Khoros CX experts Brian Timmons and Jacob Borgeson answer your frequently asked questions about the Khoros CX Insights solution. Don’t see your question here? Ask in the chat below or connect with us on Maia (the lower right corner Khoros bot).
The below is a transcript from a live CXI FaQ webinar that aired on August 10.
Khoros acquired Topbox in January of 2021, bringing an innovative omnichannel CX analytics solution to Khoros’ award-winning digital customer engagement platform to create a powerful new standard for artificial intelligence (AI)-powered customer experience management.
[Jacob] What is CX Insights?
[Brian] It's the ability to aggregate the Voice of the Customer (VOC) into a unified view: phone calls are transcribed into text and applied to a sentiment algorithm, chats and emails and surveys and third-party review sites like Amazon reviews, Google reviews, web boards like Reddit. Really any way that your customers can talk to you or about you is aggregated together so that you get a 360 degree view of what your customers are feeling and experiencing with your brand. Everybody wants to be able to take action and be confident in those actions, but without having a way to aggregate, normalize, and surface valuable insights from the massive amounts of customer communications you're constantly getting, it's really difficult to rally the troops internally to make those changes.
So that's what we do is aggregate, normalize, and present the data in a way that makes it really fast and easy to take action and improve your business.
[Jacob] Can you get these insights without buying Khoros CX Insights?
[Brian] The traditional way to gather CX insights is to send customers a survey, which is still a valid mechanism. But if you’re solely relying on surveys for customer feedback, you’re only using a very small slice of ALL your customer feedback data to drive improvements, which means you’re probably not making the RIGHT improvements and you’re missing out on greater revenue opportunities by ignoring the majority of your customer base and their feedback.
The key is to take that survey data and combine it with what customers are saying on phone, chat, email, and social media... that's how you really create that 360 degree view.
In order to get those holistic CX insights, you have to buy the software, which for the value you get and the return on investment, is actually very inexpensive. We expect a minimum of a 5x return on investment, and oftentimes we see 20, 30, 50 times return on investment.
[Jacob] Khoros has other solutions, like Khoros Community. How does CXI work with the Khoros Community and what’s the value of applying CXI to Khoros Community data?
[Brian] In a community you have one customer asking a question, another customer providing an answer, which is a super cost effective way to support customers. And embedded in those consumer-to-consumer conversations are really valuable insights around customer friction points and new ideas for what they want to see from your brand. So, when we ingest community data, we're ingesting those conversations just like it was a chat between an agent and a customer. The beauty of the marriage between CXI and Khoros is that we can take all of this embedded data that Khoros generates on behalf of our customers and use that in coordination with third-party data to create a unified Voice of the Customer.
Community is just another channel that your consumers, your clients, your customers are talking to you and about you. Let's use that data to show you where your friction is and improve your business.
[Jacob] So, on that note, how long does it take to get the insights from CX Insights?
[Brian] It’s really a three-step process because you have to go through the normal buying process to get a contract in place, and we're dealing with customer data so security review is a big part of that.
And then we load the data, which can take 2-4 weeks. The timeframe for how long that takes depends on how many channels you have and the complexity of your data — and we have clients with very organized, well-structured data and we have clients who have data that's really all over the board, it's in different places and it's messy — that's our job to simplify your data.
Once those two things are done in your launch, insights are available immediately. We typically bring in two to three months of historical data, so on day one you already have insights telling you trending topics or emerging issues from last quarter. We call that our running start.
Within the first two or three weeks after CXI is up and running, our team will create what we call an “Insight Report,” which shows our customers specifically what the data is telling us without any bias from being inside your business. The reaction we usually get to the insights we share is, "Wow, I did not know that was happening," or "I knew this was a thing, but I didn't know it was at this scale. We have to reprioritize and fix these things."
So, to answer your question, within the first month of install you're going to start seeing value from the application.
[Jacob] Are there limitations to channels or anything you can't ingest in CXI?
[Brian] We get asked that a lot because everybody’s data is unique and different. There is only one channel that we've ever not been able to ingest because it's not not really a consumer-based communication method - Microsoft Outlook.
We've never found a social platform that we couldn't integrate. We've never found a phone platform where we couldn't ingest phone calls and transcribe and translate into the languages we support.
So, the answer is, not so far, and we've been at this for six years.
[Jacob] What happens with CXI when the data is just a big mess?
[Brian] Many companies haven’t really started to genuinely invest in customer experience until recently. So, we have this range of clients from neophytes to jedis. They're brand new or they've got it nailed down.
Those neophytes, the companies that are just beginning to tap into their customer feedback and are mostly focused on improving agent quality, are the most fun for our team because we have such a huge amount of opportunity. And for those companies it's literally millions and millions of dollars that we end up generating in value.
And then you have those that have many CX tools. They have Q&A functions that are ingrained into their applications. They may have speech analytics, they may have text analytics, they may even aggregate some of that together. In those cases, we're talking to them about the business problems that are most pressing for them, and often its retention. So, we're looking specifically at joining retention data so that we can help them improve that specific metric.
But we've never seen somebody's data where it's such a mess we just can't help, right. That's the beauty of CXI. We can take messy, complex data elements — and when you're talking about Voice of the Customer it's just messy — and clean it up, customize it and make sure that it is presented in a way that makes it fast to find insights. That's what we do, that's our expertise. So, the messier the data the more fun it is for our engineers and for our business value consultants to generate value.
[Jacob] Is CXI usable for just community content?
[Brian] It is, and we often have customers who start by only ingesting one channel of customer data. All of them end up bringing in the rest of their data.
If you're a community manager and you want to be able to quickly see trends, friction points and opportunities within community data, we can absolutely do that. But our client success managers will be bugging you to bring in phone calls, chat, email, and social media on top of that because when you find something in community you need to be able to test that for scale. Because even though a hundred people are chatting about something in your community channel, there could be a hundred thousand others that are calling you on an annual, monthly basis about the same or a related issue.
Understanding scale can’t be emphasized enough. For every one of your customers who contacts you about a problem, most don’t bother. In retail, for example, it's around 35 to 1. Every consumer that calls you, chats with you, 35 don't bother. They bail on the purchase or they go to your competition.
So, to answer your question, yeah, bring your community on, but more channels will get you more valuable insight.
[Jacob] Another technical question, do we have to manually tag all our products and keep a label system, or will the tool do that and use Natural Language Processing to train over time?
[Brian] Yeah, so that's the beauty of automation. The application automatically tags and then puts into topics what customers are saying. For example, if it's a defective product, the customer could say it's broken, it popped, it tore, it ripped, it smells, it squeaks... there are a million things that they say that mean there's something wrong with this product. We take all of those words that mean ‘defect’ and put that into one topic.
There's no tagging needed across any channel because we do that automatically.
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Who are Brian and Jacob?
[Brian] I am one of the founders at Topbox and my role is pretty simple, to evangelize customer experience insights in how we can help our clients better their relationships with their customers, which is a really easy job because it's so important and such a near-and-dear thing to all companies as the battlefront for customer experience has arrived, so it's such an important element off everybody's strategy.
[Jacob]I’m a Principal Product Marketing Manager where I provide customer and market inputs for our Communities and CX platform. By talking to customers, doing research, and reading a lot of content, I try to uncover interesting problems and help a lot of different groups of people figure out how to solve them.
Interested in learning more about Khoros CX Insights or need more questions answered? Schedule a demo HERE.
Don’t forget to submit more of your CXI questions in the chat below or connect with us on Maia (the lower right corner Khoros bot).
