Khoros CX Insights
Ask the Experts
Khoros CX experts Brian Timmons and Jacob Borgeson answer your questions of your frequently asked questions regarding 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 conversation aired on August 10 during a live
CXI FAQ webinar.
[Jacob] What is CX Insights?
[Background] Khoros acquired Topbox (press release) 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.
[Brian] So, what is customer experience insights? It's the ability to aggregate all Voice of the Customer (VOC). Phone calls that are transcribed into text and applied 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 that data, normalize the massive amounts of communications you're getting and create an insight, 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, whether those improvements are really simple in the contact center, improve handle time in first call resolution and those timing metrics to improving conversion customer retention, understanding product issues, contact drivers. There's a lot of data and without an automated way to view it and manipulate that data it's an overwhelming job. So, that's what we do.
[Jacob] Can you get these insights without buying CX Insights, or is that just the way that it comes today?
[Brian] Yeah, before CX Insights, the way you gather insights was to send your customer a survey and read the response, which is still a valid mechanism, but when you can combine all of your Voice of the Customer from a survey with what are they saying on phone and chat and email and social media, that's how you really drive that 360 degree view.
And in order to do that, 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. Millions and millions of dollars for our customers who are really investing in using the data the way it's intended to be used.
[Jacob] So, Khoros has other solutions, like Khoros Community. How does CXI work for the Khoros Community? What happens and what do you get when you look at Khoros Community data?
[Brian] Prior to the acquisition we viewed Community as just another channel, another way customers provide information about how you're doing. 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 what are the friction points, where are customers confused around your product or service.
So, when we ingest a community, we're ingesting that conversation just like it was a chat between an agent and a customer. And from there we're gathering product information, knowledge base information, things that could be automated within your infrastructure. And that's the beauty of the marriage between CXI and Khoros, is the fact 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, right, whether it's your phone calls that are recorded, or third-party websites. We can join that all together.
So, 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] I'm going to say that that's 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 we are PCI compliant and SOC 2 compliant and GDPR and CCPA, all the acronyms that you need in order to pass a security review.
And then you need to load the data and, depending upon your end point, if it's non-Khoros data, we're agnostic to the data. So it would be another partner recording calls and doing surveys, we can bring all of that in.
So, depending upon how many channels you have, 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, which usually the data ingesting portion is two or three or four weeks of kind of back and forth, let's get the data organized, it's pretty quick. From the time it's installed the data starts to jump off the page, the insights start to jump off the page because we typically bring in two or three months of historical data so that on day one you already have trending, you already have things that are starting to emerge from the last quarter.
We call that our running start. It's like signing up for the gym and getting credit for being there for two months already, right. You're already in a bit better shape than you were the day before. And so, it's usually within the first two or three weeks that our team starts to generate what we call an insight report, or an insight deck showing you this is what the data is telling us.
Without any bias from being inside your business and knowing exactly what's going on, we often times generate insights that our clients are like, "Wow, I did not know that was happening," or, which is more frequent, "I knew this was a thing, but I didn't know it had such scale. I didn't know it was impacting as many customers as it was. We have to reprioritize and go fix those things."
So, to answer your question, within the first month of install you're going to start seeing value from the app.
[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. But 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. So, just that email that's intended for a business case, but any other email platform that is intended to be systematic. 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, it's a lot of different data?
[Brian] So, anything that's relatively new, and customer experience, while it's been a buzzword for a long time, many companies haven’t really started to genuinely invest in customer experience until recently.
So, we have this range of clients that are neophytes to jedis. They're brand new and they've got it nailed down.
Those neophytes, the companies that are just getting into it where they have the foundation, they serve their customers and maybe they review some, they use quality from the agent perspective ( those are the most fun for our team because we have such a huge amount of opportunity.
And 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 embedded, 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 looking for increments of improvement.
Companies where they have a lot of tools, 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 we were like, it's such a mess we just can't help, right.
That's why we are such a big help is that messy data — and when you're talking about Voice of the Customer it's just messy — our ability to join complex data elements, to clean that 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 do have single-channel customers that start as single-channel customers. All of them end up bringing in the rest of their data.
So, if you're a community manager and you want to be able to quickly see trends and patterns and friction points and opportunities within the community data, we can absolutely do that. And our client success managers will be all over you to bring in phone calls on top of that, and chats, and email and social media because when you find something in community, for example, or you find something in social, or you find something that you need to fix via a survey, being able to test that for scale is really valuable.
Because even though maybe only a hundred people are chatting about something in your community channel, there could be a hundred thousand that are calling you on an annual, monthly basis. So, understanding that scale is important.
The other thing about scale, and this is a little bit off topic, but there's what I call the scale behind the scale because for every one of your customers who contact you about a problem some number doesn't bother. They just exist with that problem, or they try to solve that problem with your competition. In retail, for example, we've done a lot of work in terms of identifying what that number is in retail, it's around 35 to 1. Every consumer that calls you, chats with you, 35 more don't bother. They bail on the purchase, they go somewhere else. Understanding scale is important, and then what's the scale behind the scale.
So, to answer your question, yeah, bring your community on, but more channels get that 360 degree view.
[Jacob] 35 to 1, seems makes sense for retail when it's just so easy to buy everything online.
[Brian] And even like healthcare, it's still 5 or 6 to 1. And the mobile it's 15 or 18 to 1. So, there is a huge scale behind the scale. The more important the thing to the consumer the more likely they are to contact you, and the less choice they have the more likely they are to contact you. But if there's a choice and it's not a must have, there's a lot of customers that are having the same problems, you just don't know about it.
[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 an LP to train over time?
[Brian] Yeah, so that's the beauty of automation. You can't tag a phone call. There's going to be thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of phone calls, and you can't do that.
So you need the tool to be able to identify what your customers are saying in a phone call, and in chat, and in an email, in all of these channels. So the application automatically tags and then puts into topics what customers are saying. So, if it's a defective product, the customer could say it's broken, it broke, it popped, it tore, it ripped, it smells, it squeaks, there's a million things that they say that mean there's something wrong with this product.
So, 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.
Check out our CXI Demo here
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.