6 Powerful Ways Experience Analytics Can Help Your Business Now

Discover how leading companies stay one step ahead with an Experience Analytics Platform that uncovers the hidden stories in CX data. From omnichannel optimization to product experiences and competitive intelligence, new AI-driven insights are fueling the next wave of CX strategies.

Learn how those insights deliver greater efficiencies and help improve the moments impacting customer loyalty and retention the most.

Table of contents

Boost Your Customer Retention Rates
Improve Product Experiences for Customers
Understand the Impact of Business Operation Changes
Use Competitive Intelligence to Your Advantage
Discover Hidden Insights in Your Data That Can Impact Customer Loyalty
Gain Insights Across the Entire Customer Journey
Apply the Power of Experience Analytics to Your Business

Discover how to rapidly adapt to your customers’ expectations with fast data insights.

Due to increasing competition, shifting consumer expectations, and an uptick in digital channels and  cross-channel usage, businesses are under enormous pressure to learn and adapt from the data and signals they collect on their customers. And the COVID-19 pandemic has only further heightened this pressure.

Consumers are brand and channel switching in ways that we have historically not seen. According to McKinsey & Company, 75% of consumers have tried a new shopping behavior since the COVID-19 pandemic began. And nearly one-third of U.S. consumers say they will increase their long-term use of digital channels because of the COVID-19 pandemic—with 73% indicating that the online experience they receive today will impact their future purchasing behavior.

In the past, historical data or voice-of-customer surveys were enough for brands to understand the customer experience—and what their customers wanted most. But that is no longer the case.

“A rear-view mirror look at your data used to be representative of what was going on with your customers. When you look at the environment we’re living in today, customer expectations are pivoting on a dime, and businesses must be able to change with those expectations—and know-how customers are reacting to the changes they’re making,” notes Michelle Turner, VP of Product Strategy, at Stratifyd.

Experience analytics can help your business understand and improve the customer experience, but just having the data isn’t enough.

Many companies remain data-rich, but insight poor.

Often, this is because businesses lack two critical capabilities:

• The ability to bring data together across channels to help understand the customer experience at each step of the customer journey.
• The ability to uncover and respond to insights in near real-time.

We’ll show you why these capabilities are crucial by exploring six ways they’ve helped businesses in multiple industries improve the customer experience now—and how they can help you do the same.

40% OF CONSUMERS HAVE TRIED NEW BRANDS OR RETAILERS IN 2020

Boost Your Customer Retention Rates

It’s no secret that retaining customers costs much less than finding new ones. But with consumers feeling less loyal since the changes of 2020 began, as a business you now have to try even harder to keep customers returning. In a New Voice Media survey, 39% of customers said they’d never again go back to a company they were dissatisfied with.

With customers having so many choices about whom to do business with today, you get only one or maybe two chances to get it right. To move the odds of getting it right in your favor, you can use predictive analytics to help.

By predicting when a customer might churn, your company can proactively step in to solve the problem— eliminating the issue before it ever escalates to your customer leaving.

Here’s a look at how one company we worked with applied this strategy.

Proactive outreach creates happier customers

Contact Energy, which serves more than half a million homes and businesses in New Zealand, wanted to improve the customer experience to increase loyalty and reduce customer churn. To determine future churn risk, they started by applying predictive modeling to analyze historical data to identify the words used in reviews by customers who switched to another company. Analysts could then look for the same indicators in new data sets.

Now, Contact Energy can quickly identify customers likely to churn and proactively address these customers’ concerns before they escalate further. As a result of using this predictive analytics strategy, the company has seen a reduction of CX-related complaints by 58% and a reduction in monthly unrecoverable revenue by over 90%.

When you can proactively change your business based on insights about what your customers want or don’t want, your customers will be more satisfied and more loyal.

Predictive analytics can be a powerful tool in understanding your customers.

Improve Product Experiences for Customers

Product failure rates are high. Every year, over 30,000 new products are introduced, and according to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, 95% of those products fail.

But what if you could avoid product failure by getting insights directly from your customers about what features of your product they like or how they perceive your product compared to competing products? Experience analytics can provide you with these types of insights—and more.

In our work with one pharmaceutical company, they were able to gather product intelligence that helped them fix an issue that, while not directly related to their product, impacted the customer experience when using the product.

Experience analytics highlight the need for better product instructions

A pharmaceutical company that sold a self-administered drug discovered that the term “injection site” was strongly associated with negative customer sentiment.

