Loyalty 360 had the opportunity to hear from Sid Banerjee, a customer experience pioneer and CEO of Clarabridge and Sidra Berman, VP of Product Marketing. We asked Sid and Sidra to share insights on marketplace trends, loyalty, and customer satisfaction philosophies.
Loyalty 360: Tell us first a bit about yourself and your history in loyalty marketing …
Sid Banerjee: I’m a founder of Clarabridge, a leading provider of text and sentiment analytics solutions. Our customers use Clarabridge products to collect, transform, analyze, and use customer generated feedback (surveys, call center transcripts, social media content, emails, chats) to identify drivers of loyalty, satisfaction, and profitability. Prior to Clarabridge, I founded a business intelligence (BI) services firm, worked for many years with a leading BI software vendor, and have engaged with hundreds of customers in the application of analytics to a wide variety of marketing, promotional planning, supply chain, and CRM business areas.
Sidra Berman: Early in my career, I worked for GE where listening to and understanding the Voice of the Customer (VOC) was core to every aspect of the company culture. In fact, I earned my Green Belt (Six Sigma) certification on project that incorporated VOC into the company’s leading edge e-commerce systems—and I’ve taken that philosophy with me to other organizations. Similar to GE, Clarabridge truly lives and breathes VOC – and enables our customers to do the same with industry-leading text and sentiment analytics.
L360: What is your customer loyalty philosophy?
Banerjee: We believe that customer loyalty begins with actively and continually listening to your customers through every channel they use (online, surveys, calls, chat, etc), transforming that feedback (much of which is unstructured data and requires text and sentiment analytics) into quantifiable, trackable insights, and correlating that feedback using a range of analytic techniques to determine drivers of loyalty and satisfaction (and also to determine drivers of churn and dissatisfaction). The key to creating loyalty is a program that incorporates all sources and types of feedback, is able to scale to address enormous volumes of data from ever more sources, and can provide needed insights to all business stakeholders who can create loyalty, whether in sales, marketing, support, or product development, to achieve holistic loyalty results.
Berman: In over 15+ years of marketing, I’ve learned that customers are usually smarter than the organizations in business to serve them. Therefore listening to, understanding, engaging, and acting on customer needs is core to a business’ success. Customers tell organizations all of the time what they need, what they want to purchase, how you can serve them better, and how you can turn them into a loyal customer—you just need to listen and consistently act on it.
L360: What is your favorite loyalty or engagement trend (or tool) in the marketplace today and why?
Banerjee: I may be a bit biased, but I’m a big fan of the Clarabridge Enterprise offering – a software solution that connects to an expansive range of internal (CRM, call center, email) and external (survey platforms, hosted CRM, review sites, communities, twitter, Facebook) content sources and produces advanced text and sentiment analyses that links product and service drivers of customer satisfaction, correlates structured data (such as NPS, customer profitability, customer loyalty status) to product and service experiences, and ultimately helps companies answer important questions such as “what product features, or service experiences, create loyalty? Which create churn? What issues are rapidly developing that create positive or negative loyalty across product areas, service areas, or customer segments? And ultimately, how should I engage with my customers to ensure that they are satisfied, loyal, and profitable?
Berman: I’m going to have to agree with my CEO on this one. The key to customer loyalty is listening to all of your customers through whatever channel they leverage to communicate with you. And customers love to – and actively do – give feedback. The challenge today is to make sense of it all. Twenty or thirty years ago, listening to customers was much easier because there were fewer channels (postal mail, phone). In today’s world, it’s much more complicated because there is so much feedback—literally millions of pieces of data. The beauty of the Clarabridge solution is that we make it possible for businesses to process, understand and act on of all of that feedback—so organizations can be more successful, profitable and customer-centric.
L360: What would you say is the most common marketer mistake in CEM efforts today and why is this occurring?
Banerjee: Customer Experience Management is not a product, or a report, it is a process and a programmatic commitment that companies must make to achieve sustainable results. Often companies will try to “do” CEM by buying a range of customer engagement, customer experience collection, or social media analysis tools, but a solely tool-centric approach to CEM won’t create better customer experiences. The best approaches begin with identify key content areas that can provide customer insights, mapping customer experience insights, through tools, to insights and findings, and creating an organization that is empowered to recommend and implement changes (to products, to services, to marketing and support programs) to ensure that negative drivers are eliminated and positive drivers to loyalty are amplified throughout an organization.
Berman: There are two common mistakes: treating CEM as a one-time project and collecting & understanding VOC on a department-by-department basis instead of enterprise-wide. Individuals give feedback on each aspect of their interaction with your organization: product, service, distribution method/channel, etc. However when companies look at customer feedback, it’s usually on an ad-hoc, department-by-department basis. Every department wants answers to specific questions like what features to add, but no one is looking holistically at the entire customer experience from beginning to end. When it comes to CEM, it’s critical to make it an on-going investment and not a one-time event. And once you start listening to and engaging with your customers, they will be disappointed and frustrated if you stop interacting when “the” specific question is answered. Engaging and then disconnecting with your customers is worse than never engaging with them at all.
L360: How do you define customer satisfaction? Do you believe there is a key measure of customer satisfaction, any one metric that stands out above all others?
Berman: Customer satisfaction is about whether a particular product, service, interaction or combination thereof met or exceeded customer expectations. This can be based on a one-time experience (did you have a good stay at the hotel?), but has the most meaning when applied to the lifetime value of the customer (a strong preference to stay at a particular hotel). There are multiple drivers of customer satisfaction such as the specific product, wait times, high-quality service, consistency of experience, etc. The challenge is that what matters to one customer many not be as important – or important at all – to another customer. Customers are not monolithic. That’s why it is so important to listen to, understand and act on VOC from all segments of your customer base. Believe me, if there were one perfect measure of customer satisfaction that held across the board, every organization would use it.
L360: In your opinion, what is the best communication channel available today for engaging customers and influencing loyalty?
Banerjee: There is no one best channel – and that’s the challenge organizations face. Each channel has pros and cons. For example, social media is very hot right now as a feedback channel. It’s growing quickly, there’s lots of engagement, and it’s filled with a plethora of suggestions and complaints. However, social media may not represent your entire customer base—and “closing the loop” or taking corrective action to fix a negative experience may not be possible if you can’t link the feedback to a specific customer. The other channels have similar pros and cons—making it all the more important for firms to listen to ALL of their customers through EVERY channel.
L360: What would you like to see devlop in the market’s approach to customer experience management, engagement and loyalty?
Berman: It’s great that so many companies try to measure customer satisfaction with a variety of tools such as surveys and NPS scores. That is a critical first step to successfully listen to VOC and create a CEM program. The next evolution is to go “beyond the number” and really understand what’s driving the scores companies receive. It’s not enough just to know if someone is a detractor or a promoter—companies need to engage with their customers to understand the “why” of the scores. Once you understand the drivers of satisfaction (or dissatisfaction), you have actionable information that you can implement to improve those scores leading to increased customer satisfaction.
On Thursday, October 13th at 1:00PM Eastern, Sid and Sidra will be presenting the webinar, “Event Information: The Dynamic Duo: Customer Satisfaction And Loyalty: And How Text Analytics powers It All.” Be sure to join in and discover how organizations should define their satisfaction and loyalty programs, how social media can affect and drive loyalty, common pitfalls and best practices for achieving success and the added ROI gained from including text analytics in such programs.
For more information click here or Register Now