Customer Experience: Listening to the Voice of the Customer with AI

In this talk from Target Marketing’s All About Marketing Tech conference, Trust Insights co-founder Christopher Penn showed the breadth of modern customer experience and why mapping customer data back to the customer journey is essential for truly understanding your customers. Watch this talk to learn the customer experience data that maps to the journey, why you should be collecting it, and see some case studies of how to analyze it.

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Machine-Generated Transcript

What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.

Thank you so much. Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, depending on where you are listening in the world. Let’s get started. To set the table about customer experience and marketing technology, you guys see this slide like 1130 million times today, it’s an important slide. This is Scott Brinker, marketing technology, landscape 5000, which actually has close to 8000 different marketing technology companies, including companies like vid yard and link on here, somewhere in there. But this slide is a little misleading. And here’s why marketing technology is absolutely important is essential. But it’s out of context. Right? Before you begin talking about customer experience, before you begin talking about marketing technology, you have to figure out where does this stuff fit in the overall perspective for your company. This slide does not show you your strategy, your plan, your human resourcing the people that you need to make your technology work, it does not show you anything other than the ecosystem itself, the partners and the technology vendors that you need. So before we dive into any kind of marketing technology, we really need to back up and level set. What is this customer experience stuff, what is it’s called CX, if you want to be trendy about it, I guess. CX is composed of three domains, three areas of expertise, the voice of the customer user experience, which is UX, and UI, and analytics and big data. And now here’s the thing.

The voice of the customer, which is what we’re going to be talking about today, is the most neglected part of customer experience, then the reason why we give it lip service, the customer’s always right, the customers important where a customer centric organization, all these things that you have heard from many, many companies, many executive, there’s some things but then where do we spend all of our time, our money, our effort, our people, of course, we spend it on the toys and the tech. And that’s okay, but not great. If everything else isn’t working. So we’re going to take a few minutes to decompose to dig into the voice of the customer and how it applies to modern cx. And how it applies to marketing technology. So let’s talk about the voice of the customer. A lot of people think it is just kind of this is a very limited view of it, like oh, it’s just focus groups or just surveys, or it’s just, you know, the customer service inbox that nobody really wants to read, because you’re afraid that there’s gonna be a lot of negative criticism. And that may be, but customer experience, the voice of the customer is so much bigger than that. It is how you map all the data inputs that you get from your customer journey. So think about your customer journey, awareness, consideration, evaluation, purchase, ownership, loyalty, retention, and evangelism, that big circle that we all know that we all are aware of. How are you mapping your data, your analytics, all the tools and vendors that you use to that, I would submit that probably most people are not pulling in all the data into one place, and making good use of it. So let’s look at a couple of locals. Look at how this maps. At the very beginning. You have awareness. How aware? Are your customers? Are you? Are you pulling in your advertising and marketing data reactions to your advertising and marketing? Are you pulling in market research credible third party data that even tells you Hey, there’s the they’re there for our products and services. That’s your awareness space. Go down, go to the next step in the customer journey, social conversations product and service reviews, consideration tools that help you understand how is our How do our customers think about us? Or how do our prospective customers hear about us? Rob existing? So these are these conversations that these reviews are so important. And again, we know they’re there. But we don’t do anything to pull that data and move another step to evaluation you have in person and private messaging, how are people having conversations with you, as they consider your products and services as they consider whether they want to do business with you again, Tyler and fog are going to talk about things like video as a way to do that, or messaging as a way to do that. But this is one of many, many parts of that voice of the customer. You also have to pull in things like search intent data, real simple question to ask yourself, how often do you look at branded organic search the number of people who search for your company by name. If you’re not checking that data, you’re missing a critical part of the voice of the customer. Because if no one’s ever asking for you, they’re not going to do business with you, we get to the last part of the first half of the customer journey, which is where most marketers tend to stop thinking about it, which is that that sales interaction, how much data you collecting about the sale, the conditions of the sale, who it was the conversations that they had that led to the close of the sale, you would be amazed at how many CRM systems are out there that have rich, rich data about what made somebody want to do business with you. And then no one looks at it, no one digs through it, no one says, Hey, we should probably like mine this data to get additional insights to fuel further marketing. From there, we go into the second half of the customer journey, which is the owners journey, a neglected and often thrown to the side. And marketing never sees it. So that’s customer service. I mentioned at the beginning, that’s your customer service inbox. What’s in there? Do you know we did a project last year mining customer service in emails at this one company, it was in the food and beverage space. And we found two lines of inquiry about these two beverage types that the company never heard of like these are multi billion dollar product lines. And you had the data right there in your CRM, right there and your customer service inbox, you just never pulled it out. So how can you be using customer service data to inform the voice of the customer? user groups, owner groups? Do you have any? Do you know if you have any because some customers are so avid about your product or service they may provide their own groups or some customers may be like, well, I like this company. I like its products, but they’re kind of a pain to deal with. So they provide their own support. Do you know about these groups? Are you part of them? And are you extracting data from them? Next is that customer metadata and this is where advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning can help you build true models of the customer that are behavior based that are pulling it all of this data about the customer to establish a true profile, not a persona not you know, Sally soccer mom drives a minivan and has you know, errands $90,000 a year no real behavioral data that helps you predict who in your customer base is going to be valuable, who and your prospective customers is going to be likely to convert. That’s a towards the end of this journey once you have the information. And finally,

