Here at Chattermill, we have the pleasure of working with market-leading companies such as Zappos, Skyscanner, Transferwise and many more. This being the case, we’re uniquely placed to identify key behaviours that enable companies to provide unrivalled customer experience across multiple industries.

So what’s the key to success?

1 - Customer Experience Analytics

Exceptional companies know that you can’t build great products without truly understanding the voice of the customer. It’s vital you have the technology and text analytics systems capable of analysing customer feedback at scale. If you’re not already, you should be collecting customer feedback and avoiding asking too many questions in your customer surveys.

Why? Customer feedback holds a considerable amount of customer opinion and sentiment on topics impacting their experience (find out the reason behind this here). The best way of learning is to ask customers to tell you what is essential in their own words. The difficulty with collecting customer feedback is that it’s unstructured data, and this type of data is hard to analyse. This makes having a Customer Experience analytics platform in place essential to make the customer feedback you collect actionable.

Thanks to advances in powerful text analytics, we can now unlock this data, helping you to understand everything relating to your customer’s experience and generate business insights across their journey.

However, picking the right tool is just as important.

When it comes to rapidly advancing technology, it’s key to partner with the right organisations which focus on applying cutting edge technology in order to get access to the latest developments.

Some of the companies mentioned above have the best engineering teams in their industries, but even the best teams can have so many projects and moving pieces internally meaning text analytics development can be left as an unprioritised side project as other pressing items make it onto the roadmap instead.

When a company does prioritise work on text analytics projects, a common pitfall I’ve seen is said project lacking any deliverables or real output objectives, wasting both time and money. The leading companies understand the importance of partnering with specialists who sit at the bleeding edge of CX technology to achieve their end goal.

Be confident of the accuracy of your analytics system.

Another pitfall some of our clients have experienced before partnering with Chattermill is relying on outdated rule based technology that simply isn’t up to scratch in the modern era of CX analytics.

A rule-based system finds it challenging to analyse sentiment in sentences accurately which usually means you’re not in touch with your customer’s emotions and how they feel about their experiences. Second, it’s impossible to create enough rules to capture the myriad of ways people discuss certain concepts.

A rule-based system will struggle to pick out the colloquialisms and abbreviations that customers use to describe and express their experiences with your brand. As a consequence, you can end up missing key insights and worse, make decisions off inaccurate data that doesn’t reflect the reality of what the customer wants. This is not only an expensive mistake in terms of sunk time, but could end up having a fatal effect on a business.

2 - Understand Segmentation

Once you have the ability to analyse customer feedback at scale through picking the right technology partner, you should be able to easily identify the key drivers behind customer sentiment. However, there is still much more to be considered.

The best companies know the importance of understanding how the different segments of their customer base think and behave. For example, Chattermill makes it easy to run a query to uncover which areas of the customer journey customers feel most negative or positive about. This process, however, is futile if you are not applying segmentation.

Take the chart above for instance; not only do these customer segments feel completely different about some very prominent parts of the customer journey, some of the drivers displayed in the chart above are more important to focus on than others, depending on what the objectives of your team are.

Additionally, segmentation adds a lot of context to data. As we see here in this chart, churn rate due to the negative customer service experience of Premium customers is arguably more of a problem than negative customer service experience of Freemium customers.

On the flip side, information is likely to be much more important to Freemium customers as opposed to Premium customers, with conversion to paid customers in mind here.

This brings me to my next point:

3 - Give access to all

Companies delivering the best modern-day CX care deeply about all employees having access to the Voice of the Customer.

At Chattermill, we’ve noticed that the more employees who have access to Voice of the Customer the higher the company-wide motivation to improve CX. This is because employees can access insights and can track and measure the fruits of their labour, specific to their role or function. We’ve noticed first-hand how Chattermill has helped build a customer centric culture across organisations.

Use of a customer analytics platform also acts as an excellent tool for the employee to brainstorm new ideas digging into customer feedback and actionable insights that can make a difference. Some of our most forward-thinking clients have granted access to Chattermill to their entire team so that anyone in the company can easily acquire visibility of the sentiment and text analysis we have applied to a customer verbatim.

Even in cases where companies which choose not to roll out company-wide access, dedicated junior team members are able to quickly and easily extract data insights without having to be a trained CX expert.

For example, when Chattermill pushes classified customer data back to a company’s data warehouse, an analyst with no prior knowledge of Chattermill can quickly run queries that displays the sentiment of a group of customers meeting a specific criteria. Given that this query would be run in their database, it means they can also include a plethora of personally identifiable variables within their queries (e.g. — “show me the 10 top most negative topics of customers based in London, aged 21–25 years of age who have spent over £200 in the last six months”).

4 - Find a single source of truth

If you’ve made these steps, you and your colleagues company-wide should now be able to easily see what customers think and feel about your brand, product and the customer experience. This is great, although potentially brings a new set of (solvable) problems around metric consistency — in other words, what metrics are you using to monitor customer sentiment?

Whether you decide to use NPS or Chattermill’s very own Net Sentiment, everyone across your company not least your customer-facing teams need to be aligned, using the same metric.

The reason for this is that in order to drive change and enhance customer experience it’s likely you’ll need to work collaboratively with other teams. You will need to be able to explain to the rest of the business the relative impact of solving a problem or making a change to the customer experience in a way that is understandable to multiple stakeholders. For your product managers and engineers it makes their prioritisation far easier and increases their impact on the success of the company if they are able to connect a task to the effect on the company’s NPS score.

Which is related to my last point:

5 - Find the monetary value behind your single source of truth

Once you have your single source of truth, you are in a fantastic place. You now know in fairly certain terms what needs to be done to give your customers the best experience possible. In addition to this you can explain to your colleagues in the product team and others what their exact impact will be on NPS if they prioritise fixing a specific problem.

Metrics such as NPS, CSAT and Net Sentiment are incredibly important and familiar to those of us who work in customer-facing or focused roles, but it’s worth remembering that may not be the case for people who don’t work in such functions. That said, everyone understands the cost of doing or not doing something.

The most successful companies which offer an expert level of customer experience know exactly what the difference of one NPS point means in terms of dollars, pounds or euros. Having this knowledge is incredibly powerful as it allows you to explain to your entire company how much money a particular issue is costing them. Without a doubt, this is the quickest and most effective way to drive change and enhance customer experience within your company.

In Conclusion

For your organisation to succeed in a world where Customer Experience is more important than ever, employees need to take advantage of the latest technology so they can delight customers and build great products.

Here’s a recap of the lessons your team can start capitalising on today: