Today’s CX and contact center leaders are offered a bounty of vendor options to fill both technical and business needs inside the contact center and across the customer journey as a whole. Discerning the nuances between product offerings, and how it fits the overall needs and strategy of the business, can be half the battle. The other half of the battle? Understanding how the solution will positively impact KPI’s and translating that into real revenue for the business. It’s paramount for getting buy-in on a new solution from key stakeholders and ensuring you’re positioned to show growth against metrics that are important to your department.  Recognizing that proving the ROI of a new solution is a critical element to making informed decisions, we created an interactive ROI calculator for our Khoros CX Insights solution to provide a general approximation of the cost savings businesses can expect by deflecting calls, decreasing Average Handle Time (AHT), and improving loyalty when listening to customers with Khoros CX Insights. Fill out the calculator here to discover the revenue opportunity of Khoros CX Insights: https://bit.ly/3iGfTuI Brands like DoorDash, Aetna, e.l.f. cosmetics, and Sprint have already saved millions with Khoros CX Insights by turning the voice and text data they already have into fuel for improving the holistic customer experience and reducing costs in the contact center. Khoros CX Insights delivers a unified view of the customer by stitching together customer interaction data from every channel and analyzing it as a single data set to uncover how customer expectations are being met by each part of the business, where the friction points lie, and how to resolve them. Received your ROI results and want to learn more? Khoros has an entire team dedicated to showing you the value of our solutions. No contracts or commitments needed. You can fill out the form HERE to chat with our in-house business value consulting experts and receive an in-depth ROI evaluation that’s tailored to your unique business. ... View more

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. ______________________________________________________________ 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). ... View more

It’s a stark fact: CX initiatives are failing. Resting on the shoulders of CX leaders is the responsibility to unify customer data, initiate cross-departmental action to improve the end-to-end customer journey, and prove the value of CX program outcomes in dollars and cents. But the typical organizational framework makes achieving these goals a momentous task and ultimately what is responsible for a disproportionately low CX success rate.  In our new ebook, From team to COE: Why CX teams struggle, and how to fix it, we provide actionable steps for how CX leaders can overcome the top three internal obstacles to create a unified view of the customer, drive cross-departmental action and connect CX program outcomes to ROI.  Most companies have yet to adopt a true customer-centric framework. Departments are typically aligned by channel, whereby teams KPI’s are based on improving efficiency and the customer experience in the channel they own. For example, the contact center typically owns phone and they’re measured against metrics like Average Handle Time, First Contact Resolution, CSAT and NPS scores to benchmark improvements made in that channel. Moreover, each department has their own unique business systems and point solutions to track customer data in their respective channels. Not surprisingly, an organizational framework like this naturally leads to data silos. Data becomes confined in the systems owned by each department and inaccessible to the wider organization, a problem no one wants to spend time or budget to deweb. Without free-flowing customer data, CX leaders can’t surface a unified view of the customer experience to identify customer friction points across the end-to-end customer journey. Even if CX leaders did have holistic insights to bring to cross-departmental stakeholders, teams outside of CX don’t care about furthering CX initiatives when, quite frankly, the outcomes/successes won’t be attributed to the work in their role.  Without unified CX insights and cross-departmental action, the improvements CX leaders CAN make usually end up siloed to the contact center and measured in terms of NPS/CSAT scores. But those metrics mean nothing to the C-suite. They want to see the output of CX initiatives in dollars and cents - a hard thing to show when you’re tethered to the contact center. Consequently, with no tangible revenue to show for CX program outputs, executives are increasingly pulling back the reins on CX investments. Despite the minefield CX leaders must navigate to successfully execute CX initiatives, there are proven ways for how to overcome these internal obstacles to create a revenue-driving CX program - no matter where your company is in it’s journey to become customer-centric. For actionable steps for how to break through internal roadblocks to turning CX program insights into measurable revenue, download our ebook: From team to COE: Why CX teams struggle, and how to fix it. ... View more