Does Your Brand Have e-Motional Intelligence™

Society, culture, technology are changing exponentially. Duh.

The need to adapt to fast changing trends in the marketplace speaks to the need for faster tactical decisions. Furthemore, the big unmet need in R&D is not only in understanding *why* people have pain points - but how their pain points stack up against each other. 

Emotion is better suited to uncovering this - AI is better at ranking it. Having the ability to automatically spot and act on the most important changes to these trends is the best way to maintain relevance in an exponential world.

We need the ability to be in front of megatrends and rapidly R&D new products that will be relevant by the time they are launched

Our team at Stitched Insights is helping brands create more valuable product versions to better compete in this rapid paced technology environment where consumers change behaviors on a monthly basis. The usual methods of customer discovery fundamentally don't work because they take months, cost hundreds of thousands of dollars and their insights are stale by the time action can be taken on them. New jobs-to-be-done and undiscovered touchpoints await.

What to do and what NOT to do - fewer R&D programs because of fear of failure

What *not* to do is just as important. Ranking the severity of every touchpoint with deep-learning enables Stitched Insights to dramatically boost brand confidence in R&D and product launches by increasing the accuracy of what is actually most important to customers in real-time. Finally giving brands universal customer alignment and a compass pointing to the “next big thing”

About Dmitriy Pavlov:

Dmitriy Pavlov is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stitched Insights. Dmitriy has over a decade of nose-to-tail experience creating consistent category growth through data with prior leadership roles at large corporations like ADP and enterprise startups like Duda & Conduit.

The New Survey: Answers Without Questions

Making Decisions

All organizations rely on information to make decisions.  From financial data to customer insight to market intelligence, data has been the main lifeblood of the modern company.  Yet when it comes to understanding the voice of the customer, many organizations are still muddled in methods popularized in the late 1990’s (or earlier).

A main tool of understanding customers/consumers/users has been, and still is, survey research.  That is, ask people to answer questions about a variety of topics. A simplified index of questions and analysis called Net Promoter Score is widely used by vertically integrated companies the world over.

So what’s wrong with asking people to share what they think?  Reliability for one, validity for another. But moreover, survey research doesn’t accurately capture the emotion of the granular customer experience.  Good or bad, it’s the emotion – how a person feels – that will drive behavior such as purchase, loyalty, overall engagement. Too often companies are really understanding just the what without understanding the why.

We’re asking the wrong questions

Case-in-point, two questions addressed to a 22-year old who’s recently purchased something on the E-Commerce Company X website and received a survey moments later:

Question #1 Asked: How satisfied were you with your experience with E-Commerce Company X today?  (Very Satisfied, Satisfied, Neither Satisfied Nor Dissatisfied, Dissatisfied, Very Dissatisfied)

What the 22-year old is thinking:  Uh, I dunno. It was ok but I don’t really remember half of the pages I clicked through and I really just wanted these headphones because all my friends are talking about them.  Can’t wait till they come.

Question #2 Asked: Why does that describe your level of satisfaction with E-Commerce Company X today?

What the 22-year old is thinking: WTF.  IDK. TLDR.  

People will never say what they mean!

It’s absurd. Companies are already spending millions of dollars a year to survey customers, and all they’re seeing is the tip of the iceberg. Today there is a better way to find out the feelings and emotions of people, ways that don’t involve asking them any direct questions and simply mining for insights they are already sharing through social media, customer service interactions, ratings/reviews, etc.   It’s more accurate and avoids the TLDR phenomenon of survey research.

Said differently,

 “it’s the difference between studying elephants in the wild and inviting 6 elephants to a focus group to talk about the jungle”

People think this is an impossible problem to crack -  it’s not. There are myriad AI/ML tools in the marketplace that have developed tools to recognize language and make sense of it in an orderly way.  What Stitched Insights does better than most is recognize underlying sentiment and emotion beyond the words said. That’s a game changer. By using Stitched Insights tools, companies will be able to deeply understand the Why, very quickly, and take action on it.  

“Understanding the root cause of behavior as it changes in real-time is much more powerful in driving correct business decisions than sending a survey”

The future of business in our highly competitive world rests with differentiated, accurate, and timely insights.  Methods and approaches must keep pace. Stitched Insights has cracked the code on passively understanding mode, tone, and expectations and quickly applying it to action.

About Adam:

Adam Simons is an investor, adviser, and board member to a portfolio of start ups and emerging companies around the globe. After spending 15 years in large enterprises, Adam has grown a practice where he works hands-on with some of the best startups in the world - both consumer and enterprise - helping to cultivate and grow the talents of early stage founders and their teams.

Customer Support Re-imagined: Feelings, Emotions and Experiences

Take a dip in the pool of Customer Support with me.

Let’s say you currently work in product marketing or operations for a global corporation. Your work revolves around meetings and schedules — things don't always go your way but your life is fairly predictable — and scheduled. You have lots of time for analysis, planning and testing.

Now, picture yourself in a new role. Take that schedule and throw it at Mars.  Your life is now a non-stop, 24-hour ride; your schedule slows down and speeds up, you have less control over it and it never stops for a break. You're trying to do analysis, but the data is non-stop and you can't stop the test to analyze results. You work in a world based on others’ schedules, needs and emotions.

Welcome to the world of customer support.

In your new role, your goal is to be proactive. But human behavior is unpredictable and forces customer support into a world of reactive tendencies.

