LOVE + SCIENCE

As online consumer interactions and research skyrocket in 2020, brands are bracing for emotions to drive more and more purchase behavior in 2021

It’s Not Luck That We’re Prepared 

Stitched Insights provides live insights into customer emotion and behavior without teams having to spend any time on analysis. These new deep-learning language analysis techniques were pioneered by our very own team. Today we’re highlighting and celebrating our scientists behind the curtain.

Breakthrough Academic Research

The Stitched Insights engine has been busy connecting millions of organic customer interactions across the globe - enabling the world’s largest brands to predict the impact of campaign and market changes to customers in real-time. None of this would have been possible without the innovative blending of psychology and artificial intelligence by our very own Dr. Johannes Eichstaedt.

Dr. Johannes C. Eichstaedt is a Professor of Psychology and Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. In 2011 he co-founded and led the World Well-Being Project at the University of Pennsylvania, a large research lab devoted to psychological language analyses. His work spanning 40 publications has received media attention around the world, including in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker and The Onion.

Dr. Eichstaedt’s unique research has led to countless breakthroughs in the budding field of computational psychology. 

“We stand in between the poles of summarization and knowledge extraction, in that way we summarize (e.g., through touchpoint extraction) but also provide meaningful social science insights about the people behind the summaries” Dr. Eichstaedt shared in a recent interview.

Dr. Eichstaedt is currently pushing the limits of psychographic research at Stanford and making sure that Stitched Insights is making a positive impact on humanity.

Core Technology

Since conceiving these new measurement techniques over the past couple of years, we’ve been able to predict the effectiveness of new campaigns in real-time and have helped the world’s largest teams prioritize features across their entire brands that drive more customer love. Dr. Andrew Schwartz has been the e-wind behind our digital sails. 

Dr. Andrew Schwartz is an active researcher, speaker, teacher, and machine learning developer. He is director of the Human Language Analysis Beings (HLAB) housed in the Computer Science Department at Stony Brook University. He is also a CO-PI and previous Lead Research Scientist for the World Well-Being Project (WWBP) at the University of Pennsylvania.

“We’ve created a process that quickly updates existing marketing stacks to expand insight coverage for every important competitor and adds state-of-the-art psychological modeling” says Dr. Schwartz. 

“We’ve now used a wide variety of structured and unstructured text sources such as support requests, open-ended survey answers and public reviews to identify new psychographic insights that drive important behavior” continues Dr. Schwartz, “and we’re only getting started!”

The Latka Names Stitched Insights as One of the Most Promising SaaS Companies in California

Stitched Insights is a Silicon Valley SaaS start-up that has built a proprietary machine learning system that helps companies better understand their customers. Born out of world class research from the University of Pennsylvania and turned into a commercially useful product, the company now works with several Fortune 500 companies providing deep customer insight quickly and efficiently. Stitched Insights believes the future is in listening to customers, not asking them questions, and has built a suite of tools for organizations to do just that. 

We’re excited to share that The Latka has named Stitched Insights to its list of the “Most Promising SaaS Companies”. Each year, Latka analyzes 10,000 different software companies around the world to select the most promising in each location.

How We Ranked As Most Promising

The Latka picks the best from 10,000 SaaS companies around the world. The rankings are based off a combination of factors including revenue growth and frequency of use. Latka also looks at how many customers expand their accounts and increase their ARPU as a factor in the rankings.

We love that more teams across your organizations have found Stitched Insights to be so valuable and many of you have come to us with exciting new use cases. A huge thank you to the brands that have been supporting and staying with us from the start! Your commitment to better understand the people behind your customers is inspiring.

You played a vital role in helping us grow and rank so high up against thousands of other SaaS companies. We’ve got big product plans for 2020 as we build more ways to help you grow your brand and acquire more happy customers.

Product Features To Look Out For

Over the past few months we have expanded our global coverage through new partnerships with regional systems integrators. We’ve also entered into initial strategic alliance dialogues with Zendesk, which will enable faster client on-boarding and add novel retention metrics for dramatically decreased customer churn.

Be sure to check back on the blog in July when we announce a new collaboration project we call, “Brand Love Meter”.

The Stitched Insights team

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.