Research by Pearl-Plaza shows that customers are unlikely to trust businesses with an average rating below 4 stars. In fact, up to 94% of people say a negative review or social media comment has deterred them from visiting a business. Conversely, positive reviews and high ratings can strengthen a business’s reputation, helping to attract and retain customers while building consumer trust.

From Google ratings to social media conversations and even local business listings, every interaction leaves a lasting impression. With the right strategy, you can build trust, boost your online presence, and turn clicks into booked appointments, all while staying ahead of the competition.

What is Dental Reputation Management?

Dental reputation management is the ongoing process of monitoring, improving, and maintaining the public perception of your dental practice. It encompasses everything from patient reviews on Google to social media interactions and even local business listings. 

Reputation management helps ensure your practice is viewed positively by both current and prospective patients, which is critical for maintaining a competitive edge in your local market. With the right strategy in place, your practice can strengthen its online presence, improve patient trust, and ultimately drive more appointments through the door.

Why is Dental Reputation Management Important?

In the digital era, your practice’s online reputation is often the first impression patients have. With most patients researching dental practices online before booking an appointment, having a solid reputation management strategy in place is essential. 

Positive reviews and well-managed online listings contribute to increased visibility, trustworthiness, and patient loyalty. Negative feedback, on the other hand, can significantly damage your reputation and cause potential patients to seek dental care elsewhere. That’s why managing online reputation should be a top priority for any modern dental practice looking to grow.

Benefits of Dental Reputation Management

A strong reputation management strategy offers several benefits that directly impact your practice’s growth:

• Increased Patient Trust: Positive reviews from satisfied patients build trust and credibility, helping new patients feel confident in choosing your practice.
• Improved Local SEO: Managing your online reputation boosts your practice’s presence in local search results, helping you rank higher for “dentist near me” and other key phrases.
• Higher Patient Retention: By responding to patient feedback and addressing concerns, your practice can improve patient satisfaction, leading to higher retention rates.
• Boosted Referrals: Satisfied patients are more likely to recommend your services to family and friends, organically growing your practice.
• Enhanced Brand Perception: Proactively managing your online presence ensures your brand is represented positively, giving you more control over how you’re perceived.

Reputation management for dentists not only benefits the practice in terms of patient satisfaction but also helps strengthen your local business listings, making it easier for potential patients to find and trust you.

Challenges of Dental Reputation Management

Managing your dental practice’s reputation isn’t always easy, and there are a few common hurdles most practices face. 

Negative Reviews
Bad reviews happen to everyone—even top-rated dentists—but how you handle them is what really counts. Responding quickly and professionally shows that you care, turning negative feedback into an opportunity to win patients over.

Inaccurate Business Information
Another tricky challenge is inconsistent information across platforms. If your hours or contact details are outdated, it can confuse potential patients and hurt your credibility. Then there’s the issue of engagement—many practices let online feedback go unanswered, which can make patients feel ignored and damage your reputation over time.

Significant Effort to Manage
Lastly, keeping up with everything—reviews, social media, business listings—takes time. Without the right system, it can quickly become overwhelming, especially for smaller practices. Staying proactive and organized is the key to tackling these challenges and keeping your practice’s reputation in great shape.

How to Improve Your Dental Practice Reputation Management

Improving your dental reputation management starts with building a patient-centric approach. Here are a few strategies to elevate your reputation:

• Monitor Reviews Regularly: Keep track of dental reviews on Google, Yelp, and other platforms. Make it a habit to respond to both positive and negative feedback.
• Encourage Positive Reviews: Ask satisfied patients to leave reviews. A simple reminder during or after their visit can lead to an influx of positive feedback.
• Keep Your Information Up-to-Date: Ensure your practice’s name, address, and contact information are consistent across all online platforms and directories.
• Engage with Patients Online: Responding to comments and questions on social media, review sites, and knowing how to respond to reviews shows that you value patient input and care about their feedback.
• Use a Reputation Management Tool: Streamline the process by using reputation management software to monitor feedback and track reviews across multiple platforms.

Do You Need A Dental Reputation Management Service?

If managing your reputation feels overwhelming, you might benefit from a professional dental reputation management service. These services help you monitor reviews, maintain your online listings, and respond to patient feedback efficiently. 

A reputation management service like Pearl-Plaza’s can save you time, improve your online presence, and ensure that negative feedback is addressed promptly—before it affects your practice’s reputation.

Features to Look For in Dental Reputation Management Software

Choosing the right software to manage your dental practice’s reputation is essential for streamlining the process and maintaining a positive online presence. Here’s what you should prioritize when selecting the right tool:

Review Monitoring: Your software should allow you to track patient reviews across multiple platforms like Google, Yelp, and social media in real-time. This keeps you aware of feedback as it comes in, giving you a chance to respond promptly and keep your reputation in check.

Automated Review Requests: Encouraging happy patients to leave reviews can dramatically boost your ratings. Look for software that automates review requests, sending timely prompts to satisfied patients, so you don’t miss the opportunity to collect positive feedback.

Response Automation: Manually responding to every review can be time-consuming, especially for a busy practice. Software like Pearl-Plaza’s includes customizable templates or AI-generated responses to help you reply quickly and professionally to feedback—without losing the personal touch.

Analytics & Reporting: To truly understand the health of your reputation, you need more than just reviews. The right software should offer detailed analytics, providing insights into patient sentiment, review trends, and overall performance. This data helps you identify areas of improvement and track your progress over time.

Listings Management: Inconsistent or outdated information across directories can hurt your credibility and confuse potential patients. A reputation management tool should help ensure your practice’s details—like hours, address, and contact info—are accurate and up-to-date across all online platforms.

By investing in software with these key features, you’ll not only stay on top of your practice’s online reputation but also simplify the process, freeing up more time to focus on providing excellent patient care.

Dental Reputation Management with Pearl-Plaza

At Pearl-Plaza, we know that a strong online reputation is key to thriving in today’s competitive dental industry. Our cutting-edge reputation management software and solutions make it easy for you to keep track of patient feedback, enhance your online presence, and ensure your practice information is always accurate across platforms. 

With our tools doing the heavy lifting—monitoring reviews, boosting ratings, and optimizing listings—you can stay focused on what truly matters: delivering excellent patient care. Let us help you build a reputation that not only attracts new patients but also keeps them coming back. Stand out, stay ahead, and let your reputation shine.

Every call in your contact center represents a breakdown in your customer journey. Customers don’t want to call; they want quick and easy solutions. The moment they have to dial your number, frustration is likely already simmering. The friction of navigating IVRs, waiting on hold, and repeating information can erode loyalty in seconds. Yet, it’s not just the customer paying the price for this breakdown—your business is footing the bill, too, in more ways than one.

The True Cost of Contact Centers
The true cost of relying on traditional contact centers is staggering. Staffing, training, infrastructure—these expenses pile up, and the result is often a system straining to keep up with an overwhelming volume of calls. However, the most dangerous aspect of this reactive approach is that it fundamentally undermines the customer experience (CX), leading to dissatisfied customers and missed growth opportunities.

So how can companies eliminate the need for customers to call in the first place? By moving to a strategy of zero call resolution through channel deflection—meeting customer needs proactively and driving contact center cost reduction before they even think of reaching for the phone.

The Financial Burden of a Reactive Call Center

Let’s break down the expenses of maintaining a traditional contact center that prevents call center cost reductions:

1. Staffing Costs: Running a contact center is expensive. It requires an army of agents to field calls, troubleshoot, and resolve issues. Yet, many of these calls could have been deflected through other channels like self-service or automated solutions. The more calls you receive, the more people you need on hand, and this cycle leads to mounting labor costs.

2. High Agent Turnover: Contact centers suffer from notoriously high turnover rates. Dealing with repetitive and often stressful calls takes a toll on agents. High turnover leads to increased recruitment costs, loss of institutional knowledge, and the need to constantly onboard new employees, all while sacrificing service continuity.

3. Training and Coaching Costs: New hires must be trained not just on your product or service, but on how to handle a wide variety of customer issues. Regular coaching and upskilling are necessary to keep agents effective, especially as new products, policies, or technologies roll out. This constant training cycle can become a significant operational cost.

4. Infrastructure Expenses: Beyond staffing, the infrastructure needed to run a contact center is a massive financial drain. This includes physical space, telecommunications systems, workforce management tools, and advanced call routing software. These are crucial for managing high call volumes but can quickly spiral into a cost-heavy operation.

5. Scheduling Complexities: Managing agent schedules to match peak call times is a challenge that plagues most contact centers. Too few agents mean long wait times and frustrated customers, while too many agents during off-peak hours lead to underutilization and wasted resources. Balancing this requires constant monitoring and adjustment.

6. Inconsistent Issue Resolution: Customers expect quick and accurate resolutions when they reach out, but in reality, many issues are escalated or require follow-up. Real-time identification and resolution of problems are complex, especially when agents are overworked and juggling multiple tasks. The result is longer handle times and a less satisfying experience for the customer.

How to Reduce Contact Center Costs to a Zero Call Resolution

So, let’s get down to brass tacks. How can you start to quantify this? The ultimate goal of zero call resolution, and going 100% self-service as a business model is straightforward and directly linked to call center cost saving:

1. How many customer calls do you handle in the contact center per year? (Eg, 250,000)
2. What is the average cost per call? (Eg. $5.00 fully loaded with call center systems and agent handle time and note-taking)
3. Multiply those numbers together and that’s the ultimate goal of ROI you’re chasing. (Eg. $1.25 million per year)

You got us, it’s never that simple. Moving towards a zero call resolution model requires a dedicated focus to understand why customers are calling in the first place, which topics and issues drive the highest number of inbound calls, and then game-plan the best way to systematically solve the issues through channels that your customers prefer.

Calculate your business’ ROI using Pearl-Plaza’s conversational intelligence tools.

Industry

Please Select Automotive Entertainment Financial Services Healthcare Hospitality Insurance Retail All

Number of calls per year

Number of agents

Average call duration in minutes

Percent of calls where issue is not resolved

Agent time spent per call on notes (minutes)

Percent of calls reviewed by supervisors (%)

Employee turnover per month in call center (%)

Estimated Revenue Growth

$
Use the calculator to find an estimated ROI

Total ICX ROI

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Whether you are curious about other programs/ROIs, want to gain a better understanding of options in the market, or are insight-obsessed like us, you can gain unlimited access to all of our valuable calculators by simply entering your email. You’ll also unlock valuable customer experience analytics resources, articles, and other tools to help you quickly elevate your CX program and grow your business.

