The challenges of unstructured data scattered across numerous platforms, websites, and channels—and the sheer volume of them—may be daunting, but unlocking this wealth of insights offers brands tremendous opportunity. If your sentiment analysis only gives you an understanding of whether feedback is positive or negative, it’s time to adopt a more statistical approach to maximize your customer experience efforts. This can be done by unblocking your customer’s voice.

Today, AI-powered customer feedback tools can extract valuable insights from across the customer base and even analyze unstructured data. We call this improved understanding of your customer’s end-to-end journey “Voice of the Customer (VoC)”. It’s an approach that opens every channel and breaks down data silos to give brands a transparent view of their experiences from the customer’s perspective.

How can your organization uncover and activate insights hidden in social media conversations, emails, chat logs, call recordings, and survey responses? In this guide, we examine how text analytics contributes to a successful customer experience (CX) program, learn the business benefits of statistical text analytics, and provide tips to help you get started.

The power of unsolicited customer feedback

It’s important to ask customers to share their feedback in reviews and surveys, but many insights can be gleaned from unsolicited feedback. In fact, Gartner estimates that up to 80% of an organization’s information assets are unstructured content.

The customer issues you don’t know about might be the most critical ones to address, and these unexpected insights are more likely to come from open-ended questions or unsolicited communications than multiple-choice response surveys.

People often give positive and negative customer feedback when they have an extreme experience. For example, you may see Yelp restaurant reviews that are either enthusiastic or critical. This is because people feel they can gain social capital by sharing positive experiences or warning others about negative ones.

Browsing the web for those mentions and conversations is made possible by technology, but what you do next determines the value of that feedback from customers.

Our software helps you understand the entire customer experience thanks to its proprietary combination of AI and human NLP techniques to organize, structure and categorize text. We also offer full support from our analysts to ensure your AI algorithms align with your business goals and evolve with your customers’ behaviors and preferences.

This is how the Customer Experience Text Analysis works

There’s no dark magic here – just the power of AI and Natural Language Processing (NLP) with proprietary algorithms at work for your business.

Let’s say your restaurant brand collects 17,000 restaurant survey responses each month. They kept the survey short and direct to improve completion. It therefore asks for a score for customer satisfaction and contains an open-ended question: “Why did you give this score?”

This open text field contains all kinds of feedback on temperature, restaurant atmosphere and cleanliness, table service, app feedback, delivery on-time, packaging, order timing and more. How can you make sense of all this unstructured feedback when it’s being collected at scale?

Text analysis categorizes these comments into concepts and assigns sentiments or “qualifiers.” Integrating this data with other CX analytics gives your restaurant brand (or any other brand) monthly customer satisfaction trends through the review score.

It also provides important insights into the specific reasons customers were satisfied or dissatisfied and the business units, products and services that contributed to that experience. With this rich set of actionable insights, you can determine where to prioritize and what to keep.

And that’s exactly what the customers shared directly with the brand as part of the survey. Now imagine all the feedback that customers are sharing on other channels—email, social media, local review sites, and customer forums. Leveraging this deep insight can benefit the organization in a number of ways.

Text analysis in action

Here’s a real-life example of a popular Mexican fast-casual restaurant that wanted to eliminate common pain points and friction points in their customer journey. To create a better local experience in each location, this brand needed to identify common themes and feedback in their online reviews.

We use Rio SEO’s powerful Genius® Text Analytics solution. We started by grouping positive review sentiment into several key areas so the brand could see where their location excelled. The negative sentiment surrounding ordering and delivery processes required further analysis and the brand was able to pinpoint customers’ exact concerns.

Rapid implementation of an action plan to address these issues resulted in Google’s average star rating improving in just two months. The proportion of 5-star reviews increased exponentially over the same period.

How analyzing customer feedback can benefit your business

Unlocking customer insights using state-of-the-art statistical analysis techniques offers valuable business benefits. Here are just a few examples of the impact VoC features can have.

Identify new delivery issues early

By monitoring feedback from customer reviews, social media, and customer support interactions, businesses can quickly identify and fix delivery issues as they arise, rather than waiting for larger problems to develop.

Suppose a company notices that several customers are reporting delays or missed deliveries. When this happens, they can investigate the root cause and take corrective action before the problem affects more customers. Likewise, companies can improve their packaging and quality control processes when customers report problems with damaged or incorrect items.

Analyzing customer feedback also helps companies understand customer expectations and preferences, which can inform future improvements in their delivery process. By regularly monitoring feedback, companies can better understand customer needs and align their delivery processes accordingly.

Recognize and use new trends

Advanced statistical analysis can help companies identify and capitalize on new patterns and trends to stay ahead of the curve. Businesses can identify new opportunities and potential market segments, develop new products or services to meet those needs, and maintain a competitive advantage in their industry. By leveraging customer insights, companies can develop products and strategies that resonate with their target audience and drive growth over the long term.

Reduce operational costs by addressing common customer support issues

Monitoring feedback channels like customer support tickets can provide insight into common requests and complaints. This can inform about improvements to products or services that reduce the number of support requests. Organizations may also choose to allocate resources more effectively. Both measures can lead to significant cost savings.

When brands leverage VoC insights and focus on delivering a quality product or service to customers, customer satisfaction and loyalty improve. Customers who can solve problems quickly and efficiently are more likely to continue using a product or service and recommend it to others. This can help businesses increase revenue and profitability over the long term while reducing their customer support resources.

Develop innovative products and new features based on customer ideas

Involving customers in the product development process can help ensure that new products and features align with customer needs and preferences. By soliciting feedback and incorporating it into the design process, companies can create products that are more likely to be well received by customers and achieve commercial success.

Up-to-date customer feedback allows brands to identify new growth opportunities and differentiate themselves from the competition.

Understand the causes of customer satisfaction scores

Even unstructured customer feedback can provide good insight into customer experiences and expectations with the right technology and expert support. Active listening and text analysis can help companies identify the specific factors driving customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.

For example, a company with a high level of customer satisfaction might find in its text analysis that product quality, customer support, or ease of use are most important to customers. Identifying the root causes of customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction allows the organization to prioritize, focus on high-impact areas, and take corrective action to address issues and improve customer satisfaction over time.

Text analysis in action

How to start your Voice of Customer program

At Rio SEO and Forsta you will find all the technology and expert support you need for a successful Voice of Customer (VoC) program. Whether you’re conducting a simple or complex survey—or an online, phone, or face-to-face interview—our platform’s intuitive interface makes advanced text analysis work quick and easy.

Our dashboard offers multilingual capabilities, is compatible with any device and is easy to configure so you can view data the way you want. Sort and filter by industry, product, region, or any other criteria to get the insights you need. You can easily schedule all your projects in your Forsta calendar and also view all your Instant Sample Audience provider options and costs.

Customer insights are scattered everywhere—across social media, email, chat logs, call recordings, and survey responses. Text analytics help you understand and structure all that data, and turn all that rich text into measurable, understandable, and actionable insights that drive customer retention, sales, and more positive feedback in the future. Would you like to find out more? Contact us for a demo.