This article probably isn’t the first place you’ve seen the terms “Great Resignation”, “Great Reshuffle” or “Big Quit” on the internet, and from the looks of things, the battle to retail talent won’t settle anytime soon. The causes and effects of employee churn are complicated, but the bottom line for brands and organizations the world over is simple: employee expectations have changed, and workplace cultures’ view of the employee experience must change as well.
You’ve probably seen that writing on the wall ever since The Great Resignation kicked off in early 2021, but if you’re not sure where to start, we have you covered! Today’s conversation briefly touches on how employee experience (EX) programs can help you navigate employee challenges big and small, how EX initiatives interconnect with customer experience (CX) and how all of this can lead to meaningful Experience Improvement!
How We Got Here
The biggest assumption that a lot of the biggest brands have had going for many years is that customers are the most important part of an experience ecosystem. Customers are certainly vital, but we’re going to challenge that long-running assumption by saying that employees are actually an organization’s most valuable asset. Sure, happy customers help a strong bottom line, but passionate, bold, and invested employees are what encourage those customers to keep doing so. Employees are invaluable for creating the human connections that reinforce brand loyalty, which helps your organization stay at or reach the top of your vertical!
One of the reasons we’re seeing the Great Resignation play out so hard for so many companies is that, unfortunately, they didn’t view their employees through this prism. They didn’t adequately invest in employee support resources over a period of years, and when that lack of support came into focus during COVID-19, it was the last straw for many workers. A few other factors have contributed here too, but it all boils down to the fact that employees’ idea of a supportive workplace culture has rapidly changed.
The Rundown on Employee Experience
So, if employees are now expecting deeper and more consistent support from their workplaces, what’s the best way for brands to respond? The phrase “deeper and more consistent support” reads pretty simply on paper, but we all know that’s going to vary wildly from brand to brand, industry to industry. The truth is that there’s no one benefit, idea, or other silver bullet that will guarantee employee retention. Rather, organizations need to go deeper by carving meaningful intelligence out of their employee feedback, then acting upon it.
That advice sounds obvious enough, right? Well, you might be surprised (or not) to learn that a lot of brands and experience platform vendors consider gathering feedback the high water mark of program success, not acting on it. However, numbers and metrics alone aren’t going to get you the employee retention you need to create meaningful experiences—taking meaningful action is the only step that’s going to get you there.
So, with that in mind, shift your paradigm if you haven’t already to designing your experience program with the end in mind. Identify your retention challenges, build your feedback-gathering tools around those challenges, and analyze what your employees are telling you for insights to take action on. This approach differs significantly from what many brands have considered the norm for many years, where they simply inhale mountains of data and then try to scour all of it for any intelligence of value.
Trajectory Takeoff
We’ve talked about how employee experience got here, what employees are expecting from their workplaces, and a top-level methodology for organizations to use as they work to close that gap. But as brands begin gathering data or take a moment to reassess how they’ve been doing it, what type of roadmap might be most helpful for them to stick to as they grow their EX maturity?
Well, we have the answer to that as well! Click here to read a full-length point of view article from expert Michael Lowenstein on the various levels of EX maturity brands can use these ideas to achieve, as well as what each stage of that journey means for your employees, your workplace, and even your customers. Best of luck on the road ahead!
If you were trying to convince your family to go on a weekend trip, you likely wouldn’t use the same tactics for every family member. Your retired parents may be persuaded by the luxurious rooms at the hotel, but your brother and his spouse probably care more about the activities they could do with their kids. Your college student sibling would likely love the break from school, but they’re more concerned with affordability compared to the rest of the family.
Even within a single family, there are different types of people with different values, concerns, and priorities—now consider how much variance there is in a national or global market campaign. Personality, occupation, and life experience all affect what appeals to a certain person, which is why demographic segmentation is so important in all marketing efforts. Finding out what your audience demographic looks like will help you better understand the needs of your target customers, create more specific solutions, and market those solutions better.
There are 4 different types of segmentation: demographic, psychographic, geographic, and behavioral. Demographic segmentation is just one part of the puzzle, but an essential tool for competitive marketing, especially in the digital space. This article will go over everything you need to know about demographic segmentation and how to take your business to the next level with advanced demographic analysis technology. But first, let’s go over the basics.
What Is Demographic Segmentation?
Demographic segmentation is a method of grouping a target audience or customers by specific traits, most often by age, gender, occupation, income, socioeconomic background, and family status.
If your product or service is meant for luxury and comfort but comes with an expensive price tag, you would want to target high-income households. If your product or service is mostly bought by women, you want to be able to market to them specifically. Let’s say you sell solar panels; the demographic for your product is warmer climates, and knowing that allows you to segment that group of people and market to them while avoiding the uninterested ones. Once you’ve identified the right group, it’s much easier to target their needs and appeal to their preferences.
By dividing the market audience into smaller and more specific categories, businesses can better define who their audience is and ultimately funnel their messaging and resources into focused and effective strategies. The prospective market is clearer, current customers are more accurately advertised to, and businesses can personalize the experience of their brand for each segmented audience.
Not only can you use demographic data to identify and isolate customer groups, but you can also use demographic segmentation for UX design, brand positioning, CX, and other analytic tools that assist with business strategies. The most competitive businesses that are seeing success from their marketing efforts gather demographic data using analytics software, consumer insights, and census data.
Benefits of Using Demographic Segmentation
Using demographic segmentation isn’t just beneficial—with the rise and projection of digital marketing, understanding the traits of your target audience is becoming more essential. Here are five more benefits of using demographic segmentation to hone your target audience research.
Personalization and Relevance
When you segment your audience based on accurate demographic data, you can advertise and communicate with each group according to their preferences and values. That means your messaging, the pain points you solve, and the features you highlight can be different (and more effective) for each audience. Your products or services can be relevant to a range of audiences, but your message won’t resonate exactly the same with every person in that range. To be relevant and persuasive, a customized approach is best.