Real-World Examples of Channel Deflection Success

To truly reduce contact center costs and get to zero call resolution starts with conversational intelligence. If you’re unable to derive the purpose of repeat calls then how are you meant to fix them with less expensive channels and methods? Here’s the integrated customer experience framework from the companies who see tangible results from zero-call resolution:

Like the example above, leading businesses across industries are already reaping the benefits of channel deflection and zero-call resolution strategies. But none of it is possible without conversation intelligence.

How Conversation Intelligence Empowers Zero Call Resolution? 

Conversation analytics software is the conversational intelligence solution for contact center and CX leaders that need to reduce costs to serve and increase customer loyalty—and the foundation to build your strategy to zero call resolution. 

Through the use of advanced AI technology, organizations can make sense of customer interactions from multiple channels, identify root causes of repeat issues using individual speaker analysis, and use those insights to create self-service customer journeys that deflect from expensive channels like call centers or in-store conversations.

Here are a few ways that companies have used their insights from conversational intelligence to deploy lower-cost service options:

• AI-Powered Agents: Intelligent chatbots, powered by natural language processing (NLP) and generative AI, can converse with customers to discover and understand issues, handle routine inquiries like account balances, shipping statuses, and FAQs preventing the need for human intervention. 
• Rapid Resolution: In-channel text analysis of customer feedback that identifies expensive repeat issues that have been flagged by the business, and produces resources that are proven to resolve the concerns and let customers indicate their satisfaction, or escalate to an agent.
• Robust Knowledge Bases: Self-service portals with detailed, searchable knowledge bases empower customers to resolve issues on their own. This reduces inbound call volume while boosting customer confidence in your brand.

Customer Communities: Forums and online communities allow customers to help each other, share knowledge, and offer solutions. Businesses like Microsoft, Atlassian, and Salesforce have used this strategy effectively, encouraging customers to seek peer support before contacting official channels.

These approaches not only deflect calls but also foster a sense of independence and satisfaction among customers.

How Can Pearl-Plaza Help Reduce Call Center Costs?

Pearl-Plaza specializes in helping organizations generate increased revenue and lower costs by improving experiences and interactions. We know conversational data such as chat logs and transcripts contain the nuggets of gold that can make customers happy and reduce call center costs. Collecting that data is the first step to any CX-focused strategy and zero call resolution—collecting feedback to make data-driven decisions.

We then work with our clients to safely use natural language processing and advanced AI to power our predictive customer analytics to make sense of every byte of structured and unstructured data as it relates to their goals. Whether it’s starting small with call center cost reductions or big with targeting zero call resolution at the outset or a phased approach of increasing first call resolution, we provide out-of-the-box and customizable models and workflows to get to the insights quickly and in a way, your team understands and trusts. 

Finally, we provide the technology and strategic guidance to break down data and team silos to help your teams take the smartest actions. From case management to impact prediction, our solution gives your frontline teams the tools they need to identify the root cause of issues and share their perspectives on how to avoid repeat calls—getting your business closer to zero-call resolution and high ROI customer experience programs.

Conclusion

Reducing call center costs and moving to zero call resolution is no longer a nice to have—it’s a necessity in a customer-first world. By focusing on channel deflection, businesses can save on operational costs, increase efficiency, and vastly improve customer experience. Through the strategic use of technology, proactive engagement, and a commitment to seamless CX, companies can avoid the pitfalls of traditional contact centers and build a reputation for putting their customers first. The result? Lower costs, happier customers, and a future-proofed brand.

This technology supports a wide array of applications, from voice-activated assistants and chatbots to sophisticated text analysis tools and language translation services. By leveraging complex algorithms, machine learning techniques, and vast amounts of linguistic data, NLP aims to bridge the gap between human communication and computer understanding, transforming how we interact with technology in our daily lives. As the capabilities of NLP continue to expand, it further revolutionizes various industries, enhances user experiences, and opens new avenues for research and innovation.

What is Natural Language Processing?

Natural Language Processing, or NLP, is a part of computer science that helps computers understand, interpret, and use human language. Basically, it’s like teaching a computer how to talk and write like a human.

Imagine you’re talking to your friend, you can understand each other easily, right? But if you try to talk to a computer in the same way, it might get confused because it doesn’t understand things like jokes, sarcasm, or even some common phrases. Natural language processing tries to solve this problem. It’s like building a bridge between human language and computer language.

Natural Language Processing in AI

Natural language processing is a critical area of artificial intelligence. It allows computers to understand, interpret, and generate human languages. Therefore, enhancing the interactions between computers and humans to be useful and meaningful is crucial. 

One of the most beneficial aspects of this interaction is how NLP can rapidly process and analyze vast amounts of data, far quicker than a person could. This accelerates data analysis, allowing us to concentrate on more important tasks. It filters out unnecessary and irrelevant information, enabling businesses to focus on what truly matters. For instance, product teams can extract data specific to their products, while service teams can focus on improving customer service.

Why is Natural Language Processing Important?

Natural language processing has recently become an integral part of our everyday lives. However, for businesses—especially those in finance, healthcare, and legal sectors—NLP has long been essential for processing large amounts of unstructured data. Without NLP, businesses could not efficiently and effectively analyze data that would play a critical role in informed decision-making. 

Natural Language Processing Examples & Use Cases

A good example of NLP is voice assistants like Siri or Alexa. You can ask them questions in normal human language and they can understand and respond to you. That’s because they use NLP to understand what you’re saying. However, natural language processing goes far beyond Siri or Alexa and has many advantages for businesses including:

• Customer Service Automation: Many companies use NLP to automate customer service through chatbots. These AI bots can understand and answer customer questions. This reduces the need for human help and speeds up response time. 
• Sentiment Analysis: Businesses use NLP to analyze customer feedback, reviews, and social media conversations to determine customer sentiment toward their products, services, or brands.
• Market Intelligence: NLP can analyze many news articles, blog posts, and social media posts. This helps provide insights about market trends, competitor activities, and possible business opportunities.
• Email Filtering: NLP helps filter out spam and sort emails into different folders. This makes managing emails easier.
• Resume Screening: HR departments and recruitment agencies use NLP to help screen resumes. This technology matches the candidate’s skills and experience with job requirements.
• Personalized Advertising: NLP can analyze a user’s online behavior and preferences. It does this by identifying specific words, both positive and negative. This enables businesses to optimize personalized ads and product recommendations.
• Content Creation: Generative AI is part of NLP. It can help automate content creation. This allows news outlets and companies to create simple reports or articles automatically.
• Search Engine Optimization: NLP can help businesses optimize their content to rank higher in search engine results. It does this by identifying relevant keywords and phrases in your content and comparing it to high-ranking competitors.
• Contract Analysis: NLP can analyze contracts and legal documents. This helps businesses find important information and possible risks. It can ensure that the language within a contract is present and can look for problematic wording.

Natural Language Processing Applications in Business

Natural Language Processing is transforming how businesses interact with data and customers by enabling machines to understand, analyze, and respond to human language. From automating customer support to extracting insights from large datasets, NLP applications help streamline operations and enhance decision-making. Here are some real-life examples of businesses applying natural language processing to their operations.

Biotechnology

When someone calls the Medical Information Department (MID) at Biogen, they’re routed to operators who search through FAQs, brochures, and product resources to answer questions. If the answer cannot be provided within a minute, the call escalates to an expensive medical director. Biogen wanted to reduce the involvement of these directors. So, they turned to Pearl-Plaza for a solution to empower, not replace, their human operators using NLP in healthcare. 

First, we configured our core NLP to identify relevant information within Biogen’s resources. Then, we combined this solution with an open-source search engine and custom user interface. The resulting system understands complex relationships within Biogen’s data. Now, MID operators can type in keywords or questions to get answers in seconds. Early testing by Biogen already shows faster responses and fewer calls sent to medical directors.

“We’ve worked with Pearl-Plaza for years on programs surrounding Voice of the Patient, Voice of the Key Opinion Leader (KoL), and social media monitoring… They’ve always been a key partner.” — Keith Ho Director of Customer Focus and Medical Digital, Biogen

Sports & Entertainment

Brandtix delivers actionable brand performance insight for the world’s top athletes and teams by gathering data from social media and news platforms. They turned to Pearl-Plaza for a powerful NLP platform that could analyze and decode the jargon-filled language of professional sports. 

Together, Pearl-Plaza’s cloud API and Brandtix’s proprietary algorithms now process fan vernacular across 19 languages. As part of this, Pearl-Plaza analyzes and structures the sentiment of fan conversations as positive or negative, based on context. These capabilities play a crucial role in brand reputation management, enabling franchise owners, player agents, and PR teams to separate meaningful mentions from general chatter and address PR problems before they get out of hand.

“Choosing Pearl-Plaza over its competitors was easy — thanks to the mix of service, price, ease of use, and language packs. Further, Pearl-Plaza counts extraction and sentiment analysis as one action. The other solutions we looked at bill extraction and sentiment separately, charging double the volume and double the price.” — Shahar Fogel Vice President of Product

Social Media Monitoring

evolve24 is a data analytics firm that combines myriad data sources to help companies develop strategic direction. To process information and provide market intelligence in real-time, evolve24 can only employ best-in-class toolsets with the lowest possible latency and downtime. 

Pearl-Plaza’s core AI-based NLP engine, provides low-latency text mining and analytics that process five or more tweets every second, expediting evolve24’s time-to-value for their customers. Salience’s power and customizability give evolve24 the ability to keep up with increasing volumes while helping them maintain high standards of consistency and measurement across a range of text data sources.

“The text analytics engine is a key tool for us in conjunction with our proprietary emotion metric; this next evolution of functionality promises an even more comprehensive look into the conversations our customers’ customers are having.” — Noah Krusell VP of Product Development, evolve24

Customer Experience Management

VOZIQ offers a suite of Predictive Customer Retention and Customer Experience Management solutions for call centers. Traditional customer churn prediction models rely on transaction histories and demographics data but fail to incorporate consumer-generated input with real customer sentiment. VOZIQ turned to Pearl-Plaza to fill this gap.

With Pearl-Plaza, VOZIQ categorizes the text comments and identifies customer sentiment from survey scores and keywords in each call log. Since partnering with Pearl-Plaza, VOZIQ has retained thousands of customers for their clients, resulting in millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.

Industrial & Aviation Design

Gensler’s Los Angeles Aviation and Transportation Studio partnered with Pearl-Plaza, leveraging sentiment analysis on customer feedback to make better-informed decisions about the planning and design of airports. The result is a data-driven voice of customer program that can help win contracts and build airports that better serve stakeholders and travelers alike.

