Customer Experience Archives – Page 10 of 23

What Is Sentiment Analysis? Definition, Types, Importance, and More

There is so much more to communication than just the words we say. Take sarcasm, for instance. Sarcastic comments often rely heavily on irony, conveying the opposite meaning from the one being directly expressed. But this irony is hard to convey without the added benefit of voice inflection and bodily cues (which is why it can be so problematic when someone tries to be sarcastic in a text message or email).

At the same time, non-verbal cues may even go so far as to reveal deeper meaning even beyond what a person intends to express—lack of eye contact during a conversation may indicate that one is uncomfortable with the situation while leaning forward can mean that they are actively engaged and paying attention. In fact, studies suggest that as much as 90% of communication is non-verbal. And while there’s some debate over the accuracy of that number, no one can deny that there’s more in what we say than is carried in the words we speak (or type).

This can create real problems for your business. Given that most customer feedback is text-based (such as emails, social media posts, surveys, in-app feedback, SMS, live chat, etc.), it can be extremely difficult to discern the actual meaning behind the words. To keep up with expectations and provide a positive customer experience, companies in all industries need a more accurate way to understand and categorize their customer feedback. This is where sentiment analysis comes into play.

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

Sentiment analysis is a term that describes the tools and strategies designed to help organizations extract unspoken meaning and emotion from text. By using sentiment analysis to contextually mine written communication for subjective information, your business can gain a greater understanding of how your customers view your brand, services, products, and more.

At its most basic, sentiment analysis can, with reasonable accuracy, determine whether written or spoken feedback should be classified as favorable, unfavorable, or neutral, and how intensely that sentiment is being expressed.

To make this possible, sentiment analysis is generally supported by sentiment scoring (also called polarity analysis). Often the polarity or overall sentiment is expressed using a numerical score ranging from -100 up to 100, with 0 representing a completely neutral sentiment. This kind of sentiment analysis scoring can be applied to specific phrases or points in the customer feedback or may be calculated for the entire text. Thus, your organization can apply sentiment analysis to create a mathematical data model representing the overall opinions or attitudes of your customers—either as individuals or groups.

But sentiment analysis can also go beyond the basics, picking out subtle clues in messages to help you better understand what your customers are feeling and how you can help them have a positive experience.

How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

The origin of sentiment analysis as a field of study traces itself back to the mid-20th century, when researchers would comb through and compare written documents to better understand the authors’ intent. But it wasn’t until the advent of digital communication and big data mining that sentiment analysis became a viable business tool. Today, technology advancements in AI, deep learning, and natural language processing (NLP) make it possible for organizations to mine massive amounts of customer data to gauge public opinion, conduct market research, monitor reputation, and better understand the customer experience.

At the heart of modern sentiment analysis are algorithms designed to automate the identification of text sentiment based on specific methods and analysis models. And although individual organizations may differ somewhat in their approach, most sentiment analysis processes fall into one of three categories:

Machine-Learning Sentiment Analysis

Using automated techniques, machine-learning sentiment analysis allows computer systems to learn from provided texts and apply those learnings to future evaluations. To do this, companies will provide the sentiment analysis model with a training set of natural language feedback that has already been tagged with labels showcasing which words or phrases demonstrate a positive, neutral, or negative sentiment. The model takes these correlations and then applies them to new natural language sets.

Over time, the machine-learning sentiment analysis model becomes more effective at automatically identifying emotional sentiment within text.

Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis

Rule-based sentiment analysis relies more heavily on human-built rules to locate hidden sentiment within a text. In its most simple form, the algorithm is provided with a detailed lexicon of possible words, terms, and expressions, with each assigned a sentiment score ranging from negative to positive. Then the algorithm simply tabulates the total score from each word or phrase within the text to determine the overall sentiment of the data set. Rule-based sentiment analysis may require further refining to account for things like idioms, sarcasm, or other unique verbal cues.

Hybrid Sentiment Analysis

For increased accuracy, organizations will often combine rule-based and machine-learning sentiment analysis models to create a hybrid approach to sentiment analysis. This allows the model to retain the statistical accuracy of machine learning while also incorporating hand-written rules for a more stable sentiment analysis solution. In this approach to sentiment analysis, different types of classifiers back each other up, so that if one fails, the next can step in to ensure that no sentiment is overlooked.

Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?

As communication technologies continue to improve, today’s customers expect their voices to be heard. As such, sentiment analysis has grown into an essential tool for monitoring and understanding opinions relevant to business.

Using sentiment analysis to mine these opinions from customer feedback, social conversations, service agent interactions, etc. can give your organization key insights into how customers and other stakeholders feel about your business and its offerings. You can then refine your processes, products, and services to better meet these expressed—and unexpressed—needs. The advantages of effective sentiment analysis range from being able to resolve customer concerns more quickly, to tracking and identifying trends and relevant factors in customer satisfaction scores across predefined periods.

Those businesses that offer a multichannel or omnichannel experience gain further benefits. Sentiment analysis empowers teams to automatically categorize feedback by the channel it was received in, and to develop an accurate picture of customer perception across individual platforms.

Types of Sentiment Analysis

Even within the categories mentioned above, there are different ways to approach sentiment analysis. Some of the most widely used sub-types of sentiment analysis include:

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-based sentiment analysis tracks emotional sentiment related to specific aspects of a business or its products/services. For example, an organization that rolls out a new feature as part of its app may employ aspect-based sentiment analysis to better understand how users feel about the upgrade. Aspect-based sentiment analysis would identify feedback, comments, and conversations relevant to the new feature and determine whether customer sentiment is positive, negative, or neutral.

Clause-Level Analytics

Clause-level sentiment analysis breaks feedback down into clauses rather than sentences. For example, if a customer were to comment that a clothing product they recently purchased “Looks great but isn’t comfortable to wear,” clause-level sentiment analysis could be applied to better understand just how satisfied or dissatisfied the customer is with their purchase. This makes it possible for businesses to correctly categorize responses that may include both positive and negative sentiments in a single sentence.

Emotion-Detection Sentiment Analysis

Emotion-detection sentiment analysis goes further than tracking negative-to-positive sentiment polarity and instead detects the emotional state of the person originating the feedback. Like other forms of sentiment analysis, emotion detection relies on lexicons of emotionally-charged words, machine-learning algorithms designed to detect emotional cues in text, or a combination of both.

Intent Analysis

Customers may reach out to your company or provide feedback for many different reasons—a client who wants a refund will naturally be motivated by intentions that are not the same as those who are merely looking for information. Intent-based sentiment analysis analyzes the objective of the customer, categorizing the message so that it can be more accurately addressed.

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Multilingual sentiment analysis applies the same processes to messages and feedback originating from speakers of more than one language. This adds to the complexity of the algorithms and may require additional processing and resources. In many cases, organizations will train an individual sentiment analysis model to address sentiment in a specific language, rather than attempting to create a model that can analyze sentiment in multiple languages.

Sentiment Detection

Sentiment detection is a form of sentiment analysis used to pick out emotionally-relevant text from neutral or objective information. For example, sentiment detection applied to a movie review would identify “It was exciting” as a positive sentiment while making note that “The run time was 122 minutes” is simply a statement of information with no positive or negative sentiment attached to it.

Smart Text Analytics

Smart text analytics can help you gain vital insights from unstructured feedback. This approach to sentiment analysis breaks down silos and connects data from various sources, applying an AI-based adaptive sentiment engine capable of closely analyzing customer messages to identify trends and themes over time. Click here to learn more.

Sentiment Analysis Examples

At the end of the day, most forms of sentiment analysis are tied directly to the words and phrases customers use when they discuss your brand, its business policies, and the products or services you offer. With this in mind, let’s take a look at some examples of sentiment analysis, and why some feedback may be easier to classify than others.

