Customer Experience Analysis – How to Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention

Your customer experience is the most important aspect of developing a loyal customer base. A quality experience encourages buyers to continue doing business with you. Each touchpoint has the opportunity to improve loyalty and overall retention. If your customers have a bad experience, they’re going to look into other options for their product and service needs.

Customer feedback and the ability to analyze it provides your organization with a greater understanding of your customer’s experience. You learn more about what’s going right and wrong throughout the customer’s journey and problems in your business that you need to address. Gaining insight and understanding what your customers want will help you see what areas you need to improve and what areas you are performing well in.

How to get better customer feedback.

You will want to start with quality feedback from your customers. If you don’t have good data on hand to analyze, you will lack visibility into the customer experience. Many organizations use a Net Promoter Score to gauge customer satisfaction and loyalty. The NPS is a valuable metric, but it’s more useful when you pair it with open-ended questions.

Customers can go into detail about their experiences with your products and services. This feedback surfaces many insights into customer loyalty, engagement, satisfaction (or lack thereof), and willingness to make future purchases. The challenge of working with open-ended questions is that you also need a way to effectively analyze the text. Manually processing verbatim comments is unfeasible for many companies and businesses, as you may be working with large data sets. Customer experience analysis products are able to handle the heavy lifting for your organization.

Types of customer experience analysis products.

Customer experience analysis products come in many forms, from bare bones solutions designed for data scientists to comprehensive platforms with robust reporting and visualization features. Here are the leading options in this software category.

IBM is well-known for being at the forefront of the artificial intelligence field. Among their solutions, they offer several tools for text analysis. Watson Explorer is designed for data scientists and advanced users for enterprise-level operations. It processes unstructured and structured data and provides fine-tuned control over the content analysis model. Watson Explorer includes a basic data visualization tool but it lacks advanced reports and dashboards. This solution works best for large-scale customer experience analysis programs, so smaller companies would find it more challenging to work with compared to other options.

This text visualization tool provides significant control over creating reports and dashboards from the information analyzed in Watson Explorer. You build the machine learning models used for the visualizations in this solution. This platform also integrates with many popular data science products. Once again, IBM’s offering requires advanced data science knowledge to use effectively. Enterprises that have full data science teams are well-equipped to derive the full value from this platform, but smaller organizations or those lacking data scientists will struggle.

Ascribe is well-known in the Market Research industry given its leading verbatim analysis platform.  CX Inspector’s text analytics is powered by artificial intelligence and uses Natural Language Processing to automate verbatim comment topic and sentiment analysis. It’s highly customizable while remaining user-friendly for non-technical users. Several key features include drag and drop taxonomy creation, custom rulesets, support for translating 100 languages, anonymized data, an API connector, and the ability to work with structured and unstructured data. Intermediate and advanced users at all sizes of organizations will find this tool valuable for learning more about their customers.

Ascribe Illustrator is a product that can be licensed with CX Inspector which helps visualize the results of the text analysis. Visualizing your text analysis data allows your organization to make data-driven decisions from verbatim comments. Ascribe Illustrator offers many types of reports and dashboards to improve access to actionable insights. Examples of the reports available include co-occurrence charts, star charts, enhanced word clouds, and correlation matrices. It supports real-time and dynamic reporting to ensure that decision-makers are getting up-to-date information. You can create highly customized reports through drilling down to granular data, allowing leaders to focus on their priority topics. This tool is ideal for any business user, even those who are not technically savvy.

This customer experience analytics platform offers user-friendly features and a simple interface for organizations that have a limited scope on their text analysis projects. You can get started quickly through Clarabridge Engage, but its simplicity can become a major drawback. There are limited customization options for working with your data. Small companies starting their explorations in customer experience analysis can benefit from this solution, but other organizations may get frustrated by the lack of options.

Microsoft’s entry in text analytics is one of the most affordable options available. However, the low cost comes with significant drawbacks. You’re building everything from scratch, so while you have access to sentiment analysis, text extraction, and other useful features, you need data scientists to work with it. You lose out on customization, support, advanced customer experience analysis, and other features commonly found in this software category. This API is an excellent choice for data scientists looking for a basic method for text analysis, but it falls short for most other use cases.

Choosing a customer experience analysis product.

Your organization needs to ask itself several questions when evaluating customer experience analysis products.

What is the source of your data?

What is the scope of your customer experience analysis projects?

Do you need data visualization?

What is the technical level of the end users?

What is your budget?

Do you want an on-premise or cloud-based product?

Do you need a scalable solution?

What data science resources do you have available?

During the evaluation process, test out the most common use cases for your organization to explore how to help improve the customer’s experience. Get feedback from the end-users to ensure that they can properly use important functions. If you’re looking at tools offering data visualization, present sample reports and dashboards to important decision-makers. Your leadership may have specific reporting needs that could be overlooked without their direct feedback.

Customer experience analysis products empower your organization with the information it needs to improve customer loyalty and retention. The right solution provides important insights that drive changes to the customer experience so you’re continually improving. High retention rates contribute to a healthy business growth rate and set your organization up for long-term success.