company genuinely understand how they impact the customer experience, the business can create a seamless customer experience that keeps them coming back for more.

This is in contrast to a siloed approach in which teams are unaware of how their customer service affects the customer’s experience or how it could affect another team.

Insights are Analyzed Through a Commercial Lens

Looking at insights through a commercial lens essentially ties it in with other relevant management information or commercial data that provides your organization with more than a view of the experience. It shows how the initiative is affecting the business’s bottom line.

Tips to Re-energize Your VoC Program

Sian and Mark shared a couple of ways to reenergize VoC programs- although effectiveness would be dependent on the design and maturity of the program:

Take a Step Back

Mark suggested taking a step back from where you are now and not getting too caught up in the specifics. He further advised mulling through these few questions as an exercise as if you were starting the project afresh:

• What would we want the program to achieve?
• What do we want it to measure for us?
• What channels and touch points should it cover?
• Who are the people that will need to be involved in designing and shaping the program to have the biggest possible impact?

Take a look at your responses and evaluate how they relate to your current circumstances. Find any gaps, then consider the possible impact of implementing changes on the company. Consider how much time, money, or effort it would take to set up and implement changes.

In a perfect scenario, this would be the starting point for planning a VoC program’s future and prioritizing some of the initiatives you’ve identified.

Gamification

Gamification is all the rage in survey research and for good reason! It can not only increase response rates but also capture more meaningful feedback from participants – who are usually happy to put down their pens with traditional surveys.

Gamifying your surveys give you insights beyond what people say: measuring responses speed or using emoticons instead of words allows you to dig deeper into how they feel as well. A top tip? Consider a behavioral science approach when crafting your gamified questions; that way decision-making will be better understood…and we all know understanding leads to success!

Reflect on Your Successes

Sian explained how acknowledging your wins could re-energize your VoC program. It involves pausing to reflect on your accomplishments over a specific period—say, within six months to a year—and then looking backward.

The purpose of this is to drive engagement and re-motivate the team by showing what their efforts have achieved so far. This also fosters a sense of pride within the organization and motivates the team to strive for continued success.

Share these details with the entire team and all stakeholders, from upper management to frontline employees:

• What the program achieved within that period
• What initiatives have come out
• What impact have they had (in terms of customer experience and commercial)

Present your VoC program’s achievements thus far, and discuss your plans for expanding the initiative.

Omnichannel strategy

Barrett mentioned that for businesses that follow an omnichannel approach, it is important to identify the reason behind the decline in the Voice of the Customer (VoC) program.

One should begin by examining whether customer journey maps have been created to capture feedback at critical touchpoints, and if the program is aligned with those maps. It is also important to determine whether the program is dynamic enough to provide a nuanced understanding of customer experiences across channels. Rather than taking a siloed approach, businesses should consider all the key channels, journeys, and touchpoints and how they relate to one another.

This can help identify the priority gaps and challenges, and ultimately, reinvigorate the program.

“To inform the channel strategy, businesses should consider the operational costs, volume of traffic, drivers of channel preference, barriers to channel use, first contact resolution, and issues in completing actions by channel. By taking a commercial lens and considering the desired channel mix, businesses can build a stronger VoC program and enhance the customer experience.”

The post How to Re-energize Your VoC Program appeared first on Lumoa.

You probably know this. But where do you start? One of the best analysis techniques available is the voice of customer (VoC) template. It will help you gather valuable feedback, identify customer pain points, and work towards better solutions.

This article will explain what VoC is, how to use it, and tips on creating your own voice of customer template for your business.

Ready to dive in?

What is Voice of Customer(VoC) and Why Is It Important?

A voice of the customer (VoC) is the process of gathering customer feedback to discover what they need, want, and expect from you.

The goal is to better understand your customers, earn their trust, and improve customer experience. The voice of the customer can also help you identify and address any issues preventing you from achieving key goals.

Additionally, the voice of the customer encompasses both positive and negative feedback on a variety of topics. It could cover products, services, prices, and brand perception. In recent years, VoC has gained popularity as new technologies have expanded how companies receive and process customer feedback.

We’ll say it here – It’s impossible to overemphasize how important customer feedback is. Without it, you’ll never know what a customer wants or expects. Business owners have always sought out customer opinions. But in our digital age, receiving feedback has never been easier. Thanks to the Internet, customer feedback has never been so accessible. 

Learning what your customers think about your products or services isn’t difficult. Customer experience templates, customer survey templates, or customer satisfaction survey templates allow you to make informed decisions on improving the customer journey.

Without customers, there is no business. That’s why the voice of the customer is an essential part of any successful business strategy. 

By understanding what your customers want and need you can ensure that you are providing them with the best possible service or product which will help you stay ahead in an ever-changing market.

When to Use Voice of Customer

Before we cover building your own VoC template, let’s talk about when to use this type of analysis. Remember, you should always care about what your customers say. Using the voice of the customer isn’t something you only use once and never turn to it again. It should be a regular part of your customer experience strategy.

Instead, you should see VoC as a tool to gain unique insights. Let’s look at several reasons you should consider using VoC.

• Verifying customer feedback. Use VoC to verify customer feedback, enabling businesses to make more informed decisions based on actual customer experiences. In addition, VoC can provide insights into customer preferences, allowing companies to tailor their communication, featured items, or other offerings. 
• Quantifying customer feedback. It might feel impossible to put a number by feedback. How do you “rate” an emotional response complaining about a problem with your website? The good news is that you can assign a rating or score based on the relevance and importance of each insight. These insights can help you make better decisions. They will also help you train your customer service reps in de-escalation.
• Launching new initiatives. Insights from data analytics can help create new product designs or services. Data can also inform pricing strategies for a better return on investment.
• Keeping up with industry standards or new trends. You need to remain competitive in the market and make a profit. But you also need to maintain relationships with your customers. Continue to create meaningful connections with customers while still keeping your business profitable.
• Improving brand perception. This can include analyzing customer reviews and surveys, understanding what customers are saying about the brand online, and taking steps to address any issues that may be affecting your reputation. By doing this, businesses can ensure that their brand is well-regarded by customers and potential customers alike.
• Increasing customer loyalty. Feedback will reveal what customers want and how you can improve your products or services. This information helps create targeted campaigns that will help increase customer retention rates and build long-term relationships with customers.

How to Create a Voice of Customer Template

A voice-of-customer template helps you collect and interpret customer feedback. The template is a framework for setting goals, involving the right people, identifying solutions, and tracking progress throughout the process. 

While a VoC template may be different depending on the company profile and industry, each template should have the following elements.

Setting Your Goal

By gathering customer feedback, you’ll gain a better understanding of where your customers are coming from and what they want. Use this data to identify opportunities for improvement and insights so you can better meet their needs. In the end, you want to see increasing customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

Everyone involved in the VoC process must understand how important it is for the success of the business. 

Identifying Key Stakeholders

When it comes to collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback, involve every key stakeholder. This includes departments such as customer service, marketing, product development, sales, and even executive leadership. 

Each department will bring its own unique perspective to the table. You want as many valuable insights as possible to inform decisions that will improve the customer experience.

Gathering Direct Feedback

Obtaining feedback from customers is essential. But how do you get well-rounded data? Only if you get direct feedback using every possible medium. With an omnichannel approach, you’ll gather feedback from the following:

• Online surveys
• In-App surveys/rating request
• Chatbots
• Customer interviews
• Your Net Promoter Score
• Online product reviews
• Social Media mentions and DMs

You’ll gain deeper insights into a customer’s behavior and preferences by collecting their direct feedback. Being proactive here will help you get ahead of the curve by measuring customer satisfaction. 

As you work through the template, you’ll see that this collected feedback will be used to identify areas for improvement in service delivery, product design, and more.

Image Source

Finding the Primary Request

Every piece of customer feedback, no matter how lengthy or detailed, can boil down to a primary request. To do this well, customer feedback must be carefully analyzed and interpreted to identify the underlying issue that needs a customer has. 

This might mean some translation work on your part. Not every customer will state explicitly what their main problem is. It’s important to read between the lines to find any hidden issues.

Providing Solutions

In certain cases, large feature updates may be needed to successfully resolve an issue while in other scenarios, smaller bug fixes and modifications as well as ensuring that customers have the right information about a product or service. The choice of which fix to use depends on the complexity of the problem, availability of resources, and time constraints.

When trying to enact changes in your organization, it is important to rank them based on your resources and the time available. This is where prioritization comes into play.

Prioritizing the Needs

After completing the preceding steps, rank each solution based on its potential value and return on investment. Due to limited resources and bandwidth, you should focus on those initiatives that will have the greatest impact. Which need would benefit the largest number of customers in the shortest amount of time?

You’ll want to consider the main project goal as you do this. If not, you’ll spend time, energy, and money on priorities that won’t help reach your desired outcomes or increase the bottom line.

Here’s a visual representation of what a template could look like:

Using this template will help you act quickly and efficiently when customers provide feedback. It is valuable for short-term and long-term feedback strategies. And it will help your company stay agile amidst changing customer needs. 

Voice of Customer Best Practices

Now that you have a framework for creating your own VoC template, here are five best practices to help keep in mind.

1. Personalize the Questions You Ask

Customers expect to receive personalized attention. Companies that wish to cultivate loyalty and strong communication should focus on providing more personalized interactions with their customers. This can help them to build a better relationship with their customers.

Your goal is to build stronger relationships and customer loyalty. How you phrase questions can help you do this. Craft questions that put the customer at the center of attention. The way to do that is to help them feel like an individual. Not a number or someone lost in the crowd. This helps the customer feel valued in communication and it creates a more positive customer experience.

2. Gather Feedback at the Right Time

Best practices for obtaining customer feedback involve not only determining which platform they feel most comfortable providing their opinion on, but also the timing of the request. It is usually best to ask them immediately after their experience so that you will receive more accurate responses.

Even as you gather feedback, you want to enhance the customer experience. So try to time interactions with customers according to their individual journeys. Great moments to engage are when a customer’s behavior changes or when an already-purchased product is upgraded or bought again.

3. Share Feedback with Your Whole Company

The success of any business depends on all employees functioning efficiently and effectively together. Though some team members may not have direct interaction with customers, their roles still contribute to the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction.  A comprehensive business plan template serves as a guiding framework to align these collective efforts toward achieving organizational objectives. All departments must work as one for a company to thrive.

So that customer feedback is maximized, it should be made available to every employee in the company. The customer success team can create a detailed profile of customers which includes their demographic information, buying preferences, past purchases, as well as other relevant data which can then be shared with every department. 