In digging deeper into the problem, the company discovered that prescribing doctors weren’t providing in-office demonstrations of how to self-administer the medication properly. In turn, patients were resorting to video tutorials and independent online resources to learn how to deliver the injections, often resulting in pain or irritation at the injection site.

Once the company had this insight, they quickly took steps to make information more readily available to patients about how to properly inject their medication. They provided more comprehensive resources online and accompanying the medicine, and they also worked with doctors to ensure they were prioritizing teaching patients how to properly self-administer doses of the drug.

By sifting through unstructured data like customer reviews, social media, and voice and chat data, your business can uncover frequent keywords or emerging topics and pair those with human analysis (a combination we call “augmented intelligence”) to discover important product intelligence. Then, using these insights, you can make changes to your product to make it or the experience surrounding your product better for your customers.

Understand the Impact of Business Operation Changes

Since the coronavirus pandemic erupted, companies have had to make rapid changes to their business operations—closing stores, moving all services online, and having employees work remotely. McKinsey & Company reports that the speed with which respondents have made COVID-19-related changes is 20 to 25 times faster than expected.

In the case of shifting to remote work, companies moved 40 times more quickly than they thought possible before the pandemic.

While the pandemic has forced businesses to rapidly adapt, it’s also forced customers to adapt in response to these business changes. Not surprisingly, many businesses have been left wondering exactly how their customers feel about the changes they’ve had to make. To answer that question, one company we worked with dug into their call data.

Is a remote work environment going to work?

With many businesses eliminating in-person interactions with customers, 92% of contact centers have reported an increase in interactions during the pandemic with 62% reporting an increase in digital interactions and 57% reporting an increase in phone calls.

As a result, many businesses have been concerned with how an increase in call center demand combined with having to move all agents to a work-from-home environment has impacted the customer experience. Executives at one company we worked with were especially concerned about the quality of service and whether customers might be frustrated by noise in the background or have a harder time hearing when agents weren’t in a controlled and quiet environment.

Using the Stratifyd platform to rapidly sift through their call data, the business discovered that the top phrases customers were using were “Are you safe?” and “Stay safe.” There were very few references to background noise or having a hard time hearing. For the small group of agents who were identified as being difficult for customers to understand, the company was able to determine that a lack of bandwidth in the agents’ personal internet plans was the issue. The company was then able to quickly resolve this issue by covering the cost for these agents to upgrade their internet plans.

By not having to wait for survey feedback or detailed analysis because they had the tools to dig deep on timely and emerging topics in real-time, this company was able to determine very early on how the business changes they’d made were impacting their customers— and what their customers cared about most—and then respond in real-time.

Use Competitive Intelligence to Your Advantage

With 90% of businesses indicating that their industry has become more competitive in the past three years and 48% saying it has become much more competitive, competitive intelligence is becoming a critical asset for almost any business.

One way to gain competitive intelligence is to track reviews—yours and your competitors’—over time and analyze those for positive/negative comments or keywords. You can also benchmark your reviews against your competitors or use the intelligence to get to the root cause of an issue, such as why is a competitor’s service so much better? Having this type of intelligence can be especially helpful when launching a new service or business process, as our customer recently discovered.

Customers want their food faster

A quick-serve restaurant chain, which had built its reputation around the freshness of its food, struggled with moving to take-out-only service due to COVID-19. Their initial approach had been to prioritize freshness above all else, which meant they waited to make the order until customers arrived to pick up the order. This also meant that customers who had pre-ordered still had to wait to get their food—sometimes even longer than those who just showed up at the drive-thru.

Sifting through customer reviews, the company discovered something they hadn’t expected: their customers were upset by having to wait for their food and would rather go to their competitors to get fast service.

By knowing that speed was more important than freshness, the company was able to make a rapid adjustment in their processes so that when customers ordered their food in advance, they selected a specific pickup time. This allowed the restaurant to have the food ready (i.e., deliver fast service) when customers arrived, while still allowing them to have a competitive edge because their food was also freshly made and not sitting under heat lamps.

Without this critical competitive intelligence, the restaurant risked losing many of its loyal customers— and possibly not just throughout the pandemic, but for good. But by being able to not only mine public information in real-time but also respond to it, they have been able to retain their customers and their competitive edge.

