Where CX matters most

Thematic CEO Alyona Medelyan shares valuable insights from her work with customer insight professionals and analysts.

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Predictive analytics is changing the CX (customer experience landscape)

CX is becoming more data-driven, just like other areas of the business. Predictive analytics can be applied to customer data to find areas where CX efforts would produce the greatest effect, says Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic. The company provides a SaaS offering for customer feedback analysis.

For example, if companies can predict demand for certain items, they can make sure these items are available in stock. Amazon went even further: A recent patent shows that Amazon can predict the specific items a customer is likely to buy.

This means the company can pre-distribute these items to locations near customers' homes for speedy delivery.

A different example would be predicting customer satisfaction scores in relation to specific service improvements.

"I’m sure we will see more changes and innovative applications in this space," says Medelyan.

Focus on customer comments rather than your Net Promoter scores.

Alyona Medelyan, Thematic

Make the most of your net promoter score (NPS)

Over the past 10 years NPS became the most popular CX metric, because it is easy to explain and because it is known to correlate with company’s revenue and market share, says Medelyan.

Medelyan notes 90 per cent of Thematic’s customers use the company to improve their NPS.

She shares three of her biggest lessons from working closely with customer insight professionals and analysts.

First, optimise your survey.

Make sure to keep your open-ended questions specific: ‘Why did you give us this score?’ rather than ‘Your comments’.

Add a second open-ended question to your NPS survey asking what your company can improve. Otherwise, your participants will not give you suggestions to improve, says Medelyan.

Second, take your score with a grain of salt!

“Your score alone doesn’t mean much in isolation. If you don’t know your competitors’ scores, then you won’t know if you are doing better than them, or improved more than them compared to the last quarter. In the end, it is the relative NPS that decides who wins market share."

Third, focus on customer comments rather than scores.

Make sure to pay attention to common themes in individual customer’s responses, she advises. “This is the only way you can learn what are the key drivers for your customers’ loyalty and their propensity to recommend.”

This can be accomplished by either manually tagging each verbatim with one or more themes, or by using an automated solution.

CX is becoming more data-driven, just like other areas of the business

Alyona Medelyan, Thematic

Get the executive team, business leaders - everybody - on board

"Every person in an organisation should strive to know what drives their customers. And it is the leader’s job to make sure it is part of a culture and is re-enforced," says Medelyan.

One way of achieving this is by having a dedicated customer portal, where they can share survey results and specific customer feedback across the organisation.

It can be the company intranet, SharePoint or Salesforce.

Employees should not only know what the score is, but also what are the reasons behind the scores, she points out.

"Employees are more likely to jump on board, if they can relate to the data. Surfacing some of the customer’s comments on specific topics could be one way of doing this.

"Picking up the phone and speaking to a customer who responded to a survey is an even better way,” she adds.

“I could imagine that some companies may want their departments to compete. I think it depends on the company and the culture of its teams.

"To avoid departments seeing each other’s satisfaction data, a dashboard may be showing each department’s result in relation to all other departments collectively, rather than comparing department A and department B side by side."

“Any scoring system can be gamed, which is another good reason for removing the focus from the scores and focusing instead on the areas in which one department under or over-performs.”