“As a global industry leader in airport architecture, we utilize the power of Semantria’s rapid and precise data analysis to create better-informed designs for the airports of tomorrow.” — Andy Huang, AIA LEED Associate Designer, Gensler Aviation and Transportation Studio

Hospitality & Hotel Management

Revinate helps over 30,000 hospitality providers measure online presence, analyze consumer feedback, and reinvent the guest experience. With over 2,700 categories, 100 restaurant topics, 200 hotel topics, and nine languages, Revinate gives their clients the ability to measure consumer sentiment in critical categories, such as rooms, staff, service, and food. Pearl-Plaza’s customizability lets Revinate’s users create lists of custom topics, follow trending topics as they evolve, and compare sentiment scores across multiple organization-specific metrics.

“The support from the team at Pearl-Plaza was outstanding; they made a very complex project seem simple. With their partnership, we met our goals on time, delivered the best possible product, and were set up to ensure continued success.” — Matt Zarem, Senior Director of Product, Revinate

Technology & Electronics

A large tech company’s Customer Market Research (CMR) team helps managers across the company make better decisions regarding product and market strategy. Before, the CMR team used to listen to the Voice of the Customer by designing, distributing, and analyzing a wide range of surveys. As the group began working to integrate social media data, they turned to Pearl-Plaza.

Their team needed to effectively filter social content in order to extract relevant data, reduce survey spend, easily configure flexible one-off analyses, and validate long-term trends. Traditional social listening tools didn’t offer the customizability and scalability that the CMR team needed, so they contacted Pearl-Plaza to discuss a “semi-custom” solution.

First, the CMR team extracts a subset of social comments from an Pearl-Plaza-built data warehouse, based on the products and brands they want to know more about. Then they use Pearl-Plaza’s Spotlight tool to analyze this data and understand what people are saying, how they feel, and why they feel that way. Next, they validate the results and relate the net sentiment score to quantitative Likert scale survey data. This approach allows them to compare and contrast what people say in structured surveys, versus what they say in the unstructured environment of social media.

“Pearl-Plaza is the only vendor we’ve seen that can offer the flexibility that is required to support our complex product line.” — Csaba Dancshazy Senior Market Research Manager 

Fitness Lifestyle & Events

Tough Mudder Inc. has grown to become a leading active lifestyle brand and endurance event company with more than 2.5 million global participants. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an essential measurement for the company. However, the volume and the qualitative format of their post-event surveys make it challenging to garner insight.

Using Pearl-Plaza’s API for Excel, the Tough Mudder team reduced manual survey coding time by 90%. Working with Pearl-Plaza staff, they designed custom queries to solve an industry-specific sentiment analysis problem. In total, Tough Mudder uses Pearl-Plaza to process 2,000 surveys for each of the company’s 78 events per season, some 156,000 surveys total.

“By teaming with Pearl-Plaza, Tough Mudder is able to report Net Promoter Scores and review participant feedback within a week of every event. The company’s ability to make strategic adjustments based on customer insights is invaluable to providing the ultimate event experience.” — Sydney Friedkin Consumer Insights Analyst, Tough Mudder Inc.

Regulatory Compliance & Financial Services

The Australian government mandates that financial Statements of Advice (SoAs) include disclosures covering conflicts of interest, own product recommendations, and more. Financial services providers doing business in Australia use SoA templates and frequent spot-checks. This helps make sure that financial advisors aren’t modifying or deleting critical disclosures.

An average-sized firm produces hundreds of pages of SoAs each week. Manual review is costly, unreliable, and exposes the firm to high non-compliance risk. One such firm, unable to find an existing contract analysis tool that could solve this exact problem, turned to Pearl-Plaza for help. 

First, we trained our semi-structured data parser with machine learning to understand the underlying structure of the Statement of Advice document. Then, we built a custom natural language processing configuration to extract and analyze entities and other text elements. Then, we structured and exported the resulting data into a simple spreadsheet.

Now, in mere minutes the firm’s auditors can see whether proper disclosures were made across hundreds of documents. They can even identify where an advisor’s recommendations may go against their client’s stated goals and risk attitude. This substantially lowers the firm’s non-compliance risk even while reducing their disclosure compliance costs.

Natural Language Processing Techniques & Models

Human language is complex and flexible. Many NLP models have been created to process it well for different needs and tasks. Here are a few common types of natural language processing models:

1. Rule-Based Models: This type of NLP model uses specific rules and grammar to understand and interpret natural language. 

2. Statistical Models: These models use statistical methods and algorithms to understand the probability of certain words appearing together to make meaningful sentences. 

3. Machine Learning Models: Machine learning models use algorithms that can learn from data and improve over time. They use features like words, phrases, sentences, etc., to classify, predict, or translate text.

4. Deep Learning Models: These are a type of machine learning models that use neural networks with multiple layers (deep networks) to understand and interpret natural language. 

5. Sequence-to-Sequence Models: This type of model is used for tasks where the input and the output are sequences, like in machine translation or voice recognition.

6. Transformers Models: Introduced by Google, Transformers models are based on an attention mechanism that allows the model to focus on different words in the input sequence while generating the output sequence. Examples include BERT, GPT-3, and T5.

7. Hybrid Models: These models combine several techniques like rule-based, statistical, machine learning, etc., to improve the accuracy and efficiency of natural language processing tasks.

8. Reinforcement Learning Models: These models learn by interacting with their environment, and receiving rewards or penalties based on their actions.

9. Cognitive Language Models: These models use cognitive psychology to better understand human language processing and build models that can mimic human-like language understanding. 

10. Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) Models: These are primarily used for text classification, sentiment analysis, and other NLP tasks.

11. Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) Models: These are especially useful for sequence prediction problems, as they can use their reasoning from previous inputs to inform the current one.

What are the Benefits of Natural Language Processing?

Natural language processing can be highly beneficial for businesses as it enables technology to understand, interpret, and respond to people in a valuable way. NLP enhances communication between people and computers, making interactions more efficient and effective including:

Improved Customer Service

NLP helps create chatbots and virtual assistants. These tools can understand and answer customer questions quickly. This reduces wait times and boosts customer satisfaction.

Enhanced Decision Making

By analyzing vast amounts of textual data, NLP can help businesses make data-driven decisions. It can identify patterns, sentiments, and trends, providing valuable insights to businesses.

Increased Efficiency

Tasks like data entry, customer service, and report generation can be automated using NLP, freeing up staff to focus on more complex tasks. 

Better Accuracy 

NLP can significantly reduce human error in tasks like transcription services, data extraction, and language translation.

Personalized Marketing

By analyzing customer behavior and preferences, natural language understanding can help businesses create personalized marketing campaigns and product recommendations.

Advanced-Data Analysis 

NLP can process and analyze unstructured data. This includes emails, social media posts, and customer reviews. Traditional data analysis tools cannot handle this type of data.

Improved Accessibility

NLP can be used to develop applications for people with disabilities. For example, speech recognition systems can help people with mobility issues, and text-to-speech systems can assist people with visual impairments.

Enhanced Language Translation

NLP improves the capabilities of language translation software, making it possible for businesses to communicate with customers in different languages more effectively.

Early Risk Detection

It can be used to monitor digital conversations on social media, emails, and forums to identify potential threats or negative sentiments toward a brand or product.

How has Natural Language Processing Evolved?

While natural language processing might seem like a modern concept to the general public, NLP has been around since the 1950s and has evolved rapidly over the years. 

1950s – 1970s

When NLP was first developed, it started as a rule-based system where the rules were manually created by linguists for language processing. Since the system was heavily dependent on manually handcrafted rules, NLP was limited and lacked generalization. 

1980s – 1990s

The introduction of statistical methods would be the next shift of natural language processing which allowed NLP to become popular for simple tasks such as part-of-speech tagging and machine translation. This led to a more robust and scalable solution, compared to the initial rule-based systems. 

1990s – 2000s

Natural language processing (NLP) continues to evolve quickly, especially from the 1990s to the 2000s. During this time, the integration of machine learning algorithms allowed NLP to handle more complex tasks. Significant advancements were made in areas like identifying named entities (like names and places), analyzing sentiments (understanding emotions in text), and parsing syntax (understanding sentence structure). These improvements enhanced both the performance and efficiency of NLP applications.

2010 – Present

This period marks the revolution of natural language processing with the advent of deep learning, especially neural networks. These progressions have greatly improved NLP’s ability to understand and interpret the meanings of words and sentences. The introduction of pre-trained language models, such as GPT and BERT, has further transformed NLP by enabling the handling of vast amounts of text data and performing specific tasks with high accuracy.

Future Trends in Natural Language Processing

With NLP rapidly evolving over the past 70 years, it doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon. As demand continues to rise, this will help set future trends for NLP including:

Advance Language Models

We’re already seeing continued development and refinements of large-scale pre-trained models such as GPT and BERT. These models will only become more accurate, efficient, and capable of understanding context, nuances, and generating human-like text. 

Multimodal NLP

Taking language to the next level by integrating text with other types of data like images, audio, and video. This opens up new possibilities for content generation and improving applications such as virtual assistants and translation services. 

Improving Trust and Transparency

For critical applications, especially within the healthcare, finance, and legal industries there will be a need for enhanced transparency in the NLP models. This will help provide clear explanations and understanding for predictions and decisions.   

Ethical and Fair Processing

As natural language processing becomes more engrained in our lives, ensuring these models are used ethically and do not create harm. 

Integrations

With how popular NLP has become, we can only expect continual integrations with other technologies allowing for a more intuitive voice-controlled interaction from smart devices, vehicles, and other connected technologies. 

With how rapidly NLP is evolving, future trends for natural language processing can change quickly as well. Therefore, it’s crucial to stay ahead of these trends so that your business can leverage the full potential of NLP to make intelligent business decisions.

What to Look for in a Natural Language Processing System

When it comes to analyzing unstructured data, NLP involves these core functionalities including keyword extraction, sentiment analysis, and classification. Other features to consider in natural language processing software include: 

• Predictable Pricing: Pricing for NLP software can be complicated and cumbersome. CX leaders and teams should know exactly how much they will be charged for a product or service, with no hidden fees or unexpected costs. Predictable pricing should make it easy for you to budget and plan expenses more effectively.
• Stable and Scalable Architecture: Stable and scalable architecture in NLP software refers to a system design that ensures reliable and efficient operation, is capable of handling increasing workloads. Stability means the system performs consistently without crashing, handles various input types, and is easy to maintain and update. Scalability involves the ability to expand the system’s capacity by adding more machines or enhancing existing ones, effectively distributing workloads to prevent any single server from being overwhelmed. This architecture allows the system to automatically adjust resources based on demand, ensuring optimal performance and reliability even as usage grows.
• Customization Through Tuning and Configuration Tools: Customization through tuning and configuration tools in NLP is vital for adapting models to specific use cases, improving accuracy, and handling unique language variations like industry-specific jargon. It allows optimization of performance, balancing speed and accuracy, while also reducing biases that may arise from pre-trained data. This ensures that NLP models deliver more precise and context-aware results, aligned with the needs of the task.