survey data is one of those things that people do very cursory. It’s not integrated into the voice of the customer strategy, you can take tremendous amounts of data from surveys, and use to inform everything else within the customer journey lifecycle and the voice of the customer. Jet Blue does this so well. They have NPS surveys that go out Net Promoter Score NPS go out after every leg of a flight, not just the flight overall, but from leg to leg because they want to know maybe it was flying out of Boston’s Logan International Airport always a pain out, you know, does that dampen your happiness? If so, that might even inform the decision about what leavin want to have added investments in there. So all this combined, has to be brought together, analyzed and built into a model of who is the customer? What is their voice? What do they say? Now, how many companies do this? Well, it’s hard for organizations because very often, it’s slow, it’s boring, it’s inaccurate. And the solution to the getting the hold of the voice of the customer, the true voice of the customer is to use artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies to listen throughout the journey. Why? Because AI technologies help us listen faster, listen better and and do a lot of the repetitive work the processing of the data, so that we can focus our time our effort and our domain expertise on the insights that data gives us. If we don’t use AI technology, what happens, of course, is that everybody just kind of collects data, gives lip service to God service in the voice of the customer and customer experience, and then goes about doing the way things the way they’ve always done it. And nothing ever changes, which means we don’t ever see the results, the upside of truly mapping out that voice of the customer. A couple of examples.

About a

three year months ago, a company came to us and said, Hey, we’re not getting great job applications, we’re not getting enough candidates for our business. HR, by the way is a a sales and marketing function, you’re selling somebody on wanting to work at your company. So the first thing we did was we pulled down all 3000 job listings they had on indeed, and ran them through some machine learning tools to extract out what were the most prominent words and phrases both frequency and linguistically that this company mentioned in the job so you can see them here. Now here are all the things that this company says you must have these things, this is what we care about as a company. And you look at that the thousands of job listings cool. Then they gave us 17,000 audio recordings from their call center. And we analyze those with AI we did the same type of modeling. Look at the difference in the words that the customer uses on the phone, and then compare it to what is in the job as you see the difference. The job ads are all about this is what we care about. We as the company care about and you the customer, you have no voice Here we are, you know, we we are the most important than the customer saying I don’t know I care about things like what’s my pay, what others they’re signing bonus, am I going to be home on the weekend. So these are, this is what the customers voice is saying. And this is why it is so important to align your what you’re going to say the customer understand the voice of the customer throughout that customer journey because here’s a clear a clear case where Guess what? They were not aligned. And then they’re wondering why am I applications down? Because you’re not saying anything people want here. I think about your own company, whether you’re in recruiting whether you’re selling something, I see people like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra here and Delta Dental of Iowa, what are you saying and doesn’t jive with what your customers are saying in their own voice. Another example, similar looking at reviews, analyzing those reviews that towards the beginning of the customer journey, we wanted to understand for this company, what were the main topics that drove a positive review, on score of one to five with five being the highest what were the drivers of positive reviews, this company thought it was all about our culture, and how well we communicate with our customers. But when you look at the reviews, the reviews say now it’s all about the money, the money is the most important thing. And so again, this is a case where the voice of the customer was Miss aligned with what the customer truly cared about. You have to get everything lined up together. So a couple of takeaways. Number one, listen to the customer throughout the journey use AI to do it. Every vendor these days is going to say that they have AI and machine learning and according to the most recent financial times study of this, about 35% are lying outright, they use none whatsoever. The rest of can be in varying states of maturity. So build an AI technology stack in your company so that you can fully understand the customer journey and customer experience. You can do that in partnership with great vendors and will again we’re going to hear from a couple of these next but make sure that at the end of the day you truly have the voice of the customer experience within your own organization and your data and to please with without AI do it the old way do it the new way doesn’t matter. Align the voice the customer with your customer journey throughout the lifecycle. If you want to win if you want to maximize the results that you’re getting. This is something that my company does trust insights which you can find at trust insights dot Hi my name is Christopher Penn and now I want to help solving your company’s data

analytics and digital marketing problems. This is trusted insight stuff AI today and let us know how we can help you

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Trust Insights (trustinsights.ai) is one of the world's leading management consulting firms in artificial intelligence/AI, especially in the use of generative AI and AI in marketing. Trust Insights provides custom AI consultation, training, education, implementation, and deployment of classical regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI, especially large language models such as ChatGPT's GPT-4-omni, Google Gemini, and Anthropic Claude. Trust Insights provides analytics consulting, data science consulting, and AI consulting.