Companies are under unprecedented pressure to optimize the customer experience. We see evidence of this during the last 18 months in the emergence of the chief customer officer (CCO) role. Companies such as United Airlines, Samsung and Chrysler have all recently announced CCOs as part of their executive suites, and one report indicated that 45 percent of large U.S. firms responding to a survey now have a senior executive responsible for customer experience.

Consequently, customer experience management (CEM) is emerging as an increasingly important tool. CEM is the practice of actively listening to customers, analyzing what they are saying to make better business decisions and measuring the impact of those decisions to drive organizational performance and loyalty. When powered by text analytics, CEM drives significant, quantifiable benefits across varied areas of the business.

New Sources of Information

In fact, hearing the voice of the customer has never been so easy. More sources of customer feedback are available to companies than ever before.
 
Customer relationship management (CRM) systems have been widely deployed, and these usually hold valuable comments from emails, support cases and online conversations between contact centers and customers. Customer surveys have grown up; sophisticated methodologies such as Net Promoter Score (NPS) provide companies more reliable analysis of surveys, and the Internet and email have made distribution cheaper and easier. Meanwhile, more and more companies are turning to their front-line employees for insights into customer sentiment and best practices.
 
And certainly social media is transforming the way customer feedback is shared and captured. Web forums are soaring in popularity. Customers are airing likes, dislikes, expectations, desires and plans through an exploding array of Web 2.0 forums, including online product reviews, news feeds, wikis and blogs. TripAdvisor.com and FlyerTalk.com, for example, allow consumers to post comments about their travel-related experiences; Wal-Mart Stores Inc., meanwhile, has enabled online shoppers to rate their purchases and shopping experiences. The amount and importance of consumer-generated content is growing every day.
 
The Unprecedented Power of Text Analytics
 
An effective approach to CEM fosters customer intimacy by enabling CCOs to listen to the gamut of ways that customers are speaking about their companies, and the key enabling technology in CEM is text analytics.
 
Structured data - the checkboxes in surveys, transactional detail and various point-of-sale data - solely influenced business decisions of the past. Companies were completely reliant on data that could be easily represented in the rows and columns of relational databases and spreadsheets.
 
Text analytics is a recent innovation that enables unstructured, textual customer feedback of every type to be measured and analyzed alongside structured, transactional customer information (purchase histories, demographics, product-feature data, geographic data, etc.). For example, a company that once just acted upon customer comments generated through its call centers can now marry this information with customer comments posted in online consumer forums and blogs, as well as its own internal sales information, to analyze the exact cause as to why sales have increased or decreased during a certain period of time.
 
Text analytics leverages natural language processing technologies that allow computers to interpret sentences and paragraphs from the rapidly expanding volumes of unstructured content (said to be more than 85 percent of all the information available to companies, according to an Aberdeen Group report). Mineable presentations and reports are automatically generated from text.
 
With CEM powered by text analytics, companies for the first time can quantify the true voice of the customer. Companies can now tap previously unreachable business intelligence, discover trends, illuminate issues and gain the elusive, longsought-after, 360-degree view of customer desires, emotions and future behaviors. General business users - not just IT “power” users - can access all of their customer data through a single analytical interface for instant and ongoing analysis via traditional, familiar business tools and techniques.
 
Putting CEM to Work
 
Innovative leaders across a growing array of industries - airlines, consumer packaged goods, entertainment, financial/insurance services, healthcare, hospitality, investigation, marketing services, pharmaceutical/life sciences, retail and technology - are already using CEM powered by text analytics.

CEM and text analytics can reduce a company’s reliance on manual coding of internally generated customer-interaction data. Clear connections between marketing programs and their impact on customer sentiment can be drawn with text analytics.
 
With market leaders becoming more comfortable and creative with these new capabilities, the applications of CEM powered by text analytics are growing more diverse every day.

Still, at many companies today, the potential of CEM remains untapped.
 
The unfortunate truth is that many companies are concluding that manual processing of unstructured information extends so little value to their customers, provides so little competitive advantage and recaptures so few unnecessary operational expenditures that they do no analysis of unstructured information whatsoever. CEM is stripped of its potential.
 
When powered by a complete text analytics capability, however, CEM can drive dramatic, quantifiable benefits across diverse business areas. And the results experienced by a widening array of early-adopter market leaders are proof.
 
References:
 
1Bruce Temkin. "Obstacles to Customer Success." Customer Experience Matters.com, February 2008.
2David Hatch. "The Opportunity for Integration of Unstructured Information: Customer Size Matters." Aberdeen Group, July 2007.

Excerpted with permission from DM Direct, DM Review.