External Impact Analytics Uses Social Media to Pinpoint What's Affecting Customer Behavior
As I've discussed previously, social media activity offers an enormous wealth of insights regarding what drives your customers' perceptions and behavior. But what if they're not talking about their interactions with your brand, but rather something happing far away from your contact centers? If something is impacting your customer journeys for better or worse, but isn't being captured via traditional customer journey and voice of customer data applications, wouldn't you still want to identify it?
Consider: A nationwide chain of pizza shops observed that demand for pizza orders and deliveries would peak when certain television programs were airing. In this case, the public was most likely to crave pizza when a popular game show was on. Other top pizza-movers included football games, reality TV series, and a highly-rated news program. Using data like this, the brand can better predict when and how to allocate its resources, and more effectively target promotional activities.
In short, their customer experience was affected by factors independent of their customer engagements. What could your brand do with such insights?
The Tweets Tell the Tale
As a proprietary enhancement to its Customer Journey Optimization and IVR Optimization applications, NICE's External Impact Analytics provides automatic detection of meaningful events, identifies their impact on customers' journeys, and spotlights changes in customer experience. For the client, it:
- Summarizes which external events impact the customer experience.
- Identifies any KPIs that changed due to these events.
- Visualizes the changes in customers' journeys.
- Recognizes customers who changed their behavior.
When integrated with Twitter, for example, the application ingests all tweets within a given time frame, separates them out into streams of varying (trending) topics, builds trend lines for each topic, and identifies events happening in the world as people take to the internet to discuss them. Then, these trends are correlated against internal customer data to determine cause and effect.
"Well that's your problem right there…"
NICE recently demonstrated this for a major telecommunications provider in North America. Aggregating data from nearly 200,000 customer journeys and more than 2.2 million interactions (including IVR, web-based, voice call, retail, and other channels), External Impact Analytics scanned 1.3 million tweets and correlated the data to isolate the five public events that most impacted customer experience metrics during the test period. These included:
- Signal issues at a sports venue.
- Adjustments to the carrier's coverage and plans.
- A promotion between the carrier and a third-party distributor.
- A public announcement from the company's CEO.
- A broad disruption of texting capabilities.
External Impact Analytics adds another level of insight beyond both customer journey data and feedback management. It enables brands to visualize and understand the impact of external developments, including promotions and competition, on their customers' experiences.
For these brands, the customer experience was largely determined not by their customer engagements, but by external events. Your customer engagements are indeed critical to building satisfaction and loyalty, but ensuring rewarding experiences does not end there. Depending on your industry, bad weather, power outages, promotions, rebranding, or any number of other goings-on might have a significant impact on customer behavior—and none of it is reflected by traditional customer journey visualizations. External Impact Analytics keeps you appraised of what's motivating your customers beyond the contact center, giving you a more complete grasp of your customer journeys.
Learn more about how you can optimize the customer's journey, improve digital containment, drive the greatest value from your IVR investment, and deliver personalized customer experiences to promote long-term loyalty.