“I love how the new menu is arranged!”
The sentiment here is fairly straightforward; the customer is expressing a positive feeling and providing clear feedback. Most sentiment analysis tools would have an easy time identifying the sentiment.
“Oh man, I sure do love how you increased all the prices. Thanks so much for doing your part to drain my wallet.”
The sentiment in this feedback is more difficult to identify from the text alone, requiring a more in-depth sentiment analysis. Although the customer is using positive terms (“love,” “Thanks”), they are clearly intending to convey a negative response.
“I’m not unhappy with how the product looks.”
The feedback here uses a double negative to indicate that the reviewer is not fully pleased, but also not fully displeased. Poor sentiment analysis of this phrase may incorrectly attribute polarity beyond what is being expressed.
“The new slogan made me 😆.”
Nonstandard characters can present a real challenge for sentiment analysis tools, unless the tools have been trained to recognize the sentiment of these characters.
“The service agent was salty about something.”
Sentiment analysis tools need to be adaptable enough to take into account new slang as it evolves. In this case, the term ‘salty’ may be too new for some sentiment analysis models to accurately identify as a negative.
“The ending of the film was horrifying.”
Often, whether a word or phrase carries positive or negative sentiment depends on the context. In this example, the “horrifying” ending may indicate a positive response, provided that horror was what the viewer was hoping to experience. To identify this, the sentiment analysis tool would need to be capable of taking other factors into account.

In each case, the best sentiment analysis tools are those that can help you see beyond the words, and grasp the meaning and purpose behind your customers’ feedback.

Sentiment Analysis with Pearl-Plaza

Sentiment analysis can help your business more easily quantify your customer’s experience, providing you with unique insights into your reputation, service, and products. But as digital channels open up ever-expanding sources of customers and user feedback, sentiment analysis tools must likewise scale to meet increased demand. Without the right sentiment analysis solutions, you may find that keeping track of what your customers are saying (and how they are saying it) is prohibitively expensive in terms of cost, effort, and time.

If sentiment analysis is a concern for your business, then we have the solution.

Pearl-Plaza, the leader in people-oriented text analytics, brings advanced sentiment analysis to businesses in industries around the globe. leveraging industry-recognized metrics and real-time intelligence gathering, combined with powerful survey capabilities across every common digital channel, Pearl-Plaza sentiment analysis tools give you the power to quickly and easily gather the insights you need to optimize onboarding processes, enhance product experience, improve customer support interactions, and boost customer relationships like never before.

Don’t let hidden sentiments hamper your success. Learn how Pearl-Plaza’s CXInsight sentiment analysis tool can help you get the most out of your customers’ feedback.

In this Post

What Is Sentiment Analysis?How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?Types of Sentiment Analysis Sentiment Analysis Examples Sentiment Analysis with Pearl-Plaza

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 1, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 10 minutes

CX 101: Sampling Methods

When you want to get information from customers, it might seem nice to be able to ask every single customer. To make that happen, you would need every customer to agree to be surveyed, and it would take an extreme amount of time, effort, and money to then ask every customer your survey questions. Even then, you would have an inordinate amount of data to sift through. It’s true that you could definitively make claims about what your customers are saying, but it’s not actually necessary to go through this level of work. In fact, most likely, it’s not possible to survey every single customer.

Instead of surveying every single person you want feedback from, most people use a concept called sampling instead and rely on sampling methods to research a group. Sampling allows you to get information from a group of people, and when done correctly, the information is also generalizable and usable. We’ll walk you through sampling, types of sampling methods, and how to begin using some of these techniques.

What Is Sampling?

Sampling is using a group of your population to understand the population as a whole. Think of sampling as you would with sampling a cake. To see if a whole cake is delicious, you can usually tell by eating a slice of the cake. That slice of the cake can tell you a lot about the taste, texture, consistency, and overall balance of the cake—and it’s much easier to eat just a slice instead of an entire cake. Sampling for surveys works much the same way.

You take a group of your population and survey just them. It’s typically much more manageable and affordable to do so when you’re doing large scale research. From there, your data team will be able to analyze the data from the sample—which is typically a smaller amount that’s easier to glean important insights from. The insights from sampling—if your sampling is done correctly—can then tell you about the whole group you’re researching. And it can help you gather these insights at a fraction of the cost and much less effort than it would take to survey the entire group.

Difference Between Population and Sample

To better understand sampling methods, it’s important to distinguish between the population and the sample. The population is the entire group of people you want to learn about and to be able to draw conclusions about. For example, if you wanted to determine how your customers felt about a new product, your population would be every single customer that’s purchased the new product from you. If you wanted to research the grocery shopping habits of single mothers, your population would be every single mother.

The sample is a representative group of your population that will be participating in your research or survey. The key is that the sample has to be an accurate representation of your population. For example, if you were researching the grocery shopping habits of single mothers, you couldn’t go to a local grocery store and survey every person who walked in. You would get data, but it wouldn’t be data about the population you’re trying to study. As with the cake analogy, the sample or slice has to accurately represent the entire cake.

It’s important to remember that population doesn’t necessarily mean “big” and sample means “small.” Populations can be defined by so many factors: geography, age, gender, income, and so many more factors. You can have a tiny population of just a particular set of customers or a large population like the entire adult population of North America. The larger, more dispersed, or more diverse your population is, the harder it will be to sample.

What Are Sampling Methods?

When you want to do a survey or perform research, you’ll need to use sampling methods to determine who will be a part of your sample and how it will be related to your population. Carefully consider how you will select a sample that is as representative of your population as possible. In general, there are two categories of sampling methods: probability sampling and non-probability sampling.

Probability sampling is when each member of the population has an equal chance of being selected to be included in the sample. The sample participants are chosen randomly, and the results from the survey are generalizable to the population as a whole. Probability sampling methods are typically more accurate than others, but they are also more time consuming and expensive to make possible.

On the other hand, non-probability sampling is when each member of the population does not have a chance of being selected. With these sampling methods, you could choose your sample based on convenience or other limiting criteria that make it so that every person isn’t eligible to be selected.

For example, if you wanted to study all of your customers, it would be a non-probability approach to then just select a sample of customers who have subscribed to an email list. In this situation, you would be limiting who could be selected to those on a list, which may or may not be accurate to your entire population. With non-probability sampling, it’s generally much more affordable and easier to do research, but you do run the risk of accumulating higher amounts of sampling error and reducing the likelihood of having a generalizable sample.

Probability Sampling Methods

To perform a probability sampling survey, there are several methods that are commonly used. These are some of the most commonly used probability sampling methods:

Simple Random Sampling

Simple random sampling is the simplest way to get a sample where every member of the population had an equal chance of being selected. To do a simple random sample, you will choose a way to randomly select a certain number of people from your population to survey. Some common methods include using a random number generator, drawing a name out of a hat or bowl, or any other type of chance.

For example, you could number each customer you’ve had and use a random number generator to determine who will be a part of your sample. You could use a list generator to select certain customers from a list of names or emails. However you do it, the key is that it’s random.

Systematic Sampling

Using simple random sampling can be extremely time consuming with a large population, so many will instead use systematic sampling. Systematic sampling is using some sort of designated system to choose randomly. For example, you could number all of your customers and choose the tenth individual. Choosing systematically saves you time and effort but still provides you with a random sample.

Stratified Sampling

Stratified sampling is most useful when you have groups of people who should be sampled from equally. First, you divide your population into groups that don’t overlap (i.e. people from one group can’t be in another group). From there, you’ll randomly select a sample from each group.

For example, if you were looking at your customers, you might want to break them up by annual income to see if that affects what you’re researching. Your stratified groups would then be done by income, and you would select a small sample from within each group.

