Clarabridge C3 2018 Takeaways

While attending C3 Europe — Clarabridge’s user event that took place in the UK last week — I had the chance to interact with company executives and have discussions with a variety of Clarabridge customers and prospects, leaving me with several interesting takeaways.

Customer effort was front and center at the event. Loyalty is the ultimate goal for almost all customer experience (CX) leaders, and achieving it requires firms to first and foremost, understand buyer needs so they can meet and exceed them. At the event, Clarabridge emphasized their focus on helping companies (B2B, B2C, and mix-model (B2B and B2C)) manage customer loyalty by minimizing customer effort — in other words, helping brands make it easier for their customers to do business with them. They also noted emotions such as happiness and empathy (e.g., the ability to adapt the business around client needs) as other factors influencing customer loyalty.

Discussions at the event explained how the company’s CX platform is designed to help brands capture voice of the customer (VoC) data through channels such as social media and phone calls; analyze that data through business intelligence, text analytics and root-cause analysis; and ultimately, use the resulting insights to engage buyers in a personalized fashion. There were sessions solely dedicated to effectively using social media content (e.g., Facebook posts, tweets) and contact center data (e.g., agent notes and customer voice) to develop insights.

These sessions highlighted the urgency of moving beyond simply capturing VoC data — emphasizing the need to turn data into insights, and act upon them. This aligns with Aberdeen’s research in the CX space which shows that many organizations are rich in data, but struggle turning it into actionable insights. In fact, 83% of companies in Aberdeen’s May 2018 Customer Analytics: Connect Data to Insights to Results study noted that they are unsatisfied with their ability to deliver truly data-driven customer interactions. Hence, it’s important for companies to move beyond simply capturing data, and begin empowering employees with the insights they need to accomplish business goals.

Another takeaway from the event was that Clarabridge continues to increase its focus on the contact center as a key user of its capabilities. This isn’t surprising, as the contact center is the nerve center of the business, capturing a wealth of structured and unstructured data about customer interactions. Clarabridge’s focus on areas such as text analytics is aligned with enabling contact centers to analyze vast volumes of call recordings (after transcribing call recordings) to determine hidden trends influencing customer issues. As more businesses plan to incorporate chat bots within their activities, Clarabridge focuses on incorporating analytics to make the chat bots more efficient. Specifically, they focused on using text analytics to gauge customer sentiment and effort when buyers interact with a chat bot, enabling contact centers to continuously improve the workflows and content used by the chat bot.

Aberdeen continuously captures market insights on the key topics technology buyers research to help make educated technology purchase and utilization decisions. We recently analyzed the top topics CX leaders across Fortune 1000 firms research as it relates to social media management — a sector related to how firms manage social media interactions with customers — Figure 1.

Figure 1 shows that CX leaders regularly research content to help them understand and manage voice of the customer through social media. Specifically, tools used to capture VoC data through social media — social media monitoring — ranked as the second top topic, followed closely by ‘word of mouth’ and ‘voice of the customer.’ Together, these findings show that Fortune 1000 firms primarily aim to educate themselves on how to manage social media programs to better understand customer needs and respond to them in a timely and efficient manner. This, in turn, drives positive word of mouth and brand awareness — ultimately leading to customer loyalty.

Aberdeen recently surveyed 164 CX leaders across companies of all sizes and industries to determine how they use social media in their CX programs. Findings from this research revealed that there is a group of organizations — Best-in-Class — that observe greater performance across a variety of KPIs, compared to other CX leaders using social media. These brands enjoy greater customer retention rates, decreased handle times in the contact center, and greater marketing results – Figure 2.

Figure 2: A Well-Designed Social CX Strategy Truly Boosts Performance Results

How do brands generate Best-in-Class results by using VoC data captured through social media? A closer analysis of the activities used by the Best-in-Class shows that they establish four key pillars that they’re more likely to have in place, compared to All Others. These are:

1. Demystify customer actions. Top performing businesses don’t just collect data, they use analytics to shed light on the key drivers influencing customer journeys. Start out by building a single view of customer data, then incorporate analytics within your technology toolbox to determine the best paths to achieve your goals.
2. Weave social media into your omni-channel program. Social media interactions, when managed in silos, will frustrate customers. Buyers today want brands to know them — for this you need to map their journey of interactions with your brand across all channels. If your social media strategy isn’t integrated with other channels, we highly recommend you do so.
3. Don’t just listen to customers, respond when appropriate. There might be a lot of ‘noise’ in social media. Customers generate content to share their experiences, seek support and interact with one another. To achieve Best-in-Class results, savvy brands determine the context of social media content to gauge if the content references a specific product, solution, company, or store. They also determine if the content requires the company to respond (e.g., lost luggage) or doesn’t require the firm to open a support ticket to engage the customer (e.g., a ‘like’ on the company Facebook fan page). If you’re not analyzing social media content in such a contextual fashion, we highly recommend you do so.
4. Don’t ignore performance measurement & management. Aberdeen’s Customer Analytics research shows that savvy firms use root-cause analysis to support their efforts in determining the connection between specific social media activities and their performance results. If you’re not currently using analytics to determine the root-causes of what drives positive and negative results across your key performance indicators (KPIs), we highly recommend that you do.

An illustrative list of technology providers enabling companies to capture and analyze customer intelligence across various channels includes (in alphabetical order): Adobe, Aspect, CallMiner, Clarabridge, Confirmit, Informatica, Medallia, NICE, Oracle, Qualtrics, Salesforce, SAS and Verint.