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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.
How Decades of Product Launches Reveal the Role Imagination Plays in Success, and Why Businesses Can’t Afford to Ignore It
Tom Kalinske with (L to R) Alec Wright, Chief Innovation Officer at GSV Labs (Advisor), Tom, Jim Berkman (Advisor), Mike Choi (Product), and Dmitriy Pavlov (Founder/CEO).
Guest post by Tom Kalinske
When I reflect back on my career as a marketing and product executive, I feel fortunate for the number of successes that helped propel me to leadership roles – some expected, some based on intuition, and some that might have been completely missed had they not emerged through various kinds of market and consumer research.
One common theme was the ability of a product to fulfill some deep-rooted human desire; in other words, to tap into human imagination. I learned that understanding a consumer’s psyche can lead to incredible business success, which may seem counter-intuitive to the concept of business as a numbers game. To illustrate this point, I wanted to share a few stories from various stages of my career.
The Inception of Flintstones Vitamins (J. Walter Thompson)
I started my career in marketing at J. Walter Thompson in New York City after getting a Masters Degree in Business. There I was assigned to a group that was not a typical advertising role; a group tasked with developing new products for existing J Walter Thompson clients and introducing them into the marketplace.
I worked with clients like RJ Reynolds Foods (Chun King Egg Rolls, Jeno’s Pizza Rolls) and Miles Laboratories (One-a-Day vitamins, Alka Seltzer.) When Miles’ competitor Bristol Meyers introduced colored animal-shaped vitamins for kids, the RJR Chocks vitamins business went to hell, literally fell off a cliff. We did a bunch of research and learned that Flintstones characters were the leading characters at the time. But the folks at Miles Laboratories didn’t agree at first; they said the show had just gone off prime time and was moving to Sat AM. They asked J. Walter Thompson to do more research, which produced the same results.
So after successfully acquiring the Flintstones license from Hannah Barbara, we introduced Flintstones vitamins in 6 months, and it became the #1 selling vitamin within another 6 mos. This was a great introduction to product development and the power of market research and marketing.
Mattel & The Barbie Revival
When I was a product manager at Mattel, it was a hard time for Barbie. Co-founder Ruth Handler came to me and said the retail buyers and the analysts said it was over for Barbie. She said, “What do you think about that?” and I said, “That’s crazy. Barbie will be here long after you and I are gone.”
That’s what she wanted to hear, so she said she’d talk to my boss about making me the marketing & product Director on Barbie. I asked Ruth why she thought Barbie would be great again, and her answer was the key to Barbie’s revival: “With Barbie, a girl can be anything she wants to be.”
We tested the imagination play suggested by Ruth’s powerful statement in market research, and her line became the messaging and positioning we used for Barbie for the next 15 years. This led to introducing different Barbie versions, like Astronaut Barbie, Doctor Barbie, and Veterinarian Barbie.
While Ruth’s intuition was right-on and then validated by market research. There were occasions where market research revealed some positive aspect of the Barbie brand that we had completely missed. For example, there was a general feeling among well-educated moms that Barbie was too materialistic and just dressed in fancy clothes and drove around in her corvette. But market research told us that there was a powerful affinity among moms who had played with Barbie growing up, that they reflected positively on their experience and wanted their girls to experience it. In many ways, the new Barbie that allowed girls to be anything they wanted to be also gave the moms permission to satisfy a private emotional desire to share part of their own childhood with their daughters.
Over time, I became CEO of Mattel where we continued to invest heavily in R&D as part of our new product development process – approximately 7% of sales. I can only imagine what having a tool like Stitched Insights could have saved us in terms of time and money.
SEGA: Entering the Game
The same suspension of disbelief that helped Barbie’s revival was responsible for the enormous success of video games among teenage boys who actually felt they were entering the game. This was intuitive. But there was another reason for video game popularity we nearly missed.
We talked to a bunch of college kids in dorm rooms, conducted focus groups and sent out surveys, and a value message emerged. If I’m a college kid, I don’t have a lot of money and I might spend $10 to go to a 2-hour movie, but I could buy a $50 game and play it for hundreds of hours for literally pennies per hour of entertainment.