Cluster Sampling

Cluster sampling also involves splitting your population into groups, but these groups should be split randomly if possible. Then, instead of selecting from each group, you will randomly select groups and sample everyone in the group. For example, an airline might randomly select a certain number of flights each day and survey every passenger on those flights.

Non-Probability Sampling Methods

Since probability sampling can be time consuming, some people will use non-probability sampling methods instead. These methods are generally not generalizable to the whole population as they may or may not be an accurate representation of the population.

Convenience Sampling

Convenience sampling is choosing a sample based on ease of access. Instead of choosing from a population randomly, you choose from a population based on who is easy to communicate with. For example, standing in front of a grocery store and surveying everyone who walks past is convenience sampling. Not every member of your population has an equal chance to be chosen, and your data will only represent one day at one grocery store.

Choosing customers based on being subscribed to newsletters or who follow your company on Instagram could also be convenience sampling (if your population is larger than just “those who follow us on Instagram”) because it’s all about ease of access.

Voluntary Response Sampling

Voluntary response sampling is when you select a sample based on who wants to be a part of the sample. The individuals can voluntarily choose to respond or not respond based on a general call for responses. For example, you could send out an email to every customer and ask them to join the study. Those with strong opinions or interest would be the most likely to join, which could mean your population isn’t representative.

Purposive sampling

Purposive sampling selects a sample based on what a researcher decides. Essentially a researcher will be the one to determine if someone is in the sample or not. For example, you could put out a survey, and the researcher would then only look at the surveys for people who they decided met a certain criteria: like having purchased the most recent product.

Snowball Sampling

Snowball sampling is used when a population is hard to reach. For example, if your research requires data from shelterless people, you may have a hard time reaching them for a survey. Snowball sampling is when you use just a few individuals you can find from this group or even choose participants based on whose family or associates you can contact. While snowball sampling isn’t random, it can be useful for certain populations that you may not be able to survey in another way.

The Bottom Line

Overall, there are many sampling methods to choose from when planning your surveys. The end goal is to try to get your sample to be as representative as possible of your overall population, so you can use the results to generalize about the population and make conclusions. Poor sampling will give poor results. After all, as we all know, if we put crappy data in, we get crappy results, which don’t benefit anyone. Choose a representative sample instead for beneficial results.
See how Pearl-Plaza can help you with your sampling and survey efforts to help you choose the right sampling methods to get a representative sample.

In this Post

What Is Sampling?Difference Between Population and Sample What Are Sampling Methods?Probability Sampling Methods Non-Probability Sampling Methods The Bottom Line

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 9 minutes

4 Ways a Quick Service Restaurant Chain Refreshed a Stale Customer Experience Program

When you think of going to get a quick bite to eat, you’re probably thinking of getting a burger. With so many quick-service restaurant chains to compete with, how can one chain expect to stand out above the rest? One family decided to perfect freshly sliced sandwiches, custom menu items, and a never before seen “light” menu that features low calorie salads and sandwiches. Their revolutionary blend of quick-service speed and made-for-you care helped them create as many smiles as they did sandwiches.

Despite their global and loyal fanbase, the quick service restaurant chain experienced a period of stalled sales and mixed reception to marketing messages. It was this period of confusion that caused them to revamp their menu. But, as the restaurant underwent a massive change, they realized that their current customer experience platform was ineffective. Therefore, along with the refreshed brand, came a refreshed customer experience program. Here are the 4 ways they refreshed a stale customer experience program:

Going from Measuring to Improving
Getting the Right Insights to the Right People
Turning Intelligence into Action
Proving ROI Using Purpose-Driven Results

These four strategies helped this chain go from behind the times to a trailblazing leader in their field by partnering with Pearl-Plaza. Let’s dive in to see how they did it!

Strategy #1: Going from Measuring to Improving

Before partnering with Pearl-Plaza, this brand was relying heavily on a cloud-based analytics platform to track store performance. However, what this platform did not measure was the customer experience. This brand was able to tell how many meals were ordered in a day, but not how their customers felt about their meals—and if they had a good experience eating their food in the restaurant.

The brand decided to partner with Pearl-Plaza based on their ability to implement the quantitative data with customer experience data. Pearl-Plaza offered them a chance to see a holistic view of individual location performance, automated intelligence informed by data, and employee commitment to enhance the guest experience and drive sales.

Strategy #2: Getting the Right Insights to the Right People

The quick-service restaurant’s Pearl-Plaza team was able to take advantage of performance data and customer experience data to offer this brand a monthly granular, location-level report.

Using these reports, area supervisors could now conduct quarterly, on-site performance evaluations. Then, Pearl-Plaza would correlate the audit results with customer experience data in an easy-to-review report that gave actionable coaching insights and suggestions for improvement.

Strategy #3: Turning Intelligence into Action

By sending pertinent data to decision makers, Pearl-Plaza was able to help the QSR chain foster an environment of growth within the organization. Pearl-Plaza’s reports—that integrate performance audits and guest experience data—created priorities tied to the greatest return on investment.

But, priorities aren’t chosen solely from data. Pearl-Plaza also measures brand loyalty drivers such as friendliness, food quality, and cleanliness.

Based on the platform-identified priorities and the data received, the brand was able to leverage Pearl-Plaza’s tech to empower general managers and area supervisors to select quarterly action steps from a pre-populated library.

Strategy #4: Proving ROI Using Purpose-Driven Results

After implementing these data-driven improvements using the Pearl-Plaza correlated system, the brand saw a significant increase in key metrics in just eight months; the most notable being a 34% increase in their overall satisfaction (OSAT) score and a 22% increase in product quality.

Through its re-energized approach, this brand understands that every experience matters, and it’s important to get it right the first time. If there’s a problem, it’s acknowledged and fixed.

With the combined incremental value derived from its partnership with Pearl-Plaza—and

commitment to service excellence—the restaurant continues to inspire smiles through delicious experiences.

To learn more about how Pearl-Plaza can transform your customer experience, and to learn more about this brand’s journey, read the full client story here!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

How Quick Service Restaurants Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Every Department

In our last blog about creating an excellent food service customer experience (CX), we talked about how vital customer reviews are to growing your business (and how your customer experience plays a pivotal role in making sure your reviews are positive).

It’s clear the customer experience is vital for any food services business, and in our decades of experience working with the world’s best brands, we’ve noticed a common challenge: food service customer experience data is often very siloed from department to department, and team to team. Too often customer experience data isn’t being shared or leveraged across departments, even though there is tremendous value for all departments to make business decisions that either cut costs, help to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and grow the lifetime value of your loyalists.

In order to win in a competitive market, all departments need to have a sense of ownership in the customer experience. Every team should be able to explain how their role connects to the customer and to the customer feedback, from the front line to operations. We are going to walk through how different departments can benefit from customer feedback and some examples of how it can be used.

How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands

#1: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Operations

In food services, operations managers are typically concerned with hiring and training employees, coordinating work and schedules, developing working relationships with front and back of house staff, and more. Where customer feedback can help with these responsibilities is by promoting an internal culture that puts the customer at the center. Your employees need to be on board with what you are trying to accomplish with your customer experience efforts from day one, and giving them a window into the end customer is one way to do that!

Building employee buy-in comes from rallying around the employees. This can be done in a variety of ways. One example of this comes from an Pearl-Plaza quick service restaurant (QSR) customer who has had great success by building an employee Facebook group to share success stories. This keeps employees engaged and aware of what is happening within the company, and helps to inspire them to create great experiences.

Another example of how to rally employees around the customer experience is by using a solution like Moments. Moments from Pearl-Plaza helps you to build a meaningful experience culture and inspire employee advocates for your program. Moments is available in an app, allowing you to surface valuable comments in an Instagram-like feed, so your teams have access to customer feedback anywhere they go!

