Voice of Customer and Social CRM

Most consumer generated content systems use keywords to classify verbatim. Keyword classification is largely based on human intuition and experience. As valuable as that may be, it’s no match for the statistical machine learning techniques used by OpenMic. First, many of the clues to categorization in a verbatim message are counterintuitive. For example, let's say the category is “legal issues.” The obvious keywords pointing to "legal issues" are: “law suit,” “lawyer,” “brief,” etc. But when you examine a set of verbatim that you know are about "legal issues", you'll see there are a lot of them that don't contain any of these keywords. It turns out that two of the best clues to messages about legal issues are “sir” and “madam” . Messages beginning with the phrase “Dear Sir or Madam” are far more likely to pertain to legal issues than not. This includes valuable clues which wouldn’t occur to a human (like “Dear Sir or Madam”) as well as clues which at first glance would semm to indicate a category but indicate the opposite. For example, "I couldn't be happier" throws a wrench in most keyword classification schemes.

Overtone's clients each process from several hundred to several million feedback transactions per month. First off, though, you probably aren't getting as much feedback as you should. If you have hundreds of thousands of customers, then you should be generating enough customer feedback where an Integrated Listening System™ will deliver immediate actionable insights, and immediate return on investment.

Very little. The implementation is performed by our Professional Services Team and is typically accomplished within a few weeks after all your social media and direct feedback sources are connected to OpenMic. During this time, we work to build the categories and reports that meet your business needs. Once the system is operational, reports may be scheduled and delivered via email. Automated alerts are also delivered via email and require no maintenance. After implementation, our Professional Services Team will continue to help you derive valuable customer and market insights with included consulting and support services as part of your subscription agreement.

For customer-focused organizations, command of this kind of intelligence is a central strategic goal. Business users from the C-suite on down to marketing analysts will derive immediate and sustained value from the system. The actionable insights illuminated by OpenMic continuous brand monitoring can be put to immediate use in almost every part of your business. From identifying and prioritizing new features in product development to improving the quality of product or service delivery, you can now know in real-time the issues, concerns and, hopefully, delight that your customers are experiencing.

The ability to identify emerging issues before they become crises is the most obvious benefit, but continuous brand monitoring opens another new dimension in customer engagement. Continuous monitoring means that you can establish a baseline or benchmark for customer satisfaction or customer issues so you can track how well you are taking care of your customers 24/7. What's more, you can proactively engage your customers with OpenMic built-in business rules engine. If, for example, a customer tells you in a comment that you let him or her down with your shipping service, you can set the system to instantly respond with a browser window or email, conveying a message of sincere concern and offering free expedited shipping on their next order. You have the chance to take positive action to turn a potential lost customer into a net promoter.

No. OpenMic works in conjunction with surveys to enhance your existing customer intelligence. Moreover, OpenMic can be deployed to deliver context-specific surveys based on feedback categories to deliver the exact answers you need, while your customer is still engaged with the issue that caused them to reach out to you. Imagine this scenario: OpenMic uncovers a spike in usability issues for a specific user segment. Using OpenMic's business rules capability, you can re-direct users to three short follow-up questions to identify the root cause. You no longer need to squeeze a few more questions onto an already crowded survey or go through an entire ad-hoc qualitative, quantitative research cycle to obtain a single insight.

While the system supports simple keyword categorization, this is just one point in one dimension of the multi-dimensional analysis OpenMic uses to categorize and analyze customer comments. Our proprietary methodology utilizes a combination of statistical techniques for categorization and clustering to provide real-time intelligence.

Over the years we have we have developed a set of best practices for soliciting and collecting the highest volume of the quality feedback for our clients. Implementing an optimized placement for your feedback channels is part of the Island Data solution. A good place to start is to prominently place a "Feedback" button on your home page. A recent study Fortune 500 companies found that most were doing a surprisingly bad job of soliciting feedback. It took a customer an average of three clicks once they'd found the contact form to get to a text box that they could share their comments with the company. The website feedback channel, however, is only the beginning. Email, SMS, CRM transcripts, IVR transcription, RSS, even forums or Twitter "tweets" are all possible customer comment channels to feed into the OpenMic system. Any and all of your customer interactions are potential sources of customer comments that you can mine for actionable insights.

The Overtone analysis engine can be as accurate with customer comments as the most sophisticated linguistics-based system. Because of the wide range of expressions and language that consumers use in their comments, our statistically-based natural language processing engine offers the optimal combination of accuracy, precision and robustness for handling customer verbatim records. The benefits of this approach are threefold. First, the engine can handle any Western language, dialect, or slang - even the acronyms of "leet" common in SMS messages and web posts (i.e. IMHO, OMG, ROTFL). Second, our engine works so fast that we can process comments in milliseconds and scale to millions of comments a day. Third, the speed of our processing means that you can engage your customers in real-time based on the content of comments. Imagine what kind of up-sell, cross-sell and win-back programs you can run if you could immediately reach out to a customer with a relevant offer at the time that they communicated their complaint.

Overtone is a fully featured customer listening system. The data input module allows you to solicit customer comments in email, online feedback forms, SMS and a whole host of other channels. The proprietary intelligent classification engine then assigns customer comments to one or more categories that map to your brand performance. Typically, clients will have 20-25 categories, with groups of categories for customer service issues, product features, product quality, and competitive intelligence. Our statistically-based natural language processing engine allows the OpenMic software to analyze each customer comment in less than a second and scale to millions of customer comments a month. Automatic analysis is what transforms this basic classification into actionable customer intelligence. Using several proprietary algorithms, OpenMic extracts themes, detects emerging issues, identifies out-of-pattern conditions and performs root-cause analysis. This quantitative data is reported in real time as alerts-glowing red lights on the dashboard or an email to your inbox, with summary reports available on demand.

Overtone can analyze all forms of electronic customer comments: emails, feedback cards, surveys, Web comments, SMS, and message board posts among others. Messages may be streamed in real time, providing continuous analysis or batch-loaded as often as you wish.

No, Overtone's solution goes far beyond any ordinary survey tool. Although it is easily integrated and very complementary to survey programs you may already have, our solution brings you strategic insights you simply cannot get any other way. By collecting the customer's thoughts in their own words, you gain much deeper insight than through structured questions alone. Imagine a doctor's visit where he/she has to play 20 questions to guess what's wrong with you as opposed to just listening to you first. Structured questions are still important — if you need to know where someone lives, you have to ask — but your knowledge is greatly enhanced by hearing what the customer wants to tell you in their own words.