Matt Cohen, Vice President Strategic Accounts, for Clarabridge will participate in a compelling session titled, “Build It and They Will Come: Creating a Customer Experience Hub,” at the 3rd Annual Engagement & Experience Expo, presented by Loyalty 360 – The Loyalty Marketer’s Association. The event will be held Nov. 5-7, 2013, at The Westin Galleria in Dallas, Texas.
Engagement & Experience Expo is a forum to openly discuss customer, brand and channel challenges and solutions. Through a robust slate of best-in-class speakers and interactive discussions, attendees will learn about the latest theories, best practices, relevant case studies, emerging trends and strategies that drive measurable behavioral change and quantifiable results.
Cohen participated in a Q&A with Loyalty 360 regarding the session and current industry trends.
Q: Can you explain the concept behind the Customer Experience Hub?
It’s not uncommon for major brands to gather feedback from customers and clients from a variety of places like tech support questions and product feedback. Each of these areas on a website alone can help brands gather lots of feedback about different aspects of their businesses.
Then there is the call center and this whole idea of social media. You start looking at all of these different channels of communication where customers talk about a brand. Yet many of these departments are trying to make decisions in a silo.
The need for a Customer Experience Hub is to integrate all of these feedbacks so different departments aren’t looking at different elements of this data. Customer Experience Hub is the integration of all of these different data points.
Q: What has the feedback been from the Customer Experience Hub?
The feedback from clients has been great! We have a YouTube page with customer testimonials from our Annual User Conference from brands like Walmart, Best Buy, QVC, Pet Smart, Ascena Brands, Estee Lauder, General Mills, and Clorox.
Q: What is the key to using the Customer Experience Hub in an effective way?
Once you have all the data integrated into the Hub, the key is creating intelligence around all of the data, structuring all text in a meaningful way, measuring and tagging the sentiment of the text -- and putting that intelligence into reporting analytics.
Q: Can the Customer Experience Hub help break down department silos?
It encourages collaboration among different departments. It really awakens people to the value of their own data. We see a trend where these functions are falling under the marketing umbrella instead of operations. It drives a cross-functional conversion and sparks a revolution about how companies advocate for their customers.
Marketing departments are finally realizing that the contact centers are talking to customers every day, and marketing is saying this is valuable stuff and we should harness this. Many of these tasks are falling under the CMO now.
Q: How important is listening to the customer today and, how do brands then integrate that data across all channels?
Listening to the customer is critical. It’s a matter of understanding, not necessarily what things you have to do to your products or services, but what things are keeping customers coming back.
When you really listen authentically, and authentically make changes based on what customers are asking for, loyalty has improved. Research shows increased listening equals increased transactions equals increased loyalty.
Q: How important is a company’s culture to validating its commitment to being customer-centric?
It’s a matter of authenticity. Consumers do not take well to a one-man band speaking on behalf of the brand. Look at what social media has done. Companies are thinking more about customer-centricity.
It breaks down silos and it gives companies a vocabulary to talk about customer experience and it gives the executives something to talk about. A key thing that blocks progress is many companies aren’t set up to collaborate across departments.