In addition to these important functionalities, you should also consider these features:

• High Support Availability: ​​Dependable support availability in an NLP tool is essential because it ensures timely resolution of issues, minimizing downtime and ensuring smooth operation. Since NLP models can be complex and require frequent tuning or updates, accessible support helps users address challenges quickly, whether it’s troubleshooting, fine-tuning, or integrating the tool into existing systems. This support enhances user confidence, boosts productivity, and ensures the tool’s long-term success in meeting business needs.
• Private Hosting Environment: A private hosting environment is crucial for NLP tools, especially when handling sensitive or proprietary data, as it ensures enhanced security and privacy. By hosting the tool privately, organizations have full control over data access and compliance with regulations, reducing the risk of data breaches. Additionally, private hosting allows for greater customization, performance optimization, and scalability tailored to specific business needs, all while maintaining a secure infrastructure.
• Custom ML Models: In NLP tools, custom ML models are important because they allow organizations to tailor the tool to their specific needs, such as adapting to unique industry jargon, data formats, or specialized tasks. By creating or fine-tuning these models, businesses can achieve greater accuracy and relevance in the results, leading to more meaningful insights and better performance. Custom models also provide flexibility, ensuring the NLP tool evolves with the organization’s changing requirements and delivers optimal outcomes.

Stay Ahead and Informed with Pearl-Plaza

For businesses aiming to revolutionize their customer experience, analyzing large sets of unstructured data from emails, social media posts, customer feedback, and contact centers can be transformative. Pearl-Plaza’s NLP model powers our text mining and analytics platforms, enabling top brands to uncover powerful insights that drive significant changes. Learn more about Pearl-Plaza’s powerful natural language processing AI software, which has won numerous awards as a leader. 

What is Active Listening?

Active Listening is a conversational AI agent designed to improve the feedback collection experience by engaging respondents in real-time. It prompts users with context-aware follow-up questions, encouraging them to provide richer, more detailed answers. Whether through simple rule-based interactions or advanced AI, Active Listening transforms survey data from shallow comments into meaningful insights.

Active Listening Agents

• AI-Powered Active Listening: This agent uses advanced AI to continuously learn and adapt based on user feedback, evolving its language to elicit more detailed responses. It identifies patterns in real-time, helping businesses quickly uncover emerging trends and improve decision-making.

• Basic Active Listening: For organizations that prefer full control over their feedback collection process, this agent offers customizable rules. It allows you to tailor how Active Listening interacts with respondents, adjusting trigger phrases and follow-up prompts to gather more valuable data on specific topics.

Benefits of Active Listening for Feedback Collection

Why does it matter for your business? The benefits of Active Listening go beyond improving survey response rates; it drives more actionable insights and ultimately enhances your overall customer and employee experiences.

• Actionable Insights: Captures deeper, more meaningful feedback, enabling businesses to uncover the root causes of issues and identify growth opportunities.
• Improved Engagement: Respondents feel heard, leading to higher satisfaction rates as surveys become more conversational and personalized.
• Increased Efficiency: By automating follow-ups with AI or customizable prompts, teams spend less time chasing responses and more time acting on valuable insights.
• Enhanced Security: With locally hosted AI models, businesses can maintain strict control over their data, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.

Who Would Benefit

Organizations that prioritize understanding and improving experiences will find great value in advanced feedback collection tools.

• Experience Leaders: Those responsible for customer and employee experience will benefit from more detailed, actionable feedback that allows them to address pain points and drive loyalty.
• Customers & Employees: Respondents appreciate the ease of giving feedback and knowing it will be used to make meaningful improvements, increasing their willingness to engage.

How is Active Listening Different from Competitors?

Pearl-Plaza’s Active Listening stands out in the feedback market by offering both AI-powered and customizable rules-based agents, giving businesses flexibility that competitors lack. 

• Unlike others, Pearl-Plaza uses a privately hosted LLM to keep data secure, while real-time follow-up prompts improve feedback quality before submission. 
• The platform’s Strength Meter gamifies the survey experience, increasing engagement, and its Topics to Avoid feature ensures on-brand prompts. 
• Designed for both CX and EX, Active Listening keeps surveys concise and impactful, delivering deeper, actionable insights more efficiently than traditional platforms.

Why Active Listening Matters

For businesses seeking to transform vague, unactionable feedback into insights that can drive real change, Active Listening is the solution for effective feedback collection. It’s a game-changer for brands looking to improve both customer and employee experiences. Companies using Active Listening have seen a 10x increase in survey responses and are resolving issues 62% faster. With the ability to customize every aspect of the feedback process—whether through AI or predefined rules—Active Listening ensures that businesses get the insights they need while maintaining full control over the process.

Elevate Your Feedback Collection with Active Listening

Ready to take your feedback collection to the next level? Active Listening is your key to deeper insights, better engagement, and stronger results.

What is End-to-End Customer Experience?

End-to-end customer experience refers to all the different experiences a customer has with your organization, and how they feel about those experiences as a whole. For example, in the context of retail customer experience, suppose a customer had a smooth checkout experience, but then experienced a shipping problem. When they contacted the support team, their problem was resolved and they were awarded 20% off of their next order. 

This customer had three experiences for this transaction: shopping, ordering and shipping, and post-transactional. While this customer may have had a bad shipping experience, it was made up for by the support team. So their end-to-end customer experience was a positive one because they felt their issue was resolved. 

End-to-End Customer Experience vs Customer Journey

The difference between end-to-end customer experience and the customer journey is that one of them is business-focused while the other is customer-focused. The customer journey maps out the path a customer takes and focuses on individual touchpoints.

The end-to-end customer experience, however, is how the customer feels about each of those touchpoints. It takes a broader view, emphasizing not just the sequence of interactions but the quality, consistency, and emotional impact of those interactions. It’s about the holistic experience, not just isolated steps.

86% of customers agree that they would switch to a competitor after three or fewer negative experiences with a brand.

Why is the End-to-End Customer Experience Important?

The end-to-end customer experience is important because it can be key to retaining customers. 86% of customers agree that they would switch to a competitor after three or fewer negative experiences with a brand. So, it is important to create a customer experience that ends with the customer being satisfied so that they develop into a lifetime customer, rather than take their business elsewhere. 

Benefits of End-to-End Customer Experience

A memorable end-to-end customer experience will have a tangible impact on your business. It can have an impact on everything from sales to operations. Here are some benefits you may realize from having a positive end-to-end customer experience: 

Increased Customer Loyalty

When customers know they will get a good customer experience from start to finish, they are more likely to return for future purchases. As a matter of fact, customers are willing to pay more for a product or service from a brand with a better end-to-end customer experience than competitors. A positive end-to-end customer experience will help you improve customer loyalty. 

Improved Brand Reputation

Improving the end-to-end customer experience can also improve your brand equity. When your brand delivers a consistently positive experience, customers trust you more and think of your products or services as higher quality. Customers are also more likely to share their positive experiences through online reviews, social media, or by recommending your brand to others. 

Reduced Costs

A good customer experience often results in fewer customer complaints and support tickets. Focusing on the end-to-end customer experience will also help you revamp or retire processes that are causing frequent issues or customer churn. A streamlined customer experience will improve operational efficiencies and reduce overall costs. 

How to Improve the End-to-End Customer Experience

To improve the end-to-end customer experience, you will need to make sure you are doing everything you can to listen to and understand your customers while they interact with your organization. Here are some steps that you can take to improve your end-to-end customer experience:

1. Understand the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping will give you a visual of all the touch points that a customer has with your brand. Understanding what the customer experience looks like in your organization will help you identify where you may be falling short. Every member of your CX team must understand the customer journey. 

2. Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is useful when improving the end-to-end customer experience because it can give you insights into how customers feel at every stage of the customer journey. For example, an online review might reflect a customer who had a positive purchase experience, while a social media post may reveal a customer who didn’t make it to the purchase phase because of poor customer service. 

3. Ensure Consistency Across Channels

The end-to-end customer experience doesn’t include a set start and end point. Where customers start their experience will depend on the industry and type of organization you run. They might start their journey via social media, a paid ad, a search engine result page, or coming to visit you in person. 

Regardless of where they start, they are going to take multiple steps before they reach the end of their experience. It is up to you to ensure create an omnichannel customer experience so that their experience is consistent across whichever channels are most convenient for them.

4. Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalization is one of the most important things you can do to improve the end-to-end customer experience in today’s market. In fact, 71% of customers expect personalization, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get it. 

A lack of personalization in your customer experience will hurt your business. To improve the end-to-end customer experience and your bottom line, consider implementing personalization such as product recommendations, unique discounts, or personalized communication. 

5. Measure Customer Experience Metrics 

One of the ways to track the effectiveness of your end-to-end customer experience improvement is by tracking customer experience metrics. As you work to improve your end-to-end customer experience, measuring the performance of your chosen metrics will help you know the success and ROI of your efforts. 

How to Create An End-to-End Customer Experience Strategy

Your end-to-end customer experience strategy can be an extension of your overall customer experience strategy. The most important part of creating an end-to-end customer experience strategy is communication. Communication between different stakeholders and teams will drive the success of your CX initiatives. Here are what you will need to get started: 

1. Define Your CX Goals

Before you get started, you have to know where you’re going. What do you want to achieve with your end-to-end customer experience strategy? Are you aiming to increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, differentiate from competitors, or some other goal? 

Having specific goals will ensure that every CX action that is taken will be taken to improve your goal. It is also important that every stakeholder in your organization, such as executives, is aware of this goal as well. 

2. Empower Employee

Once the key customer experience stakeholders in your organization know and understand the objectives of the end-to-end customer experience strategy, it is time to empower employees to help deliver on those goals. Frontline employees are the most important part of any organization’s customer experience program since they are the group that interacts with the customer the most. 

Consider offering trainings that help define the business goals and what steps can be taken to get there. You may also be able to drive employee engagement by offering incentives once certain metrics are met. Securing the buy-in of employees will drive a successful end-to-end customer experience. 

3. Create a Continous Feedback Loop

Once your goals are created and employees are empowered, you can implement your end-to-end customer experience strategy. Once implemented, it is important to have a customer feedback loop as well as an employee feedback loop. 

A customer feedback loop will help you enact changes requested by customers. On the other hand, an employee feedback loop will help employees make stakeholders aware of what is or is not working in your end-to-end customer experience strategy. Make sure that you have created an environment that supports employee feedback, as it will often have a positive impact on your overall customer experience goals. 

End-to-End Customer Experience Examples

Implementing a seamless end-to-end customer experience can differentiate brands in competitive markets. Below are some real-world examples of companies that excel at delivering exceptional customer experiences from the first interaction to post-purchase support.