This will enable each department to have better insights into the needs and wants of their target customers. Most importantly, it will help the business as a whole make informed decisions about product offerings.

4. Continue to Listen to VoC

Fostering strong customer relationships often depends on recording their order history and online clicks. In an omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC) approach, customers can be asked to periodically answer questions about their lifestyles, routines, and preferences. This helps to deepen the understanding of their needs.

A continued conversation about the customer and their lifestyle, rather than just their immediate needs, can yield deeply useful data to help shape future engagement.

5. Always Respond to VoC

You want all customers to feel appreciated and valued. So it is critical to act quickly and meaningfully upon any feedback received–whether they’ve purchased a product or yelled at a customer service rep on the phone. 

Preparing for potential risks in advance is critical to any business’s success. It will help reduce the damage and allow for timely and efficient decision-making.

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How to Analyze Your Voice of Customer Data and Generate Actionable Insights

You built your template, followed best practices, and gathered feedback. Exciting! Now, what do you do with the data?

Analyzing VoC data is just as critical as getting the data. It will help you develop strategies to improve customer pain points and satisfaction levels.

Here are three things to help analyze your VoC data.

1. Prepare and Structure Data

Unstructured data sources are pervasive in business and need to be effectively managed. You’ll likely pull data from many sources: text, audio, email surveys, in-person feedback, etc.

Audio recordings are a prime example of unstructured data. An audio file is would need to be manually transcribed for usability purposes. Speech analytics tools allow you to transform a voicemail into a transcription that is organized and searchable. Once you do that, you’ll have an accessible transcript of the message that allows you to convert your data into usable files.

2. Import Data into a Reporting Tool

So you’ve received all the data. And it could be a lot. You’ll need a tool to help you

The reports you end up generating should focus on answering these initial questions. For example, if you are the Director of Customer Experience at a call center, you will likely want to structure a report that highlights caller sentiment, call outcomes, time to resolution, and other customer-centric data points.

Thankfully, we’ve got you covered. You can import your data from a third-party tool. Or you can create your own survey directly with Lumoa and then get started analyzing. Get a free demo of our text analytics or survey analytics tools.

3. Gather Analytics Insights

Analyzing customer feedback is the most important part of the process. You can have data for days, but what’s the point if you don’t learn from it and make the data actionable?

Look for trends in your customers’ emotional and sentiment responses, positive or negative. These will give insight into why they bought something and if they’re likely to be a repeat customer. Don’t forget to focus on the big picture, too. How does the brand appeal to your customers? Do they recommend you to others? Do they leave feeling positive about your brand?

As you take action on these insights, you will make better decisions for your customers and the long-term health of your company.

Wrapping It Up

Creating a great voice of customer template is key to understanding customer feedback and making data-driven decisions. By following the tips outlined in this article, you can create a VoC template that will help your business capture the right information from customers and use it to make more informed decisions.

Your VoC template will lead to valuable insights into customer sentiment and preferences, allowing them to better serve their customers and improve their experience.

Lumoa’s call and voice analytics solution helps you automate the process of listening to your customers share what’s important to them. It automatically detects topics, sentiments, and insights so you can analyze calls at scale. Start your free trial today.

The post How to Create a Voice of Customer Template for Your Business appeared first on Lumoa.

• Ekaterina Mamonova – Global Lead, CX and Marketing, Allianz Global Corporate & Specialty
• Sarah Patel – Customer Success Expert (former Finastra)
• Jeremy Payne – Global Operational Lead, FX & Securities, OSTTRA
• Richard Jeffreys – CX Lead, Managing Director, Hartwell Buck

Together, the panel provided insightful viewpoints on CX’s evolution for current needs. Here are the main takeaways.

Why Financial Services Companies Should Focus on CX Now That a Recession is Approaching

According to Ekaterina Mamonova, when a brand makes a promise, and its CX delivers on it well, it produces a positive feedback loop that supports brand integrity and brand values. This does two things: First, it raises the brand’s perceived value in the eyes of the customer, and second, it increases customer loyalty.

She then discussed some core benefits related to delivering CX excellence. These are:

• Differentiating yourself from your competitors – especially across industries where the competition is fierce
• Getting greater customer loyalty and retention
• More effective acquisition of new customers
• A reduction in the cost of serving your existing customers

Mamonova added that one element that is getting more attention is the idea of staff motivation and talent retention. All of these things combined, in general, lead to greater shareholder value.

In the face of an impending recession, many financial services companies are turning to customer experience (CX) to attract and retain customers. And there’s a good reason for that: When you look from the customer’s point of view and balance that with business considerations and shareholder value, you can get less customer churn, more revenue, less risk, and more efficiency.

Instead of immediately deciding, “I want to cut costs with this program” or “I want to make a product that brings in more money,” viewing things through the CX lens forces you to look at all these business aspects. And that’s what makes it strong.

Sarah Patel added that you’ll get the results and rewards you want if you use CX to figure out what will have the most significant impact. “It’s not about giving your customers a box of chocolates or a big hug. It’s mostly about how you can improve their experience in a very practical manner.”

How Can We Still Acquire Funding For CX Initiatives?

It’s always been a challenge to get CX budgets, even more now that we’re entering a recession. The question is, does this make CX an even more compelling investment that needs to be budgeted during times of recession? Or do we need to change our mentality since money is difficult to come by?

A new Gartner survey found that insurers’ initiatives in 2023 will shift towards improving customer experience and operational excellence instead of growth.

Source: Gartner 2023

While this isn’t surprising, Mamonova believes it’s a truly unique indicator of the value of customer experience initiatives that businesses are witnessing throughout the industry.

She added, “I think the economic stressors of the coming year are also making companies refocus and shift directions to fill gaps that have existed for many years.” From an insurer’s perspective, what is needed is more customer data, including more behavioral and preferential data, shared Mamonova further.

Using such data, we would be able to implement business strategies, including digital ones, upselling and cross-selling strategies, strategies for dynamic customer engagement, and, ideally, plans for revenue development through products and services.

Getting a budget is never an easy task. One needs to start identifying clear objectives and metrics. Before even starting a CX initiative, it is really important to identify the metrics that will be used to measure the success of that program. It can include metrics such as customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention.

The next step is to focus on tracking and measuring progress against those established metrics. You can use this to determine whether your initiative meets your expectations and has the desired impact.

The last but most critical step is to convey the results. It’s becoming increasingly important to understand business language and metrics. This will enable you to prioritize customer loyalty, and build trust to increase the likelihood of getting recommendations while focusing on customer satisfaction, retention, churn, and customer lifetime value.

How Do You Keep Focused on Supporting and Engaging Customers?

As CX can cover many areas, one might be inclined to ask, where do I begin?

Jeremy Payne shared that your end user is the first thing to focus on. They have to be the starting point of these conversations. Regarding your management information system (MIS), he said that your company should provide data to its support engineers or agents so that when a customer calls, they can help immediately.

The customer support team has an unrivaled view of how clients use your products. Understanding the trends, looking at how agents are being trained, how they use the system, and their internal processes can guide you toward your first step.

The next step is to create improvements that will save both your agents and the company money. In truth, clients need our help regularly, so we need to be proactive and put mechanisms in place to get them the support they need immediately.

For instance, when customers are dealing with credit card fraud, they are understandably anxious and frustrated. Instead of having to phone in and get through an agent, the company could ease their worries by saying, “We’ve just seen something, we’ve stopped it, don’t worry, we’re investigating it, we’ll call you in five minutes.”

Solutions like these can be put in place if you have the correct data to allow you to know what insights are actionable and give you the right results.

To create effective tools for consumers, you must first collect relevant data and conduct insightful analyses. Then, convey this information to product teams, the business, and the technology in meaningful ways related to costs and an understanding of those costs.

Finally, Payne emphasized the need for a customer service representative at every stage, from the first discussion, through deployment and beyond.

The post Why are We Still Talking About CX in Financial Services? appeared first on Lumoa.

With all relationships, taking the time to listen is crucial to its success. Nowhere is this more true than with customer relationships. Without listening to the voice of your customer, you’ll be like a ship without a rudder or a compass…lost and drifting without direction. 

But listening isn’t always that easy. Customers don’t always take the time to express their feelings. Analyzing the feedback that you do get can be overwhelming, especially when it’s coming from so many different sources. This is where a Voice of the Customer approach can help by organizing and prioritizing customer insights into a usable format.

What is the Voice of the Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a research technique aimed at gaining a thorough understanding of the customers’ perceptions, experiences, and emotions toward a business. The term “Voice” is used in a metaphorical sense, as customers may not express their thoughts and feelings verbally or through traditional feedback channels. VoC delves beyond the surface level of customer feedback to uncover their underlying desires, requirements, and expectations. By utilizing VoC, businesses can gain valuable insights into how their customers truly feel about their products, services, and overall brand image.

Implementing a VoC program will help you understand your customers better and know where to focus your efforts on improving the customer experience. By leveraging VoC, businesses are able to gather critical insights into their customers’ needs, expectations, and pain points. Rather than simply addressing the most pressing issues or complaints, VoC enables businesses to make data-driven, customer-centric decisions that result in meaningful and sustainable improvements in the customer experience.

With a well-designed VoC program in place, businesses can gain a competitive edge by focusing their efforts on the areas that matter most to their customers, ultimately driving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and growth.

Examples of VoC

There are so many different ways customers can share information about what they want. If you’re only collecting VoC data through a feedback form, you’re missing out on valuable insight. Here are just a few examples of data that could be included in VoC.

• A customer mentions during a service call that they’ve had trouble finding the new permissions settings in their account dashboard.  

• While canceling their account, a customer indicates that “customer service” was the main reason they are leaving. 

• On Twitter, a customer tweets to let their followers know how much they love using your service. 

• During an NPS survey, a customer replies with a 7 and comments that they’d love to see the reporting section expanded. 

• A customer clicks repeatedly on spot in the screen in quick succession before scrolling down the page and exiting.

In short, anywhere your customer talks about their experience with your business, or interacts with you is an example of VoC.

Why you should care about the Voice of the Customer?

It’s unlikely we need to convince you of the power of listening to your customer. It’s been consistently proven that customer-centric companies out-perform their competitors in revenue, customer loyalty, and growth:  

• 72% of customers will spread the word about a positive experience to at least six people when they receive good customer service.

• Organizations that analyze and act on their customer behavioral data outperform the market by 85% in sales growth, according to a 2021 study by Microsoft. 

• 45.9% of business professionals says this is their top priority for the next 5 years

Caring about the Voice of the Customer puts your company in a better position to make customer-centric decisions and provide a great customer experience. When you capture VoC data, you can: 

• Evaluate new product and service offerings, and prioritize based on customer expectations.

