VOC at Art.com - Using Etuma360 insights to be better and sell more

Followers of this blog will know that I represent Etuma, Ltd. here in the US and that I sell and support the product.  I've been working for over a year with Art.com on an evaluation and eventual acquisition the Etuma360 product.  Following is a little bit about Art.com, their implementation / usage of Etuma360 and some of the benefits they receive by its implementation. Thanks very much to Leanne Onstott - Senior Director Customer Sales and Service at Art.com for the kind words and testimonial.

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A little about Art.com

Established in 1998, Art.com has helped 10 million customers in over 120 countries. Art.com is the world’s largest online retailer of posters, prints, and framed art.  They offer the world's largest edited selection of wall art products with over 700,000 images including posters, art prints, tapestries, photography, wall signs, limited editions, hand-painted originals, and exclusive products, as well as a variety of high-quality finishing services including custom framing, wood mounting, and canvas transfers.  Art.com, Inc. runs five sites in the USA and has a strong international presence with 25 local sites in Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, Mexico and South America.

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Why Etuma360?

In the very competitive world of internet retailing, pricing, inventory, service and customer experience really matter.  Knowing the importance of customer feedback for understanding how they are doing, Art.com collects a lot of feedback from a number of sources.  They needed an effective, and cost effective, way to interpret their feedback.  And, because feedback is largely text based in several languages, they needed a multi-lingual text analytics solution.  They found Etuma360 from Helsinki based Etuma, Ltd.

Art.com currently uses Etuma360 in three main applications: Monitoring the global customer experience, Improving sales agent performance and Monitoring their Beta Test website.  “We were capturing customer feedback from various sources and in multiple languages”, says Leanne Onstott - Senior Director Customer Sales and Service.  “We needed a way to accumulate and understand what our customers found as barriers to happiness and repeat purchase with our website and processes.  Using Etuma360 has allowed us to have a centralized view of our customer pain points.  This allows us to prioritize work efforts around addressing key issues.“

Improving Sales Agent Performance:

“We also needed a way to analyze our sales agent’s chat dialogues with customers to understand how to improve their ability to convert sales during chats.  Etuma360 has helped us understand what our best agents chat about and helps us give input to our agents about how to be better in their chats with customers.  Since customers in chats may have experienced issues with our self service processes, Etuma360’s chat analyses have been a key to helping us understand what was confusing to them on the website and to help us reduce those self-serve barriers to sales conversion.”

Website Beta Testing:

“Recently, we launched a beta version for one of our websites where we used Etuma360 to isolate chat feedback from beta site customers to learn what changes we needed to make to the website's look and feel in order to prevent customer attrition and limit backlash.

The really cool factor for Etuma is its ability to customize reporting and drill down on key customer topics. It's a big plus for a small company with a global footprint to have the machine translation capability to really hear and understand the voice of the customer."

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Being in the business of helping organizations collect, analyze and act on customer feedback, my experience tells me that it's a rare circumstance where a business can receive the kind of cost effective solution that Etuma has been for Art.com.  Getting that solution to work required some effort from a few key Art.com people and a good deal of education about Etuma360 and its capabilities.  But, the payoff has been that Art.com has achieved essentially a do-it-yourself (DIY), highly functional text analysis capability that helps them build a better business by using customer feedback.  All done without any large cash outlays.  This proves that the DIY model can work in the realm of text analytics.  

Stewart Nash

stewart@etuma.com

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Etuma - Lowering Costs for Advanced Text Analysis

A quick Monday morning note:

Anyone who has looked into using text analysis technology very quickly realizes that the products available on the market require substantial investment.  But, this is beginning to change. 

Technology investment costs occur along three paths.  Product license costs, Solution implementation costs and Internal time and effort to support on-going use of the technology.  For Text Analysis, typically the benefits have had to be in the millions of dollars per year to justify the solution costs.  As a result, like most technologies, bigger firms with bigger needs, and bigger potential benefit pools, are the ones to adopt first.  So far, market development for text analysis tools is following this model. 

Over time, vendors look to offer their products to larger markets by offering packaging that fits smaller benefit pools that are more broadly applicable to larger groups of potential customers.  Again, text analysis is following this market development model. 