Metro Bank 

Metro Bank worked to improve the end-to-end customer experience by restructuring its customer insights program. Before this restructuring, customers had to go to a third-party platform to take a survey. One of the biggest changes made during this restructure was moving the survey within the app. This, as well as other changes, helped Metro Bank was able to realize growth in revenue, customer accounts, and overall operational efficiency. 

Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks has created a positive end-to-end customer experience by making it easy for customers to leave feedback. By leveraging Pearl-Plaza’s platform, they have created short, mobile-friendly surveys that can be sorted by keywords. This allows unstructured data to be analyzed easier and ensures the most important feedback takes priority. These customer-focused features have allowed Juniper Networks to increase customer resolution times by 62%. 

Improve Your End-to-End Customer Experience with Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza’s platform allows you to view every point in the end-to-end customer experience and gives you the tools to track and measure changes over time. To see how this can be customized for your business, schedule a demo today!

What is Customer Experience in Healthcare?

We’ve all been a sick patient before, and we know that the experience can make or break how we feel about a healthcare provider. Customer experience in healthcare goes far beyond just scheduling appointments. It includes every touchpoint—whether it’s the way you’re greeted at the front desk, how well your concerns are listened to during an exam, or how smooth the follow-up process is. A positive experience doesn’t just create happy patients—it builds trust, fosters loyalty, and can even lead to better health outcomes. To sum it up, it’s about ensuring each step of the patient journey feels seamless, compassionate, and human.

What is Customer Experience Management in Healthcare?

Managing customer experience in healthcare involves actively monitoring and improving every touchpoint patients have with your organization. Think of it as building a feedback loop: you collect patient insights, analyze them, and take action to enhance the patient journey. Healthcare organizations that leverage tools like Pearl-Plaza’s CX solutions can gather feedback in real time, identify problem areas, and streamline operations to make the experience as smooth as possible.

What is the Importance of Customer Experience in Healthcare?

In healthcare, the stakes are high. Patients aren’t just customers—they’re individuals often dealing with stress, illness, or pain. Their experience can have a profound impact not only on how they perceive your care but also on their overall well-being. It’s not just about providing excellent service to retain patients—it’s about being empathetic and making the entire process as easy and comforting as possible. This care extends beyond patients to their loved ones, making the experience smooth for everyone involved.

Most Important Factors in Healthcare Customer Experience 

The patient experience in healthcare hinges on several important ingredients. Here are the top factors that make or break a great healthcare experience:

• Ease of Access: Make it simple for patients to book appointments, access test results, and communicate with your team.
• Wait Times: Long wait times can quickly sour an otherwise good experience. Reducing them shows respect for patients’ time.
• Clear Communication: From appointment reminders to treatment plans, patients need clarity and consistency at every step, such as balancing efficiency with delivering empathetic and thorough responses within healthcare contact centers.
• Staff Empathy: Friendly, compassionate care is key. A simple smile or a comforting word can make a huge difference.
• Personalized Care: Treating each patient as an individual, with tailored care, makes for a more meaningful experience.
• Facility: A clean, safe environment is a top concern for patients, especially for infection control and hygiene, but facility comfort, including ease of navigation and privacy, is also important.

Mastering these areas will set your healthcare practice apart and keep patients coming back.

What are Common CX Challenges in Healthcare?

Of course, healthcare comes with its unique set of challenges. For many organizations, it’s about balancing efficiency with compassion. Here are some of the most common CX hurdles healthcare providers face:

• Long Wait Times: Whether it’s waiting for an appointment or in the waiting room, delays are a top frustration for patients.
• Scheduling Issues: Limited availability or complicated booking processes can drive patients away.
• Bedside Manner: Healthcare professionals who lack empathy can create lasting negative impressions, even if the care is clinically sound.

These challenges vary depending on the type of provider. For example, hospitals may struggle with fragmented care coordination, dental offices often face appointment management issues, and pharmacies might have long lines or delays in prescription fulfillment. Addressing these issues head-on is the first step to improving CX.

How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare?

Improving healthcare customer experience doesn’t happen overnight, but there are actionable steps you can take:

• Streamline Scheduling: Use online booking systems to make it easier for patients to secure appointments at their convenience.
• Reduce Wait Times: Improve internal workflows to ensure patients aren’t left waiting unnecessarily.
• Enhance Communication: Keep patients informed with clear, compassionate communication, whether it’s before, during, or after treatment.
• Offer Training for Staff: Ongoing training on empathy and bedside manner ensures your team is offering the best possible patient care.
• Use Technology: Implement CX platforms like Pearl-Plaza to monitor patient feedback, identify pain points, and optimize the patient journey in real time.

How to Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience in Healthcare

In today’s digital world, patients expect seamless experiences across multiple platforms. An omnichannel approach ensures that patients can interact with your organization through their preferred channels—whether it’s in-person, online, or via mobile. This could mean offering online appointment scheduling, a user-friendly mobile app, or telehealth services. Ensuring that patients have consistent, high-quality experiences across all touchpoints makes it easier for them to engage with your services and boosts overall satisfaction

Customer Experience Trends in Healthcare

As the healthcare landscape evolves, so do customer experience trends. Here’s what to expect:

• Telehealth Expansion: Virtual care isn’t going anywhere. As telehealth becomes more mainstream, expect continued improvements in remote care delivery.
• AI and Automation: AI is making its way into everything from appointment scheduling to treatment recommendations. It’s helping reduce wait times and improve efficiency.
• Personalized Healthcare: Data-driven insights allow healthcare providers to offer more personalized care, improving both outcomes and satisfaction.
• Natural Language Processing (NLP): Tools like NLP in healthcare are being used to analyze patient feedback at scale, allowing providers to address concerns faster and more effectively. 

Improve Your Customer Experience in Healthcare with Pearl-Plaza

Delivering a great healthcare customer experience takes more than just good intentions—it requires the right tools and strategies. With Pearl-Plaza, you can capture real-time patient feedback, analyze it, and make data-driven decisions that improve every aspect of the patient journey. From reducing wait times to enhancing patient communication, our solutions are designed to help healthcare providers create the best possible experience for their patients.

Ready to start transforming your healthcare CX? Explore our healthcare reputation management and download our healthcare reputation report for insights on how to take your organization’s customer experience to the next level.

As a matter of fact, 56% of customer service leaders said they plan to invest more into their customer journey, which would be a first-time investment for 45% of them. These investments highlight how crucial the customer journey is to a great customer experience and creating lifelong customer relationships.

What Is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from awareness to purchasing and beyond. To provide an exceptional customer journey, you need to understand your customers—how they interact with your website and what they’re looking for. It’s important to point out that the customer journey is different from the customer experience. Customer journeys are what your customers are doing, while the experience is how they’re feeling. A fully optimized customer journey can help improve your customer experience. 

Why Is the Customer Journey Important?

The customer journey is so important because it is the foundation on which customer acquisition and customer loyalty are built. Most consumers express a desire to interact with a brand across multiple channels, but 77% of brands admit they struggle to create a cohesive customer journey across those channels. 

If a customer chooses to interact with your organization, it is your responsibility to have a customer journey that gives them a stress-free experience. Without a customer journey, you could have low acquisition rates or increased customer churn rates. 

Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey

When your organization understands the customer journey and can give your customers what they need at the right time, you will realize benefits that will improve your overall business performance. Some of the benefits include: 

• Improved Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey will give your customers a better end-to-end customer experience, which will result in increased customer satisfaction. 
• Increased Customer Retention: An understanding of the customer journey allows your business to proactively address issues and provide timely support, which will increase the likelihood of repeat business and long-term customer retention.
• Increased Conversion Rates: By identifying and removing friction points, your business can guide potential customers through the sales process more smoothly. 

What are the Principles of Customer Journey?

While there are no set principles of the customer journey, an important step to understanding and designing the customer journey in your organization is to create your own set of customer journey principles that represent an effort to develop long-term customer relationships. Some possible principles include: 

Customer Empathy 

Customer empathy refers to working to understand the emotional states of customers at each stage of the customer journey. By understanding how customers will feel at certain points, rather than focusing on what action you want them to take, you will create a journey that is easier and less stressful. 

Customer Empowerment

Give customers the ability to manage their journey by offering self-service options and transparent processes. Empowered customers feel more in control and satisfied with their experience.

Proactive Engagement

At some point in the customer journey, your customers will connect with you. When they do, be sure to be equipped with the right information in a timely manner to assist them during the customer journey. 

These principles are an example of what the principles of customer journey could look like in your organization. The exact principles you choose will depend on your business and the journey you build for your customers. However, they should be customer-focused and put your organization in a position to make the customer experience better. 

What Are the Customer Journey Phases?

While the exact steps in the customer journey can vary, these are the six most important parts of the journey for any business: 

The Problem

First, customers need to realize they have a problem, a need, or a want that must be solved. Once they recognize a problem, they can begin looking for solutions, which should hopefully lead them to your company. 

Awareness

During this stage, the customer is gathering information, researching, and looking for options to solve the problem. Hopefully, with your marketing efforts and channels, the customer will come across your company and become aware of your solution to their problem. They’ll still be weighing options and researching what suits them best, but this stage is a great place to use content to showcase your brand. 

Consideration

During this stage, your customer will be considering using your product or service. They may be deciding between you and another option debating pricing options, prioritizing features, and weighing drawbacks. When a customer is considering, brand recognition is crucial. Having a trusted and well-established brand could be what sways a customer toward your product during this stage. 

Purchase

The customer decides on your product and makes the purchase. Even once they’ve purchased your product, companies benefit from reaching out to customers and acknowledging the purchase. 

Retention

Once a customer has bought a product or service, it doesn’t mean they will return to your company again. A key part of the customer journey is retaining the customer for future purchases. Providing support is important to improve customer retention. You want customers to come back repeatedly and look for your product or service when faced with a problem. 

Loyalty

Once your customer comes back to you a few times, they’ll start to develop loyalty to your brand. Loyal customers will almost always come to your company if they can because they trust your products, services, and customer experience. Getting to the loyalty stage takes effort, but loyal customers are the goal of every company. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Journey

Businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and retailers have to consider certain aspects of their locations when creating a customer journey such as signage, lighting, walkways, and more. Most other businesses, however, will only ever interact with their customers through digital channels. The digital customer journey is just as important as any customer journey and is crucial to a positive digital experience. 

A successful digital customer journey can be difficult to create because you need to make your customers feel understood and wanted, without being able to talk to them in person. This can be done by creating easy self-service options and being readily available through support channels in case they have any questions or concerns. 

A Customer Journey Example

To see what the customer journey looks like in action, let’s walk through the journey a manager might take to improve operations. 