Additionally, customer feedback also helps food services brands to ensure quality customer experiences at scale and across locations. For example, a globally popular restaurant chain and Pearl-Plaza customer previously used mystery shopping techniques to gather data before partnering with Pearl-Plaza. Mystery shopping gave this business very limited data that they only had access to once a month. With Pearl-Plaza, they are able to show stores how they rank on key metrics such as friendliness and value. And, as this program has progressed, they are able to draw correlations between stores that are performing well in the system and their sales.

#2: Leveraging Customer Feedback in H.R.

The best way to use customer feedback in human resources is to highlight employee success. Research shows that 79% of employees who quit their jobs say that they didn’t feel appreciated. Knowing this, an Pearl-Plaza QSR customer built an employee recognition page on their company intranet to recognize employees! This page quickly became the most-read page on their website.

By highlighting employee success, you will be able to reduce turnover, which means not having to spend the money on training new employees. Our QSR clients say training a new employee can cost them an average of $1900! By reducing turnover, you’ll not only experience significant cost savings, but you’ll also have more tenured employees that create the best customer experiences. And we don’t know about you, but lower costs and better experiences sounds like a whole lot of value to us!

#3: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Finance

Using customer feedback in finance may sound obscure, but it may be one of the best ways to help your business succeed. By listening and digesting customer feedback, you’ll be able to recover at-risk revenue. You can identify where you may be losing customers and reach out to recover them.

It will also help you build a high sales potential. Forrester research shows that customers who receive positive experiences are 2.7xs more likely to spend more with a brand. By curating a positive experience, customers will be more inclined to revisit and spend more with your business.

Furthermore, if customers receive a positive experience, they are more likely to talk about it. Research shows that 3% of CX-fueled revenue is from word of mouth.

#4: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Development

It is important to be aware of where your customers are coming from in order to promote the growth of your business. As a QSR owner, you should be able to look at a map and point to where your customers are coming from. If not, you need to be leveraging customer surveys to answer those questions.

Once you are able to pinpoint where your customers are coming from, you can use it to inform your business decisions. Are you planning on expanding and opening new locations? Your customer feedback will help you decide where to put your stores.

Leveraging customer feedback not only helps you sustain your current business, but also helps you grow and build your business.

#5: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing

Any time you unveil a new item, promotion, or special, the customer needs to be at the heart of that campaign.

A globally popular restaurant chain and Pearl-Plaza customer recently tested new menu items out in their stores. The company thought it was time for a change, and ended up replacing two items that had been on the menu for years. After taking these older items off the menu, they quickly received heaps of customer complaints asking them to bring those items back.

For marketers, customer feedback helps you to bridge the gap between what you perceive customers want from your brand, and what they actually need from you to keep coming back for more.

Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit

In order to deliver on customer expectations, every department needs to have a line of sight into the customer experience. The information you receive from customers needs to be shared with all other departments and teams, not siloed in different departments, otherwise, you could be sitting on insights that could make a huge difference in your bottomline. When you break down those silos and create channels of communication across departments, your business will see more success in the areas that matter most!

For more information on using feedback throughout your organization, read our ebook here!

In this Post

How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 5 minutes

How a Global Grocer Turns CX Feedback Into Realized Customer Spend Targets

The Context

A global grocery retailer was facing the uncertainties of COVID-19 and through their struggle, they found a perspective
that helped them focus on forwarding progression throughout the pandemic. The grocery chain is known for its simple and
continuous efforts to always improve, and that consistent effort through the decades has helped to expand its market position.
The ongoing and steady growth is proof that the brand’s intention where quality is concerned has greatly paid off.

The Opportunity

COVID brought a heightened sensitivity and sense of uncertainty to most of the global grocer’s guests and staff. Along with the
rest of the world, the retailer hadn’t experienced a disruptor of this magnitude, which left most scrambling to understand how to
best serve their guests and help them feel safe while keeping store doors open.

And while they faced an immense challenge, the retail leader also saw an opportunity to emerge into a post-COVID world equipped with reliable data that would revitalize its customer experience, improve customer retention, and solidify brand loyalty. Moreover, the chain decided to challenge locations to optimize customer experience and increase customer spending.The chain looked at its customer experience through the lens of its business goals. They analyzed key business metrics related to
location eciency, staff measures, and stock availability. The big question was, how do customer experience metrics relate to
other KPIs, and which customer metric should they focus on to drive customer spending? That’s when they turned to their team
at Pearl-Plaza.

The Impact

By linking current store survey data to financial data, Pearl-Plaza helped the brand pinpoint areas in specific locations that could
increase customer spending. The analysis uncovered that locations with the highest percentages of customer spend had,
higher CX scores, lower employee churn, and on average, 34.41% higher rate of positive first impression scores.

The data showed that 64% of customers left a positive in-store survey response, which correlated to an average of 11% higher
spending. With this, the retailer knew if it could improve the number of positive in-store customer survey responses by 5%,
spending had the potential to increase by +€35m* in as little as six months. The brand leveraged Pearl-Plaza’s Explore and Coach tools to sort feedback at the highest-performing locations. Ultimately, the chain worked with its Pearl-Plaza team to identify struggling locations and create an action plan to build opportunities for positive in-store customer experiences moving forward.

The retailer has implemented these measures as a store target in struggling locations, resulting in the proportion of customers
leaving positive in-store survey responses increasing by 3% in the first quarter of the push to meet the 5% goal equating to €21m*.

What’s Next

This global grocer continues to see significant growth as it listens and responds to customer feedback. By consistently aiming to put the customer at the heart of the business, the retailer continues forward progression through its insightful approach despite the
challenges of a pandemic.

Summary

11% Spend Increase Tied to Positive In-Store Survey Metrics
3% Increase in Positive In-Store Survey Score in the First Quarter
+€35m* Opportunity in as Little as Six Months

In this Post

The Context The Opportunity The Impact What's Next Summary

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated October 14, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 2 minutes

The Best Way to Identify (and Share) the Moments that Matter with Frontline Employees

Metrics, metrics, metrics. It’s common for frontline employees like contact center agents to be inundated with them—schedule adherence, efficiency, handle time, and hopefully, amid all of that and more, customer experience (CX) metrics. Ostensibly, the goal with this information is to give contact center agents the guidance needed to create Experience Improvement (XI) for customers, but do they have the time and wherewithal to actually sort through comments and data? Should that even BE an organizational expectation?

Having plenty of data and feedback is certainly important, but inundating your contact center agents with it won’t make them better at their jobs. Today’s conversation briefly covers how to actually leverage data by being tactical and thoughtful with what you share with your frontline employees. We’ll also discuss how best to use data to recognize employees for excelling at the executing moments that matter to customers. Let’s get started!

Sharing What Matters with Frontline Employees

There’s no one specific type of information, insight, or data that supports frontline employees across all industries, but there are several high-level principles that brands can bear in mind when determining what those employees need to know. The first north star to aim for with sharing insights to frontline employees is to consider which of those insights will make your employees not just efficient, but actually better at their jobs and at creating Experience Improvement.

Organizations that make compliance and efficiency the high water mark for contact center excellence will not see remarkable agent performance, let alone the Experience Improvement that you need to acquire and retain customers. Finding the insights, data, and comments that will make employees better at their jobs begins with using an Experience Improvement platform to ingest data (especially customer comments) for actionable insights. Many brands end up wasting time by either trying to manually mine insights out of data mountains, or by gathering metrics and then quitting at that point because they think numbers alone can drive success.

The platform approach can help you avoid both of these pitfalls and make the most of all your data—both qualitative and quantitative. Finding relevant and actionable insights in your data will motivate your employees to act upon Experience Improvement opportunities. Enacting this approach will also enable your frontline employees to provide a far superior experience to customers. This strengthens brand connection and creates a customer-centric culture.