Finland based Etuma Oy (www.etuma.com) has found a way to package its text analysis service so that it is easily affordable for almost any company seeking to better understand its free form text feedback.  They have priced a new package of Etuma360 at roughly $400.00 per month.  The package allows one stream of text data of up to 25,000 text items per month.  It's based on a single named user but includes their "Research" and "Dashboard" analysis tools.  Data sources can be customer surveys, facebook feeds, 3rd party websites or most anything else.  But, for $5K / year a company can process a lot of text and get some very valuable analyses done on it.  And, can do it simultaneously in 10 european languages.

Etuma's new offering should be perfect for companies that want to interpret free form text based customer feedback coming through a dedicated channel like a customer survey or a website based form.  This kind of pricing model has the potential to really broaden the market for text analysis by taking something that was an enterprise type of decision and moving down to a departmental level decision in many companies.

Etuma will be making a product announcement fairly soon, I would guess.  But, to me, this kind of pricing model makes an enormous amount of sense because many applications of text analysis are at the department level. 

More to come on this......

An alternative to CRM based feedback - QuestBack Respondent Data

I am a big proponent of CRM Integrated Customer Feedback processes.

There is no question but that Customer feedback initiatives (especially in B2B) benefit greatly from CRM database integration. Just some of the benefits include:

• Personalization of questionnaires, e-mail invitations, reminders and follow-ups
• Optimized survey taking experience via data driven customization
• "Piping" of individualized data into questions or answer alternatives
• "Branching" the survey based on data (Customer has product X and not Y so only ask about X)
• Shorter surveys and resultant higher response rates
• Easier to implement and more precise follow-up processes
• Much better reporting of results

Integrating customer surveys with CRM tends to be a win-win for both businesses doing the surveys and their customers who take the surveys. 

But, CRM integrated feedback only covers a small part of a business' overall feedback needs 

Anyone who's been involved with system integration projects knows that they can be costly, that integration can limit an application's functionality and carries a maintenance burden (like any other software).  In practice, these issues limit the use of CRM integrated feedback to only critical feedback applications such as transactional Net Promoter or Customer satisfaction. 

Since, in most businesses most feedback is not about NPS or CSAT, feedback applications typically have to operate without the benefit of CRM integration.  Bigger businesses realize this, of course, and they organize many of their more regular feedback processes around customer / user "panels" or "communities".  Product user panels are particularly prevalent in software companies, for instance.  But, panels and communities also generally require significant resources.  And, as a result, also aren't practical for many businesses. 

Importing data as an alternative.

Without a budget for integration, user panels and the people to operate those systems, businesses can be forced into doing what I call "bad feedback" projects.  "Bad" projects feature surveys that ask too many questions (often seeking data they already possess), aren't personalized or optimized for the customer, don't trigger actions based on feedback, etc..  These projects produce feedback with lots of gaps, suffer from low response rates, are difficult to organize follow up activities for, etc...

In most of my customer feedback projects I use an Import process to embed customer data into my surveys.  The products I work with (QuestBack Ask/Act and QuestBack EasyResearch) both let me import substantial amounts of customer data into my surveys.  They both also integrate with CRM systems.   QuestBack calls imported information "Respondent data".  I have found Respondent data to be a very powerful and easy-to-use capability that gets me the benefits of CRM integration, but without integration's costs. 

QuestBack Respondent Data

Respondent data lets me do most things in a survey that integration would let me do. With it I can:

• Personalize invitations, reminders and follow up notifications
• Embed imported data into follow ups, allowing people to respond quickly without need for research
• Optimize question flow and user experience
• Create multiple and distinct follow up processes from the same survey instrument
• Create "prototype" feedback / follow up processes that can then be automated through integration.
• Work with multiple CRM data sources concurrently

With Respondent data I am able to help customers to quickly attain their immediate feedback management objectives while helping them determine what should be automated and how to best deploy an automated solution.  Customers get feedback benefits quickly, evolve into more sophisticated feedback uses and then go to a database integrated feedback process in a very precise manner.

At the end of the day, CRM integrated feedback is great to have. But by using QuestBack Respondent data first, integration can cost less and feedback processes can be more effective sooner, in my opinion.