1. Recognizing the Problem

A hypothetical manager at a finance company recognizes an ongoing issue with managing data for customers. Realizing that this is affecting their efficiency, they start looking for a data management solution. 

2. Researching Potential Solutions

The manager starts exploring different data management tools. A friend in the industry recommends a solution they use, while another contact from networking suggests a different option. The manager also conducts internet searches and reads online reviews to find more potential solutions. Meanwhile, targeted ads on Google and social media bring additional products to their attention. Using reviews and priorities, they narrow the list down to two companies. 

3. Comparing Final Options

Once they have their two favorites, they use the companies’ software demos and pricing packages to consider each one. They make their selection based on which one works best for their company and is the most affordable.

4. Making the Purchase

After purchasing the data management software, the company immediately acknowledges and thanks the manager for their business. This gesture makes the manager feel valued, reinforcing a positive customer experience.

5. Returning for Future Purchases 

A few months later, this same manager is looking for data architecture solutions that will provide security and big data management. They remember their experience with the data management company and start their search on that particular website. When they see they offer software for their needs, they spend less time in the consideration stage and move quickly into purchasing. They also begin recommending the company to other people in the industry when they’re looking for similar products.

The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey 

Spending time and resources focusing on the customer journey may seem like a luxury, but the benefits it can have for your organization are a necessity in today’s business environment. Here are some statistics about the importance of focusing on the customer journey:

• 87% of companies use their understanding of the customer journey as a decision-making tool
• 89% of companies can identify gaps in their service by looking at the customer journey
• 91% of companies say an improved customer journey led to increased sales

Overall, this shows that companies that focus on customer journeys can benefit in revenue and profitability. Optimizing the customer journey also helps decision-makers at the company to stay focused on customers. It also helps improve the customer experience and your brand. A well-optimized customer journey makes the purchasing process easier and more enjoyable for the customers, which improves their experience. 

Customer Journey Management Best Practices

Successful customer journey management requires every interaction a customer has with your brand to be satisfying while also aligning with business goals. To have an effective customer journey management strategy, you will need to consider these best practices:

1. Map the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is a great way to visualize every expected touchpoint a customer will have with your brand. A customer journey map can help you understand the flow of the customer experience. 

2. Segment Your Customers

Not every consumer will have the same customer journey, nor will they want to. By segmenting your customers based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and buying habits, you can create tailored versions of the customer journey to meet the specific needs of these different customers. 

3. Utilize Data and Analytics

Customer journey analytics are important to gain insight into how customers interact with your organization. You can start to use customer journey analytics by identifying customer journey touchpoints. Your touchpoints could be ads, your website homepage, a physical storefront, reviews, newsletters, phone calls with sales, or emails. 

Once you identify all the touchpoints, you can start to measure how customers interact with them. By keeping track of your customer journey touchpoints, you can optimize them to keep your customers moving through your customer journey seamlessly. 

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a method of tracking and analyzing every interaction a customer has with your brand across various customer journey touchpoints. By leveraging customer journey analytics, businesses can measure each phase of the customer journey in a detailed and data-driven manner. This includes understanding how customers discover your brand, how they interact with your content, their decision-making process, and the quality of their post-purchase experiences.
This approach provides insights into the effectiveness of your overall customer experience strategy. By evaluating key metrics at every stage, such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction scores, businesses can pinpoint areas of success and identify potential bottlenecks or pain points.

Customer Journey Metrics to Track

Once you have created your customer journey, you should be able to track where a customer is based on what checkpoints they hit. This may include a free trial, demo appointment, payment, or other points. Since you can track where customers are, you should also be tracking metrics that give you an insight into how effectively your customers move through those stages. Here are some common customer journey metrics you can track:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer, including marketing, sales, and advertising expenses. Tracking CAC can help you evaluate how efficient your customer journey is and help you identify the most cost-effective paths that customers take. 

2. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate shows the percentage of potential customers who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or completing a demo. By monitoring your conversion rates, you can identify any possible bottlenecks that may be hindering customers from moving forward in the customer journey. 

3. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period. This is an important metric to track because it reminds businesses that the customer journey does not end with a purchase. A high churn rate indicates that you may need to improve your customer retention efforts. On the other hand, a low churn rate suggests that your customers value your brand. 

4. Customer Satisfaction 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a key metric for evaluating how happy customers are with their overall experience. This metric can be used to track satisfaction levels at various stages of the customer journey or track overall satisfaction. 

5. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to others. NPS provides insight into whether or not your customer journey is producing strong advocates of your brand that will promote your products or services. 

Customer Journey Software

Customer journey software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to map, track, and optimize the interactions customers have with their brands throughout the entire customer journey. Customer journey software platforms provide valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points, which allow companies to create more personalized experiences. Here’s how customer journey software can benefit your business:

1. Visual Journey Mapping

Customer journey software gives you the tools needed to create a customer journey map. This feature helps you visualize the customer journey and understand what metrics can be tracked and where. It can also be a useful sharing tool to get the rest of your CX team on board with the customer journey improvement process. 

2. Multi-Channel Tracking

Modern digital customer journeys are often non-linear and span multiple channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and in-store interactions With customer journey software, you can integrate data from various channels to get a unified view of the customer journey. This helps deliver a cohesive and consistent experience to the customer regardless of where or how they engaged with your business. 

3. Behavioral Analytics

Customer journey software can track user behaviors such as click paths, product views, time spent on site, and more. This will help your business identify patterns and behaviors that indicate customer intent. 

Improve the Customer Journey with Pearl-Plaza

Improving your customer journey will help your customers learn about your company, products, and services. It will also help you keep your customers moving seamlessly through to the purchasing stage. But ultimately, your customer journey can help you improve your customer experience. 

Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them.
To improve your customers’ journey, you’ll need tools to understand your customers and to utilize your customer journey touchpoints. Pearl-Plaza CX solutions provide feedback and active listening tools to help you understand where to tighten your process and bring more customers to your brand. Schedule a demo today to see how Pearl-Plaza can help you improve the customer journey. 

Patient feedback is the opinions, reviews, and thoughts that healthcare organizations gather from their patients. From the healthcare contact center to the doctor’s diagnosis, each step of the patient journey presents an opportunity to learn about patient expectations and behavior.

The goal of collecting patient feedback is to pinpoint areas for improvement in healthcare operations. For instance, a hospital could have world-class medical staff delivering high-quality care. But, if patients have to endure long wait times to see the doctor, they are still not likely to report a positive experience.

Healthcare centers usually capture this feedback with the help of surveys, reviews, and conversations at different points of the patient journey. Here is an overview of when and why each institution collects feedback.

Hospitals and Clinics

In hospitals and clinics, the medical staff gathers feedback from inpatients and outpatients to see what steps in the patient journey need improvement.

Each type of patient care involves feedback collection at the following points in the patient journey:

• Inpatient care
  • Appointment booking – helps understand if the patient is satisfied with wait times or staff behavior.
  • Medical diagnoses – provides information on the patient’s experience with the accuracy and price of medical tests.
  • Hospital stay – gathers feedback on the patient’s stay in the hospital, including quality of treatment, staff support, and cleanliness.
  • Discharge – captures patient opinions on discharge, such as how long it took and how well the doctor followed up with them.
• Outpatient care
  • Check-in – gathers patient feedback on wait times and quality of staff support during the check-in process.
  • Consultation with the doctor – offers information on the patient’s satisfaction with the doctor’s communication and overall behavior.

Dental Clinic

Dental clinics capture feedback from patients to pinpoint any issues with their oral healthcare service and general operations. They usually collect patient feedback at the following points:

• Appointment scheduling – helps understand the patient’s experience with ease of booking, staff support, and wait times.
• Dental treatment – captures patient feedback on the quality of dental care, dentist’s communication, and treatment plan.
• Billing process – collects feedback on the transparency of costs and availability of various payment options.
• Follow-up – provides information on how well the dentist followed up with the patient post-treatment, including the quality of aftercare instructions.

Aged Care

Aged care facilities rely on feedback loops to make residents feel more comfortable and satisfied. The goal is to check in with them and their family at the following points to see if the center is meeting their unique needs:

• Patient admission – collects information on the ease and convenience of admitting a new resident.
• Medical check-ups – highlight issues, if any, with daily health assessments and if the resident is satisfied with them.
• Daily care – captures resident feedback on the quality of care, support from staff, and general activities.
• Family visits – collects feedback from family members on their satisfaction levels with the facility, including staff, hygiene, environment, and healthcare.
• Discharge – covers any complaints from the resident or their family about the convenience of the discharge process and support from staff.

Pharmacies

Did you know that 58% of Americans view pharmacies as a first step when faced with a non-emergency medical issue? A pharmacy gathers feedback at the following touchpoints to better understand patients:

• Prescription dispensing – helps understand if the medication was safely, correctly, and appropriately dispensed to the patient.
• Consultation – captures patient feedback on consultations offered by the staff, including dosage and general medication advice.
• Purchase and billing – collects information on how smooth it was for the patient to purchase medicine and process payments.

Why is Patient Feedback Important?

Patient feedback is primarily important for enhancing patient satisfaction and helping the healthcare organization with brand reputation management.

Feedback highlights the organization’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to fulfilling a patient’s needs. Hospitals and clinics use this kind of insight to make data-driven decisions to improve their workflow and enhance patient satisfaction. 

For instance, if a hospital receives multiple complaints about wait times during appointment booking, it has an immediate area of concern to address.

Moreover, collecting patient feedback encourages transparency and communication with patients. By becoming proactive listeners and responders to their needs, organizations show that they value their patients’ thoughts and feelings.

As a result, patients are likely to trust these healthcare centers and give them a positive review online. Given that over 70% of patients consult online reviews before visiting a new center, it’s important to focus on practices that boost patient satisfaction ratings.

Benefits of Collecting Patient Feedback

Collecting patient feedback helps organizations make informed decisions on delivering a positive patient experience. Here are a few key benefits of capturing feedback from patients:

Higher Quality of Healthcare

A key component of performance assessment is to look at areas for improvement, especially those suggested by patients. This is where feedback is beneficial as it pinpoints the exact issues to prioritize and fix in order to deliver a higher quality of care. It provides specific answers to important questions about the patient experience.

Enhanced Patient Satisfaction and Retention

A higher quality of health care has a positive impact on patient satisfaction ratings. When patients feel that an organization successfully met their care needs, they are more likely to give it a glowing recommendation online or otherwise. 

Satisfied patients not only provide positive recommendations, but they are also likely to become loyal customers themselves. Therefore, by collecting and acting upon feedback, healthcare providers boost patient retention.