Optimized Marketing Strategies
It may seem like going after such specific audiences limits your reach to potential customers, but the opposite is true. By segmenting your target audiences into demographic groups, you can identify common threads within each group and offer more satisfying content or ads. Targeted ads that are especially polished will also increase the visibility of your brand and products, so you will have greater volume and more impactful ads that convert for the right group.
Improved Products or Services
The more you know about the needs of your customers, the better you can serve them by offering improved products and services. For example, a company could learn through demographic analytical tools that the shaving cream they originally advertised for men is actually being bought and used by more women. This would allow the company to tune its product offering for its female audience.
Increased Customer Retention
When the customer experience is better than ever, so are customer satisfaction and loyalty. Knowing what someone needs is a powerful tool when it comes to both business and marketing. By providing improved products or services and personalized solutions, especially over time, customers will return to that company. Customized solutions also add a personal touch to your brand, which is something most customers appreciate and want more of.
Data-Driven Decision Making
It’s much easier to make a decision about what your marketing budget should go to if your audience groups are crystal clear. Instead of putting money and time towards potential customers that you aren’t sure about, you can have a strong idea of the products and solutions specific demographics need.
It’s of course important to remember that demographic information is still working off certain assumptions. However, relying on time-tested statistics gives you much more direction and surety than blindly hoping your message or offering is well received by someone. Intentional and evidence-based advertising is far more effective, which is what demographic segmentation can help with.
What Variables Are Included in Demographic Segmentation?
Many variables can be used in demographic segmentation, but here are the most common and relevant ones, depending on the industry.
Age: People have different experiences, desires, and priorities depending on their age. You wouldn’t advertise a dentist’s office to a tween the same way you would to an adult. You also have to consider someone’s level of work and life experience, which often comes with age.
Gender: Men and women share many needs, but there are some needs or appeals that tend to lean one way or the other. A nail salon likely gets more women customers than men, so while they may get both, they may want to focus their efforts on the women in their area. But beware of harmful stereotypes—there are plenty of sales pitches that have no need to advertise to only men or women.
Ethnicity: Ethnic backgrounds can greatly affect something’s appeal or even its appropriateness. Many ethnic groups take great pride in the traditions of their community and culture, so it’s important to know who you’re talking to so you can actually address their unique needs.
Income, Occupation, and Education: Money isn’t everything, but it is an important demographic factor. People in different income brackets save and spend their money differently, so to get the right eyes on your products. It’s important to consider who really wants and can afford what you’re offering. Similarly, a blue-collar worker compared to a professor at a college may even make the same amount of income but have totally different types of education and experience, so each customer type would need to be marketed to differently.
Religion: Faith is a big part of many people’s lives, and similar to ethnic appeals, you want to be careful that you’re properly advertising to certain groups to avoid offending or alienating your target audience.
Family Structure and Marital Status: It’s wise to look at large families compared to couples or single people. If you only advertise your product to families but your product could easily be helpful to a single person, you may be missing out on an opportunity. On the other hand, you may have a more niche market, such as a jewelry store, so couples getting engaged would be far more relevant for your marketing efforts. Children are a huge part of many parents’ lives, so it’s important to factor them in as well.
Sexual Orientation: With such a broad spectrum of sexualities and preferences, it’s important to be inclusive to all while recognizing what a specific group of people may need or like. If a lot of your customers come from a progressive and urban city, it’s going to be important for most of them to see representation in your advertisements.
Residence Environment and Location: Speaking of urban cities, where someone is located, whether urban or rural, plays a big role in someone’s preferences. A lot of people in the city don’t drive a car and instead use public transportation, but others that live in the country desperately need their vehicles to get to their jobs every day. How a car dealership markets its cars could drastically change based on who is looking for a car.
More Demographic Segmentation Examples
Here are some examples of demographic segmentation and how it can change the way a company approaches its audience, marketing strategies, and customer experience.
Location: Save Money and the Environment
Let’s use the solar panel example we talked about earlier. Solar companies need to mainly advertise to people in places that get a lot of sunshine. However, solar panels have many benefits, like how they save money on electricity and make less of an impact on the environment. Based on their demographic information, a solar business can adjust their messaging to what’s actually relevant to them. People that live in rural single-family homes and use a lot of electricity will be interested in the savings, while green thumbs—often living in the city—are going to appreciate the environmentally friendly attributes of solar.
Family Status: A Versatile Vehicle
If a car company has a spacious vehicle with a lot of storage and seating, it could appeal to big families who have a lot of children to get around. On the other hand, a small business owner who transports their products everywhere by themselves could also use a spacious vehicle—but the car company would need to market differently to these two potential customers. With demographic segmentation, the company could create two different advertising campaigns, one that focuses on family values and authentic family living versus a woman running her own business independently.
Diversity: Take a Walk in Their Shoes
Foot Locker, a global shoe store, used personalized customer experiences to better their service since it had a broad range of customers with a lot of customer feedback and surveys. Outside of their typical customers, they also had elderly customers, guests with disabilities, non-sneakerheads, and customers with diverse interests. By analyzing their demographic data, they were also to customize both the in-store and online customer’s journey for different demographics, which was better for the brand and the consumer.
Pearl-Plaza Can Help with Demographic Segmentation
If you’re ready to upgrade your marketing and other demographic tools, it’s time to partner with Pearl-Plaza. Pearl-Plaza has the Customer Experience Cloud that helps you perform demographic analysis and segmentation so that you can give your customers the best CX possible.
Book a demo to see how Pearl-Plaza’s CX Cloud can help you optimize demographic segmentation, improve the solutions for your customers, and make the most of your marketing funds!
Surveys are a great way to collect information about people's perceptions, opinions, thoughts, attitudes, etc. However, the trick is making sure that you're asking your questions the right way in order to get the data that you need, as well as ensuring that the people who take your survey will all interpret your survey questions the same way. To help you get started, below are 12 qualities of good survey questions to keep in mind when writing your surveys.
