In 2020, our environment has become increasingly unpredictable. It has been marked by a pandemic, technological advances, political and economical uncertainty, as well as environmental concerns. All of these factors have had an impact on how customers make decisions and what they deem a necessity or a luxury.

During the past year, we have seen NPS trends that would normally take 10 years to evolve, happen in a space of a few months. Companies that are not tracking customer sentiment, have no way of knowing whether these changes are permanent or short lived. Hence, the ability to extract how customers feel, what they value right now as well as being able to act on that information is no longer a ‘nice to have’ but a ‘must have.’ That’s where actionable CX insights come in.

What makes a good quality CX insights?

CX insights are the human element of big data. Customer insights allow brands to:

• Better understand customers, their core priorities, motivations, wants and the drivers of decisions to purchase.
• Guide business decisions, identify and prioritise what is important within the business and what changes will have the largest impact on revenue.
• Evaluate performance of their products, services, projects and determine the ROI.

A good quality insight consists of three main attributes:

• Novelty: The piece of information uncovered is new and can quantify an important hypothesis that will drive significant revenue.
• Actionability: An action can be made off the back of a good insight; whether it be a quick fix, a recommendation, or a confirmation/validation to improve an issue.
• Measurability: The ability to measure the level of impact an insight has by estimating the ROI of the action taken.

How to find insights that are meaningful and actionable?

In order to find insights that are actionable and meaningful, three simple rules can be followed:

1. Capturing quality data:

To do this you need to be asking your customers the right kind of questions. Avoid asking questions that are leading or about a specific part of the customer journey to ensure you capture a holistic view. Consider at which touchpoints of the journey the questions are aimed. Is it post delivery? Is it at checkout? This will determine what kind of responses you’ll get. Enrich the data by having a variety of data sources and variables as this will enable you to segment data in interesting ways to get deeper insights.

2. Analysis of data:

This is where you would categorize your data into common themes. Are there issues or topics customers are continuously talking about? Is there a common trend over time? Can the topics be bucketed into broader categories? Answering all of these questions will create a base for your data segmentation and grouping of visitors with common attributes in order to dig deeper.

3. Finding a narrative:

Make sure the insights are relevant to a specific department, client or business objective. Contextualize the data with historical knowledge to understand the wider context of the insight in order for it to be a useful and actionable piece of information. Lastly and most importantly, never separate insights from commercial metrics.

What steps to follow to find and action insights?

If you are unsure about how to start looking for an insight, try to break it down into these simple steps:

Step 1: Find a trend

Look at the top level overview of the data you have. The best way to do that is to look at your data over time. That way you can spot any decrease or increase in trends and any dips or peaks at specific times.

Step 2: Find commonalities

Once you've found your point of action, identify the commonalities. Drill down to establish what it is customers are specifically talking about. To do that break down the feedback and bucketed them into categorised and then into common themes. This will give you a better idea of what the main topic is and will help you identify the main pain points.

Step 3: Drill down to a specific pain point

Start looking at the commonly used phrases and words to understand what customers are really saying about that theme. Drilling down on the pain point means you can determine what action can be taken to fix the issue.

Step 4: Use Text Analytics

Use AI to speed up the insight process to find out what your customers think and feel about their experiences. Try with a comment below:

Step 5: Apply the insight

There are three main ways in which you can apply insights:

• Action to fix an issue: This is the way in which most companies like to use insights. This is where you identify quick wins such as errors or bugs.
• Assessment of business strategy: Used to determine where to allocate resources, if the current strategy is working and measure the success of ongoing projects.
• Validate hypothesis: This insight doesn't necessarily lead to an action but is useful for validating an assumption or a hypothesis.

Whatever approach you choose, you need to remember that actionable insights must be relevant to the stakeholders, must have a narrative so your business can truly understand customers' pain points, and have the business value attributed to them.

For more information on this topic, check out the ‘Gaining Actionable CX Insights’ webinar.