Data-driven Decisions

The last thing healthcare centers want to do is take a guess at what works for their patients. It’s important to have access to actionable data that provides specific insights into improving the customer experience. Collecting patient feedback helps organizations capture and analyze this data to enable continuous improvements in their services.

How to Collect Patient Feedback?

From kiosk surveys at check-in to post-treatment email surveys, patient surveys help organizations collect valuable feedback at each step of the patient journey.

Patient Feedback Survey

Surveys are great options for feedback collection because they let patients reflect on their experience right away. Moreover, surveys allow patients to be more forthright and accurate in their feedback by removing the need for an in-person conversation.

By issuing surveys at key touchpoints during the patient journey, healthcare centers gain targeted insights on improving their operations. Here is an overview of the surveys healthcare centers use throughout the patient journey:

1. Kiosk surveys

A touchscreen display device placed at strategic points in the hospital, like the reception area, is a popular way to collect feedback. 

Kiosks are typically used to survey patients on their experience after check-in, consultation with the doctor, and booking follow-up appointments.

2. Email surveys

According to a 2024 report on email statistics, 88% of respondents said they use email daily, with 39% checking their inboxes 3-5 times a day. Therefore, email remains one of the most reliable channels for organizations to gather customer feedback.

For healthcare centers, sending an email survey right after discharge is a great way to collect insights from the patient. Emails can feature a link to the full survey form or a straightforward one-click survey embedded within the email body itself.

3. Mobile app and website surveys

Healthcare providers can also leverage mobile apps and website widgets to collect patient feedback smoothly. The idea is to integrate always-on surveys within the apps and websites to prompt customers for specific (post-consultation, discharge, etc.) or general feedback.

Feedback from Online Reviews

In addition to surveys, online reviews offer another valuable method for gathering patient feedback and play a crucial role in healthcare reputation management. Beyond providing key insights and actionable data, online reviews can:

1. Authentic Patient Experiences: Reviews often capture unfiltered, real-world patient experiences, providing healthcare providers with genuine insights into what patients appreciate or dislike about their care.
2. Volume and Diversity of Feedback: Healthcare providers can gather a large volume of feedback from a wide range of patients, offering a broader view of service quality across various demographics and healthcare needs.
3. Timeliness: Patients tend to leave reviews soon after their visits, giving providers immediate feedback that can highlight pressing issues or recent successes.
4. Publicly Accessible Insights: Since reviews are public, they not only provide feedback but also shape the provider’s reputation. This transparency encourages healthcare providers to address concerns quickly and improve their services.
5. Building Trust: By engaging with reviews, responding to patient concerns, and showcasing a commitment to improvement, healthcare providers can enhance trust and credibility within the community.
6. Benchmarking: Reviews allow providers to compare their performance against competitors in the same field or location, giving insights into areas where they can improve relative to others.

Regardless of which method is used, healthcare providers will receive both positive and negative feedback:

Examples of Positive Patient Feedback

• “Efficient, friendly, and informed doctor. She carefully checked my medical records and I felt confident in her expertise.”
• “The receptionist was very helpful on the phone. He was polite and took care to answer each of my questions in detail.”
• “I visited the app to book an appointment, thinking it might take a week to get one. However, to my pleasant surprise, I got an appointment the next day!”

Examples of Negative Patient Feedback

• “Avoid going to this doctor’s clinic. He didn’t seem interested in spending time on the patients at all. He just prescribes medication and goes away without any explanation!”
• “I found that I’d been billed for services I never received! I won’t be returning to this dentist as this is unacceptable.”
• “The facility was dirty and outdated, which is not what I expect from a hospital. I didn’t feel comfortable at all.”

How to Manage Patient Feedback?

Be it positive or negative, it’s important to know how to effectively manage patient feedback. The goal is to organize the collected feedback, analyze it to gain valuable insights and focus on high-priority issues before checking in with the patient again.

Here are four key steps to follow after collecting patient feedback:

1. Organize and respond to feedback

The first step to effective feedback management is organizing the patient feedback coming from various channels.

A dedicated feedback portal or a CRM system helps integrate multiple pieces of feedback in one place for easier analysis. It is also useful to categorize feedback in this step by overall sentiment (positive or negative) for a targeted approach.

The next step is to respond to the feedback based on its sentiment. While automated responses save time, it’s good practice to have a dedicated support team to contact the patients as well.

2. Analyze the feedback for useful insights

Analysis of patient feedback reveals the exact issues and opportunities that healthcare providers must focus on. With the help of AI-enhanced customer feedback analysis, organizations can speed up the process of capturing actionable insights.

One popular method here is sentiment analysis, which leverages natural language processing (NLP) to determine if the feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. Similarly, AI is useful for detecting patterns in data, such as recurring issues faced by patients concerning wait times or staff behavior.

The results of this analysis reveal priority areas to fix immediately for an enhanced patient experience.

3. Take immediate action based on the analysis

Healthcare centers should encourage their staff to take instant action on patient feedback. For example, if the analysis shows a recurring issue with wait times, the staff should optimize their workflow or look to hire more people to reduce delays for patients.

A good practice for organizations is to offer a token of apology, regardless of the exact action taken. These tokens could include a free checkup or a discount on medication. The idea is to offer a bonus that further affirms the organization’s commitment to patient satisfaction.

4. Follow up with the patient

In order to create a feedback loop, healthcare providers should follow up with the patient, informing them of the actions taken. This step builds trust as it signals to the patient that the hospital or clinic is willing to hear them out and act on their feedback.

Patient Feedback Software

When choosing the right patient feedback software to collect, organize, and analyze data, there are a few key factors to consider:

1. Multi-channel feedback collection: The software should be able to accept and collect feedback from various sources, including email, kiosk surveys, and SMS.
2. Automated survey and feedback response: The software should feature automated workflows for issuing surveys at key touchpoints in the patient journey, from check-in to discharge. Similar workflows for sending instant replies to patient feedback are also helpful.
3. Customizable surveys: Healthcare providers should invest in software that allows them to represent their brand. Personalized surveys featuring the brand’s colors and style are likely to engage more patients.
4. Analytics: The software should feature analytical tools to provide useful insights from patient feedback. For instance, it should support sentiment analysis to distinguish between positive and negative reviews.
5. Integrations: To ensure smooth patient feedback management, the software should support integration with electronic medical records (EMR) and CRM systems. By providing information like patient demographics and clinical records, these integrations enable more specific analysis.

How Pearl-Plaza Can Help Collect Patient Feedback 

Pearl-Plaza’s feedback management system lets you collect, organize, and analyze patient feedback in one place. Our integrations and award-winning technology will help you capture actionable insights into patient expectations. 

As a result, you get access to all the data you need to deliver the best possible patient experience. Schedule a demo today to see how you can get started!

What Is Customer Churn?

Customer churn occurs when someone chooses to discontinue using your products or services—or in other words, they are no longer a customer. Also known as customer attrition, customer churn gives a business owner insight into how well their business is doing over time, which is an essential part of management and growth.

More specifically, customer churn is measured and evaluated using a customer churn rate. This rate reflects the number of customers who stopped using services or products during a set period. This set period could be any relevant time frame your company is analyzing, including a year, a financial quarter, or even a single month. This churn rate is also useful in customer churn analysis. 

Types of Customer Churn

When looking at customer churn, each case can be divided into one of two categories: voluntary churn or involuntary churn. 

• Voluntary Churn: Voluntary churn occurs when a customer actively chooses to stop doing business with you. This decision is driven by dissatisfaction, a change in needs, or moving to a competitor. This may look like a customer buying from a competitor after experiencing long wait times with your organization. 
• Involuntary Churn: Involuntary churn occurs when customers stop doing business with you without intending to. This is often due to avoidable factors such as payment issues or subscription expiration. An example of this is a customer’s credit card expires, and they forget to update their payment information, leading to an unintentional cancellation of their subscription.

It is important to understand these two types of churn and how each of them can be addressed. 

Why is Customer Churn a Problem?

Customer churn is a problem that businesses should seek to solve because it directly affects revenue, reputation, and growth. 

When customers leave, your business loses the immediate sales from those customers and the potential for future revenue. Since acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing customers, you will be forced to spend more to cover the churned customers’ loss. 

Furthermore, a high churn rate can be indicative of dissatisfaction with your products or services. Dissatisfied customers who have churned can harm your brand reputation by leaving a negative review or sharing their bad experiences on social media. 

These results of customer churn will ultimately end with your business struggling to maintain sustainable growth. Long-term customer relationships are important for an organization to be able to grow, and customer churn disrupts this cycle. 

Why Is Customer Churn Important?

Churn rates examine the recurring business and value lost over certain periods. It’s important to look at customer churn to prevent customers from leaving due to problems you could potentially solve, which protects your brand, money, and future. Here are some of the more specific reasons why customer churn is important to measure:

Brand Impact

Dissatisfied customers negatively impact your brand equity, and especially in a market that is driven by the internet and influencers, it can be dangerous to your company if customers leave for a similar reason and discuss it online. 

Not only are you losing their business, but having dissatisfied customers also makes it more difficult to find new customers if the brand receives a bad reputation from dissatisfied customers. This could be news spreading by word of mouth, reviews, or social media.

Costly Consequences

Customer churn costs money, not only because you would be losing someone’s immediate purchases, but because customer loyalty is a huge asset to companies. Returning customers tend to spend more money on a brand once they have made a decision to become loyal customers, and finding and persuading new customers can be very costly and time-consuming. Ultimately, losing customers who spend a lot on your brand can affect the bottom line in the present and over time.

Future Growth

You need the loyalty of your customers to sustain your business, especially when you roll out new products or initiatives. If there aren’t people around to get excited about new products and services, companies can wear themselves thin because they focus on the basics that need to be fixed rather than healthily expanding.

Competitive Advantage

With every industry getting more and more competitive, it’s more important than ever to be at the top of your game. The last thing you want is a new competitor stealing clients or customers, especially if you can offer a solution for those customers. This competition should encourage organizations to focus not only on new business but also on retaining existing customers.

Proactive Business Strategies

Some problems arise seemingly out of nowhere and businesses must adapt as needed. Others, though, can be identified in advance by closely watching customer churn, which means you can put certain procedures in place to prevent serious losses. If you can predict customer churn after measuring it over time, you can do more to prevent it than wait until it is too late.

Why Does Customer Churn Happen?

Customer churn is more than a metric; it’s an indicator of how well your services, products, and sometimes employees are performing. Sometimes all companies go through a higher customer churn period, but it’s always important to know your potential blind spots and look for creative solutions. The most common reasons include the following scenarios.

Poor Customer Service

Whether you offer an immediate service or online resources for purchases, how people feel treated makes a big impact on whether or not they stick around. High customer churn rates may be an indicator that your employees or teams “on the field” directly interacting with customers may need more training or evaluations.

