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Getting Actionable Insights from Customer Support Conversations
We’re in a world where the customer is king. We rely on them to reach out to us, tell us how they feel, tell their friends about us and, of course, to continue spending their money with us. We could just take each of these interactions at face value and continue on with our day, but gaining more actionable insights from customer support conversations helps perpetuate a pattern of customer happiness and loyalty.
Actionable insights go beyond the raw data that you pull from your CRM, helpdesk, or other software. Instead of just a single point of data, actionable insights offer a clear path for an organization to follow in order to best make changes to processes or strategy.
Unfortunately, while gathering data is common, aggregating actionable insights is not. Forrester reports that 74% of companies say they want to have strong data processes, but only 29% are actually successful in actioning their analytics. Luckily, though, customer support conversations are some of the easiest places to collect actionable insights. Here are a few straightforward ways to get started today.
Read your reviews (and have AI analyze them for deeper insights)
While you can gain a ton of insights just by reading what your customers have to say about reviews, they will be even more actionable if you analyze them. Using machine learning can help you uncover trends that you might not be able to see with just a human reviewing every response. This is especially true in situations where there is so much data available that it’s near impossible to read it all. In those cases, reading just a sample of your responses would never be reflective of your customers’ sentiments overall. AI gives a much more accurate analysis overall because it analyzes everything.
Determining that survey responses are overall positive or trending down is just a starting point for further analysis. Use high-impact text analysis tools and methodologies to mine verbatim feedback about how customers truly feel about your product or service and how they want to be engaged. Not only will this help point you in the right direction for what needs to shift it will also give you a better handle on what you’re already doing correctly. It will also help you to find correlations between customer feedback and actions that they’re taking within your product.
Listen to your customers on social media
Almost everyone has some form of social media presence, and it’s in your best interest to capitalize on that. While offering social media support properly is more difficult than people expect, the payback is worth it. A Bain & Company report on social media found that customers who engage with companies over social media spend 20-40% more with those companies than their other customers do.
Social listening is generally best practiced when you’ve made it easy for your customers to reach out to you. Facebook pages and Twitter feeds make it easy and quick for people to share how they’re thinking without having to jump through a ton of hoops or engage with you directly.
Monitoring this free and undirected flow of information allows your team to move away from the bias of the specific questions you might ask in surveys. There, you get into the meat and potatoes of what people are actually thinking and when they’re thinking it.
Social media listening also helps teams assess customers’ intent to purchase, determine segments around customer interests or sentiment and determine which communities are most active for them (and where they should invest potential marketing spend).
Identify at-risk segments
The best way to give your customers a superior experience is to appropriately segment them using up-to-date data. There are a number of things that you can segment on, including:
- Customer journey timeline location
- Sentiment, NPS, CSAT
- Industry
- Professional position
- Behavior
- Spend
From there, information that you glean from customer feedback data can be put to use improving your segments. You can track your most at-risk segments, and put specific efforts into their retention. Start by segmenting based on the more structured and straight-forward data points such as CSAT survey or churn numbers, and then delve deeper. When you read into more unstructured data, such as customer feedback comments, you get more insight into which segments are particularly at risk. It also opens you up to more deeply understanding how product changes and updates affect your customers’ engagement with your product.
For example, you can dive into feedback from customers in specific segments to see which struggle most with a specific feature. You can also uncover things like cost-aversion and specifically target segments with proactive support or marketing campaigns. Tom Shapiro, CEO of Stratabeat, believes that close to 50% of your segments should be based on a customer’s goals and struggles with your product. Diving more deeply into the specific, unstructured data behind each segment helps get you closer to that goal.
Correlate your customer support conversation metrics with company-wide KPIs
For some companies, support feels irrelevant when it comes to conversations about company-wide KPIs or goals. But, just because support isn’t directly responsible for things like product deadlines or NPS survey doesn’t mean that the two can’t be correlated.
When you start to correlate customer ticket volume or actions within your product with things like bug reports, or churn metrics, it helps tell a more compelling story about what’s really happening. Sure, you likely get churn responses from a survey that you send out after the fact, but correlating those pieces of data with things like support ticket satisfaction, volume or first response time can get you a better picture of how your support team can make an impact on company-wide metrics.
You can also use natural language processing (NLP) to dive deeper into sentiment for an even stronger comparison. NLP allows insights teams to analyze customer conversations based on what they’re actually saying, not just the basic sentiment or score being given, as well as how they feel about certain features or issues.
If you’re able to see correlations between a segment of customers, negative sentiment around a product release and churn rates, you have an actionable insight!
Follow your volume
Pay attention to the peaks and valleys of your support volume. If you’ve just released a new product, do you see a spike in tickets? What about if you push a large bug fix? Understanding how work outside of your customer experience team affects the customer experience can be integral for perfecting your processes.
After you’ve made a major change, such as a new product feature, a bug squash or a change in refund policy, following the volume in the inbox can help give you a map for how to better handle it in the future. If you segment and review specific tickets related to the change, you’ll be able to see what to improve (or what customers really loved) so you can build it intentionally in the future.
Consider, for example, if you were to see a large number of tickets coming in about documentation after the release of a new product. A review of the tickets shows that people were looking for documentation but couldn’t seem to find anything that helped. That means that you may want to look into what your process for creating and curating documentation looks like for future releases.
To close
Customer conversations are a data gold mine when it comes to helpful information about where you can take action. Your customers are, after all, the most important part of your business. They keep your doors open and lights on. Using their words to directly impact your company strategies and processes is the best way to keep yourself afloat and successful.
Use AI, such as NLP and text analytics, to get more precise and applicable information about how your customers are doing and feeling. Listen to them, both in reviews and on social media, to see if there’s anything that you can find between the lines. Follow the trends in your support volume to see where you’re doing things right and deflecting tickets, or where there are opportunities for you to do better. Finally, use all of this information to keep the good experience train rolling.
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Texting is one of the most used forms of communication. In the United States alone, 5.5 billion text messages are sent daily. So maybe it’s not so much of a surprise that your customers want to be able to text your business when they need support. Few things are more frustrating than when you’re trying to solve a problem and just end up sitting on hold. And texting offers an alternative for you and your customers. If your business doesn’t already offer texting support, then here are the nine reasons you should.. 1. Customers spend a lot of time on their phones People in the U.S. spend an average of 3 hours and 10 minutes on their cell phones each day. Mobile commerce, or purchases made on mobile devices, is expected to account for 45 percent of the total market in the U.S. by the end of 2020, according to Business Insider . Besides people using their phones for more than personal communication and shopping, they are also working from their phones. All of this points to the fact that your customers are already spending more time on mobile than anywhere else. And nothing is more accessible to a mobile user than texting. So it is high time that your business starts texting your existing support. Meet your customers where they are. 2. Your customers prefer texting Now that we know customers are already on their phones, but does that also mean they want to text businesses? Yes. Customers want to be able to text your support team simply because they prefer texting over long-winded support calls. Reportedly, 52 percent of customers prefer texting over other support communication channels. Another reason why texting should be preferred is that it has a 98 percent open rate . That means your customers will read your message nearly every time, which only makes it easier for you to resolve all of your customers’ support questions. If you meet your customers where they want to talk they’ll view your business more favorably too. Research shows that 65 percent of consumers feel positive toward businesses that they have the option to message. 3. Speed The average response time for texting is just 90 seconds. On top of that, 95 percent of texts are read within the first three minutes of being received. This is way quicker than your average email response time and thus will make your customer feel valued. Part of what can help to speed this process up is a good texting platform that your customer support team can work with. Such a platform can host all of the support messages, where they can see, respond to, or share messages. Some texting platforms like Textline can even integrate with your favorite customer support tools like Freshdesk and Slack. These integrations make responding and managing customer support requests easier. Another reason why texting is simply better when it comes to speed is that texts are inherently short. You’re limited to 160 characters and so are your customers. Realistically, there’s only so much one can squeeze into one text that naturally forces the sender to keep the message simple and clear. 4. Reduced active wait Customers don’t like waiting. Nearly 60 percent of customers said they would hang up if put on hold for more than a minute. Texting eliminates that hold time and gives your customers more of their day back. The beauty of texting is that it’s quick, convenient, and doesn’t interrupt your customer’s day. Texting also comes with built-in expectations around timing and the natural flow of conversations. While responses are expected, there’s an understanding that it may take a bit of time. This differs from live chat, which expects near-instant replies. With texting, even if you think there might be a wait for getting your customers some help, you can use a simple text to let your customers know that you are working on an answer but it might take a bit of time. This will help them to continue with their day without sitting by the phone waiting. Let’s look at the following example of one such situation.
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