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The 5 Biggest Aha Moments From “THE STATE OF CX ANALYTICS 2021” Study

For a few years, CX research tech is booming, empowered by emerging tech. Despite the exploding variety of tech, the state of execution is in a mixed state. Companies are looking for orientation.

What are the benchmark implementation top companies are deploying? Is there any vendor-independent guidance?

CX.AI teamed up with University Ostfalia and TMRE to give answers and to track progress year by year with this study called “THE STATE OF CX ANALYTICS”.

We interviewed 155 Enterprise insights professionals from around the world qualitatively and quantitatively. These are the five biggest learnings

#1 GETTING LEADERSHIP BUY-IN IS THE BIGGEST PAIN

The biggest pain of CX insights teams is not finding the fanciest tech in town. Its not to quantify the customer journey, to improve response rate or to drive impact. The biggest challenge is to gain the internal buy-in of stakeholders.

One reason is that researchers do not professionally manage the process of getting buy-in. 40% are doing nothing systematically in this regard. Just 27% have a marketing plan for insights in place.

#2 NPS IS KING. STABILITY CAN BE AN ISSUE.

There are many different outcome metrics in CX research, but the bulk of companies leveraging the NPS. Some participants complained about the instability of the NPS score, but just a few leverage available modeling methods to fix that. 17% are utilizing multidimensional rating as a means to get a stable outcome measure.

#3 SURVEYING STILL HAS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT

One-third are still using also CATI (phone) to gather feedback. 23% of companies are already using advanced tech to get better feedback, such as active listening, audio or video feedback.

The biggest room for improvement: 40% are still asking different questions to promoters vs. distractors to get better feedback. This is blocking the ways to find drivers thru modeling properly.

#4 TEXT ANALYTICS ON THE RISE – BUT NOT SATISFACTORY YET

36% still do not systematically analyze their customer feedback, apart from eventually reading them. Most text analytics is “unsupervised”, leaving them room for improvement. Although 47% are already leveraging text analytics, the majority is not satisfied with granularity or accuracy.

#5 DRIVER ANALYSIS AND IMPACT EVALUATION IS EVOLVING

57% are using no or not appropriate methods to evaluate what’s important. Just 30% running drivers on text analytics data. That’s a method that combines short surveys, with qualitative insights and predictive and prescriptive insights.

Only 40% perform a proper analysis to explain the impact of CX on the bottom line. Just 13% use Causal Machine Learning – a tech proven to outperform conventional modeling by factor two.

CONCLUSION

The State of CX Analytics is advancing. It is evolving in measurement, surveying methods, text analytics, and proper interpretation with modeling. However, the biggest “construction site” is still the art and science of getting buy-in. This is what insight leaders need to work on:

1. Set up a marketing plan. “Insights” is a product like any other service. It remains a shelf warmer unless adequately marketed. It starts with researching the target audience's interests.
2. Do your homework. Use tech to getting your scores stable and eliminate the risk of questioning the outcome itself.
3. Simplify with tech. If your tech can read, categorize, and understand by finding what predictably leads to outcomes, you can simplify to focusing on the supercritical topics.
4. Align with interests. Understanding is biased by interests and beliefs. Use available analytics tech to prove impact to every particular interest. Prove the impact of CX on churn, revenue (for CFO), word-of-mouth (for CMO), and operational costs (for COO).
5. From reporting to gamified planning: Leadership needs planning help not just insights. The more insights can be experienced e.g., by interactively simulating impact, the better it is understood.

Author:

Dr. Frank Buckler is founder of CX.AI who is serving enterprise insights teams to move the organization & get leadership buy-In by using world’s-leading AI to turn Customer Feedback into what CMO’s, CFO’s & COO’s love - evidence on how to predictably improve churn, costs and revenue.

Frank is a frequent speaker at MR conferences and was invited to speak at worlds largest industry conference four times in a row. He is the inventor of a groundbreaking causal machine learning technology (NEUSREL) and an ambassador for improving decisions with AI.

The above report is provided by CX.AI and can be obtained by writing an email to Frank@cx-ai.com