Surveys are a great way to collect information about people’s perceptions, opinions, thoughts, attitudes, etc. But what makes for a good survey or good survey question?
The trick is making sure that you’re asking your questions the right way in order to get the data that you need, as well as ensuring that the people who take your survey will all interpret your survey questions the same way. To help you get started, below are 12 qualities of good survey questions to keep in mind when writing your surveys.
12 Things Good Survey Question Do…
#1: Evokes the truth. However, you should avoid sensitive questions.
#2: Asks for an answer on only one dimension. You will need to phrase the question to extract the exact information you need, and avoid the possibility of someone giving you an ambiguous response.
#3: Can accommodate all possible answers. A good practice is to allow for multiple responses. Don’t assume that you know it all.
#4: Has mutually exclusive options. (i.e. There should be only one correct or appropriate choice.)
#5: Flows well from the previous question. Your question transitions should be smooth and logical.
#6: Does not make erroneous assumptions.
#7: Does not imply a desired answer. Remember to use objectivity in your questions.
#8: Does not use emotionally loaded or vaguely defined words. Also remember not to use unfamiliar acronyms or abbreviations.
#9: Does not ask the respondent to rank more than five items in a given series.
#10: Puts personal questions at the end of the survey.
#11: Gives respondents the option to not answer the question.
#12: Uses one or two open-ended questions. This invokes direct, well thought out answers.
Types of Survey Questions
Here are some of the most common survey question types you could use:
Multiple Choice Questions
Open Ended Questions
Close Ended Questions
‘Yes’ or ‘No’ Answer Questions
Rating Scale Questions
Good Survey Questions to Ask
Depending on your subject matter, here are some examples of good survey questions to ask about a product/service or a brand/company.
What could we improve on?
On a scale of 1-10 how easy was it to use our product/service?
Would you recommend our product/service to a friend?
Why did you choose us over a competitor?
Did our product/service help you accomplish your goal?
Did we solve your problem?
How can we be more helpful?
What would you like to see from us?
How would you rate our customer service from 1-10?
Why did you choose this product/service?
Why are you canceling your service?
Where did you hear about us?
Your survey will want to give you the right data so make sure to ask the right questions and phrase it in a way that’ll achieve what you’re looking for.
Looking for More Advice on How to Craft Effective CX Surveys and Good Survey Questions?
Over our decades of experience improving customer and employee experiences with the world’s most beloved brands, our experts have collected plenty of best practices and compiled them into various resources to help you inform your efforts! Wondering how to measure survey success? We’ve got you. What about increasing your response rates? We’ve got you there, too.
Check out this list of our most game-changing survey best practices here:
Focus on Your CX Program to Improve Your Response Rates
Clients frequently ask Pearl-Plaza XI Strategist Eric Smuda how they can improve their response rates, which is a significant issue in the customer feedback and market research arenas. However, he believes the obsession with them is misguided and stuck in traditional market research methodology. The quality of the feedback you are getting is much more important than how many people answered a given question or the statistical significance of that sample size. Learn more here!
When to Send a Traditional Employee or Customer Experience Survey
What questions warrant sending a survey? Our experts advise a process of elimination that helps you understand which listening tools to use and when—and they’ve laid it out step by step in this asset!
How to Achieve Meaningful Listening Through Surveys
It can be tempting to send out surveys whenever you have a question, but effective surveys are part of a much larger strategy. Wondering how to craft that strategy? Our expert Andrew Park has you covered in this quick article.
How Short Should You Make Your Survey?
Most customer experience surveys are designed to be five minutes in length or shorter. However, we have seen a trend toward companies requesting even shorter customer experience surveys, often due to the impression that shorter surveys increase response rates. Their assumption is that customers are overwhelmed with surveys and therefore will only answer short ones. Is there empirical evidence to back up this perception? Find out in this white paper by expert Dave Ensing!
The Art and Science of Email Survey Invitations
We don’t know about yours, but our email inboxes are constantly flooded with requests from brands! So, how do you make your email survey invitations stand out, fetch great response rates, and collect quality data? Dave Ensing has the answers here!
Looking for more advice on how to craft good survey questions and even better surveys? Contact an Pearl-Plaza sales representative today to inquire about Pearl-Plaza Survey Design & Data Gathering Best Practices Consulting Services. And/or, sign up today for one or more survey training courses at Pearl-Plaza University.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.”
Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities
Whether you’re struggling with limited resources, data fragmentation, or evolving customer expectations, this guide offers the expert advice you need to elevate your CX strategy. Download now to discover how to transform these challenges into growth opportunities.
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The challenges involved in regulatory compliance vary greatly between industries, countries, and companies. But many compliance tools lack flexibility or are missing key technologies for parsing complex structures in legal, medical and financial documents. That’s where pearl-plaza.rues in.
Leverage Pearl-Plaza to Lower Your Regulatory Compliance Costs and Risks
Pearl-Plaza helps you tackle compliance challenges involving text data through “semi-custom” solutions. We combine semi-structured data parsing, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning with other features and technology suited to your specific problems. By working from our existing infrastructure through a staged Proof of Concept, we reduce your initial investment and deliver tangible results more quickly.
We don’t “solve” or automate your entire industry. Instead, we help you improve existing compliance processes and scale your compliance teams more easily, resulting in lower costs and reduced risk across your organization.
Your Regulatory Compliance Technology Toolkit
Curious about the tech Pearl-Plaza provides that will help you get the job done? Here’s an overview of your toolkit:
Natural Language Processing Features
Sentiment Analysis: Combine natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to assign weighted sentiment scores to the entities, topics, themes and categories within a sentence or phrase.
Theme Analysis: Use natural language processing (NLP) to break down sentences into n-grams and noun phrases and then evaluate the themes and facets within.
Entity Recognition: Identify people, places, and things within a piece of text.
Categorization: Categorize customer reviews, support tickets, or any other type of text document into groups based on their contents.
Intention Extraction: Determine the expressed intent of customers and reviewers.
