Source: Wizu
A customer’s experience is very much a qualitative and emotion based experience. So why are companies so obsessed with turning this into a quantitative measure? Whether it is Net Promoter Score, Customer Satisfaction or Customer Effort Score, companies want to track a number. Tracking a score like NPS can be used to highlight the need to improve but the number alone won’t provide the insight you need to actually make those improvements.
Many businesses solely rely on this scoring system as they simply do not have time to do a more thorough analysis of the feedback they are getting. That is where text analytics software enters and creates the potential to gather insights from thousands of open text customer comments.
What Is Text Analytics?
Text Analytics (or Text Mining) is the process of deriving meaning from text. It can find patterns and common topics which you can then take practical action based on what you learn. This can of course be done manually but this would be incredibly inefficient. Text Analytics software uses natural language algorithms to find meaning in large amounts of text.
Why Text Analytics Is Important?
Any business that wants to provide a superior customer experience needs to utilise text analytics for mining voice of the customer feedback and complaints. If you are not regularly assessing the qualitative data of what people like or don’t like about your service then you will struggle to deliver that superior experience.
Text analytics software can turn the unstructured thoughts of your customers into more structured data that can be utilised by a business. Without text analytics, it would take a huge amount of time and resources to analyse and classify this data, never mind start to detect and score emotion sentiment.
Text analytics is truly capturing the voice of the customer, finally allowing respondents to provide feedback on their terms in their own voice, rather than simply selecting from a range of pre-set options.
Conversational Surveys and Text Analytics
One of the advantages of utilising conversational surveys, such as Wizu, to gather your customer feedback is that you can uncover a deeper insight from your respondents. This makes text analytics even more vital as you are now capturing more unstructured data and finding out more ways you can improve your business. Wizu text analytics looks at all your unstructured data and does the hard work for you. Picking out the common topics that are being discussed and scoring every comment in terms of sentiment. This allows you to filter out the areas that have the biggest positive or negative areas on the customer experience or pick out the topics that are being mentioned the most.
Real time artificial intelligence also allows you route surveys down more relevant paths or assign issues to relevant departments in your business, giving you the opportunity to deal with detractors instantly and provide positive outcomes.
Take a hotel survey scenario as an example and when providing answers about their experience, respondents might talk about things like service, food, cleanliness, bed comfort or any combination of things. The sentiment behind each of those things could be negative, positive or a combination. For example, a customer might state “The food was great but the waiter was rude”.
Here text analytics can work its magic by being able to categorize comments into topics and assigning sentiment to each topic. The hotel can now analyze customer satisfaction trends and understand the root causes for loyalty or dissatisfaction.
Using Text Analytics To Improve Customer Experience
So now we know what text analytics is and why it is important, so how exactly can it be used to improve the customer experience? To really be successful you need to go beyond simply listening and measuring and start to actually respond to customers, take action and deliver real insights across your organization. Unearthing and categorizing all this data is all well and good but the question becomes what are you going to do with it? There a number of ways you can take this data and start to utilise is.
Take Instant Action
Real time AI and text analytics within a conversational survey gives you the unique opportunity to take immediate action and close the loop with your customers. You can show them their feedback has been received and taken into account or even go a step further and provide a resolution to common issues. This can allow you to deal with detractors instantly and perhaps even convert them to a promoter.
Generate Follow Up Actions
For those issues that can’t be resolved instantly you can use the sentiment and topic analysis being done through text analytics to categorize issues and generate relevant actions. Wizu allows you to associate people or departments with topics meaning you can reference them to the customer and automate an email to be sent to both the respondent and the member of staff, ensuring action is being taken immediately. This helps customers feel their issues are important and that they will be dealt with. Compare this to a standard survey form where they might enter a complaint and get nothing back at all. This helps operationalise your data to integrate it into every day employee workflows, ensuring that customer experience is integral to your company’s agenda.
Analyze Trends Over Time
By aggregating the data by things such as customer segment, demographics, topic etc you can start to get an overall picture of the main issues that your customers face. This helps you to make long-term business decisions, identifying common issues that have the biggest negative impact on the customer experience.
Track Emotions
Text analytics can analyze emotions allowing you to go beyond metrics and keyword topics and start to understand the emotional experience of your customers. Tracking emotional sentiment over time alongside topic categorization, helps you monitor how changes are impacting specific areas of your business and the correlation this has with your overall satisfaction metrics.
Set Priorities
By having visualisation of not only the amount of mentions certain complaints are getting but also the emotional impact of these areas, you can start to prioritise these issues in order to deal with them in a way that will have maximum positive impact. This can also be used to determine new features that are being requested in order to delight your customers even more.
Summary
Conversational surveys are the next evolution in customer feedback but in order to be successful it is vital that organisations know how to collate and act on this data. Text analytics is integral to this approach. Through categorising and analysing your unstructured data you can start to turn your qualitative data into quantitative data and turn feedback into actionable insight.
If you would like to find out more about Wizu conversational surveys and our advanced text analytics reporting then get in touch with us to arrange an online demo today.