• Customize your brand to better align with your customers’ needs.

• Proactively adjust customer service strategies to avoid issues or red flags. 

• Retain more customers, and improve your relationships with customers.

How do you collect VoC data?

There are as many ways to collect VoC data as there are types of data. From qualitative to quantitative information, actively soliciting feedback to passively analyzing user behavior, text analysis to interviews, VoC data collection can run the gamut. Here are 6 ways you can collect VoC data:

Customer Surveys: often what most people think of first when it comes time to collect feedback. Customer surveys include customer satisfaction surveys, NPS, and long-form questionnaires. 

Customer Conversations: whether you’re talking to customers on the phone, over email, or through chat, the transcripts hold valuable information. Analyzing this text and voice data can provide insight into what your customers are talking about, as well as the sentiment. 

Focus Groups: when you want to get deep into conversations with your customers, focus groups are an excellent way to ask deeper questions. You also have more control over which customers are invited to respond, so you can be very specific. 

Social Media: even if you aren’t listening, customers will be talking about you on social media and other websites. Reviews, tweets, and forum posts can all help you understand what your customers are talking about (when they don’t think you’re listening). 

Website Behavior: it’s not just about what your customers are saying, but also how they act. How users interact with your product, app or website contains lots of valuable information about what they expect and where their journey falls flat. Tracking user data and behavior can help you make sense of what users are actually doing on your platform. 

Feedback Forms: make it as easy as possible for customers to provide feedback by including forms in common spaces. For example, pop-out feedback forms on your website can collect feedback from a wide range of customers, with minimal effort. Compared to the lengthy process of finding a phone number and feedback forms are a low-barrier way for customers to tell you what they really think. 

How to make customer-centric decisions based on VoC

Now that you have your data, how can you put it into a usable format so you can make decisions with it? That’s often the biggest challenge when it comes to creating effective VoC programs. If you’re collecting VoC input through different channels (and you should be!) it can feel overwhelming to sort through the data. 

Without the right tools, you won’t have a full overview of your VoC sources and no one will be able to make use of this valuable data, which can lead to blindly making decisions based on gut instinct. 

Survey responses come in through your survey provider, reviews are available only on third-party sites, and customer conversations are all stored in your contact center. This makes it impossible to understand what’s really happening. Are customers talking or complaining about the same stuff on all the different channels? or is it different? and if it is, what do they talk about? 

Once you’ve managed to make sense of this data, the problem happens again – each of your functional teams needs access to the data. Product, support, and marketing teams all receive value from VoC insights, but if they are trapped in a silo, you lose the benefits.

Creating a full overview of the Voice of Customer

The solution to making VoC data actionable is to have a centralized view of the data to analyze, with insights easily shareable across the organization so that everyone can make informed decisions. 

Most companies today use metrics like NPS, CSAT, and online ratings to gauge customer satisfaction, but they struggle to understand what drives these numbers.

Sifting through large amounts of feedback from various sources and finding meaningful insights can be overwhelming. That’s where Lumoa comes in. Lumoa automates the analysis of customer interactions and highlights the key drivers of customer satisfaction, enabling companies to see a noticeable improvement in their customer metrics.

Lumoa offers a centralized platform for all customer feedback, making it easy to view an overview of customer opinions and compare feedback across different channels. With the help of voice and text analytics, the data analysis process is made even easier.

Moreover, Lumoa helps distribute customer insights throughout the organization, eliminating the need for each department to conduct its own surveys.

By bringing the entire team on board with a comprehensive Voice of the Customer (VoC) overview, every team can make informed decisions based on customer feedback.

Want to discover the full potential of your Voice of the Customer (VoC) data with Lumoa? Sign up for a FREE TRIAL today and experience the benefits for yourself!

The post What is Voice of the Customer: Surveys, Feedback and Research Practices appeared first on Lumoa.

This article looks at how customer service can be optimized for better results. 

What is a Customer Experience Audit Checklist?

When shopping, have you ever encountered a salesman who was rude or unhelpful? Or used a service and had an issue with the customer support staff? Did it make you rethink your decision to patronize that particular store or service?

A customer’s experience (CX) is an essential part of every transaction and can affect brand loyalty and sales. Not to be melodramatic, but reports say that if your CX isn’t up to par, you could be sounding the death knell for your business.

So what can be done?

A customer experience audit evaluates the customer’s experience while engaging with a business or a brand. This audit examines all customer interactions with your brand from first contact, including phone support, email support, live chat options, and so on.

It helps provide an objective look at the problems of a business’s customer service and enables teams to focus on what needs fixing. These audits are often conducted by third-party firms or agencies specializing in the field. However, if you don’t have the budget for this type of research, you can also run your own audit using a checklist and some simple tools.

Most consumers consider the customer experience crucial when purchasing, but only half of them feel that organizations are doing a good job. To close this gap, start with a customer experience audit checklist.

Benefits of Using Customer Experience Audit Checklists

There’s an old saying that goes “you can tell a lot about a company by how they treat their customers.” It sounds like sage advice, right? After all, happy customers are not only loyal but will become valuable ambassadors for your brand. That’s why having a customer experience audit checklist is so important. Yet, many businesses neglect to make one despite its many benefits – more engaged and satisfied customers, direction and focus on areas to improve, and lots of growth opportunities!

So whether you’re just starting out or looking to revamp your existing checklist – let me show you why it might be time to embrace the power of CX audits!

Identifies Gaps For Improvement

A gap is an area where your company falls short. For example, it could be problematic staff, a lack of a return and exchange policy, or slow responses to customer inquiries. Conducting an audit will reveal any weak spots and direct your attention to the most critical problem areas, where you can then come up with workable remedies.

Pinpoints Where Quick Fixes Can Be Made

A customer service audit will typically identify some areas in the customer journey that can be immediately fixed. It could be a typo on a restaurant dinner menu, fonts on signages that are too small or illegible, or even just poor lighting in your store. These changes might appear minuscule but can be quite impactful.

Provides Direction For Training

Sometimes, there’s a delay in answering customer requests or inquiries because your team doesn’t know how to or can’t access the necessary information.

An audit checklist will gather such data and help pinpoint skill gaps that can be closed by retraining existing staff.

Improves Your Marketing

You’ll be able to recognize the factors that influence customer behavior. An audit will also highlight the most effective platforms. Using this data, you can develop platform-specific marketing to better serve your customers.

Steps for Creating a Customer Experience Audit Checklist

Before you can create your customer experience audit checklist, you’ll have to properly map out your customer’s journey. It’s a visual representation of how your customer moves through each interaction with your brand and what experiences they have.

Remember that the customer journey is not always linear. Mapping can be difficult because different customer types will interact with your business in various ways. It also entails data gathering and analysis that will guide your decision-making as you craft the necessary solutions.

Here’s a step-by-step guide for crafting your customer experience audit checklist.

Step 1: Map Out the Customer Journey

A customer journey map is helpful in conducting an audit of the customer experience since it allows you to examine every part of that journey. Follow these steps to start mapping your customers’ journeys:

Create Customer Personas

This is an idealized representation of your customer and investigates the psychological and behavioral elements at play when they engage with your company.

Identify Customer Touch Points

Touchpoints are where your brand and your consumers meet and interact. Any interaction with a customer- whether before, during, or after a sale- should be counted as a potential touchpoint for audit purposes.

Here are a few touchpoints to consider:

• Social media. In today’s digital age, your brand’s social media pages are often where customers see or get to know you first

• Ads. Both online and offline ads are common first touchpoints at the introduction stage

• Conversations. Any time a customer reaches out to your brand, it is a touchpoint as well

• Point of sale. A crucial touchpoint as it’s where customers are ready to make a payment

• Shipping notifications. For online stores, order confirmations, shipping updates, and thank-you emails can reinforce customer loyalty

• Customer support. When customers face an issue with your product or service, their experience with your CS is a critical touchpoint

Try to dissect the customer experience at every touchpoint. This will help you identify what channels they used to interact with your brand and what happened during their encounter. Describe in as much detail as you can the steps that were taken by the user at each point of the journey, and indicate whether or not there were any pain points along the way.

Step 2: Identify Customer Pain Points

A customer journey map can help you determine where you’re thriving and falling short. The sooner this information is collected, the sooner improvements can be made. At the same time, knowing what your customers are dissatisfied with can help you make the necessary adjustments to your products and services, leading to greater customer satisfaction.

You can start by looking at different customer journey stages and asking the following questions:

Initial Engagement

This can come in many forms, from a customer signing up for an account on your website or app, to signing up for newsletters or promotions.

How do new customers initially interact with your company? Is it the usual method they use? Or is it through your preferred channels?

Transitions

How and why do customers move between each touchpoint? Do these transitions naturally happen, or are they imposed on the customer? Are there transitions they didn’t expect or like?

For example, if customer feedback indicates that certain transitions cause confusion or dissatisfaction, then it’s necessary to simplify the transition process or provide more detailed customer education.

Obstacles

Is there something stopping customers from interacting with your company the way they want to? Is there anything that’s holding them back?

End of the journey

How does the customer experience conclude? Are customers satisfied or dissatisfied with it? After the initial stage of consumer interactions, are you taking any actions to re-engage them?

You’ll also need your staff to be part of the customer experience audit to get an unbiased overview of customer pain points. You can engage your employees through a questionnaire, a team meeting, or a special workgroup. Here are some areas to look at:

Customer Complaints

What complaints do staff commonly hear from customers? Are there any recurring customer complaints?

Technology

Do employees ever encounter issues using your company’s resources, tools, and platforms? Which areas do they find most conducive to their work? Where do customers have the most positive experiences?

Areas of Inefficiency

Does anything prevent employees from acting or responding to customers quickly? What structures and processes could have a significant impact?

Information Access

Do employees have all the information they need to provide consumers with fast, reliable service? Is this information easily accessible to them?

Training

Is there anywhere your staff is having trouble? Do they feel unqualified or under-trained?

Next, you’ll also want to get information from your actual customers. This entails conducting market research. Keep in mind that you should collect both quantitative and qualitative data.

A survey, where customers can rank their satisfaction on a scale from 1 to 5, can be a quick way to get quantitative data. Asking customers a few questions about how they feel about the brand, their experience, and what made them want to purchase – are good options for qualitative data.

Lastly, you’ll want to engage both new and existing customers. By doing so, you can be sure of having a sufficient sample to draw meaningful conclusions.

Step 3: Compare Perspectives

Once you’ve completed and analyzed the data you’ve gathered, you can compare the perspectives of your employees, customers, and upper management. Consider the following:

Agreements

Watch for areas where your perspectives coincide or echo one another. If the comments are favorable, it’s best to keep working and seek suggestions for improvement in other areas of the customer experience. If it’s criticism, be ready to make adjustments.

Disagreements

When perspectives don’t match, you need to investigate why. Sometimes managers can get tunnel vision, and their perspectives can differ from employees out on the field. At times, customers may see things differently from your employees. Look at why.

Connect the Dots 

Now that you have your data, it’s time to look at it and discover what you can find. Take some time to view the data from different angles and see if there are any patterns or trends that jump out at you. Bring it up for team discussion and see what comes up as hypotheses or ideas.

For instance, you might come up with a theory like, “Long lines at the counter or fitting room scare our customers away.”

Then perhaps you would need to make adjustments to your POS or establish other ways to check out.

Step 4: Building a Roadmap

After identifying the issues at hand, you can move on to considering potential solutions. Sometimes these can be straightforward, like streamlining the checkout process, but other times it can be challenging. A roadmap can help prioritize which steps should be taken first.

Establish goals for reducing the amount of friction at every touchpoint and set up metrics to measure your performance. Plot down when you will start implementing these solutions.

Your timeline can be short or long, depending on the size of your company. Smaller companies may be able to address issues faster than large organizations with many moving parts.

How to Use Customer Feedback and Customer Journey Mapping to Create an Effective Customer Experience Audit Checklist

A customer journey map and customer feedback can provide you with a holistic view of how your customers experience your brand. If you don’t know your target audience, their wants, and their problems, you can’t properly evaluate your performance, diagnose or develop solutions.

It’s only after you’ve gathered feedback and mapped out their encounter with your brand that you can start to look at how your customer service is performing. Many marketers launch initiatives without doing the necessary legwork, significantly reducing their efficacy.

Feedback from your consumers and a customer journey map remove the guesswork and offer you real, actionable data that will help you better understand your customers. It guides you to ask the right questions.

How Customer Experience Audit Checklists Can Help Improve Customer Service and Customer Satisfaction

Maintaining a high level of customer satisfaction requires constant attention to detail. A customer experience audit checklist can help you keep track of everything you need to check off to ensure a top-notch customer service experience for every customer, every time. It enables you to see the whole customer experience, from their perspective, in an objective manner.

A customer experience checklist helps you:

• Increase awareness of customer needs

• Pinpoint gaps in your customer service

• Identify areas for improvement

• Find out how to increase your CX in practical ways

• Boost customer satisfaction

• Boost sales and profits by earning customer loyalty

For instance, if one of your stores is receiving a lot of complaints, it might be time to look at what’s happening in-store. Is there something wrong with the display? What about the signage? Or perhaps you need to retrain your staff?

The data you gather in your customer experience audit will reveal patterns and trends in your customer’s experience with your company. This gives your company a better understanding of who your customers are and how they see your brand. Moreover, it will help highlight their experiences and pain points.

With this information in hand, the necessary adjustments can be made with more accuracy and relevance, ultimately leading to happier customers.

Conclusion: What to Consider When Creating a Customer Experience Audit Checklist

Ready to work on your list?! Let’s face it, a customer experience audit checklist is like a treasure map for businesses. It guides us through the journey of discovering the hidden gems of customer satisfaction and helps us avoid the pitfalls of poor service. Just like a treasure hunt, it may take some time and effort, but the payoff is worth it. Imagine the look on your customer’s face when they finally find the treasure, er, we mean the perfect experience they’ve been searching for.

Now, don’t be fooled by the simplicity of a checklist. It’s not as easy as just ticking off boxes. You need to have a thorough knowledge of your customers and your business as a whole. Whether it’s a customer journey map or gathering feedback, you need to be equipped with all the tools necessary to succeed.

In the end, when you finally reach the treasure, er, we mean the ultimate customer satisfaction, you’ll be like a pirate with a chest full of gold, er, we mean a business with a loyal customer base. So, don’t wait any longer, grab your customer experience audit checklist, and set sail on the adventure of a lifetime.

The post Improve Your Customer Service with a Customer Experience Audit Checklist appeared first on Lumoa.

This comprehensive guide will take you step-by-step through the essential elements of measuring customer satisfaction. So let’s get started and find out just what it takes to make sure your customers are as satisfied as possible!

The Basics of Customer Satisfaction Measurement

Before you can begin measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to understand the basics. What exactly is customer satisfaction and why is it important to measure?

What Is Customer Satisfaction?

Customer satisfaction is the degree to which a customer’s needs and expectations have been met. It’s an important factor in measuring the success of any business and can help you identify areas that need improvement. A satisfied customer is more likely to be loyal and purchase more products or services from your business.

Why Is It Important to Measure Customer Satisfaction?

By now, we all know that measuring customer satisfaction is essential for any business. Measuring customer satisfaction will help you better understand customers’ needs and expectations, identify areas that need improvement, and ultimately increase customer loyalty and repeat business.

By measuring customer satisfaction, you can also identify potential problems and take action to prevent them from occurring in the future. In short, measuring customer satisfaction is essential for ensuring your customers are happy and healthy!

Techniques for Measuring Customer Satisfaction

Once you understand the basics of measuring customer satisfaction, you can begin exploring different techniques for measuring it.

There are three main approaches when it comes to measuring customer satisfaction: interviews and surveys, focus groups, and online feedback and reviews. Each of these methods has its own pros and cons, so it’s important to consider which method will work best for your business.

Interviews and Surveys

Interviews and surveys are a great way to collect feedback from customers. These methods allow you to ask specific questions that can help you gain insights into customer experiences. You can use interviews or surveys to get an overall picture of customer satisfaction and more detailed information about individual customers.

It’s important to make sure that the questions you ask are clear and relevant so that you can get accurate results.

Conducting interviews and surveys may be good but on the other hand, they do have some drawbacks. One major disadvantage is the time required to conduct interviews or surveys. It can be more time-consuming to gather customer feedback through these methods than it would be with other methods such as focus groups or online reviews/feedback.

Additionally, interviews and surveys are often seen as intrusive by customers, which can make it difficult to get honest and accurate feedback.

Overall, interviews and surveys are a great way to measure customer satisfaction. They allow you to ask specific questions that can help you gain insights into customers’ experiences with your business. While there may be some drawbacks such as the time required for conducting interviews or surveys, they remain an effective method of measuring customer satisfaction.

With proper preparation and execution, this technique will provide valuable feedback on how well your business is meeting its customers’ needs and expectations.

Focus Groups

Focus groups involve gathering a small group of customers together and asking them questions about their experiences with your business. Moreover, having focus groups can provide more detailed insights into customer experiences.

Unlike interviews or surveys, focus groups allow you to have an interactive conversation with customers and get their opinions on various topics. This makes it easier to identify areas of improvement, understand customer needs and expectations, and gain valuable feedback that would not be possible with other measuring techniques.

One disadvantage of having a focus group is that, like interviews and surveys, can be more time consuming and costly than other measuring techniques. Additionally, customers may feel uncomfortable speaking in front of a large group and this could impact the accuracy of feedback collected.

Overall, focus groups are an effective way to measure customer satisfaction and gain valuable insights into customers’ experiences with your business. However, it’s important to keep in mind that focus groups require time, money and preparation before they can be conducted successfully.

With proper planning and execution, measuring customer satisfaction through focus groups will help you understand how well your business is meeting its customers’ needs and expectations so that you can make informed decisions about how best to serve them going forward.

Online Feedback and Reviews

Online feedback and reviews are another great way to measure customer satisfaction. Many businesses use online review platforms such as Yelp or Google My Business, which allow customers to leave detailed reviews of their experiences with your business. These reviews can provide valuable insight into how customers feel about your business, as well as any potential problems they may have encountered.

A study by Bigcommerce shows that the likelihood of a product selling is 270% higher if it has five reviews.

One disadvantage of getting feedback and reviews online on the other hand, is that it does not always provide the most accurate representation of customers’ experiences. Online reviews are often biased and customers may be more likely to leave negative reviews than positive ones. This can make it difficult to get an accurate picture of customer satisfaction, as some customers may post reviews out of spite or even malice.

Additionally, customers may not be willing to provide detailed feedback online, as they may feel uncomfortable disclosing too much personal information.

Nonetheless, online feedback and reviews can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction levels. However, it is important to be aware of potential biases in online reviews and ensure that you are getting an accurate representation of customers’ experiences.

Tips for Maximizing Customer Satisfaction Measurement Effectiveness

One of the most important steps in measuring customer satisfaction is to maximize effectiveness. This means ensuring that the measuring techniques chosen are reliable and accurate, as well as providing customers with an enjoyable measuring experience. Here are some tips for maximizing customer satisfaction measurement effectiveness:

Know Your Audience

Knowing your audience is an essential part of measuring customer satisfaction. It’s important to understand who you are measuring and what their needs, concerns, and expectations are in order to obtain accurate feedback. It’s also important to consider the customer’s experience when measuring customer satisfaction, as this will affect the accuracy of the data.

Utilize Automation Tools to Streamline the Process

Utilizing automation tools can help streamline the measuring process and make it more efficient. Automation tools such as surveys, chatbots, or customer feedback platforms can be used to quickly collect data from customers in an efficient manner. Additionally, automation tools can provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction levels that would otherwise be difficult to obtain.

Analyze and Act on Your Data

It’s not enough to simply measure customer satisfaction levels; it’s also important to analyze and act on the data that is collected. This means taking the time to review customer feedback and using it to inform decisions about how to improve customer service or product offerings.

Additionally, measuring customer satisfaction should be an ongoing process that is continually monitored and improved upon over time.

You know what they say: it’s not enough to just hear your customers – you have to listen and act on their feedback too! Closing the loop with customers is essential for measuring customer satisfaction, as it allows you to really understand how they feel about your products or services and make adjustments accordingly.

Make Use of Quality Assurance Strategies

When measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to make use of quality assurance strategies. This means taking steps to ensure that data is reliable and accurate. For example, double-checking survey responses or making sure the right questions are asked in focus groups can help ensure that the data collected is valid.

Additionally, using a combination of measuring techniques such as surveys, focus groups, and interviews can help provide a more comprehensive view of customer satisfaction levels. Quality assurance strategies ensure that measuring customer satisfaction is an accurate process.

Offer Incentives for Customer Participation

In order to maximize the effectiveness of measuring customer satisfaction, it’s important to offer incentives for participation. Incentives such as coupons or discounts can be used to encourage customers to provide feedback and reviews.

It can also be a good benefit to offer rewards to provide and ensure detailed and more comprehensive feedback data is collected. Let’s also not forget that offering incentives also helps make measuring customer satisfaction an enjoyable experience for customers, which further increases the accuracy of the data.