Discover Hidden Insights in Your Data That Can Impact Customer Loyalty

While companies have a lot of data, getting insights from that data is often a challenge. This is especially true for unstructured or dark data such as call recordings, chat logs, social media posts, and other data that isn’t organized in a predefined manner. The majority (55%) of company data is considered unstructured or dark data. What’s more, 85% of companies say their data remains unusable because they have no tool to capture or analyze that data.

This is a huge missed opportunity for companies whose unstructured data could reveal a plethora of new insights if they knew how to mine their customer data better. And with the right analytical tools, you can go even deeper by uncovering emerging topics that may not currently be the most prevalent—those that could become more urgent if you don’t take action on them.

For Contact Energy, digging into their unstructured data has helped them uncover insights about their processes that they never knew were impacting the customer experience.

Solving the mystery of low net promoter scores

Contact Energy’s net promoter scores (NPS) were low, but the company had no idea why. To try to solve the puzzle, they began mining their experience analytics data—the more than 1 million calls a year they receive. And through this process, they discovered something they would never have discovered otherwise. The vast majority of negative NPS were being generated because call details and account numbers were not auto-populating in their mobile app.

“Stratifyd brought to the surface … a bit of a hidden story that we hadn’t noticed before. And we took instant action.” – James Tribe, Market Insight Leader, Contact Energy

As a result of identifying and fixing the issue, Contact Energy saw their employee NPS, which is directly connected to their customer NPS, go from a -47 four years ago to around 30 currently, to reach a 75 NPS.

With a robust experience analytics platform, not only can you look for reasons that something in the customer experience isn’t working—as Contact Energy did—but you can also simply look for emerging topics. And when you examine those emerging topics, as was the case with the quick-serve restaurant, you can uncover insights you weren’t even looking for. By identifying and responding to them, those insights can have a tremendous impact on your business and the customer experience.

Gain Insights Across the Entire Customer Journey

The average customer now uses 10 different channels to communicate with brands, making it much more difficult for businesses to utilize all their customer data and much more difficult to tie together how the experience on one channel impacts other channels.

When your business can analyze customer data across all channels, you’ll not only have a much more holistic view of the customer journey but also be able to make adjustments that ensure a seamless experience across all channels, which is exactly what one bank we worked with did.

Website and mobile app issues drive call volumes—and customer frustration— even higher

When COVID-19 first hit the U.S., banks saw historically high call volumes. For one bank, customers who couldn’t get through to the call center started trying to use the bank’s website and mobile app. However, when these customers couldn’t remember their username or password, they found they had to call in to get it reset— which drove, even more, calls to the bank’s contact center and left customers frustrated.

Fortunately, the company was able to catch the issue in the first week that it occurred by noticing a spike in customers mentioning “login issues” incall, chat, and review data. They were then able to update their login page to direct customers to a specific number that would take them straight to the team that could reset their credentials.

In the omnichannel world in which both customers and businesses live today, the experience on one channel can have a significant impact on another channel. To ensure you’re delivering an exceptional experience all the time to your customers, you need the ability to identify and resolve issues across all your channels.

Apply the Power of Experience Analytics to Your Business

In today’s fast-paced world, the reality is that you need to be able to respond to customer feedback immediately—not in days or weeks.

This means that to get the most value from your customer data, you need to get insights in real-time. And you need to be able to gather and analyze those insights across multiple channels—like call, chat, and social media—to have a holistic view of the customer experience.

An analytics platform that can leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to derive advanced text analytics and identify predictive insights is critical to enabling this real-time access to the customer analytic insights you need to take the pulse of the customer experience.

Additionally, to truly maximize the power and return of investment of an experience analytics platform, you want to ensure that every business user has access to the data and insights—without needing a degree in data science—and that the platform can easily connect to your critical systems, such as your BI solution or your CRM.

Finally, it’s important to realize that quickly uncovering critical insights isn’t only about how powerful the AI and machine learning technologies in the platform are (although, that is important). But it’s also about how you combine those capabilities to surface trends and patterns with human intelligence to draw insights from those trends (i.e., how you can augment the intelligence of the platform). Having the ability to analyze customer conversations is critical to this process of combining AI and human intelligence, but so is having an experienced analytics vendor that will work closely with you to develop the best use cases for your unique business challenges.

Customer sentiment and behaviors are constantly changing based on new technology, current events, and the experience your competitors provide. If your business wants to keep your customers happy and loyal, you need to know how customer sentiment is trending in real-time. And you must be able to respond to that customer feedback in near real-time to ensure you’re delivering an exceptional customer experience every time at every moment on every channel.

Source: Stratifyd