Clarabridge Blog

The sun has set on Technology Services World 2012 (TSW) Santa Clara, CA hosted by the TSIA. As the newest member of Clarabridge’s marketing team, I had the opportunity to attend TSW and network with many fellow attendees. The conference was exciting, with a plethora of great presentations, as well as new and old professional connections. John Ragsdale launched his new book Lessons Unlearned, and all attendees had the opportunity to pick up a copy. In addition, the TSIA launched a new mobile TSW App, which enabled attendees to build and discuss the show in custom groups, as well as form personal agendas.

During Q3 2011, DMG conducted a worldwide benchmark study of enterprise, marketing, customer service, contact center and IT leaders and managers regarding their use of social media. The study found a great deal of confusion or simply a lack of clarity regarding the best ways to manage and participate in social media in the enterprise, despite the fact that 67.4% of respondents indicated that their company was using social media to communicate with and/or respond to customers, prospects and the general public. (25 different verticals were represented in this study; click here for the full study.)

In a recent blog post I wondered out loud why it was that Retailers dominate the Customer Experience (CX) ratings charts as measured by consumer feedback. As well as musing I did some hard thinking and spent some time interviewing some of our key Retail customers to find the needle in their haystack.  My conversations often times kept coming back to two things – data and heritage.

Contact centers tend to be common targets when corporate executives—under renewed orders to do more with less—consider where to look for cost savings. But with consumers made so jittery by unsettling macro-economic trends, this is hardly the time for a company to step away from ensuring positive customer experiences. To lose touch with a customer’s evolving demands and needs in today’s nervous marketplace only encourages that customer to experiment with your competitors and jeopardize hard-won brand loyalty.

Voice of the Customer programs depend on collecting, transforming, analyzing, and acting on ALL consumer insights.  Customers pick up brand insights from social media, review sites, online communities, forums, and recommendations.  They develop insights, suggestions, and needs as they comparison shop in stores, talk to agents via phone, and shop online.  And once they’ve made a purchase, they continue to engage with fellow customers, and the companies they do business with via every conceivable channel imaginable – support hotline, online chat, email, return desk, store, survey, shopping site, knowledge base, and more. 

I have been working within the customer experience industry for over 4 years now. In my position I have the good fortune to see many different companies and verticals stretching from retail to financial institutions to airlines. For the first time I believe we are on the verge of a new main stream era in contact center customer experience and data analysis.

For the past 1-2 years, most companies that I seem to come across have told me their CEO or senior leadership has stated Social Media is a major focus for them right now.  After some discussion, I then ask the following question: What parts of Social Media are you interested in?

Then it happens….that bewildered look that tells me all I need to know. They have no idea what I am talking about.

Several weeks ago I was at a birthday party with three close friends.  These are some of the fiercest friends I know who regularly balance dynamic careers, children, responsibilities at home and training for 5Ks.  They, like me, rarely sleep.  We don’t do regular social media posts; we barely have time to brush our hair.  However, a couple of them were talking about the number of hours they spend on Pinterest designing new rooms, creating amazing birthday cakes and getting gum out of hair.  After a couple days of poo-pooing it and wondering what happened to my friends, I woke in the middle of the night dreaming about its implication for customer experience. And so the pursuit for Pinterest began and I requested membership.  Like a club line I anxiously waited for the “bouncer” to let me in to the coolness that existed behind the UI velvet ropes.

ALERT! There are 100 new negative Loyalty comments this week (a 500% spike vs. last week)

Yikes, that's not what we like to hear - but the good news is that now we know and we can take action if needed, right?

Well, that all depends:

• Do you know who owns the responsibility of fixing a specific issue in the organization? Have they been notified?
• Are they aware that it's their responsibility to review and take action on the comments?
• Do they know what a 500% spike in negative Loyalty actually means?
• Do they even care?

From the time you wake up in the morning to the time you go back to bed at night, more than 300 million people have logged into Facebook, more than 150 million tweets have been posted, and more than 3 billion people have perused YouTube. And this is on a daily basis. The message is clear: Your customers are out there talking; they discuss what they like, what they hate, the latest product they just bought, and even the bad service experience they just endured. This is why marketing executives can’t turn a blind eye and make the mistake of just letting this goldmine of information sit there, getting stale in CRM systems and data warehouses.