Summarization: Extract the most relevant sentences from each document so you can quickly understand the main ideas without spending valuable time reading the whole document.
Semi-Structured Data Parsing: A powerful tool for identifying and extracting text data from PDFs, .docx files and other “semi-structured” documents while understanding the structures and relationships of each element.
Machine Learning: Custom machine learning “micromodels” to tackle unique challenges in your data, such as entity recognition on ambiguous company names or classifying news articles into pre-defined topic lists.
Add-ons and Integrations:
Low-level NLP configuration
Custom user interfaces
Specific technology integrations
Feedback loops for model training
User and project management tools
Database/warehouse hookups
Upload wizards and connectors
…. And more
Pearl-Plaza for Regulatory Compliance in Action: A Quick Case Study
Pearl-Plaza has helped brands across healthcare, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and more, but today we will share a financial services case study.
An Australian financial services firm needed help ensuring their compliance with federal disclosure mandates across hundreds of Statement of Advice (SoA) documents. Before, the firm’s auditors manually reviewed a subset, but this process was slow and unreliable.
Pearl-Plaza focused on improving the firm’s existing audit process. First, we trained our semi-structured data parser to understand the underlying structure of SoAs. Then we configured our NLP to identify, extract and analyze entities within each section. Finally, we built a connector to structure and export this data into an easy-to-scan spreadsheet.
“Pearl-Plaza’s solution for financial services disclosure compliance identifies, analyzes and structures key data from Statement of Advice documents for internal review.”
This solution substantially reduces the firm’s noncompliance risk by empowering regulatory compliance auditors to review hundreds of documents in minutes. Now they can quickly and reliably spot missing disclosures, suspicious recommendations, and other areas where advisors may not be working in their clients’ best interests.
To learn more about how Pearl-Plaza can help revolutionize your approach to regulatory compliance, check out our dedicated website here.
Do companies recognize the high customer experience (CX) value of employee advocates? Shouldn’t they want to cultivate the kind of behavior advocacy represents?
That’s my belief. And, because of dramatic, behavior-shaping trends in the world of talent and skills availability, significant and lasting disruptions in the way people work, and the greater independence of today’s employees, I’m convinced they should both recognize and cultivate it.
The EX/CX Connection
Employees are the key, critical common denominator in optimizing the customer experience. Very often, either directly or indirectly, they are at the intersection of customer/vendor experience. Making the experience for customers positive and attractive at each point where the company interacts with them requires an in-depth understanding of both customer needs and how what the company currently does achieves that goal, particularly through the employees. That means that companies must seek to understand, and leverage, the impact employees have on customer behavior. Further, and equally important, they must focus on optimizing the employee experience.
Supporters of employee satisfaction and engagement programs, research and training techniques, with their focus on retention, productivity, and fit or alignment with business objectives, have made some broad, bold, and often unchallenged, assertions with respect to how these states impact customer behavior. Chief among these is that, beyond skills, everyday performance, and even commitment to act in the best interest of their employers, employees have natural tendencies and abilities to deliver customer value, fueled by emotion and subconscious intuition.
Though on the surface this sounds plausible, and even rather convincing, a thorough examination of how employee satisfaction and engagement link to customer behavior will yield only a tenuous, assumptive and anecdotal connection. In other words, there is much vocal punditry, and even whole books, on this subject, but little substantive proof of connection or cause.
Powerful and advanced research can generate insights which enable B2B and B2C companies to identify current levels of employee commitment, and it provides actionable direction on how to help them become more contributory and active brand advocates. Employee advocacy, as an advanced EX core concept and research protocol, was designed to build and sustain stronger and more commitment-based and rewarding employee experiences and also improved customer experiences, driving the loyalty and advocacy behavior of both stakeholder groups, and in turn increasing sales and profits.
It is often stated (especially by corporate CEOs) that the greatest asset of a company is its employees. Emotionally-based research has uncovered specifically how an organization can link, drive and leverage employee attitudes and behavior to expand customer-brand bonding and bottom-line performance. This is advanced EX, some might even say it is revolutionary! Employee advocacy research can be combined with existing customer and employee loyalty solutions to provide companies with comprehensive and actionable insights on the state of their employees’ attitudes and action propensities, and how those may be affecting customer behavior.
Employee advocacy identifies new categories and key drivers of employee subconscious emotional and rational commitment, while it also links with the emotional and rational aspects of customer commitment. At the positive and negative poles, these employee-focused commitment categories include:
– Advocates, the employees who are most committed to their employer. Advocates represent employees who are strongly committed to the company’s brand promise, the organization itself, and its customers. They also behave and communicate in a consistently positive manner toward the company, both inside and outside.
– Saboteurs, the employees who are the least committed to their employer. Saboteurs are active and frequently vocal detractors about the organization itself, its culture and policies, and its products and services. These individuals are negative advocates, communicating their low opinions and unfavorable perspectives both to peers inside the company and to customers, and others, outside the company.
In any group of employees, irrespective of whether they are in a service department, technical specialty, or a branch office, there will be differing levels of commitment to the company, its value proposition and brands, and its customers. If employees are negative to the point of undermining, and even sabotaging customer experience value and company or brand reputation, they will actively work against business goals. However, if employees are advocates, and whether they interact with customers directly, indirectly, or even not at all, they will better serve and support the organization’s customers.
Employee Advocates are Essential to Customer Experience—and Overall—Success
Where customer experience is concerned, it is essential to remember that organizations and brands looking to succeed in today’s competitive climate have successfully embedded CX into their cultures, from the C-level executive to the frontline employee. They prosper by using insights generated from a variety of channels and touchpoints, including employees, integrated with customer data from multiple sources, mined by sophisticated text analytics technologies, and then channeled to steer and guide every corner of their businesses.
The more successful the brand and organization, the more evident that the approaches taken are both bottom-up and top-down. This helps ensure a more strategic and real-world view of stakeholder behavior. Truly effective organizations have wisely invested key resources in the stakeholder experience. and at every level of the enterprise. Their leaders, likewise, focus on both individual and collective accomplishment.