There are various incentives you can choose to give or do but here are some common examples of an incentive or rewards:

• Freebies
• Money
• Discount coupons or giftcards
• VIP access

Regularly Monitor Your Metrics and Measurement Techniques.

Measuring customer satisfaction is an ongoing process, and it’s important to regularly monitor your metrics and measuring techniques. Keeping track of customer feedback and measuring results can help identify areas where improvement may be needed.

Staying up-to-date with the latest measuring trends can ensure that you are utilizing the most effective measuring techniques for accurate customer feedback collection. By monitoring your measuring techniques and metrics, you can ensure that measuring customer satisfaction is an effective process.

Conclusion

We’re finally on our last part! Just remember this. Measuring customer satisfaction is an important part of any business. It provides valuable insights into how customers are feeling about the products and services they receive, and it can be used to make informed decisions about how to improve customer experience.

Utilizing automation tools, analyzing and acting on data, making use of quality assurance strategies, offering incentives for customer participation, and regularly monitoring measuring techniques are all important steps to take when measuring customer satisfaction.

When done properly, measuring customer satisfaction can be an effective process that helps businesses better understand their customers and make improvements to their products or services.

The post Measuring Customer Satisfaction: Tips and Techniques appeared first on Lumoa.

Here, we’ll discuss some best practices for designing effective surveys – everything from creating questions that elicit actionable responses, to logic-checking your data to ensure accuracy. 

So grab a pen (or popcorn) and let’s dive into the world of survey design! 

Carlos Del Corral is an expert on crafting quality surveys. With a track record of working at tech giants like Microsoft and Nokia, he offers top-notch advice to boost response rates while generating deeper insights from survey responses. In this video, Carlos imparts his knowledge gained through extensive experience in market research and product/service design – giving you all the tips needed for successful survey creation!

Survey Design Best Practices

Principles of Survey Design

Designing surveys is an important part of market research, and it requires a great deal of thought and care. It’s essential to keep principles of survey design in mind when constructing questionnaires or polls.

These principles include being aware of respondents’ behaviors, making sure questions are phrased clearly and objectively, ensuring the survey is reliable and relevant to demographic characteristics, as well as minimizing bias.

Additionally, testing survey questions beforehand to ensure they make sense is important before asking respondents to answer them. Those who are responsible for designing the survey should also consider how long a questionnaire should take and whether certain questions are worth asking in light of the target audience.

A well-designed survey has the potential to bring about valuable insights that can be used for future decision-making.

Here are things to keep in mind when creating a survey design:

• Start with the end goal in mind
• Simplify
• Avoid bias and priming
• Optimize for automated insight generation

Start with the end goal in mind

When it comes to surveying design, the most important principle to keep track of is to start with the end goal in mind.

This means that before you even begin constructing your survey, you should take some time to think through and clearly define what result you want to achieve with this survey.

The goal that you set for your survey will define every aspect of the survey, including its complexity. Here are some things to consider:

• Who do you need to interview?
• What kind of results are you trying to get?
• Are you looking for feedback on a new product or service?
• Are you trying to understand customer preferences?
• Are you trying to measure public opinion on a certain issue?

Answering these questions will help guide the design of your survey and ensure that it is tailored toward getting the insights you need.

Simplify to maximize response rate and reduce work

Once you have a well-designed goal, remember to keep things simple when designing your survey. Too many questions or overly complex questions can confuse participants and make them less likely to complete your survey.

Survey fatigue can also be an issue if too much time is required for participants, so keeping your surveys concise and relevant will reduce participant fatigue and increase response rates.

Structure your survey to avoid bias and priming

Avoiding bias and priming is also essential when designing surveys. Bias refers to any question that may lead respondents towards one answer over another, while priming occurs when a participant’s answers are influenced by previous questions or statements in the survey.

Here are 3 simple steps that will help you along the way:

1. Start with a screener
2. Continue to generic questions and concrete questions
3. End with classification questions

Screener – Knowing who should take your survey is essential to getting the results you want. That’s where screener comes in – they help you identify specific demographics so that only those who fit the criteria will respond to your questions. Knowing the demographics for example is a common criterion used for screening surveys – whether it be online or offline market research.

Ask generic questions first and then concrete questions – Start by posing broad questions to understand the overall subject matter before getting into more specific details. This can help ensure meaningful conversations and efficient use of time.

“In Lumoa’s case, if we were interested in knowing more about customers’ overall relationship with the brand, we would first ask about their relationship with us. Only then would we ask about other topics afterward.” Carlos Del Corral

End with the classification questions – These are questions about demographics. For example, age, gender, household income, etc.

These questions are at the end of the survey for two main reasons:

• By asking classification questions at the beginning, people may wonder “why do they want to know all these things about me?”. It’s better to start with questions that are close to the surface of the things you’re interested in.
• Second, this type of classification question is usually very clear to the respondent. For example, an age of a person is extremely easy to determine. And when you don’t have to make an effort to answer the question, they’re quick to get answered, and the drop rate will be smaller.

Remember: Being aware of potential biases, avoiding leading questions, and testing out questions on potential respondents prior to launching surveys can help guard against biased results.

Optimizing survey design for insight generation

Finally, optimizing for automated insight generation is key when crafting surveys. The main point here is that in most cases, you can actually go by, or solve with a simple Key Performance Indicator (KPI) and a “Why?” question.

By asking “How satisfied are you with our product?” and “Why?”, you don’t need to ask multiple different questions about the different features of the product. You’ll find out in the “Why?” question.

“This way of asking questions, (“Why?”) hasn’t been used since there haven’t been tools to analyze those open-ended questions properly. But now that you have tools like Lumoa, you don’t need to ask for many concrete things.” – Carlos Del Corral

Utilizing features such as branching logic (showing different sets of questions based on earlier responses), sentiment analysis (measuring how positive or negative customers feel about particular products or services), and open-ended text analysis (allowing respondents to type in their own explanations) can all enable richer data collection and provide more valuable customer experience analytics into customer behavior or public opinion.

Different Types of Questions in a Survey

By now, we know that surveys are one of the most efficient ways to capture accurate data, which can then be used to inform decisions. But having too many (or few) questions on your survey can have a negative impact and make it difficult for you to collect meaningful insights.

That’s why it’s important to carefully consider all the different types of questions you should include in a survey so that you can get reliable and valuable responses from your respondents.

Here are some common types of questions in a survey:

• Behavioral type of questions
• Attitudinal type of questions
• Classification type of questions

Behavioral Questions

Behavioral questions focus on the actual behavior of respondents, such as what they have done in the past or what they’re currently doing. They’re designed to provide information about how people behave. Some examples are:

• “How often do you visit the doctor?”
• “How much spread do you buy in a typical week?”
• “How often do you purchase groceries online?”

NOTE: It would be ideal if you already know your customers’ digital behaviors. For example, how often do they access a particular service (Google Analytics), or how much do they purchase (CRM), etc. Thus, these questions aren’t really needed in your survey.

Attitudinal Questions

Attitudinal questions seek to uncover how people feel about a given topic or product. These questions help researchers understand a respondent’s attitude toward an issue or concept:

• “How would you rate our product?”
• “How likely are you to recommend…?” (e.g. typical NPS questions)
• “Why did you give us that score?” (open-ended questions)

Open-ended questions are important since they allow you to express your feelings, emotions, and sentiments. They’re not just saying that they love your product, but also answering why. This is different from just getting a score of 9 in an NPS rating. Getting insights from the data is easier because it’s richer.

NOTE: Whoever is designing a survey should be careful to ask neutral attitudinal questions that don’t lead in any one direction.

Classification Questions

Classification questions ask respondents to identify themselves in terms of their demographics such as age, gender, race, and other categories. These types of questions help researchers understand their target audience better.

NOTE: In today’s “woke culture” we need to ensure that these questions are phrased in a non-discriminatory manner.

Creating Questions Do’s and Don’ts

Survey designs should always aim to keep surveys concise and easy to understand so that respondents are more likely to complete them. Let’s go through some do’s and don’ts when creating questions.

Avoiding Bias: Symmetrical Scales

The most commonly used scale for surveys is the Likert Scale, which is a symmetric 7-point scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Survey designs should have question-wording that reflects this symmetry.

For example, if the question is “I’m satisfied with my purchase”, then the Likert scale should have seven points ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” and not just three or four points.

Avoiding Bias: Leading respondents

Leading questions are those that suggest a particular answer to the respondent and will influence their response. Survey designers need to be aware of this and should ensure that their questions are neutral, and framed in a way as to not lead respondents toward a particular answer.

Ask One Question at a Time

One should avoid asking more than one question in the same statement. This can confuse you and your respondents. Leading them to give inaccurate or incomplete responses.

Simple, Specific, and Short Questions

Surveys should be kept simple and on point. Remember to make the questions as easy to read and clear as possible while avoiding the use of complex language or jargon. Survey respondents have limited attention spans and will be more likely to finish the survey if the questions are straightforward and easy to understand.

Avoid Jargon and Acronyms

Following the above note, avoiding jargon and or abbreviations that may confuse respondents should be avoided. If terms have to be used, they must be explained clearly in the survey question itself.

Avoid Questions that Require Respondents to Perform Calculations

Questions that require a respondent to calculate an answer should be avoided as much as possible unless necessary. Because it can lead to inaccurate responses. A workaround would be providing ready options for respondents so that they can select the answer with ease.

Optimize open-ends for rich results

We know already that open-ended questions are a great way for survey designers to get more detailed feedback from respondents, but they can be difficult to analyze. So remember to make sure that the questions are phrased in such a way as to ensure that the response can provide useful insights.

BONUS: Metric Selection – Optimizing for impact within the organization

Selecting metrics and scales can be controversial. On the other hand, remember that there is no one-size-fits-all. Consider what type of business you have and what works for you and everyone who’s involved in it. Let’s quickly discuss the two.

Metric Selection

There are many different metrics to choose from, such as CSAT, NPS, and CES. KPIs can be optimized for different touchpoints, and there’s a lot of theory about how to do that.

Our recommendation is to simplify rather than optimize for marginal improvements. Using fewer metrics and scales, as well as being consistent with those metrics will help make the process as simple as possible.

“As far as metric selection is concerned, Lumoa has a very pragmatic approach to it. We believe that your organization should drive impact in whatever you do.” – Carlos Del Corral

Achieving change within an organization and driving customer-centricity is already challenging, especially in larger organizations. Every time you add a layer of complexity, it becomes more complex.

