A Healthy Business Marriage Relies on Text Analytics
There is an old joke about a couple in divorce court sitting before the judge.
"So, Mrs. Smith, you want a divorce?" the judge asked, "Tell me, tell me do you have a grudge?"
"Oh, no," said Mrs. Smith. "We don’t have a garage, we have a carport."
The judge tried again. "Well, does your husband beat you up?"
"No, no," said Mrs. Smith, looking puzzled. "I’m nearly always the first out of bed."
"Mrs. Smith," the judge said in exasperation, "What is the reason you are seeking this divorce?"
"Well," said the lady, "My husband says we don’t communicate."
Communication can either make or break a relationship. Good communication is based on a foundation of listening, or seeking to understand before seeking to be understood. Many divorces could be avoided if both parties would learn to communicate better. But the requirement for good communication isn’t limited to marriages only. It is also a requirement of good business.
Most companies desperately scramble to connect with customers any way they can. Why? One Harvard study found that companies that retain just 5% of their customer base can boost their profits 25% to 85%. So, companies use email campaigns, social media, and discount cards to shamelessly distribute “spammy coupons” and “daily deals” to try and generate loyalty. Though these programs can often temporarily increase sales, they seldom foster long-term, trust-based relationships. The fundamental importance of listening is completely ignored.
Customers are desperate to be heard. Need proof? Look online. People are reviewing everything from movies to taco stands. Twitter users publish over 1 billion tweets per year, 20% of which are brand related. Nearly 40% of bloggers regularly post brand or product reviews. Social sites like Foursquare, Yelp, CitySearch, TripAdvisor, Facebook and dozens of others are being flooded with suggestions, rants, and accolades. Like a neglected spouse, customers are turning to any available outlet to make their voice heard.
Every day, companies lose customers because they don’t make an effort to listen. Many companies probably don’t even realize what they are losing. The individual lifetime value of some of these lost customers ranges from thousands to millions of dollars!
Heather Armstrongs’ experience with Maytag in the summer of 2009 is a good example of a customer’s desire to be heard. Heather and her husband saved for months to buy a new washing machine that would sufficiently handle the deluge of laundry produced by their new baby girl.
When their new washing machine (still under warranty) broke, the Armstrongs tried for two weeks to get it fixed. They dealt with incompetent repairmen, rude customer service representatives, and got few answers. Meanwhile, the dirty laundry piled up.
As a last resort, Heather, who happens to be one of the most influential mom-bloggers on the web, (www.dooce.com) turned to the internet. After tweeting a series of messages to her 1.5 million followers, and writing a blog about her Maytag experience, the Armstrongs finally got their washer fixed with the help of a Maytag executive.
Had Maytag been soliciting and responding to customer feedback through their repair technicians, their call centers, or their store fronts, they could have avoided this disaster weeks in advance!
It’s no surprise that many companies are turning to customer feedback programs. There are millions of Heather Armstrongs out there, and attempting to listen to every customer can appear to be a daunting, and resource-consuming task. Thankfully, technology can help.
Hertz Rent-a-Car receives over 100,000 customer surveys every month. Roughly 60,000 of these surveys include open-ended feedback containing valuable information related to individual customer experiences. Previously, the only way to extract the insights from these comments was for a manager to manually read and tag each comment.
Hertz needed a solution that would save man-hours, and improve the tagging accuracy of comments across the board. Their Enterprise Feedback Management vendor, Mindshare Technologies, provided that text analytics solution.
What if a computer could instantly read, understand, categorize, and report on all of your company’s unstructured feedback? What if the computer was smart enough to go beyond scanning for mere keywords, to understanding the sentiment and syntax behind every comment in less time than an entire army of employees? It can, and it is, and it does.
Like the intervention needed in a failing marriage, Text analytics can completely transform the way we communicate with and understand each other. This complex technology is trained to both discover and monitor critical performance issues so that companies can act, and act fast.
Discovery
Often, a business has no idea what important topics are being discussed by their customers. In this case, research is necessary to discover what valuable insights lie within your free-form customer comments. The analyst is asking the computer to "teach me something I don't already know" about the text. This is called Text Discovery.
For example: A quick service restaurant noticed from their customer feedback surveys that they were receiving low scores on order accuracy. Using text analytics, they were able to find that nearly 20% of the time an order accuracy problem was reported; the customer left a comment detailing a problem with pickles (poor pickle placement, too many pickles, not enough pickles, no pickles when pickles were ordered, etc.).
It is unlikely that this restaurant would have ever realized that pickles were so important to customers had it not been for the ability of text analytics to uncover those trends in the free-form text.
Monitoring
In other cases, businesses already know about, and expect, customers to talk about certain topics. In this case, the stream of text is monitored as it flows by and key concepts are extracted.
It is like dipping a sieve in a river to catch objects as they speed by. This technique turns qualitative, subjective text into a stream of quantitative, objective data that can be trended and compared over time. This is called Text Monitoring.
For example: a hotel may already know that customers are likely to comment on the quality of beds and operation of televisions. They may choose to scan for those known issues so they can identify, and fix, any problems.
“Till Death do us Part”
It costs 5 to 10 times as much money to acquire a new customer as it costs to keep an existing one. Most of the time, all you need to do to keep a customer is to listen.
Communication is the key to a healthy relationship. Keep your marriage to loyal customers strong by listening carefully to what they are saying.
- Do more than you're asked, before you're asked.
- Have an opinion. Have a spine.
- Intellectual curiosity and tenacity will drive success.
- Always listen and understand before making a decision... otherwise the wrong decision will probably be made.
- If you don't listen to customers, they will go elsewhere to be heard. This is never a good thing.
- It's far easier to find new customers when your existing customers are happy.
Mindshare drives operational improvement. Using Mindshare, companies improve operational excellence, foster consumer satisfaction, build customer loyalty, and support employee retention. Our industry experts guide clients in building comprehensive enterprise feedback management (EFM) solutions. Mindshare's proprietary survey technology captures the voice of the customer in real-time and immediately transforms it into actionable intelligence through powerful and incisive reporting. Mindshare serves more than 25 different industries including travel, hospitality, restaurant, financial, salon, automotive, and retail. For information, visit www.mshare.net.