This kind of achievement and fulfillment requires that experiences be optimized for all stakeholders. It’s a simple, basic premise, but it works – now and for the future. Ideally, there should be a direct linkage back and forth between the leader, the employee, and the customer. This is where employee advocacy, like the edelweiss flower, can bloom and grow.
It is a fact that CX survey response rates have been declining. Additionally, we are being surveyed more and more every day about every mundane thing in our lives. Even the federal government is in on it—an executive order in 1993 directed federal agencies to gather public feedback on how well they delivered services and to strive to offer a comparable level of customer experience with private companies. Orders similar to that one have continued into the present day.
But, with surveys being the lifeblood of nearly all customer experience (CX) programs, what is a CX practitioner to do to improve their CX survey response rates? Much has been written about the tactical things a survey owner can do: list hygiene, fatigue or quarantine rules, visual appeal of the invitation, subject line, formatting, time estimates in the invitation, etc. And while these elements can have some impact, they are temporary band-aids for the over-surveying problem.
The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is…
I’ll let you in on a secret: if you truly want to improve and sustain your response rates, look to your CX program (specifically your closed loop processes). There are two critical things any company can do to improve its response rates, and they tie back to the inner and outer loop concepts described in the Net Promoter SystemSM.
You’ve probably heard that it’s vital for organizations to close these loops, as doing so can help you achieve everything from Experience Improvement (XI) to enhanced customer retention and sustained business growth. That’s true! But effectively closing these loops also provides an incentive and opens a door for continuous feedback from your customers or members.
The Inner Loop
The inner loop refers to the systems, processes, and teams that organizations use to respond to customers one-on-one to address negative feedback. Having an effective inner closed loop process is of obvious importance to any company that wants to keep its doors open, let alone create a differentiated and meaningful experience for customers. Fail to close the inner loop, and you open the “leaky bucket.”
However, if you can build a system that allows you to receive customer feedback, analyze it for actionable insights, and respond both meaningfully and expediently, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and extending their lifetime value. You will learn more about their individual preferences and may even potentially cross-sell or upsell them to additional products and services.
There is also plenty of research that demonstrates that customers whose complaints have been successfully resolved tend to leave higher review scores than customers who never had a complaint in the first place! Finally, by responding to customers when they have complaints, you demonstrate that you have listened and acted on their feedback, giving them a strong incentive to provide feedback again in the future.
The Outer Loop
The scope of the outer loop is considerably wider than that of the inner loop and requires more organizational resources, cross-silo cooperation, and team coordination. Rather than focus on individual customer interactions and complaint resolution, the outer loop is about the actions your organization takes on the collective feedback you’re receiving to drive Experience Improvement and communicate those improvements back to a much broader segment of customers (if not your entire customer base). The one-on-one interactions that comprise the inner loop are certainly important, but the outer loop is all about incorporating those into a cumulative group effort to drive sustained Experience Improvement.
This improves your CX survey response rates by demonstrating to all customers that your organization truly does care about feedback and attempts to take action to improve the overall customer experience. This provides a feedback incentive even for customers who may not have shared it in the past, as they see the direct benefit.
Widening Focus
Click hereto read my full-length Point of View on how focusing on your CX program will actually help you achieve better outcomes. In the meantime, take advantage of anything you might have learned here to meaningfully improve your inner and outer loop processes. I promise you you’ll see a difference.
If we were to sum up what brands need to know about Gen Z customer experience preferences (and employee experience preferences) in a few words, it would go something like this: they’re different. Revolutionary even. This may seem like an oversimplification, but when you think about it, Gen Z grew up in a world that is more connected than ever, has more access than ever, and accomplishes everything faster than ever. It makes sense, then, that their standards for customer and employee experiences would be higher than ever, too.
Because Gen Z makes up 26% of the global population, their preferences should already be playing a significant role in your business strategy—and their influence will only grow! That’s why we put a magnifying glass over these emerging consumers and employees in our recent 2022 Experience Trends report, to give you the intelligence you need to create a positive impact with Gen Z, whether you’re trying to convince them to become loyal customers or recruit them to be engaged employees.
Here’s what you need to know according to our data:
What Is Most Important for the Gen Z Customer Experience & Employee Experience?
Tip #1: Seamless and Efficient Experiences Are a Must
We’ve spent a lot of time on the Pearl-Plaza blog discussing the importance of a seamless experience. It doesn’t matter what channel or touchpoint, your customers and employees should have a sense of consistency every time they interact with your brand. And for Gen Z, seamless experiences are table stakes when it comes to maintaining their loyalty. Gen Z shops both online and in store, so it’s imperative that they are able to experience the same level of convenience, personalization, and general experience excellence across the board.
Tip #2: Gen Z Is Unlikely to Complete a Traditional CX or EX Survey
Get ready for a mic drop moment: Gen Z is simply less likely to fill out a traditional survey. In the course of our research we found that:
In the US:
Only 19% of your emerging customers (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
Only 22% of your emerging employees (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
In Canada:
Only 28% of your emerging customers (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
Only 41% of your emerging employees (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
So what feedback collection methods should you be using if you want to gauge the Gen Z customer experience? We suggest Microsurveys, social media and review sites, and live chat to gain the intelligence you need to compete for Gen Z’s loyalty.
Thinking of adapting your approach to customer experience surveys, and customer feedback in general? Our experts have derived a four step process to help you leverage all of your data, and only send surveys when they’ll be most effective. Check it out for free here!
Tip #3: Social Media Influencers Have Significant Reach
Gen Z’s first exposure to your brand is likely via social media, and more specifically, through social media influencers. We asked Gen Z consumers about whether they used an influencer code to make a purchase in 2021, and if they are likely to use influencer discount codes in the upcoming year. Here’s what they told us:
One of three emerging Gen Z customers had used a social influencer code in 2021
One of three emerging Gen Z customers were planning to use a code in 2022
From these numbers, it’s clear social media influencers will continue to, well, influence the emerging consumer. If you haven’t considered leveraging influences to acquire new customers, then it’s time to start!