Your tickets, social media, customer reviews, and support calls are all data - and you are surrounded by it.  But it's all open ended and undefined. It's thousands and often millions of customer support contacts. It's in data lakes, and buried deep in the history of your company. The leaders at your org care about your customers, but once they take a dip in the data lake, they lose momentum and your long-sought project to do deep analysis dies unripened on the vine.

You have customer satisfaction and NPS scores which you put in the sentiment bucket to gauge how customers feel about your product. Those have helped triage things a bit. You may also have customer success metrics which tell you how often customers do certain things, their habits, their stickiness and their level of adoption and success with your product. That’s definitely a step in the right direction. You may even have a good way of tracking customer testimonials and advocacy.

But if your customer insights are based on an observer asking pre-determined questions and watching for overt pre-defined customer actions -  you're likely entirely missing out on the open-ended emotional component of your customer's feedback. How a customer truly feels about your product is vital to your product's success.  How a customer expresses themselves is the key to their emotions. This can all change on a whim - thus making it impossibly challenging to keep up using predetermined rules.

Customer support professionals want to help customers based on their needs, and their timing, not ours.  We truly do care for our customers and know that customer service is a living, breathing, ever growing, organic entity. We can’t ask customers to slow down, take a break or let us catch up. In this dynamic environment, how can we make informed decisions to provide the world's best service?

What if you had a genie that could grant you three wishes?

What are the three most compelling issues that you would like to know about your customer base if you could analyze and immediately understand every thought and expression that your entire customer base expressed? What three burning questions do you have about your base that would help you to plan your time better, be proactive and make you look like a hero?

My top 3 would be:

• Gaps in service

• Empirical data to drive the product roadmap

• Trending issues that could forecast future problems

Or, would you simply wish for a system-wide comprehensive health check?

What would you unlock in your customer data (that you likely suspect is there) but need the quantitative analysis to prove it out?

What if you could take all of your customer feedback (both internal support requests and external customer reviews) and give it to a genie to tell you what to do next? What if you could augment your customer journey mapping and health scores to measure happiness across all customer interactions in a scientific way instead of relying on genies for your next bonus.

What if you could read every single ticket, chat, text message, phone transcript and ecommerce reviews over the entire lifetime of your (or even of your competitors’) products? And then turn ALL customer interactions into a new and ongoing form of NPS - one based on reliable, quantifiable, and scalable scientific scoring that analyzes the entire audience in near real-time.

How much of your year is spent on thinking and saying how you care about your customers and want to hear from them - but secretly knowing you’re likely ignoring 90% of what they’re saying because you don’t have a genie or the manpower to analyze and track all of this information?

What if you could listen to each and every one of your customers, take in what they have to say, create a meaningful response and impact the product roadmap all at once? What would you like to discover and quantify from customer feedback that absolutely proves the case for your next big thing?

I’m super curious to hear what you would do! Email me at kate@stitchedinsights to share your story and I’d love to include it in an upcoming article on this subject.

About Kate Hobbie:

In Kate's role as a Customer support leader, she has been committed to making customer support the heart of an organization to ensure that the quality of service a customer receives is the deciding factor when choosing a brand.

How Do You Measure Customer Joy?

What KPIs are your organization tracking to measure your customers’ experience? How do you compare to your competitors? Are you checking often enough?

I’ve had the opportunity to sit in a room with CMOs, CTOs, CSOs and many forms of Senior Market Researchers at some of the biggest companies in the world and ask exactly these questions. The rooms are always different, everything from a conference room at the four seasons to a private innovation playground in a sprawling compound - but the answers are always the same.

Limitations of classic surveys and NPS

Traditionally, the closest proxy we as marketers have for this is a survey based NPS score. Anyone fully satisfied with these?

It’s a great concept on paper. You tell us if you’d recommend our product to your friends. Based on what number you give us, we infer that’s how much you “like” our product. Now how do we figure out what it is about our product they actually like? Construct a survey and ask! How do we reach more people? Do more surveys! How do we compare this to your competitors? Um, more surveys? How frequently can we get fresh data this way? Sporadically!

Pushing past old limitations

There’s a new way to measure experiences. Breakthrough data science techniques from medical diagnoses are now starting to be used by some of the world’s best teams to quantify qualitative data. With this emerging field dubbed, “computational psychology”, we can now start to measure the psychological impact of every individual aspect of an experience by analyzing customer feedback in a precise new way. By taking a customer’s review, support ticket, or customer service request, this technique analyzes the word choice, syntax, and other unique signals to differentiate what is being said and felt. Yes I said felt. We can now understand a person’s underlying feelings from text. All we need to do now is find customers talking about our products and aim this new technique at this data.

Lucky us

The lucky thing is the larger the organization the more customer data there is. Now, we can instantly look at how every customer segment feels about any specific part of their experience. Maybe our product brings far more joy when it does its job versus a close competitor. Maybe we’re not highlighting this in our marketing yet (we should asap!). Maybe we realize that the job done that brings our customers the most joy was actually a subset of a larger job that obfuscated the true source of this delight. What if we could turn up the proverbial knob on all parts of the experience our customers love and then systematically address every part of the experience that causes anxiety or anger. How would this impact brand perception, long-term growth and our bottom lines?

About Dmitriy Pavlov:

Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Stitched Insights. An innovative product leader in emerging machine learning technology. Passionate about user experience, digital marketing and data-driven growth.