For example, If you only have NPS, you only need to explain one metric to your stakeholders, or the organization. Adding more to the equation may result in a loss of understanding of what they mean, and practicing becomes more difficult.

Remember these and thank us later:

• Simplify
• Be Consistent
• Reduce the number of metrics in use

NOTE: NPS is not the only metric; there are other widely known/used metrics that can be used instead (NPS is not without its pitfalls)

Scale Selection

Scale selection generates much debate in market research. To achieve consistency,  you should measure across touchpoints and business areas using the same scale, if possible, across all touchpoints.

Just focus on improving, but keep the scale consistent so you can compare and measure improvements.

The scale will be largely determined by the KPI you will choose. Some use standard scales like NPS (1-10).

In selecting a scale, we strongly recommend avoiding creativity. If you do this, it’s impossible to follow the benchmarks. It’s recommended that you stick to the definition of a standard metric or KPI if you choose one.

It may be necessary to force a choice in some cases. Suppose you want to force your customers to tell you if they’re happy or not. If this is the case, a 4-point scale is a good option, since you can have very dissatisfied, dissatisfied, satisfied, and very satisfied. The key again is to be consistent and keep measuring improvement and change.

Generating Insights from Results

With Lumoa, it’s never been easier to gain powerful insights from customer feedback. Whether you’re looking at surveys, transcripts of phone calls and chats, or collecting online reviews – everything can be integrated into one platform!

Forget manual work as all the touchpoints are organized for you in an instant. You’ll also benefit from real-time analytics in over 60+ languages so nothing goes unnoticed. But that’s not all – after gaining your insight, use Lumoa to close the loop by following up on tasks and making sure everyone is held responsible for the voice-of-customer.

Conclusion

Designing surveys is essential for market research but it can be difficult to know where to start. By keeping the principles of survey design in mind, you can create questionnaires that are simple and easy to understand, which will result in more reliable data.

With the help of Lumoa, collecting and analyzing customer feedback from a variety of sources becomes easy. Moreover, you can get the insights you need to make informed decisions about your business.

Now, we can say that you’re definitely ready to start creating your own survey!

The post Survey Design Best Practices And Guidelines appeared first on Lumoa.

One tool businesses can use to capture valuable insights is the transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS). This metric measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a business or product after experiencing it firsthand, revealing key information about customer satisfaction. 

In this article, we’ll look at tNPS in depth, explaining how it works, how you can use it to understand consumer sentiment, and how it can help in improving your customer experience.

What is a transactional NPS (tNPS)?

Alright, we get that it’s important for businesses but, what exactly is Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS)? Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a measure of customer satisfaction. It’s a collection and the result of gathered data and feedback about an individual’s experience with a business or service.

TNPS surveys are usually sent out immediately after a customer makes contact with the business. These surveys provide valuable insight into how the interaction went, and whether it was either satisfactory and likely to result in customers promoting the business further.

“TNPS surveys ask the right questions to your customers at the most critical moment – after a transaction,” explains Colin Palfrey, CMO of Crediful. “By asking your customers how they feel immediately after interacting with your business, you can gain a truthful insight into their customer journey. TNPS gathers touchpoint-specific data to give you an overview of the strengths and weaknesses within your business.”

By quickly sending out tNPS surveys to customers and analyzing the results, companies can easily identify where their customers fall on the scale of Promoters, Passives, or Detractors based on their responses.

This type of feedback allows executives to adjust and quickly pinpoint customer satisfaction success or failure, as well as anticipate future areas that require improvement.

How to calculate transactional NPS (tNPS)?

Going back to the basics, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. It does this by asking customers to rate their experiences based on a scale of 0-10, with 0 being the least satisfied and 10 being the most.

NPS divides customers into three categories:

• Promoters: are very satisfied with the company they’re talking about and will highly recommend it to others; they rate 9 or 10 on the scale.
• Detractors: are not satisfied at all – they typically give a rating between 0-6.
• Passives: are somewhere in-between, giving ratings of 7 or 8.

By measuring the ratio between these different segments of customers, companies can get an idea of how their services are performing and how loyal their customers really are.

Calculating tNPS is straightforward – just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. That’s it! Knowing these stats can be really useful in helping you quickly identify up-and-coming trends and feedback from customers.

What is the difference between transactional NPS (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS)?

We now know that the Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a simple way to get a snapshot of how your customers feel about the transactions they’ve had with your company. But what is the difference between tNPS and NPS?

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two common measurements used to understand customer feedback. While they’re both useful, they measure different facets of the customer experience.

TNPS takes a closer look at individual customer interactions and helps to identify potential issues that need resolving in order for companies to keep their customers happy.

On the other hand, NPS looks more broadly at the overall satisfaction of customers. This score provides an indication of how well a company is doing as a whole by asking customers for ratings and collecting survey results.

“Sending a tNPS survey to a new customer is a great way to see if your business is driving away potential customers,” says George Tsagas, Owner and Founder of eMathZone. “Asking new customers to complete a tNPS survey will reveal whether your onboarding process is effective. You can use tNPS for any interaction you have with your customers to check if your clients are happy.”

Traditional NPS surveys ask the customer how likely they are to recommend a business without asking detailed questions. NPS surveys ask simple questions such as “how likely are you to recommend us to a friend?” This type of survey can tell us whether the customer is happy or not but without the finer details.

Meanwhile, a typical tNPS question may ask, “Based on your recent free trial, how likely are you to recommend our products to a friend?” Targeted questions through tNPS surveys can identify specific pain points your company fails to address.

By using both tNPS and NPS, businesses can get an idea if any specific issues are affecting customers’ opinion of them as well as get an understanding of how satisfied people are with their service in general.

Using tNPS to improve your Customer Experience

“Exceptional customer service plays a vital part in the growth of any business. 89% of customers say they are more likely to complete a purchase after a positive customer service experience,” explains Jim Pendergast, Senior Vice President of altLine Sobanco. “Customers are more likely to forgive mistakes after receiving excellent customer service. Using TNPS can help you enhance your company’s CX and prevent customers from leaving.”

Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) is a great tool for improving your customer experience. With tNPS, you can measure your customers’ satisfaction as suited to their individual experiences with you and use this feedback to hone in on where additional efforts should be made.

From gathering feedback on the efficiency of delivery, to learning what product features are most appreciated by customers, using tNPS helps companies uncover insights and make improvements, which leads to happier customers who will be more likely to trust in a brand’s products or services.

Types of transactional NPS (tNPS) surveys

The main goal of tNPS is to gauge customer satisfaction with the transaction and to identify any areas where the company can improve its service. On the other hand, there are various types of tNPS surveys.

These surveys provide valuable insights into how well a company’s products or services meet customers’ expectations and can be used to improve customer experience, drive product innovation, and build better customer relationships. Let’s check out each one of them.

Post-purchase Surveys: Post-purchase surveys are sent to customers after they’ve made a purchase from the business. This type of transactional NPS survey allows businesses to measure how satisfied their customers are with their purchase decision. It also helps them find out what areas could use improvement, such as product features, delivery speed, product value, customer service, etc.

Post-purchase surveys give companies an opportunity to create more meaningful customer relationships by acting on any feedback they receive quickly and effectively.

Post-service Surveys: Post-service Transactional NPS surveys are sent to customers after they’ve received a service from the business. This type of survey is helpful for measuring customer satisfaction with the quality of service delivered and allows companies to identify areas of improvement for future services or products.

Acting on this feedback quickly gives companies the chance to build trust with customers and make sure that each customer experience is positive and memorable.

Event-specific Surveys: Event-specific Transactional NPS surveys are sent out after an event has taken place, such as a conference or trade show. These surveys allow businesses to track audience sentiment in real-time and understand how successful the event was in terms of delivering value to attendees.

The insights gleaned from event-specific Transactional NPS surveys can be used to inform future events, ensuring that each one maximizes its impact on attendees while providing the business with maximum ROI.

Follow-up Surveys: Follow-up Transactional NPS surveys are sent out at intervals after a purchase or service has been delivered in order to track long-term satisfaction levels over time.

Companies can use these kinds of surveys to get detailed feedback about various aspects of their offerings and make sure that their products or services remain relevant and up-to-date according to changing customer needs over time.

By proactively taking action on any negative feedback received through follow-up Transactional NPS surveys, companies can stay ahead of any potential problems before they become full-blown issues down the line.

“Understanding the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors is a vital part of building your CX strategy,” says Jarret Austin, Owner of Bankruptcy Canada Inc. “If your customers are choosing your competitors, then you need to find out why. Looking at their customer feedback will help you understand their products, services, and customer service abilities and why customers rate them higher.”

What are some factors that influence transactional NPS (tNPS)?

The factors that influence tNPS scores can vary greatly depending on the business’s product or service offering, but in general, they can be broken down into three categories: customer experience, brand awareness, and product reputation.

Customer experience encompasses everything from ease of use to customer service; improving this will have a direct impact on TNPS scores. Brand awareness refers to how familiar customers are with your company and its offerings; if they recognize your brand, they’re more likely to be satisfied with their purchase or service.

Finally, product reputation reflects the opinions of existing users; if their experiences have been positive, then this will have an effect on TNPS scores as well.

Improving your tNPS score isn’t a one-size-fits-all kind of task; it requires a comprehensive approach that takes into account all of the factors mentioned above. To start off, make sure you focus on providing an excellent customer experience through quality products/services and top-notch customer service – no one will want to recommend something that didn’t meet their expectations!

Additionally, leverage social media and other channels to spread awareness about your brand and its offerings – letting potential customers know why you’re different from competitors.

This will help build positive impressions before they make a purchase decision. Finally, make sure you pay attention to what existing users have to say about your products/services.

Responding quickly and appropriately when issues arise can help ensure that those users remain satisfied with their purchase decisions even after using them for some time.

“Obtaining a TNPS score of 100 is impossible for any business to achieve,” explains Kyle Zien, Director of Growth Marketing at Felix. “Getting a positive TNPS score is possible for businesses who use customer feedback to their advantage.

Asking your customers to give feedback also shows that you value their opinion. Giving your customers a voice will strengthen customer relationships and turn loyal patrons into brand ambassadors who will recommend your products.”

Having a high TNPS score has numerous benefits for businesses both small and large alike. For starters, it serves as an indicator of how loyal your customers are which can provide valuable insights into future growth strategies (e.g., which areas should be emphasized for improvement).

Furthermore, having high marks in terms of customer loyalty means that more people may be willing to recommend your product or service – leading to greater word-of-mouth advertising without any extra effort on your part!

Key Takeaways

•TNPS is a metric that measures the likelihood of a customer recommending a business or product after experiencing it firsthand, revealing key information about customer satisfaction.