Tip #4: Strong Brand Values Are Make-or-Break
Gen Z has high standards when it comes to the brands they support, and even higher standards for the brands they work for. When looking into a possible employer, our research found that Gen Z is looking for three primary values. Here they are as explained by Gen Z:
Culture: “[I] am likely to choose a [company] that allows me to express myself […] and [get] creative with mentorship and support.”
Diversity: “I’m looking for [a company] that bring in diverse [experiences and] talents that can challenge one another.”
Connectivity: “I believe that success [means] bringing everyone together […] we all [want] to be part of the equation [not just our executives].”
To successfully recruit this value-driven generation, brands should take care to emphasize these core values in job descriptions, internal messaging, and beyond.
Tip #5: Gen Z Has Little Tolerance for Bad Behavior
We’ve all seen the news stories: customers in store or aboard flights displaying outlandishly bad behavior when confronted with mask policies or low stock of desired items, and taking their anger out on employees. We were curious about what Gen Z thought of these displays and whether it affected their perception of the brand involved.
We asked, “What would you think if you witnessed a customer acting aggressively toward an employee at a place of business?” Gen Z responded with overwhelming compassion for the employee in the situation, and even mentioned that “I would interject […] No one should be treated that way.”
What Are You Doing to Prepare for the Next Generation of Consumers & Employees?
As Gen Z becomes an even more prominent customer and employee segment, their CX and and EX preferences will become even more important to your business. So what are you doing today to emphasize and enable Gen Z customer experience expectations? How are you connecting with them? How are you collecting feedback from them to understand how they perceive your brand?
You need to have a strategy in place, and our experts are here to help. Learn how our XI Platform can support your efforts to create optimize Gen Z customer experiences by reaching out to us here or in the chatbot at the lower right hand corner of your screen. You can also read more from our 2022 Experience Trends Report here!
It’s never been more important to stay tuned into employee and customer experience trends. In the past few years, businesses have had to pivot countless times in order to adapt the experiences they provide customers, employees, and the greater market. But keeping up with quickly evolving employee and customer expectations is easier said than done.
Pearl-Plaza’s Strategic Insights Team collected data from both consumers and employees of brands across North America from 11 different industries including retail, financial services, entertainment, grocery, healthcare, hospitality, insurance, restaurants, and more.
Previous Pearl-Plaza Trends Reports have focused primarily on the customer experience (CX), but today, businesses have more experience stakeholders than ever before—including your employees and even the folks who may not have made a purchase, yet have an impression of your brand.
This report encapsulates the perspectives of all of these experience stakeholders so you can use these trends to shape your strategies for customer experience, human resources, digital, marketing, and more!
Using Pearl-Plaza’s Market Pulse™, the team asked strategic questions around three key topics:
The future stakeholder journey: Customer and employee expectations for 2022; what are the new drivers of loyalty, retention, and acquisition?
The ‘new’ world of experience: Understanding how brands across industries need to adapt the digital and in-store experience.
Emerging internal and external personas: What will emerging customers and employees look like? How can brands meet their needs?
The report also includes insights from both indirect and inferred data to provide a holistic view of the state of customer and employee experiences. It also cross references data from previous iterations of Pearl-Plaza’s previous annual trends reports.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the findings of the first of the four trends we revealed in the 2022 Experience Trends REport!
Trend #1: Experience Standards Are Changing… Again
A Word About COVID
We know: everyone is tired of talking about the novel Coronavirus. But if we didn’t mention it, we’d be remiss, especially since mask mandates and other safety measures are still common. What we wanted to know is how experience stakeholders feel about the possible loosening of these protocols.
We found that 1 in 2 consumers and employees were comfortable with the possible reduction of COVID restrictions and precautions in the coming year.
And when we dove deeper, it became clear that both consumers and employees were excited at the prospect of COVID becoming less of a factor in their experiences, especially compared to a year ago.
Check out the differences in the comments from the beginning of 2021 versus the end of the year:
How You Can Take Action
Now that you understand the changes that are coming to your experiences, we have a few actions you can take to adapt and succeed next year:
Adapt Quickly and Early
It seems like “agility” has been the MVP in the past few years. With ever-changing restrictions and safety measures, you’ve had to keep your finger on the pulse to meet customer and employee needs. But don’t stop now! With journeys evolving at a fast pace, you need to avoid a “set it and forget it” mentality. Make sure you are continuously coming back to your customer and employee feedback so you can keep up with their expectations.
Above All, Be Human
If we’ve learned anything in the past few years, it’s that your customers and employees need you to truly care about their experiences, and even moreso, the role your brand plays in their lives. Customer response to options like “buy online and pickup in store” are great examples of this; brands understood that safety was the number one priority for customers and provided safe ways to engage. This kind of understanding is essential for moving forward.
Want to read more about the trends impacting the employee and customer in 2022? Click here to review more findings in our interactive report!
You’ve been using Net Promoter Score in all the right ways, and now you’re looking to advance your CX program. Fear not, you’ve come to the right place!
The next level of CX for Growth Stage companies focuses on a few key things:
Taking a more holistic view of the entire customer journey
Leveraging technology to listen to hundreds and thousands of customer comments
Employing robust analytics
We’ve previously explained how to quickly build your first customer feedback program with a single survey like Net Promoter Score in a single channel. Now we’ll combine surveys with behaviors and concrete numbers to see how CX impacts metrics like product use, retention, and sales.
Yes, it’s time to level up your CX program!
We’re sticking with the 3-step Listen, Learn, and Act model but upgrading each step’s activities from Early Stage to Growth Stage CX programs.
Step 1: Listen
In this step, you’ll gather information across the customer journey. Many people at the Growth Stage have already identified critical touchpoints in the customer journey that drive success, including:
Achieving first value
Support interactions
Using a new product or service
The Listen step focuses on asking the right questions at these touchpoints to help you optimize your CX. During the Early Stage, you offered up the Net Promoter Score survey. Now it’s time to move on to two other important customer experience metrics.
Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
The Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) asks customers how satisfied they were with a recent interaction, like a support call. CSAT is the most popular CX metric for transactional interactions, and you use it to gauge how well these interactions are being handled.
How might you use CSAT? If you’re with an e-commerce company, you likely use it to get post-delivery feedback on a purchase. At SaaS companies, product teams use a CSAT variation called a Product Satisfaction survey (PSAT). It’s often triggered in-app to get feedback that helps product teams optimize the user experience.
Customer Effort Score (CES)
The CES survey asks, “How easy was it to _________?” CES is used to improve systems that may frustrate customers. It allows you to capture early feedback and discover ways to make sure the path to the all-important first value is smooth.
Use CES surveys to measure how customers feel about their onboarding, which is the critical first step of the customer journey. It’s much easier to retain a customer who has had an excellent first experience with your product than win over a customer reeling from poor onboarding that missed the mark.
When you combine the information gathered from NPS, CSAT/PSAT, and CES, you can uncover previously hidden areas of the customer journey and understand how those affect overall CX.
Step 2: Learn
You now have a plethora of customer feedback from your three surveys, and it’s time to extract actionable insights. The important thing to realize here is you’re collecting feedback from thousands of surveys. That amount of data quickly becomes hard to address at scale, and text-match tags won’t capture the wealth of information available. You’re going to need more advanced tools than what you used at the Early Stage.
Customer insights through machine learning
The most insightful input from customers comes in the free-text portion of your surveys. To mine that rich data, you’ll need a tool that uses Natural Language Processing (NLP), a form of AI for real-time text categorization and sentiment analysis.
For many businesses, the wealth of customer experience data has become overwhelming. Artificial intelligence gives us the means to retake the initiative.
– Jessica Pfeifer CCO, Wootric
Advanced tools for the Growth Stage Learn step share two essential elements:
Categorization in real-time
One of the reasons you’re not manually analyzing the text is you don’t want to wait weeks for insights, and your customers certainly don’t want to wait that long for action. Natural Language Processing allows computers to auto-tag, interpret, and analyze text data as new topics arise, highlighting any issues immediately so you can take timely actions.
Sentiment analysis
Simply put, sentiment analysis tells you why your customers do or don’t love you. NLP performs sentiment analysis on your customer and user feedback, taking you way beyond the traditional text-match tagging. Not only is every topic tracked over time, but NLP also tracks the positive and negative tone and tenor of the customer voice. In a quick review, you can instantly gauge whether a specific product touchpoint performs well for your customers. This lets you see how your business initiatives are affecting your users in real-time.
Auto-categorizing feedback is a powerful step in VoC, taken with the help of new technologies like Natural Language Processing.
Link CX metrics to business outcomes
You can tie CX directly to business outcomes by linking customer survey data to business-focused metrics like purchases, conversions, churn, and sales.
Say you want to tie CX to churn through your mobile app. No problem!
Look at your post-survey 90-day churn metrics and see at what scores you begin to lose customers rapidly.
Compare that with your NPS. Let’s say your NPS shows you can tolerate some Passives and maybe even some Detractors scoring you at a 5 or 6. Cool, you can let those ride a bit if you’re resource light.
Detractors scoring you at a 0 or 4, however, could be at serious risk of leaving if they don’t receive the support they need to succeed. Put your resources there ASAP!
How else can you monitor the risk of churn? Well, if you’re a B2B business, you’re probably already looking at your Customer Health Score. Factor NPS and other CX metrics into your Customer Health Score and get even more insight with a system that takes into account behavioral metrics like the number of support tickets per user, usage of product features, and other engagement metrics.
Step 3: Act
You’ve listened, you’ve learned a lot, and now you’re ready to make an impact. But here’s the thing: CX is built by and affected by more than just one team at a company. So there are two critical parts to the Act step.
Get CX data into everyone’s workflow
A customer-centric organization relies on everyone having access to VoC data, so no individual or team at your company should ever have to search for it. All functions can drive better customer experiences and benefit from having CX data and analytics at their fingertips.
Sales needs CX metrics at the account level in Salesforce to prepare for an upsell conversation.
Customer Success uses Gainsight or other platforms for regular communications with customers.
Customer Support is in Intercom or ZenDesk.
Product may want data in their analytics platform like Tableau.
Analysts will want to pull CX data into their relational database.
By connecting your CX program to the applications and software used by other teams, you can destroy silos and create powerful interactions that delight your customers. Look for CX platforms with native integrations and open APIs to make these connections seamless.
Optimize your product with CX
It’s all good and well to gather and distribute essential data and insights, but a CX program’s real power comes from making your product and services better.
Use your CX data to rank and address the things that matter most to your customers and thus to your business’ success. We recommend creating a dual-axis plan of attack to prioritize what you optimize.
Look at the number of impacted customers and their average score for each issue.
Combine that number with a qualitative measure of the engineering and operational effort required to address the issue.
Close the loop at scale
Once you’ve taken actions to improve CX, don’t forget to communicate back to your customers who gave you the feedback to make those changes. Let them know you appreciate their input and that it made an impact.
You now have hundreds and thousands of customers giving your feedback, and you won’t have enough resources to call each one personally. Thus you’ll need a hybrid model to close the customer feedback loop.
High touch. A customer success agent or account manager can reach out to their customers when they respond, even if just to say “Thanks!” This connection lets customers know you’re listening and appreciate their feedback. For a B2B business, this is the way to go if you have the resources.
Medium touch.Segment the list by survey scores. Sync with a platform like Intercom to trigger automated messages or schedule a weekly email campaign to each group.
Thank Promoters and possibly offer them an incentive to be brand advocates, perhaps by sharing their positive feedback on social media.
Route Detractors to Customer Success or Customer Support. That team can devote time to understanding why the customer’s not happy — especially those who didn’t leave feedback — and make the CX and relationship better.
