This is an excerpt from my recent article on applying the Art of Conversation - the listening approach, to understand and better #customerexperience
We have been seeing well-constructed posts in the digital media about Businesses investing heavily on CRM analytics for Customer Experience Management and meeting with limited success. I cannot disagree with this central premise that your own internal CRM data analytics will meet with limited success.
A Reality Check
The weakness lies in the way many businesses live with the common myth that Big Data is all about volume and velocity and that, real-time statistics on both their internal and external data in the form of a dashboard shall keep the business running. Add-on to this is the influx by the generic social media marketers on providing automated "metrics" and sentiment analysis, with whom a business engage at a cost and identifies the outcome to be either poor or useless. These businesses also engage more people to get to a random sample for insights by sifting through the BigData, which tends to make it more expensive and slower, often prohibitively expensive and often too slow. And when businesses do get into Big Social data analysis, they end up with the facts that it is hard to attribute comments to specific groups, eg: countries, regions, age and gender.
Then you would ask, "How do we turn it around. What in BigData and analytics, do we need to focus on for business value-adds?" The weakness is in the way we do analytics, we ask! Exactly! Ask the customer through your Customer Surveys about your service and product and a fraction of your customers reply back on these surveys. And the analysis would typically end at NPS or CSAT score from such surveys or an automated sentiment analysis on the customer feedback. And the same gets repeated on the Social media data also, where focus is on to understand good and bad around brand sentiments and statistics, thereby missing out on the finer details.
What I believe...
Here I have a slightly different perspective to what has been shared above to ensure business value – many a times tangible, and at times, intangible. The art of conversation mining is about listening research. It lets a business listen to what people talk about and share with regard to your brand, products or services – internally through your agent/customer interaction CRM logs as well as on the Big Social media, where information is being shared with your existing customers as well as your future prospects. Facebook comments and Twitter activity by virtue of their broadcasting nature skew our analysis to negative and positive. But your own Product/user forums and other message boards, blogs and product/service review sites provides the business with both the anonymous and unconstrained discussions people have with each other. In fact, the beauty of such data is that you can understand the target audience of your product/service in different mindsets, with motivational, emphasis or intention related psychographic segmentation correlated with Topics extracted from the customer conversation around your brand, Support, Product/service, competition and the related contextual customer mood/sentiment.
Such conversation analysis on Big Social data and the universe of micro segmentation opportunities it exposes, ensure tangible and intangible business value. This ensures proactive product/Customer eXperience management by business by looking ahead on what needs to be done, rather than rely on reactive strategies. This combined with your own internal customer data that reflects the interests of world at scale.
Age of the customer is not on its onset and neither is it going away, whether you are a B2C or a B2B business. Stay tuned for more on #customervalue through better #customerexperience
