Turn Open-Ended Feedback into Actionable Insights With Text Analytics

Leading brands know the quickest path to growth starts with listening to customers. But an increasingly complex customer journey spanning multiple touchpoints—including brick-and-mortar visits, contact center interactions, and online ratings and reviews—can make surfacing actionable insights seem like a daunting task. And with customers growing weary of lengthy surveys asking about every aspect of their experience, open-ended comments offer enormous potential for streamlining the feedback-to-insight process.

To drive real change, brands require enterprise-level reporting platforms that translate mountains of data into targeted customer insights that drive business outcomes—consistently and efficiently. Because while quantitative data from your customer experience management (CEM) program is invaluable, it’s often the customer comments that help you answer questions you never thought to ask.

Fueled by data science, SMG’s recent and upcoming text analytics (TA) innovations will help you maximize your CX feedback in these 3 ways:

Seeing Trending Topics for Proactive Focus

Trend reports can be very helpful by highlighting emerging topics before they become widespread issues. Brands can avoid being caught off guard and take a more proactive approach. Our text analytic technology uses machine learning techniques to comb each customer comment, cross-check them with others for similar themes, and bring you the topics that warrant further investigation.

Gaining a High-Level View of Recurring Themes

Having a high-level vantage point of the cross-channel conversation makes it easier to keep tabs on what’s being talked about—and how those topics color the customer experience. Company health reports offer a brand-level view, so you can see how you’re performing across various sources and channels.

To go a little deeper and gain insight on more specific channels and locations, word clouds provide users with:

• Recurring topics + accompanying sentiment
• Period-over-period comparisons on frequency of mentions
• Total volume of comments relating to each category

Using Word Clouds for Insight

These tools provide a quick read on frequency of mentions, along with the added layer of sentiment and change—offering an upfront understanding of how customers feel about your brand.

Tracking Regional Differences with Heat Maps

Your customers can be all over the map—and you have to be right there with them. To drive global consistency, use text analytics technology to highlight where experiences lag expectations.

Interactive heat maps enable users to:

• Identify the regions where sentiment dips
• Hover over areas of interest for quick insight
• Drill down into specific categories to take informed action

With a full view of the customer experience across your geographic footprint, you can catch regional variances in perception and know exactly where to narrow your focus.

Why Text Analytics is Key for CX Success

Text analytics is becoming an increasingly important part of the customer experience, so a high-functioning TA tool is imperative to any winning CX program. Without advanced TA technology, you aren’t harnessing the rich comments left by your customers—which means you’re missing out on even richer, more actionable insights.

Learn More About Text Analytics

In an upcoming blog, we’ll unveil more ways text analytics helps maximize CX feedback. Until then, download the best practice guide: 6 ways text analytics delivers better insights for better business outcomes