Automate a reply to Passives who didn’t leave feedback, spurring a “What would make you LOVE us?” conversation.
Low touch. Respond with information-sharing and transparency, such as a blog post or newsletter at the end of the month, summarizing the feedback you’ve received and stating your plans to address issues customers have raised.
A growing company needs to grow its CX program. By expanding your view to the full customer journey, expanding the feedback you’re requesting, and then using more advanced tools to pull insights from the feedback, you’ll be ready to optimize the customer experience you provide and enjoy the success it brings.
Text analytics, also called text mining, has countless applications. Businesses are taking advantage of text analytics to update their service offerings, improve compliance, get ahead of PR disasters, and more.
Here are 5 examples of the industries taking advantage of text analytics in 2021.
1. Hospitality
Hotels live and die by their reviews. Reviews are not only crucial to whether someone books a stay, but they also give valuable insight into what a business is doing well – or not. And while the hospitality industry has been decimated over the COVID-19 pandemic, the quickening vaccine deployment holds great promise for 2021 and beyond for the industry. Hotels use text analytics to get a deep understanding of where they excel and where they can improve, as well as what others are doing. Say some reviews mention poor wi-fi. A hotel can analyze these reviews deeper to nail down whether the wi-fi problem is a hotel-wide approach or just in some rooms. Once they’ve figured it out, they can make the fix, thank the reviewer for their feedback, and be on their way to improved reviews in the future.
2. Financial Services
The financial services sector is hugely complex. There’s an enormous amount of interaction, documentation, risk analysis, and compliance involved. Financial services firms are using text analytics to analyze customer feedback, evaluate customer interactions, assess claims, and to identify compliance risks. Take compliance. Staff can use an NLP-based text analytics solution to quickly and easily search internal legal documents for phrases relating to finance or fraud. This can save an enormous amount of time compared with doing so manually.
3. Medical Affairs and Pharma
Medical affairs specialists help move pharmaceutical products from R&D to commercialization. This involves an encyclopedic knowledge of drug body and government regulations, as well as drug compendia. Medical affairs specialists are using text analytics to parse each of these and automatically report back on changes. The specialists can then course correct depending on what these changes mean for the drug they’re developing. Using text analytics rather than human effort reduces the time spent on tracking these changes, and is more accurate and far-reaching as well. Download AI for Medical Affairs Whitepaper
4. PR and Advertising
Text analytics is brilliant at sentiment analysis – something that PR is all about monitoring. Text analytics can run in real-time to track the sentiment in mentions about a particular company, alerting them to potential brand reputation emergencies. In advertising, text analytics can help monitor the reach of a campaign and how it’s being received. For example, a leading provider of Media Monitoring and Social Influencing used Lexalytics’, an pearl-plaza.rupany, API to create custom dashboards to analyze its customers’ media relations programs in terms of sentiment, engagement, perception, and performance.
5. Retail
In retail, the customer is always right. E-eCommerce retailers in particular need to make sure that the customer experience is as positive as possible, and with the boon in online buying during the pandemic, this is more important than ever. A poor experience means a customer is unlikely to return – even more so than in physical stores that people frequent due to their proximity. Many e-tailers are turning to text analytics to curate, collate and analyze feedback that helps identify points of friction when using an ecommerce website or dealing with customer support.
Would you like to know how text analytics can help your business or industry? Get in touch
A good customer experience improvement program depends on two-way conversations between companies and their customers. It has been reported that nearly half (43%) of customers don’t bother complaining because they don’t believe companies care. Get ahead of that stat by demonstrating your company not only wants the feedback, you act on it. The three-tiered approach to customer follow-up (high touch, medium touch, and low touch) allows every company to effectively respond to customers, even if they can’t commit a lot of resources.
Treat customer feedback like a gift. It’s not enough to just gather Net Promoter Scores (NPS), you need to follow up with responders to let them know that 1) you appreciate their effort, and 2) their feedback has impact. Even if you can’t deliver everything customers ask for, they will remember that they were heard and appreciated. Closing the feedback loop will help you retain customers, increase response rates, and hopefully create loyal brand advocates.
Ready to respond? Good! Consider your resources and choose from three levels of engagement:
High Touch. This more resource-intensive approach has proven very effective for B2B companies. Every time a customer gives feedback, a Customer Success Manager or Account Manager contacts them. Don’t worry, it doesn’t have to be an in-depth correspondence. Sometimes a simple “thank you” is all that’s needed. Other times, you can dig deeper into their response (and deeper into the relationship) in order to make the feedback even more actionable.
Medium Touch. We get it — not every business has the headcount to personally respond to every piece of feedback they receive. Automating the feedback loop is a time and resource saver. Segment your customer responses by the rating each customer gives and you can still have a personalized impact where it counts most. Your follow up plan could look something like this:
Promoter. Send a “thank you” and possibly offer an incentive for the customer to share your product.
Detractor. Route the response to Customer Success or Customer Support to uncover why that responder isn’t happy, especially if they didn’t leave further feedback explaining their rating.
Passive. Deliver a message to passive raters who didn’t leave feedback, engaging them in a “What would make you LOVE us?” conversation.
Low Touch. If you have too many users to provide individual responses, or you don’t have contact information, you can still close the loop! Develop blanket communications that offer transparency and information sharing:
A monthly blog post or newsletter. Summarize the feedback you’ve received, and detail the actions you’ll be taking in response to issues customers have raised.
Product updates or release notes. CX champions in product or UX can use these to communicate “We heard you! Today we <fixed X or launched Z>.”
All three levels of engagement deliver impact, so choose the one that best fits your needs. Pearl-Plaza customer Albacross chose a medium touch model, which resulted in 2X the NPS scores and a 2X ratings increase on Capterra.
By closing the loop with customers, you show them that you’re not only listening to their feedback, you consider it so important that you’re using it to make their experiences better. This simple step can turn ambivalent customers into vocal fans.
