Hi Alyona, tell us about yourself, your background?
My background is in research. I have a PhD in Natural Language Processing. But I’m not an academic. I’ve always been passionate about applying my skills to solve real-world problems.
Five years ago, I co-founded Thematic. We help companies improve customer experience through AI-powered customer feedback analysis.
We make it easy to find insights in unstructured data companies already have, e.g., surveys, reviews, chat logs, and support tickets.
Online commerce was booming in 2020, and so did consumer reviews. – How can brands better utilize this data to improve their customers’ experience?
Customer feedback is critical to understand what’s driving your customers’ happiness. We call it “impact.” Do you use a metric like CSAT or NPS to measure your customer experience? If yes, you can use feedback to understand what impacts this metric and take actions to improve it.
For example, imagine 10% of your customers are complaining about delivery delays. What’s the CSAT of these 10% of customers?
Two companies can have 10% of late delivery issues, but the impact of this can be different because of other things the company does. One company might update customers along the way about the delays. Another company might not have this process in place yet.
What will happen to CSAT if you (hypothetically) remove customer feedback about delivery delays? Will it improve by 5 or 10 points or stay the same? That’s the impact of this particular issue. What about other issues customers are mentioning?
To decide what to focus on next to improve customer experience, you can use feedback in this way.
This translates to other metrics as well, such as employee experience and call center volume.
What is one element that must always be considered when working on a CXM (customer experience management) strategy?
One element to consider is all sources of feedback you already have. Are you getting a complete picture of your customer? Many companies focus on surveys or reviews only. But only certain types of people tend to fill these out.
The good news, most companies already have feedback spread throughout the organization. Make sure to include this feedback as well. For example, do you have a place where you log all support issues? Sometimes feedback is mixed with other operational text, e.g., emails or sales notes. You will need to improve this process so that you can work with this data more easily.
Do you think personalization and customer-centricity are going to become increasingly more relevant in the coming year? How so?
Absolutely! It’s becoming easier to buy solutions and products from anywhere around the world. This means that the competition is also increasing. It’s fierce now, and it will become even more fierce!
Companies that are more customer-centric will build a stronger connection with their customers. They are more likely to win in the long run.
What are some of the ways companies can strive to eliminate the CX Gap?
First, you need to understand this gap. Based on customer feedback, what’s the gap between what the company provides and what customers think about it.
For example, a company might think that their product is of great value for the price. But do customers actually comment on this in their feedback? Which customers do and which don’t? What can we do about closing this gap? We can either improve the pricing or focus on getting more of the types of customers who value the product.
Customer feedback analysis is not only necessary to find this insight but also to track progress as you are working on improving it.