The Next Step

Giving your employees the tools to create Experience Improvement is one thing—demonstrating your appreciation for them successfully doing so is another. All of us—frontline agents, supervisors, and business leaders—can take advantage of data and insights that allow us to simply “be better.” However, there’s one more step on that road that is specifically applicable to driving to top-level frontline work: recognition.

This is another area in which brands and experience program vendors underutilize data, unstructured and otherwise. Data is great for strengthening experiences and the bottom line, but with the right plan and structure, it can drive another factor just as if not more fundamental: an employee-centric culture.

Many brands use data to measure employee performance as a matter of course, but tracking something only accomplishes so much. Brands need to go beyond tracking—they must use data to celebrate success, continually create a positive culture, and recognize a job well done.

This is a fundamental component of being human in all of your experiences, and employees who feel both recognized and a part of the company’s success will be all the more effective in their roles. That is the heart of Experience Improvement, creating a customer-centric and employee-centric workplace, and identifying the moments that matter.

The Frontline Insights Universe

While we’ve covered a lot of ground in discussing how to improve and recognize frontline employee performance, there’s a lot more you can find by checking out my full-length point of view article here. I take a deeper dive into communicating insights to frontline employees, as well as additional strategies you can use to improve experiences for customers, employees, and your wider organization!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by Jim Katzman

Reading time 3 minutes

4 Keys to Transforming Your CX Program to an ROI-Focused, Revenue Generating Machine

2022 is being branded as “The Year of the Squeeze.” Challenging economic conditions that are bordering on a recession have forced businesses to either raise prices, cut costs, or a combination of both. And due to these conditions, businesses need to justify the return on investment (ROI) for every initiative—including their customer experience (CX) program.

CX Network, an online CX organization sponsored by Pearl-Plaza, recently asked a panel of over 250 customer experience experts across the globe what the top obstacles complicating customer experience investments were and compiled them into a report. Unsurprisingly, the answers were return on investment, finding budget space, and enabling stakeholder buy-in.

The key to facing these challenges is to build an ROI-focused customer experience from the ground up (and not as an afterthought). Customer experience strategist Simon Fraser has developed a list of four tools, tips, and techniques to help do just that!

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

C-Suite Buy-In
Design with the End in Mind
Holistic View
Don’t Stop

#1: C-Suite Buy-In

Before you can further invest in your CX program, you’ll need the approval of your board or c-suite. In order to do this, you need to talk about the situation and possible complications, as well as answer any questions they are going to ask.

The situation refers to the environment or sector that your business is operating in. Then, it is important you state the complication. What is giving your c-suite headaches? What problems are they facing? What are they worried about in regards to a customer experience program? Lastly, what questions are they asking that you need to be able to answer through your customer experience program?

One common question is, ”How can I hold on to my happy, loyal customers who prefer the way things have been, and are opposed to change?” Your customer experience program needs to be able to provide those answers.

You also need to be able to prove the value of what you are doing in regards to your customer experience program in the terms that matter most to the c-suite. At Pearl-Plaza, we focus on four economic pillars that most businesses are trying to focus on.

Customer Acquisition: This comes from supporting the brand positioning and positive word of mouth.
Customer Retention: Forrester research shows that a customer who receives a positive experience is 2.7x’s likely to remain with your brand as opposed to a customer who has had a negative experience.
Increasing Customer Lifetime Value: Additionally, Forrester research also proves that a customer who receives great experiences is 2.7x’s more likely to purchase additional products.
Minimize Costs: This can take many different forms. It might be how you focus to try and move customers to a digital experience or how you can improve to receive less complaints.

You need to ask yourself: What is it that my business is looking to solve and how am I designing a customer experience program that supports each of these pillars? That is what the c-suite is hungry to understand.

#2: Design with the End in Mind

Have you ever undergone a major home renovation? If you have, you’ll know that during the first meeting with the architect, you don’t discuss where the power outlets are going to be. Instead, the architect asks why you are doing this renovation, what lifestyle you hope to achieve with it, and what will that look like in five years?

The same train of thought can be used for CX programs and CX strategy. Everything should be tied into your vision as a business. While designing surveys and preparing email marketing campaigns are important, you need to make sure the designs are in line with your customer vision and brand promise, and that your customer experience program can support the changes that you need to deliver.

#3: Holistic View

A fully functioning CX program cannot rely on transactional surveys alone. You need to be measuring and managing customer journeys, not just transactional data, so that you can improve on the customer experience as a whole.

There are four categories of data to be examining to accurately run your CX program:

Customer Surveys: Aside from transactional surveys, you need to be measuring journeys from a customer perspective and being able to access those points
Other Feedback: To build on customer surveys, you need to be managing complaints, social media, and creating a space where your employees feel comfortable providing feedback.
Internal Data: Most businesses will have a strong customer relationship management system (CRM) that will store all customer and behavioral data. Along with that, it will also store financial and operational data from within your business. Integrating this data against your CX metrics is essential to the success of your business.
Market Data: You need to know what your competitors are offering so that you can continue to improve your customer experience and keep delivering on your brand promises. It is also important to know how your potential customers are feeling and what changes you can make to convert them.

You need to be listening to social media, complaints, and your employees who are likely to understand where your paint points are. By measuring data from transactions, along with internal data, market data, and miscellaneous data, you’ll be able to complete the picture of your customer’s experience.

#4: Don’t Stop

It is vital that you maintain momentum in your CX program transformation. Remember, customer experience is not a linear piece. Rather, it is a continuous improvement journey.

You need to ensure that you have the governance around your customer experience program to drive change. Most businesses are looking at experience data that has happened in the past. What you need to be doing, is measuring and managing your CX program and making sure it is continuously evolving with your business. Furthermore, it’s important to develop a “Culture of Commitment” where every employee across every department is focused on continuous Experience Improvement (XI) and understands (and is dedicated to) that mission. Only then will your CX program be truly ROI-focused—and achieve all the success it’s capable of.

For more in depth information on these four steps to building an ROI focused customer experience program, watch the full webinar here!

In this Post

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 5 minutes

How Two Companies Leveraged a Customized Social Listening Solution to Gain Game-Changing Insights

Many organizations are drowning in pools of untapped social data. Why? Because options to structure and analyze that data can be limited and even if businesses are able to compile that data, it often remains siloed from other data, such as voice of customer (VoC), call center, and more. That’s where Pearl-Plaza’s game-changing customer social listening solution comes into play.

Pearl-Plaza’s solution not only allows brands to access that data, but also to integrate that with other data sources, providing scalability and the deep, data-driven understanding that teams need to achieve their goals.

But don’t just take our word for it! Check out the three benefits real companies have realized leveraging Pearl-Plaza’s customized social listening solution.

3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution

Benefit #1: Greater Access to and Value from Social Data

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

Benefit #3: Effectively Filter Social Content to Only Extract Relevant Data

Benefit #1: Greater Access to and Value from Social Data

A consumer electronics brand who partnered with Pearl-Plaza previously approached Voice of Customer by designing, distributing, and analyzing a wide range of surveys. The brand knew they needed to diversify and optimize their approach to customer experience (CX) to continue to improve, so they partnered with Pearl-Plaza! Their new partnership allowed the company to integrate social media content with their VoC data. This push allowed them to:

Reduce survey spend by substituting social signals where possible
“True up” social data with survey responses to explore the feasibility of reducing their survey spend
Identify common themes and correlations in the social data to use as a reliable, immediately-actionable proxy for customer survey responses

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

A leading architect firm has leveraged the Pearl-Plaza platform to structure and analyze massive amounts of natural language feedback. The firm now has the ability to achieve a deep, data-driven understanding of customer experience in airports by mining omnichannel social media data from dozens of America’s airports. The result?

A data-driven voice of customer program that can help win contracts and build airports that better serve stakeholders and travelers alike
More meaningful and accessible analysis of social data via the platform’s intuitive functionality

And to top it all off? The customized social listening solution had a one week integration time, encompassing three data sources, 869,973 words, 30,000 travelers, and the top ten airports!

Benefit #3: Effectively Filter Social Content to Only Extract Relevant Data

Both brands we mentioned before had what many companies think they need: large amounts of data. But the problem with so much data is that it is difficult to find the signal through the noise and filter out the insights that will really make a difference. But with Pearl-Plaza’s social listening solution’s ability to effectively filter out actionale, relevant data, these two companies were able to see incredible return on investment.

Here’s what the benefits look like:

Run better surveys by identifying insight gaps
Easily configure flexible one-off analyses while also establishing and validating long-term trends
Help leadership teams make better-informed decisions around marketing and product strategy

When it comes to mining social data, working smarter, not harder is always the best route to take. Many companies struggle to grasp a true understanding of their client experience, thinking they have an ear to the ground because the data is rolling in. But all data is not created equal! That’s why it’s essential to have a customized social listening solution to unlock structured data, analyze for key insights, and capitalize on the most relevant opportunities.

Learn more about Pearl-Plaza’s customized social listening solutions here!

In this Post

3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 3 minutes

How to Write the Best Customer Onboarding Surveys & Improve the Experience

It’s no secret that customer onboarding is one of the most crucial (and oftentimes challenging) stages in a customer’s journey with your brand. Indeed, the onboarding process usually ends up setting the tone for their subsequent interactions with your employees, their perception of your messaging, and even their product experience (PX). These and other variables make a well-designed onboarding experience of utmost importance to organisations and their customer experience (CX) initiatives.

Today’s conversation briefly touches on how your organisation can ensure that its onboarding experience isn’t just up to par, but built to ensure bold, human, and dynamic relationships with your customers. There are several reasons a lot of brands have mediocre or subpar customer onboarding; one of the biggest is because they don’t design their onboarding surveys with the end in mind.

What Is Designing with the End in Mind?

One of the most commonly held beliefs in the customer experience world is that a CX programme that gathers incoming data is a CX programme that’s good enough. This isn’t the case. Your initiative should be more than a metaphorical trawler net for data, especially if you want to fundamentally improve your customer onboarding processes. This is especially true for onboarding surveys.

Rather than aiming to collect data and then attempt to mine insights after the fact, brands should design their onboarding surveys with the end goal in mind before collecting any feedback from new or prospective customers. This approach may seem a bit unorthodox, but I promise it will save you time, resources, and customers. Designing with the end in mind will also make it much simpler to actually improve opportunity areas, not just identify them.

How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?

There are a few best practices to bear in mind when designing (or redesigning) your customer experience surveys with the end in mind. Additionally, remember that these practices don’t have to apply solely to your surveys; you can aim them toward any facet of your experience programme and any goal that you need it to achieve.

First, take a hard look at your existing onboarding survey; evaluate what your existing customers have said it accomplished well and where it could’ve been better. Gather similar feedback from customer-facing and CX teams as needed. Identifying factors like these before you deploy your survey will give it (and indeed your wider programme) a proverbial north star, which will help you decide which audience segments and channels to devote your CX resources to.

Additionally, once you’ve identified the data you need your survey to collect, spell your related onboarding improvement goals out in concrete, quantifiable terms. Defining your goals with numbers will help you identify improvements much more precisely, and will also give you something tangible to present to the boardroom when you move to secure additional funding. A lot of programmes get stuck in defining their objectives abstractly, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether any improvements were actually made. This approach nullifies that problem.

Click here to learn how Virgin Money was able to improve their customer onboarding experience.

Meaningful Experience Improvement

Designing with the end in mind is not a simple task for any element of a CX initiative. It’s an approach that demands a great deal of time and discipline at the start of the process, followed by continuous dedication as you begin to collect insights. However, if your organisation is ready to invest that effort, you’ll begin to see much more promising results from your surveys than if you simply turn your listening posts on and dredge your data lake for anything potentially useful. Designing with the end in mind saves you and your team a great deal of both time and effort down the line.

Why? Because this approach will grant you only the most pertinent insights and feedback, enabling you to create meaningful Experience Improvement (XI).

Click here to read my full-length point of view article on what else your organisation can do to create consistent, successful, and peerless customer onboarding experiences. I present a few other best practices I’ve observed (and executed) in my many years within this space, and know that they will help you on your journey to improved customer onboarding.

In this Post

What Is Designing with the End in Mind?How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?Meaningful Experience Improvement

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by Simon Fraser

Reading time 3 minutes

What is a Customer Journey Map? A Beginner’s Guide:

What Is A Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a diagram of all the places customers come into contact with your brand, online or off. Each of these touchpoints influences the customer, and by analyzing customer behavior, feelings, and motivations around each touchpoint, you can begin to identify opportunities to establish more positive relationships by giving customers what they need at any given stage of their journey.

The goal of a customer journey map is to gain a deeper understanding of your customer, how they interact with your brand, and how each interaction affects your relationship. It’s also a way to ensure that the brand experience remains consistent for each customer across touchpoints.

“With the number of touchpoints a customer has with a brand increasing with the proliferation of technologies and channels, the need to create a consistent experience is critically important.” – McKinsey & Company

But the big picture goal is why there is so much buzz around customer journey maps now:

A Customer journey map can move you towards more conversions, greater customer loyalty, and improved customer experience from end to end (or from end to forever, if you are subscription-based and there’s no bottom to your sales funnel).

But a customer journey map can be complicated to create, and the results can be difficult to track and interpret from end to end. Many businesses are tempted to ignore it altogether in favor of lower-hanging fruit to increase conversions.

However, that hesitancy to use customer journey maps is quickly disappearing as more companies are seeing the results from properly customer journey mapping.

And, if your company is struggling with the question: “Why aren’t customers completing (or repeating) purchases?” – there is no better time to create a customer journey map that will lead you to that answer.

SaaS companies optimize the customer journey with this 4-touchpoint approach from Pearl-Plaza.

Customer Cartography: Where to Begin on a Customer Journey Map

“We found that a company’s performance on journeys is 35 percent more predictive of customer satisfaction and 32 percent more predictive of customer churn than performance on individual touchpoints. Since a customer journey often touches different parts of the organization, companies need to rewire themselves to create teams that are responsible for the end-to-end customer journey across functions.” – McKinsey & Company

What’s Included in the Customer Journey Map?

Before getting started on a customer journey map with the steps below, here’s an overview of some of the key components that make up the map. Be sure to weave these key components into your customer journey mapping process.

The Buying Process: The customer buying process includes milestones from start to end with their purchasing journey. You’ll want to draft the path you intend the customer to take by listing the buying process stages.

User Actions: This explains in detail what a customer may do before initiating a transaction such as seeing the ad of the product and hearing about it from their social circle.
Emotions: Adding emotions into the process helps to understand how the customer feels when they’re searching for solutions to solve their pain points.
Pain Points: This element gives insights into where a customer might encounter a negative experience and helps us understand why.

Solutions: This last part of the customer journey map is for your team to brainstorm where to improve based on the customer journey.

Gather Your Customer Journey Map Cross-Functional Team

As customers go through the various stages in the sales funnel, they cross departments from marketing to sales to product to customer success and customer service.

So it only makes sense that, when choosing your team for your customer journey mapping project, you have a representative from each of these departments involved. Having a cross-departmental team is vital to gaining the kind of understanding that is the whole point of the customer journey management exercise.

“When a manager takes the lead to form a cohesive, customer-centric, interdepartmental team, it not only facilitates learning and accountability throughout the whole company, it can even change company culture for the better.” – Jessica Pfeifer, VP & General Manager, Pearl-Plaza.

Defining Customer Segments for a Customer Journey Map

Once your team is assembled, ask marketing to list out each key customer segment for the customer journey map.