• TNPS surveys are usually sent out immediately after a customer makes contact with the business and provide valuable insight into how the interaction went.

• NPS divides customers into three categories: Promoters, Passives, or Detractors based on their responses.

• Calculating tNPS is straightforward – just subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters.

• Transactional Net Promoter Score (tNPS) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are two common measurements used to understand customer feedback but measure different facets of the customer experience.

• Post-purchase Surveys, Post-service Surveys, Event-specific Surveys, and Follow-up Surveys are all types of tNPS surveys businesses can use to gather feedback about various aspects of their company in order to improve customer experience.

The post What is tNPS? Understanding Transactional NPS appeared first on Lumoa.

Furthermore, customers remember their good and bad experiences with brands. Having the right people in your customer experience team not only strengthens your relationship with your customers but also encourages them to become repeat customers of the brand. This means they will voluntarily advocate for your brand and promote your business by word of mouth.

Here’s your ultimate guide on how to build a customer experience department.

Preliminary Steps

Having the right people behind your customer experience department is vital. But when you’re looking for new people to fill roles your organization has never had, it can be quite a challenge.

We’ll walk you through the key steps to building a successful customer experience department in this guide. We will discuss topics such as defining the department’s goals and objectives, assessing the current state of customer service, and developing a strategy.

These preliminary steps will help you create a customer experience department that meets your customers’ needs and achieves your business goals. By implementing a structured approach with the help of a customer experience strategy template and conducting a thorough customer experience audit, you can lay a solid foundation for a department that not only understands but also enhances the customer journey at every touchpoint.

1. Identify the Company’s Goals

Before you start looking for people or draft your CX strategy, your first step should be to clarify and understand the wider objectives of your organization.

What does the company want to achieve? This is true both in terms of Customer Experience – e.g., are there strategic goals around CSat or NPS? -, and in terms of broader business objectives – e.g., increasing market share, reducing churn, cutting costs, etc.

Whether your company is using the Balanced Scorecard, OKRs (Objectives and Key Results), SMART, or simple KPIs, this will help you align the work of your future customer experience department to goals everyone in the company cares about. And it will make it easier to build strong relationships and a strong culture of customer centricity.

What’s more, it will help you build a link between your CX team goals and the broader company goals. For example, you will be starting to ask questions like: how does a shorter average response time help us achieve better retention? How is NPS increase related to revenue increase or reduced churn? And so on.

2. Map Your Current Customer Journey

To gain a better understanding of how exactly your customers interact with your business, you will need to map out the current customer journey. A customer journey map provides a detailed visual representation of how your customer moves through each interaction with your brand and what experiences they have.

There are different ways to create a customer journey map, and it’s essential to keep in mind that the customer journey is not always linear. Different types of customers will interact with your brand in various ways, they might go back and forth between different touchpoints, and that’s why mapping can be quite the challenge.

One way or the other, mapping your customer journey means answering the following questions:

1. Who is the customer? – What are they like? What motivates them to buy? What are they concerned about?
   
2. How many different ideal customers (personas) do we have? – What are their key characteristics (pro tip: consider both demographics or psychographics)? Where do they hang out? What are their goals?
   
3. How do they get in touch with us? – Do different types of customers have a preferred way to buy? What are the key touchpoints for different personas?
   
4. How can we measure the interaction? – What’s the goal at the different stages? What’s something measurable that can tell how well we are doing?
   
5. How does the map look like? – To keep it simple, you can start with three stages: Awareness, Consideration, and Decision. Then expand with Retention and Advocacy (if that’s relevant).
   

Without going too much into detail here, it’s also worth remembering that there are four ways to map customer journeys.

• Service Blueprint provides an organized visual representation of the customer journey, showing all the touchpoints between a customer and a company’s services in an easy-to-understand format. It’s an effective tool for uncovering potential pain points and identifying opportunities for improvement.
• Current state mapping helps organizations pinpoint where they are currently failing to meet customer expectations, as well as any areas that could benefit from further optimization. This type of mapping is useful for pinpointing gaps in customer service and uncovering areas of improvement.
• Future state mapping focuses on identifying the desired outcomes that an organization wishes to achieve as part of its customer experience strategy. It helps organizations create a roadmap for future development and determine what changes need to be made to reach those objectives.
• Day in the life mapping is an excellent tool for visualizing a customer’s journey through their entire experience with a company. By creating a detailed narrative of what the customer does and how they move throughout their journey, organizations can gain valuable insight into exactly where customers are getting stuck or where their experience could be improved.

Current State & Future State from cx-journey.com

3. Decide When and How to Collect Data and Feedback

Utilize your customer journey to its full potential by identifying the data you collect at each stage and determining what more information you need to gather.

Remember, not all data is created equal. Set clear start and endpoints for your data collection efforts.

Tracking website visitor data over a long period of time, for example, requires setting up the necessary tracking mechanisms.

In contrast, if you are running a specific campaign and need customer experience data for a limited time, then you should focus your efforts on that period. If you collect data intentionally and selectively, you will gain valuable insights that will help you improve the customer experience and drive business success.

4. Identify What Other Departments Need to Be Involved

Customer experience extends beyond a company’s customer-facing roles. In an organization, there are different employees handling customer data or interacting with customers at various points in their journey. To ensure customer satisfaction, key members of different departments who have direct contact with customers should be involved.

The departments may include customer-facing functions such as marketing and customer service, as well as internal functions such as product development, manufacturing, and fulfillment. They play an important role in shaping the overall customer experience, and it is crucial that they know what their role is in the customer experience strategy and how it impacts the brand.

Also, their understanding and engagement in the company’s customer experience strategy is vital to its success. Here’s when you can leverage your knowledge and understanding of the broader company goals.

Pro Tip: Building strong relationships with other departments is not a one-off thing. To ensure alignment between the strategy and the needs of these employees and their customers, regular feedback should also be collected from them and they should always be kept in the loop. It’s hard work, we know!

Building Your Customer Experience Department

Are you ready to kick customer experience up a notch? Sure, customer service is important, and that’s a fantastic first step for many companies. But what would your business look like if you set the bar even higher and started building an entire department that focused on creating great customer experiences?

Some think having a focused CX team can be expensive, yet they don’t realize that no matter what size of a business they are, having an effective CX strategy and team is essential. Dedicating time and resources to build out their customer experience isn’t just important now – it’s downright paramount for businesses who want to stay ahead of their competitors in our ever-evolving digital age. So, let’s get started!

Here’s what you need to keep in mind as you build a customer experience team.

Background and Expertise

The department’s role in implementing changes is crucial, so you’ll want to fill it with people who are up to the task. Your team must be skilled in market research and analysis, be the voice of your consumers, and be the driving force behind change and the elimination of pain points.

For these reasons, customer experience departments will benefit from people who have a background in:

• Market and customer research, to tackle the collection and analysis of data, that is essential to the success of CX.
• User experience design, to be able to apply concepts such as human-centered design to cross-functional projects.
• Project management, to ensure that projects are well organized, completed on time, and meet key metrics.
• Communication and problem-solving, to promote team initiatives and manage change within the organization.
  

A recent report on customer experience professionals supports the areas listed above by stressing how the people you hire for your CX department should be able to:

• Conduct and analyze market research
• Handle responsibilities related to VoC (Voice of Customer)
• Implement programs involving customers, employees, product, and brand experience

Ideally, you will hire people who have already worked in Customer Experience, Customer Service, Customer Insights, and other related fields. But since that is not always possible, prioritize the skills we listed above, as those will ensure you have the right background in your newly formed customer experience department.

Pro tip: If your customer journey is mostly digital (e.g., website, apps, etc.), you may want to consider looking for people with relevant skills and experience. For example: website optimization, content marketing, and digital analytics.

Roles and Structure

The titles and the structure you will be giving to your CX team will of course depend on the size of it, and ultimately on the size of your organization.

Start-up and Small/Medium Businesses (CX teams of 3 to 5 people)

Compared to a large organization, a startup’s customer experience department may be smaller and less formal. Structures may be flatter and cross-functional, with employees wearing multiple hats and some of them also dedicating only half of their time to customer experience initiatives.

Here’s an example of how a startup’s customer experience department might be structured.

Customer Experience Manager / Director

This leadership role is responsible for overseeing the CX team, setting up the key processes and goals, establishing relationships with the rest of the organization, and reporting to executives and the board. They have responsibilities for both people management and project management.

Voice of Customer / Customer Insights Manager

This is the more analytical role, and it needs someone skilled at understanding data, customer experience analytics, taxonomies, conversational analytics, and in general customer feedback. They also need to be able to make sense of them, build reports, and recommend actions.

User Experience Specialist or Manager

This position is in charge of improving the customer experience through human-centered, design-thinking methodologies. Throughout all touchpoints and channels, the User Experience Specialist is responsible for creating an enjoyable, seamless, and intuitive customer experience. The role might need the support of a User Interface designer or a Digital designer if your company’s offering is mainly digital.

Customer Experience Specialists

Depending on your budget or company size, you might be able to hire additional Customer Experience Specialists to complete your Customer Experience Departments. Their duties are various, they have a supporting function, and they help implement the overall CX strategy. In this sense, it is good to look for junior people who can complement the skills of the other members of the team and can grow within the organization.

Larger Organizations and Enterprises (CX teams of 10 to 20 people)

Typically, a large organization’s customer experience department has a complex structure and is a significant part of the company. In addition, it may be composed of a number of teams and functions, each with a specific role and responsibilities.

Here’s an example of how an enterprise customer experience department might be structured.

Chief Experience Officer (CXO)

The Chief Experience Officer is the highest level and is responsible for promoting Customer Experience in the organization, while at the same time ensuring that the Customer Experience team has everything they need to achieve their targets and execute their strategy.

An organization’s Chief Experience Officer (CXO) is responsible for the organization’s overall customer experience strategy and direction. Typically, the CXO is a member of the senior leadership team and is responsible for ensuring the customer experience is integrated across the entire company. For that reason, a big part of their responsibility is to sell the value of customer experience to other stakeholders.

A CXO must develop a long-term vision for customer experience and ensure that it aligns with the organization’s overall goals and strategy.

Note that large organizations often also have a Chief Customer Officer (CCO), and their responsibility is mainly related to managing the customer service and customer support function of the company. In some cases, the two roles might be combined though.

Customer Experience Operations Manager (CXOM)

Data and methods of data gathering can vary per department, which can create silos. The CX operations manager’s role is to unify everyone involved and guide the team in the best ways to use the tools available to the company. These tools can be automation software, communication apps, or help desk suites.