Because video games were considered relatively expensive as a “product” or game for the times, we missed what our customers knew: video games were cheap compared to other forms of entertainment.
Through my years of leadership at companies that invested heavily in market research, it has become clear that ratings and opinions alone are not sufficient to understand what makes customers tick: it can take deep, qualitative information to get to the bottom of what matters to them and will motivate them to purchase. For that, you need the context behind the review, and with the current speed of business, you need it quickly.
When I was CEO of Sega, we had a team of researchers who read and analyzed the reviews and letters at the back of gaming magazines. The results of the reviews eventually made their way to product revisions through the manufacturing process, because back then, we used ROM cartridges. Today, revisions to online games can be made in hours or days instead of weeks, so analyzing the wealth of digital data available quickly and efficiently is critical in terms of beating out the competition.
The Future of Brands
When I think about the overall importance of the qualitative information acquired through billions of dollars of investment over my years leading great companies like Mattel, Matchbox, Sega of America and Leapfrog, I realize what an incredible opportunity brand leaders have today to get the same kinds of insights much more rapidly with real-time deep-learning applied to live feedback of their and their competition’s customers.
If we had anything like Stitched Insights when I was in charge of strategic and tactical brand decisions, it would have allowed us to move dramatically faster and launch products that more dependably hit the bullseye on the first try. I’ve seen how Stitched Insights AI helps some of the world’s leading teams learn an awful lot, and puts the kind of meaningful insights I experienced at Mattel and Sega to work consistently and in a fraction of the time.
About Tom Kalinske:
Tom Kalinske is an iconic American executive of market-leading organizations, such as Mattel, Sega, LeapFrog, Matchbox, Gazillion Games, and Knowledge Universe. He currently serves on the advisory board of Stitched Insights where he is also an investor and partnerships liaison.
Your Customer is Trying to Tell You Something, But You Need to Read Between the Lines
We live in an era of customer-centricity. No one knows this better than customer support professionals. Even before customer service was the new marketing, support professionals had been saying for years that customer support was your secret weapon to uncovering product insight and innovation.
While the business world is shifting emphasis to the insights that can be gained from a deeper understanding of the customer feedback that lives in the service center, the resources haven’t always followed. This is primarily due to the fact that there are three main challenges in support:
Volume of data - the thousands and hundreds of thousands of support requests that are generated
Manual processes - typically a lack of integration of support tools leads to manual processes
Siloed departments and individuals - the lack of integration can lead to lack of communication between both departments and from one support individual to another
Support always seems to be playing catch up and due to the real-time requirements of supporting customers, companies don’t get the opportunity to shut down support in order to catch their breath. If ever there was a use case for machine learning, analyzing the avalanche of data that comes forth directly from customers, this is it.
Equally important is the fact that internal feedback such as support requests and external data such as product reviews are rich with emotion. Yet support teams rarely track this most human form of feedback. We tag top issues or note the level of severity but nuanced emotion goes completely unnoticed by support teams other than to note occasionally that a customer was angry.
Big Data is a game changer for customer support
Not only can we finally catch up (whew!) simply tracking not just the top 10 but the top 100 or the top 1000 issues in support, but we can also finally do a true evaluation of what is most important to our customer base.
Breakthroughs in natural language processing now allow us to bring data science and computational psychology together to expose the nuance in what the customer is telling us. Customers have much stronger feelings about certain parts of their experience than other parts. Their feedback likewise gives us insight into which parts they actually care more about. With these breakthroughs, we now have the opportunity to uncover emotional insights behind the words that a customer uses to explain their problem, or ask their question or request a refund.
Extract quantitative insights from qualitative data
We all know that it’s not only what you say but how you say it. Computational psychology goes far further than simply noting sentiment (sad, happy, mad). Breakthroughs in NLP now allow computational psychologists to identify implied feedback and truly prioritize and identify customer emotions. No longer will the customer who shouts on the phone or types in all caps be given all the attention. We also care about the customer who whispers, for these customers may have far more important things to tell us.
For more information about gaining deeper customer insights, read our Whitepaper.
[Blog by Kate Hobbie]