Example of a segmented customer journey map

It’s extremely likely that each customer segment’s journey will be different. They’re likely finding you, and communicating with you, in different ways depending on demographic and psychographic variables.

That means, unless you only have one ideal customer persona, that you’ll actually be creating several customer journey maps, one for each segment.

Plotting Touchpoints for a Customer Journey Map

Once you have your customer journey map segments identified, it’s time to plot out your touchpoints for each one. How and when does your customer interact with your brand, your product, your team?

You can decide whether you will tackle the pre-acquisition journey, post-acquisition journey, or the whole customer journey map.

With touchpoints, there are the ones you have control over, and the ones you don’t. There are the ones you can track easily, and those you can’t. If your company advertises via billboard, for example, that can be hard to track, even if you survey customers.

Of the ones you can control and track, online touchpoints are the easiest. So start there. Ask your marketing team members to fill you in on what the top of the funnel looks like, what links are bringing people to your website, and how those people first heard of you. In the post-acquisition phase, Customer Success and Support own certain customer touchpoints, and are likely already gathering feedback about them from customers. These touchpoints may include the end of the onboarding cycle in SaaS, order delivery in ecommerce, and customer support interaction. The Product team may articulate customer journey map points that are driven by behavior, such as feature adoption in SaaS or a purchase threshold in e-commerce.

And, if the team doesn’t know already, don’t be afraid to ask the customers themselves – every step of this customer journey map should be grounded in real customer data. At the same time, don’t let the exercise become overwhelming. You and your team may already have an intuitive sense of the customer journey map. Get something documented and work to refine it over time.

Gathering Customer Data for a Customer Journey Map

You need more than touchpoints for your customer journey map. You need to know what’s happening at and around each touchpoint. You have to get inside the minds and hearts of the customers at every juncture to find out what they’re thinking, feeling, and needing to do.

Of these three, understanding customers’ emotions shouldn’t be given short shrift: 69% of consumers say that emotions count for over half their experiences. Consider adding emotions into your customer journey map.

Unless you have robust research from marketing and customer success departments already, you may want to gather all of this data, asking members of each segment – around every identified touchpoint – these questions:

Questions to Ask for a Customer Journey Map

What they’re thinking at that touchpoint
What they’re feeling at that touchpoint
What they need most at that touchpoint (use this as an indicator of buyer stage – awareness, research, choice reduction, purchase)
What their ultimate goal is (why are they here?)
What they do/did at that touchpoint (or use a session recording program to see exactly what they did, like hitting the “back” button when they land in the cart, etc.)

To get a pulse across your entire customer base, consider tracking core customer experience KPIs. These include Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score. You can use your customer feedback software program to deploy at specific touchpoints, alerting you to places where people are experiencing trouble that will require more of your attention.

You may also need to conduct analytical research for a customer journey map, taking a deep dive into your website/product analytics to find what users are doing and where they might be experiencing difficulty.

And don’t discount the data your customers volunteer on social media and review sites. You can gather valuable anecdotal evidence for your customer journey map from a social media listening tool – as well as from the stories of your own customer success and customer service managers.

With this data, you can start to build a customer journey map for each segment persona, for each purchase stage, and each touchpoint, with an overlay for what they are thinking, feeling, wanting, doing, and most importantly, what they’re hoping to achieve.

The Customer Success Component of a Customer Journey Map

This is where we add Customer Success to the mix, ensuring that at each step, we have a crystal-clear understanding of each customer segment’s success milestones and ideal outcomes, so we can bridge any gaps between them.

Including customer success metrics, (particularly success milestones) in your customer journey map isn’t often. This is likely because customer journey mapping has been traditionally focused on the top end of the funnel – Acquisition, Decision, and Purchase phases.

But SaaS is different. The funnel doesn’t end with the purchase. The goal isn’t to sell once or twice, but to retain customers via subscription, which requires continually providing and increasing value.

SaaS businesses – you need to chart much more than any other industry and make each post-purchase touchpoint count towards getting your customers closer to their desired outcome.

And that focus turns touchpoints into stepping stones towards success milestones.

In practice, this means you’ll need to consider how touchpoints, especially after purchase, can be used to help your users make real, tangible progress.

Customer Journey Mapping Examples for SaaS, eCommerce, and Brick-and-Mortar Stores

There are so many ways to create a customer journey map, and it can be difficult to decide what has to be in, and what may be less important to you depending on your type of business and your goals. Here are a few customer journey mapping examples from different types of industries that are mapping their customer journeys effectively.

First, let’s look at two of the main ways you can organize your customer journey map data: Linear or chart.

Linear: Works best when customers have fewer options for how they interact with you, or when you want to create a customer journey map along a timeline.

Chart: Works best when you have touchpoints that meander in a nonlinear fashion.

Clearly, both types of charts can hold a lot of widely-varying information. And there are many more ways to create a customer journey map too, like with emotion-centered maps.

Or customer journey map by departments…

Customer Journey map with department touchpoints

By need…

Whichever way you choose to create your customer journey map, be sure to include what the customer feels and needs at every touchpoint, as well as how you can improve the one and deliver the other.

Here are some more customer journey map examples by industry. Notice that no single map has everything.

SaaS Customer Journey Map example by Pearl-Plaza

SaaS Customer Journey Map example by Telefonica

eCommerce: Lancome’s Brand Experience Map in Two Ways:

Experience journey

A slightly different angle on a customer journey map :

Brick-and-Mortar: Starbucks

Improving Customer Experience (CX): Start with a Simple Customer Journey Map

As you can see, there are many, many valid ways to approach a customer journey map. The customer journey map examples above reflect deep thinking and research — the result of intensive project work by these companies. Use them for inspiration. Don’t let them stop you and your team from drafting a simple journey flow to get the ball rolling.

By dedicating even an afternoon to a cross-functional knowledge-sharing session you will likely come away with:

a more robust understanding of how your customers interact with and “experience” your company.
a basic journey map
3-5 “low hanging fruit” opportunities for improvement

Your goal with all of this is to improve customer experience. Remember, there is a good reason for that. As Jake Sorofman, Research VP, Gartner says, “As competition and buyer empowerment compounds, customer experience itself is proving to be the only truly durable competitive advantage.”

Good luck on your journey!

Measure and improve customer journey experience. Sign up today for free Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score feedback with Pearl-Plaza.

In this Post

What Is A Customer Journey Map?Customer Cartography: Where to Begin on a Customer Journey Map The Customer Success Component of a Customer Journey Map Customer Journey Mapping Examples for SaaS, eCommerce, and Brick-and-Mortar Stores Improving Customer Experience (CX): Start with a Simple Customer Journey Map

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 20, 2024

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 10 minutes

Interviews Aren’t Dead: How B2B Companies Can Learn More from Their Buyers

B2B purchasing decisions are complex. They’re financial. They’re political. But more than anything—they’re unpredictable. While B2B firms have more systems in place than ever to predict sales outcomes, they’re still blindsided when prospects choose another vendor.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! To avoid this fate, it’s critical to have a process in place for exploring, analyzing, and improving the buyer experience—win or lose. You might have already guessed it, but I’m talking about buyer interviews.

Using the Right Listening Technique

There’s no one right way to collect feedback. It depends on the audience, the timing, the circumstances, and ultimately—what you’re trying to learn. Whether you’re sending SMS surveys, analyzing social reviews, or conducting phone interviews, it’s about using the right listening technique for the situation to get the best results.

Following the methodology below, our own customer experience (CX) program (Elevate) is successfully getting feedback from upwards of 90% of closed sales opportunities in our best months—and the insights are invaluable.

Here’s what we’re doing and why we think it is successful.