Stewart Nash
www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

Using Net Promoter to turn Feedback into Action

Ask and Act - a new approach to NPS

As readers of this blog know, I'm a big fan of the Net Promoter methodology for using customer feedback to intelligently manage customer relationships, build customer loyalty and grow new business.  Readers here also know that I sell and support QuestBack's feedback management tools. 

Just for the record, I was a fan of NPS a long time before becoming a QuestBack reseller. 

Having said that, what's always appealed to me about QuestBack is its ability to set up customer surveys with real-time follow-up processes for Detractors, Passives and Promoters, without requiring CRM integration.  Until last week though, setting up NPS categories inside QuestBack was  something of a manual process.  And, reporting NPS relied on similar use of manually set up (but automatically run) filters on the response data. 

QuestBack has changed all that with their latest release of the product. QuestBack's new version now does some really useful things when used for NPS surveys.  First, it implements the "Likely to recommend" question as a special question type.  This implementation lets QuestBack's analytics, notifications (automated follow up) and reporting tools all automatically set themselves up for doing automated follow up, data analysis and reporting based on NPS category. 

Other features include: automated category based question branching (so different questions can easily be asked of detractors, passives or promoters), automated report setup for secure viewing, and inclusion of data from multiple survey sources in the NPS calculation.

A capability that QuestBack has implemented, and which I believe will be really useful, is the ability to redefine how survey respondents fit into NPS categories.  In my experience, many organizations for different reasons, need to determine what scores define their NPS categories differently than the standard ("0-6 = Detractor", "7-8 = Passive" or "9-10 = Promoter") survey scale.  Reicheld pointed out in a recent LinkedIn forum post, that if a customer gives an "8" on an NPS survey but otherwise behaves like a "promoter", that customer is a "promoter".  If enough "8's" behave like promoters your NPS scale needs to change to reflect that reality.  QuestBack's new NPS tools let you do this while maintaining all other automation characteristics for follow up, analytics and reporting that it implements. 

I don't often write about QuestBack on this blog.  It's always been my belief that providing more general information about "closed loop" customer feedback processes would be more interesting and valuable to readers.  But, so many companies still struggle with effective closed loop feedback processes, even after they adopt NPS, that I thought writing about an easy, affordable and powerful new way to implement NPS would be, at a minimum, interesting to people. 

Stewart Nash

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash

stew.nash2010@gmail.com

Turning customer feedback into action is the number one challenge for customer strategists

"Turning customer feedback into action is the number one challenge for customer strategists." - Walker Information, Inc.

Anyone who has visited this Blog knows that I've written numerous posts about the value-add of alert based survey follow-up processes. And, that QuestBack's Ask & Act toolset supports implementation of rules based on-line survey follow-up processes.

I don't normally highlight marketing materials distributed by competitors (even if they aren't really competitors). Walker and QuestBack are both in the business of helping companies take effective actions on customer feedback using on-line surveys, analytics, follow-up, reporting, etc.  Though in practice, I have never really found myself selling against them.  Our solution methodologies and price points are very different.

Walker recently released a marketing piece that I thought worthy of writing about.  Its a two-page blurb about one of their customers who received great value from implementing a "hot-Alert" process that allowed their client to implement follow-up on customer survey respondents with problems or issues.  And, also to identify and act on new sales leads from the data.  The blurb states: "In one year they (Walker's customer) were able to convert thousands of sales leads into millions in revenue." through this hot-Alert process.

For anyone interested.  The Walker piece is titled: "Taking Action Produces Big Pay-Off".  The Walker site is: www.walkerinfo.com

At QuestBack, our mantra has always been "ASK & ACT".  We've been talking about this topic for almost ten years.  We have customers who've been doing alert based follow up for at least that long.  And, it works.  This kind of recognition by another vendor like Walker is great news for us at QuestBack because it's another validation of our approach. 

Where QuestBack solutions implement Alert based survey follow-up processes at a fraction of the cost of a Walker implemented process.  I would think this kind of publicity would be good for business going forward.

Stewart Nash
s.nash@questback.com
LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stewartnash/