While the CXO is responsible for the overall customer experience strategy, the CXOM is responsible for the day-to-day operations and management of the customer experience team. The two positions work closely together to ensure that the customer experience is aligned with the organization’s overall strategy and goals.

Customer Experience Analysts / Voice of Customer Managers / Customer Insights Managers

This role utilizes advanced analytics and research techniques to analyze customer feedback to identify areas for improvement. They also monitor customer behavior and trends to inform product decisions and track changes in customer sentiment over time.

Additionally, they use surveys, focus groups, and other methods of soliciting direct customer input to create actionable plans that drive better experiences for customers. Ultimately, their goal is to provide strategic recommendations based on meaningful insights that will help shape the future growth of the business.

As we are addressing the needs of a larger organization, there might be 4 to 8 such professionals in customer experience departments, each one responsible for a specific business unit, or part of the offering.

Service Design Managers and/or UI Managers

They are responsible for creating and maintaining a customer-centric service design process, as well as managing, monitoring, and evaluating the performance of services and products against set goals.

With the help of analysts in the team, they research and analyze current trends in the market and in service design, and then identify areas for improvement within the existing products and services. Additionally, they are responsible for working with cross-functional teams to ensure cohesive delivery.

Customer Experience Managers and Customer Experience Specialists

They are in charge of executing against the overall strategy and implementing initiatives that translate data and insights coming from the analysts into concrete actions. They manage projects of different complexity, often involving other stakeholders and departments.

Their primary goal is to ensure that customer experience is alive within the organization and that customers actually perceive the company and brand as active and proactive in understanding their needs and wants.

Customer Support

In some cases, the customer support function might be part of the larger customer experience department. When this happens, the size of the department increases exponentially, including roles such as Head of Customer Support, Customer Support Managers, Technical Support Specialists, Customer Support Representatives, Head of Quality Assurance, Quality Assurance Specialists, and more.

It is worth noting that most companies keep customer experience and customer support separated, each one of them reporting to different executives. This is mainly because the customer support function can be extremely complex. The overall goal is nonetheless the same: creating experiences for customers that exceed their expectations and make them want to come back for more.

The difference between a small and large organization

Designing Customer Experience Processes

​​Crafting the customer experience is a combination of many different processes that need to be in place. These processes are:

1) Feedback and Data Collection

Having processes in place to facilitate consumer feedback collection is essential. You can collect feedback through customer interviews, polls, reviews, surveys, or installing the proper customer feedback tools. It’s important to remember that your organization probably already has a lot of customer data available, so starting with an assessment of what is there and what instead might be missing is a good first step.

2) Feedback and Data Analysis

The next question is, how do you make sense of all the data you’ve gathered? For the team to derive insights from the data, it must first be organized and compartmentalized. It requires the expertise of a data analyst, an agency, or an automation tool.

3) Feedback and Data Reporting

This stage is about developing methods for translating the insights into a digestible format that makes sense to those consuming it. You will soon realize that there is no one-size-fits-all report that you can distribute to everyone.

This is why it is important to establish relationships with the different stakeholders and clearly understand their goals and motivations. Build this aspect into your processes.

4) Closing the Loop and Measuring Success

Data collection, analysis, and reporting are nothing without action. When you build a customer experience department, make sure you have processes in place to translate data into actions, and actions into successes, both for your team and for the company.

Tech Stack For Your Customer Experience Department

Another crucial step as you build a customer experience department is to figure out what tools and software your customer experience department needs to implement its strategy.

Depending on the maturity of your company, you or other colleagues might already be using some of the following tools, so even in this case it is worth it to start with an assessment of what tools and systems are already in use.

Before we get to the different categories of tools you might consider, be aware that there are solutions that aim to cover the full spectrum of needs of a customer experience department.

Platforms such as Lumoa allow customers to:

• collect feedback via surveys or import customer data from different sources
• analyze customer feedback, categorize it, assess the impact on key metrics, and make sense of it
• assign tasks to colleagues throughout the organization
• and report on the results

The real benefit of these customer experience platforms is that they consolidate customer data in one place, therefore making it easier to establish a real customer-centric culture that goes beyond the customer experience department.

Now that you know how to look at customer experience tools holistically, here is a brief review of the main areas where tools are available.

Survey or Feedback Collection Tools

Survey tools are used to collect and analyze data. They allow users to create surveys, polls, and questionnaires that can be distributed online or via print. They also typically provide basic reporting capabilities. Some of the most popular tools are:

• SurveyMonkey
• SurveyHero
• QuestBack
• SurveyPal

Image from PC Mag

Feedback Analytics Tools

The importance of feedback analytics tools lies in the fact that they allow organizations to collect and analyze customer feedback in a systematic and efficient manner. Moreover, they can identify patterns and trends in customer satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and preferences, thereby improving their products, services, and overall customer experience.

Furthermore, these tools can be used to identify areas for improvement in an organization’s business, as well as track progress over time.

Here are some examples of tools you may want to take into account:

• Lumoa
• Birdeye
• AnyRoad

Lumoa, for example, looks at any customer interaction, automates the analysis, and highlights the items with the biggest impact on your key KPIs. This is a huge help, not only when trying to take ownership of customer experience metrics such as NPS or CSat, but also when attempting to have customer experience impact business metrics.

Project Management Tools

Because of the sheer amount of tasks that will fall under the customer experience team‘s purview, a tool that helps you keep projects, tasks, milestones, and deadlines on track will be indispensable.

Here are a few stellar choices:

• Asana
• Basecamp
• Teamwork
• Trello
• Zoho Projects

Pro tip: While the mentioned project management workflow tools and task management software offer a range of features to streamline your workflow, consider incorporating AI-powered tools to enhance your project management capabilities. AI project management tools can automate repetitive tasks, provide real-time insights and analytics, and even predict potential roadblocks, empowering you to make informed decisions and keep your projects on track.

Reporting Tools

By presenting data insights visually appealingly, insights can be easily understood. Those who are less familiar with data analysis can benefit from this by making the data more accessible and engaging.

Here are some examples of tools you might consider:

• Qlik
• Zoho Analytics
• Tableau
• PowerBI

Pro tip: Remember also to determine whether there are any other company-wide tools (such as CRM systems or help desk software) where important customer data might be stored. Integrating CRM of helpdesk software with feedback analytics tools such as Lumoa, for example, will unlock the possibility of looking at insights by customer segment or customer value, therefore improving your chances of determining real business outcomes with your customer experience initiatives.

Evaluating the Results of Your Efforts

To measure customer experience efforts, Ed Thompson, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, recommends the following six categories and practices:

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)

This is a basic metric that gauges how well your company has satisfied- or met- the demands of its customers. CSAT can be obtained by surveying consumers and asking them to rate their degree of satisfaction with each item. For instance, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how satisfied are you with our service?”

To calculate your CSAT score, divide the positive replies by the total number of responses, then multiply by 100. Your answer should be in percentage.

Customer Loyalty/Retention/Churn

This considers how many customers come back and stay regular customers and how many stop using your company’s products or services over a certain period. Some measurements to use are purchase frequency, average order size, repeat orders, and the number of loyalty program members.

Advocacy/Reputation/Brand

This determines the customer’s willingness to recommend your products or services. Some metrics you can use are price sensitivity, social media sentiment scores, trust ratings, and event attendance.

Quality/Operations

This looks at how well your products or services meet customer standards and requirements. Thompson says that when a product or service fails to meet those standards, the customer experience will be terrible no matter what is done to fix it.

Employee Engagement

When employees see many failed attempts to improve customer experience or experience executives who only want quick results, they can get disengaged. Employee engagement then becomes a CX strategy challenge. 86% of organizations have cited employee engagement as having an equal or more significant impact than other CX challenges.

To the list by Thompson, we believe it is worth adding the Net Promoter Score, which many consider the gold standard to measure Customer Experience.

Net Promoter Score (NPS)

If you’re a business looking for ways to measure customer loyalty and satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS) is your go-to metric. NPS relies on asking customers to rate their likelihood of recommending a business or product on a 0-10 scale. Ratings from 9-10 are considered “Promoters,” 7-8 are “Passives,” and 0-6 are “Detractors.” The Net Promoter Score is then calculated by subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters. With this metric, you can gain insight into how satisfied customers are with your business or product.

Integrating text analytics and AI into the customer experience evaluation process enhances this metric’s value, enabling businesses to delve deeper into customer feedback. By analyzing open-ended responses associated with NPS surveys through text analysis, companies can uncover the reasons behind their scores, offering more nuanced insights into customer experience. This AI-driven approach allows for a more comprehensive understanding of customer loyalty and satisfaction, transforming raw data into actionable intelligence for improving customer experience.

Tips For Leading a Customer Experience Department

Invest Time in Cross-functional Relationships

Collaboration among cross-functional team members can help the team flourish. For the team as a whole to succeed, members must learn to work and rely on each other. But first, the team should mutually respect each other’s contributions and place in the team.

A good strategy to foster these cross-functional relationships is to have team members regularly celebrate the successes of their colleagues. One approach is through the use of a communication platform that enables members to recognize one another publicly.

Train in Reporting and Story-telling

Data reporting is a crucial skill that entails gathering, evaluating, and structuring data into an understandable format. It is a process that helps analyze team performance and supports decision-making; thus, it must be done effectively. 

As statistics and data can become dull over time, more and more businesses are turning to storytelling to improve employee engagement. When the speaker can elicit emotion from their audience, they can present the report more effectively. People will remember the insights better if they can relate to them than if the information was just read to them.

Develop Career Paths For Your Team Members

To keep the team motivated, you need to invest in their growth. Please keep track of your team’s progress by establishing clear career paths that will help them move up in their positions. This means giving members goals to work toward and telling them what skills, knowledge, and experience they need to move forward.

Let Them Hang Out Where Your Customers are

While data is the backbone of building a successful customer experience strategy, letting the team experience firsthand what customers do can be an eye-opener. To give them a real-world experience they can learn from, encourage members to assume the role of the consumer and make a purchase or inquiry.

This should enable them to identify any room for growth and areas where the company thrives.

Conclusion

A customer experience department is essential for any company that wants to retain happy and loyal consumers.

To develop and implement a customer experience strategy, a company must understand its goals and current status to build a customer experience department.

As a result of the investment in customer experience, customers will develop brand loyalty, act as brand ambassadors, and advocate for the company, increasing customer retention and overall business success.

Finally, remember that it’s important for companies to understand that investing in building a customer experience department is not only a cost but also an investment in long-term growth and success.

The post The Ultimate Guide: How to Build a Customer Experience Department 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:

Image Source

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.

Image Source

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.