Misalignment with Customer Needs

You may have a great product, but you aren’t going after the right group of customers. Marketing is a key element of any business venture, including gathering research about who needs your products and how. It’s also possible that customers need new or improved features, so you may have the right audience, but you don’t understand their needs. Feedback is critical to understanding the needs of your customer community.

Pricing Concerns

If your prices are lightyears ahead of competitors and you don’t update your services, especially as other competitors join the market, even the most loyal of customers may switch to either a more affordable option or whoever gives them the biggest bang for their buck. 

External Factors

If you’re in a niche industry, you may not get consistent sales—a Christmas lights company isn’t going to have the same customer volumes year-round. You should consider this when calculating your churn rate and also see if there are things you can do during the off-season to bring in more customers. This could be adding products or services to make your offering more appealing outside of your primary season.

Furthermore, economic downturns or personal financial difficulties can cause customers to cut back on spending, resulting in churn. These factors do not affect your business exclusively and need to be taken into consideration when examining churn rates. 

Lack of Engagement

Most businesses need to have an online presence to properly promote and market their company and products. Without it, your brand awareness and loyalty will go down, meaning valuable old customers won’t stick around with a decent competitor actively drawing them away. Similarly, low-quality content and communications are also a turnoff for a lot of customers.

What is Customer Churn Analysis?

Customer churn analysis examines an organization’s customer churn rate to understand what caused customers to churn and how it can be improved in the future. Customer churn analysis is a critical part of improving your organization’s customer churn rate because you will gain the necessary information to create an action plan to reduce churn and improve overall customer satisfaction. 

An example of customer churn analysis is seeing why a specific subset of customers are churning. To do this, you can take the number of customers that churned and filter that data to represent just the demographic you are examining. Then, you can identify what caused these customers to churn and work on making customer experience improvements to prevent it from happening in the future. 

How To Calculate Customer Churn Rate

The customer churn rate is usually expressed using a percentage, and the higher the percentage, the more customers are leaving and the more business you’re losing. At its core, the customer churn rate is calculated by dividing the number of customers lost by the number of total customers in a set period.

Another way to look at it is by using a formula. The customer churn rate equation looks like this:

For example: let’s say a company has 500 customers at the beginning of the quarter, but by the end, it has 450 customers. That means the company lost 50 customers, and when you divide that by the total number of customers for that quarter (500), you get 0.1. Multiply that by 100 to get your percentage and there you have it: the company had a 10% churn rate for that quarter.

Depending on the service or product, it may be challenging to determine what losing a customer looks like. If your service is a monthly subscription to your product, it’s easy to determine when someone unsubscribes. However, if you have a one-time service, it’s more difficult to approximate when you’ve “lost” a customer. 

Some industries go months before services are needed, like home furniture stores or car dealerships. Those sales cycles are much broader and if they don’t see returning clients for even years, it doesn’t mean they’ve lost any value or money—that’s simply the nature of the field. Generally, you can estimate when a customer no longer uses your service by using the frequency of their purchases as a baseline.

Average Churn Rate
Ideally, everyone would have a 0% churn rate, but that’s not a realistic expectation to have. A 5%-8% churn rate is usually considered average, but it depends on the market, the industry, the size of your business, and more.

What is A Good Customer Churn Rate?

A good average churn rate across all industries is 4%, which can generally be used as a good benchmark for your business. However, customer churn rates vary widely by industry. 

For example, the median churn rate for the digital media and entertainment industry is 6.9%, while the median churn rate for the software industry is almost half of that at 3.5%. Knowing these industry-specific metrics will be much more valuable than an umbrella statistic. 

Tips for Customer Churn Rate

To predict customer churn, you need to be able to identify the things that have the biggest impact on your customer experience. This involves a combination of data analysis, customer feedback, and understanding the nuances of your customer journey. Here are some steps you can take to predict customer churn:

Know Your Key Drivers

In order to identify customer churn indicators, you need to identify the key drivers behind your customer experience. If you know that sales promotions have the biggest impact on your customer experience metrics, then a lack of sales promotions could be an early sign of churn. Other factors include a drop in engagement, lower transaction volumes, or an increase in negative feedback.

Once you know your biggest CX drivers, you can continuously monitor them to keep customers from churning. 

Identify and Address Early Warning Signs

Depending on your business, there can be many early warning signs that a customer is about to churn. For example, if they become inactive or are using your product less frequently, cancel or downgrade a subscription, or start making late payments, these are all early signs of churn. 

When customers exhibit these behaviors, it is important that they become a top priority and are re-engaged as soon as possible. 

How can Customer Churn be Prevented?

Preventing customer churn is essential to your business strategy. It starts with measuring customer churn and finding the root of the problem. Then, you work on solutions. Here is a list of ideas and tips on how to tackle customer churn.

Focus on Your Best Customers

Pay special attention to your most loyal customers and make sure they feel appreciated. Loyal customers will share your content and be a promoter for your brand without being paid if they feel appreciated.

Analyze Churn in Real-Time

Analyze churn as it occurs instead of waiting to fix the issue. The more preventative maintenance you can do, the better. In order to prevent customer churn, you need customer experience software that can accurately predict customer sentiment. Being able to detect customer sentiment will allow you to predict what actions a customer is likely to take based on their feedback. 

For example, a customer might leave an online review expressing their negative feelings about their most recent purchase. With the right tools, you can recognize the importance and flag this review as a high-priority case so that it is resolved quickly, which will result in a saved customer.

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Do a competitive analysis to see what your competitors are offering that may persuade customers to abandon your brand.  Understanding their strengths can help you address gaps in your own offerings that might be driving customers away.

Lower Customer Churn with Pearl-Plaza

Pearl-Plaza’s customer experience platform gives you all the tools you need to analyze, track, and reduce customer churn. With the ability to view customer interactions from every source in one place, measure unstructured feedback, and more, it is the perfect tool to help you connect more with your customers. To see how it can help your business, schedule a demo today!

Customer experience consulting is a specialized service that helps businesses enhance the experiences they provide to their customers across every touchpoint—from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase support.

But what does that really mean for your business? Essentially, a customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer interactions, analyzes data, and helps you craft strategies that not only meet but exceed customer expectations. It’s about making sure every interaction adds value and strengthens the customer relationship. By partnering with a customer experience consulting firm, businesses gain insights and strategies tailored to their unique challenges and opportunities, ensuring they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

What are the Benefits of having a Customer Experience Consultant?

Why should you invest in a customer experience consultant? Can’t your in-house team handle it? The truth is, while your team knows your business inside and out, a customer experience consultant brings a fresh perspective and specialized expertise that can make all the difference.

A customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer data, identifies pain points, and develops strategies that are proven to improve customer satisfaction and retention. But it’s not just about solving problems—it’s about driving growth. Customer experience consultants, like the experts at Pearl-Plaza, can help you craft experiences that turn customers into brand advocates, increasing their lifetime value and positively impacting your bottom line. By leveraging their expertise, you can avoid common pitfalls and fast-track your way to a more loyal and satisfied customer base.

What to Look for in a Customer Experience Consultant?

With so many options out there, it can be overwhelming to select a customer experience vendor with the right consulting services but asking the right questions can help you find the perfect fit.

Experience and credentials are key. Look for consultants who have years of experience and a track record of success across various industries. Questions you should ask when meeting with a CX consultant should include:

• How many clients have they worked with?
• Can they share examples of businesses they’ve worked with that are similar to yours (in terms of industry, size, or challenges)?
• What is their specific expertise within customer experience (e.g., journey mapping, voice of customer programs, etc.)?
• How do they stay updated on the latest CX trends and technologies?
• What is their process for assessing and improving customer experience?
• How do they tailor their approach to the unique needs of different businesses?
• What frameworks or tools do they use to measure customer satisfaction and other CX metrics?
• How do they leverage data and analytics to improve customer experience?
• Can they help integrate customer feedback systems with your existing platforms?
• What kind of results have they delivered? 
• What is the average customer experience ROI have their clients seen?
• Do they have experience in your industry? 

In addition to the questions, a reputable customer experience consulting firm should offer proof of their success—whether through CX case studies, testimonials, or data showcasing improved customer satisfaction and ROI.

Additionally, consider their approach to consulting customer experience. Are they focused on understanding your unique needs and challenges, or do they offer one-size-fits-all solutions? The best consultants take the time to understand your business and tailor their strategies accordingly.

What Services Should be Included in Customer Experience Consulting?

It’s not just about receiving advice—it’s about a comprehensive partnership that equips your business to succeed. A comprehensive service package should include the following:

• Onboarding and Training: Your consultant should provide a thorough onboarding process, ensuring that your team understands the tools, strategies, and processes involved in the new CX approach.
• Journey Mapping: One of the first steps in consulting customer experience is creating detailed customer journey maps. These visual representations of the customer experience help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
• Regular Meetings and Reporting: Ongoing communication is key. Expect regular check-ins and detailed reports that track progress, analyze data, and adjust strategies as needed.
• Tool Integration: Whether it’s a CRM system, customer feedback tools, or analytics software, your consultant should help integrate the necessary technology to support your CX strategy.

This is where Pearl-Plaza’s CX services shine. Our customer experience consultants are dedicated to setting you up for long-term success, offering a personalized approach that aligns with your business goals.

Working with Pearl-Plaza’s CX Experts 

At Pearl-Plaza, we believe that exceptional customer experiences are integral to business success. Our mission is to help you drive business value by being bold in the moments that matter. Our CX experts bring years of experience across diverse industries, offering best-in-class technology and comprehensive consulting to ensure you achieve outstanding results.

We don’t just provide consulting services—we become an extension of your team. Our approach is hands-on and collaborative, ensuring that we understand your unique challenges and goals. From the initial consultation to ongoing support, our customer experience consultants work closely with you to design and implement strategies that resonate with your customers, improve customer experience KPIs, and drive measurable outcomes.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your current customer experience efforts or need a complete overhaul, Pearl-Plaza’s CX experts are here to guide you every step of the way. With our support, you’ll be equipped to deliver experiences that not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations, fostering loyalty and driving sustained growth. 

Pearl-Plaza’s integrated CX approach has proven to boost customer lifetime value and accelerate bottom-line performance in just 12 months—well ahead of the industry average of 25 months. Get more insights and details with our ROI calculator. 

Final Thoughts

In today’s market, customer experience is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a critical component of business success. By investing in customer experience consulting services, you’re not just improving customer satisfaction—you’re building a foundation for long-term growth. Whether you’re looking to enhance existing strategies or start from scratch, a skilled customer experience consultant can guide you every step of the way. And when you choose Pearl-Plaza, you’re choosing a partner committed to your success. Schedule a CX demo to get started on transforming your business.