Building Human Connections

For our post-opportunity listening post, we’ve found that interviews are the most effective way to engage buyers. And the intelligence we glean from these “buyer interviews” is impactful across teams.

Interviews can either supplement or replace a post-sales survey. I’ve found that many buyers actually prefer spending 30 minutes on the phone with me rather than two-minutes completing a survey.

Also, the suggestion of a phone call lets the client know that we’re willing to take the time to listen—that we care, we want to learn, and we want to improve. It’s all about building that human connection, and it is a great way to get sticky with new clients and show your investment from the start.

Buyer Interviews Process

Now, I bet you’re wondering how we efficiently scale this largely manual process!

First, we conduct dozens of interviews each quarter. The open-ended nature of an interview allows us to ask all of the right questions and follow the conversation wherever the respondent takes it. And we use the robust insights to drive cross-functional action. Across all of our listening posts, I can confidently say buyer interviews have quickly become one of our most beloved data sources.

The Insights

Here are some of the things we’ve learned—and the teams that have benefited—by rolling out our buyer interview program:

Pricing (sales ops)
Roadmap Investments (product)
Messaging, Packaging, and Competitive (product marketing)
Demos (solution consultants)
Presentations (sales directors)
Renewal Strategy (client success)

At a regular cadence, our “Experience Improvement Board” looks at the emerging themes, chooses projects and specific actions, and assigns an executive owner. This owner then forms a “tiger team” to research and tackle the project—and reports on progress each month!

Time to Get Started!

If buyer interviews are not currently part of your post-opportunity strategy, they should be. They will not only increase your response rate, but will give you additional intelligence and insight into what your buyers expect from your company. It’s the most personal way to request feedback and build lasting relationships, win or lose.

I’m not done sharing the successes of our buyer interview program. In subsequent blogs, I will talk about some of the questions we ask during interviews, challenges you may face in your conversations (and how to overcome them), interview do’s and don’ts, how to build your “interview team,” and what sorts of insights you should specifically try to gain from interviews.

But in the meantime, if you have questions about launching or refining your own buyer interview program, I’d love to talk to you. I’m Josh Marans, Director Experience Improvement at Pearl-Plaza, and you can find me on Linkedin.

In this Post

Using the Right Listening Technique Building Human Connections Buyer Interviews Process The Insights Time to Get Started!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by Josh Marans

Reading time 3 minutes

How to Eliminate Friction in Your Customer Journey

What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?

When most folks think of friction, they probably think of middle school science class. But if you’re a customer experience professional, “friction” is probably a term you’ve heard whenever your teammates talk about reducing customer churn. Within that context, friction refers to points in the brand experience that can have a long-term impact on customers’ relationship with a business. Friction may even cause some customers to quit a brand altogether.

Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?

Did you know that the average business today loses between 10-30% of its customers annually?

Additionally, research by Carlson Marketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years. Multiply the amount of churning customers by the lifetime value (LTV) of the average customer at your organization and losing customers at this rate means losing millions of dollars!

Because of this, it’s essential that brands have an experience program in place that can detect friction, help experience professionals understand the problem(s) creating that friction, and correct them. The result is both a meaningfully improved experience and saved customer relationships. So, without further ado, let’s go over how your organization can ensure it’s eliminating friction across your customer journey.

How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

#1: Understand The Moments That Matter

Like we said earlier, an important part of reducing friction is knowing about and understanding the moments that matter to customers. Brands can achieve this understanding by mapping out a few of their most important customer journeys. Learning about key touchpoints is one of the best ways to become aware of problems as they arise.

One of the most impactful methods to identify these moments and then reduce friction across your customer journey is Pearl-Plaza’s Touchpoint Impact Mapping. Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a innovative way of understanding the moments that matter to customers. It is unique because it is based entirely on comment data drawn from customer feedback, ensuring a more accurate view of the customer’s memory of their experience. This creates an emotional picture of the journey that highlights what is most important to customers and also allows our clients to prioritize those moments that matter most to their customers.

Watch this video to hear how banking giant, Virgin Money, leveraged Touchpoint Impact Mapping to identify a key friction point and then improve its customer onboarding experience!

How Virgin Money Eliminates Friction in It’s Customer Journey

What’s more, once you’ve identified those high-impact moments, you can use this strategy to immediately begin solving those problems and expediently reduce journey friction. Understanding touchpoints and their drawbacks enables organizations to come up with solutions, implement them, and listen to see how they’re working. Experience practitioners can then point to those changes, and their improvements, when proving their program’s worth.

#2: Talk to Employees

Research has even shown that a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21%! So, getting your customers’ take on an experience is clearly important, but many brands, in their rush to do so, overlook chatting with their employees about customer journeys as well. Employees, especially frontline ones, can provide extremely powerful and eye-opening intel about your brand’s experience. How can brands access and leverage that?

The best way for brands to get their employees’ perspective is by letting them constantly submit feedback and ideas in real-time. Rather than relying on, say, an annual survey, organizations should instead utilize experience platforms that give employees a constant voice. This also further allows brands to learn about, and act upon, problems as they emerge in real-time instead of too far down the road for the customer’s liking.

Want to learn more about how employees can help you decrease friction in the customer journey and grow customer loyalty and value? Check out this infographic!

#3: Keeping Tabs on Your Customer Journey

That notion of being constantly aware of journey friction as it happens is at the heart of keeping it suppressed as much as possible. Surveys are important, but this dynamic is another reason why they’re insufficient for reducing journey friction by themselves—a constantly possible problem demands a constantly active solution. Organizations simply cannot achieve that level of awareness otherwise.

Another element of getting a full picture of your experience is leveraging data sources outside of surveys. And that’s going to become crucial in the next few years. Why? Because only 19% of U.S. Gen Z customers are likely to complete a traditional survey.

Instead of relying solely on direct surveys, brands can do this by combining survey listening with other sources of data, like your employees’ perspectives, and putting it against a backdrop of financial and operational information. This approach creates a 360-degree view of your customers and experience, an understanding that your organization can leverage to reduce friction, boost retention, and create a meaningfully improved experience.

Want to learn more about improving customer retention? We just published an entire eBook on the subject—click here to check it out!

In this Post

What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how Pearl-Plaza’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Written by The Pearl-Plaza Team

Reading time 4 minutes

Build an Integrated CX Program

Build an Integrated CX Program

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

What Is Sentiment Analysis?

How Does Sentiment Analysis Work?

Machine-Learning Sentiment Analysis

Rule-Based Sentiment Analysis

Hybrid Sentiment Analysis

Why Is Sentiment Analysis Important?

Types of Sentiment Analysis

Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis

Clause-Level Analytics

Emotion-Detection Sentiment Analysis

Intent Analysis

Multilingual Sentiment Analysis

Sentiment Detection

Smart Text Analytics

Sentiment Analysis Examples

Sentiment Analysis with Pearl-Plaza

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

What Is Sampling?

Difference Between Population and Sample

What Are Sampling Methods?

Probability Sampling Methods

Simple Random Sampling

Systematic Sampling

Stratified Sampling

Cluster Sampling

Non-Probability Sampling Methods

Convenience Sampling

Voluntary Response Sampling

Purposive sampling

Snowball Sampling

The Bottom Line

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

How Five Different Departments Can Leverage Customer Feedback in Food Services Brands

#1: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Operations

#2: Leveraging Customer Feedback in H.R.

#3: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Finance

#4: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Development

#5: Leveraging Customer Feedback in Marketing

Everyone Owns the Customer Experience—And Everyone Can Benefit

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

The Context

The Opportunity

The Impact

What’s Next

Summary

In this Post

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

Sharing What Matters with Frontline Employees

The Next Step

The Frontline Insights Universe

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Get More Out of Your CX Program

The 2024 Consumer Trends Report

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

#1: C-Suite Buy-In

#2: Design with the End in Mind

#3: Holistic View