The customer experience has undergone significant changes in the recent past, driven by societal shifts toward digital, the growing importance of multichannel integration, and the personalization of customer-centric strategies. Today’s customers expect brands to not only meet their needs, but to do so with speed, efficiency, and exceptional responsiveness.

Navigating today’s busy CX landscape  

Customers engage with an increasing number of touchpoints with your brand, each of which leaves an impression that impacts their likelihood to continue doing business with you.  

In addition, customers often engage with brands through multiple channels and platforms. And while the features of those channels may differ, customers expect seamless engagement regardless of where and how the interaction takes place — in-person, email, AI-powered chatbots, social media, desktop and mobile device, brick-and-mortar, etc. In addition, they expect businesses to recall and respond to all their prior interactions. 

Meanwhile, many businesses are undergoing their own shift, expanding from (or foregoing altogether) traditional brick-and-mortar to the digital space. This shift introduces a variety of new business challenges, including marketing campaigns, communication, and service.  

Added to the mix is an armada of self-service, AI-infused analytics​ tools that promise things like sentiment analysis, theme identification, and data visualization capabilities at lightning speed. But considering that quality output depends on quality input and results lacking skilled analysis have limited usefulness, the true value of off-the-shelf insights tools is murky. 

All this throws into high relief the challenges of managing the customer experience. Valuable insight into customer interactions and related conditions, along with the ability to act upon them, are crucial to optimizing CX. Businesses committed to understanding these insights will distinguish themselves amid the competition’s clutter and noise.  

Your CX solution should maximize customer lifetime value 

Customer experience research aims to understand how to keep your brand relevant as customers interact with it based on their specific, in-the-moment circumstances. For businesses ready to innovate, this represents an opportunity to invest in a CX solution.

A CX solution equips your business to monitor and react in near real time, preventing issues before they escalate and capitalizing on opportunities when they arise. The key CX technologies are case management, employee coaching, real-time data capture and analytics, and alerting, with secure data integrations enabled across all.  

Generally, the goals of a CX solution fall along the lines of growing your customer base, increasing frequency of use among existing customers, identifying loyalty-building moments that matter to customers, identifying pain points to address gaps in employee training and overall customer satisfaction and — ultimately — maximizing lifetime value of your customers.  

Considerations for choosing a market research partner to optimize the customer journey

As you begin your CX journey, you want to enlist a market research partner best equipped to position you for success. With that in mind, as you evaluate prospective research partners, look for these qualities:  

• Advanced analytics capabilities and insights expertise (preferably in your industry) 

• A collaborative, hands-on, human-centric approach; your team should be secure knowing they have everything they need to be successful at every point in the entire customer journey

• Their commitment to thoroughly understanding your business strategy, goals, and objectives (including awareness of/respect for ROI on your research investment) and ensuring the custom CX solution reflects them

• Through experience, analytics skills, and technology, the capability to accurately and effectively measure and analyze feedback across touchpoints, journeys, and the overall customer lifecycle 

• The capability to share insights that allow decision-making processes that drive customer acquisition and loyalty quickly and effectively 

• Industry-leading tech your team can access for the long-term to continue collecting and measuring feedback, anticipate customer needs, and strategically transforming it to improved performance that best serves your customers

Bellomy’s approach to CX: Research expertise strengthened by industry-leading analytics  

Bellomy’s CX solution is developed by a team of insights professionals with a high degree of expertise and a collaborative, consultative approach, all backed by powerful tools, including AI-analytics technology.

Bellomy’s robust, proprietary technology — designed and developed by our researchers — prioritizes actionability and maximizes insights by using the most advanced data collection methods available to quickly and accurately measure what’s important.  

This high-touch, high-tech solution is flexible and tailored according to specific needs, seamlessly integrating with client workflows to make them easier, faster, and more efficient and allowing you to:  

• Get an omnichannel view of the customer experience across key shopper journeys such as in-store, curbside pickup, and home delivery 

• Manage CX across journeys to drive improvement, innovation, and competitive advantage 

• Be at the pulse of customer feedback, allowing you to do things like adjust marketing efforts, improve processes, and create store-level action plans 

• Understand which marketing efforts are moving the needle so you can make fast, data-driven decisions based on key metrics that sustain and grow your customer base 

The hallmark of Bellomy’s CX solution, however, is our emphasis on the humans we’ve developed the solution for — you and your team. We pay special attention to the client onboarding process with an intentional, empathetic, high-touch approach. In the spirit of crawl-walk-run learning, the implementation simplifies the setup and adds integration and sophistication over time to ensure you have what you need for long-term success.

Our CX solution provides tremendous operational and strategic value, delivering insights with agility and accuracy and transforming how teams understand the customer experience. Combined with our research team’s collective bench strength in a wide range of industries — including utilities, CPG, financial services, and retail — we help clients extract meaningful insights from high-quality data and implement them strategically to achieve business goals. 

AI-powered tools to analyze customer data are in your hands 

Bellomy’s proprietary Research Cloud platform is an insights technology tool designed and developed specifically for market intelligence purposes. 

Client access to the Research Cloud serves as a secure, single location for a wide range of integrated capabilities, including survey and data collection, leveraging AI-enabled data analysis, insights automation, data visualization, dashboarding, and reporting.  

Powered by machine learning, optimized for integration and predictive analytics, and with a clean, simple design, the tech keeps your team accurate, agile, and insightful. It’s where you can do things like view and interact with real-time data down to the respondent level; analyze open ends (including audio), social media, email, and other unstructured data; inform workflows with research results; and tap integrated analytic and reporting capabilities to act fast on insights.

Going beyond any feature commonly available in off-the-shelf tools, Bellomy tech’s powerful capabilities include:  

• An AI Assistant summary generator​ 

• API integrations for secure data exchange between software platforms including SalesForce and Qualtrics 

• Highly customized and targeted AI-generated topics models 

• Sentiment on an aggregate level with simplified sentiment scoring ​ 

• Ability to assess, quantify, and compare themes in email feedback ​ 

• Content actionability to understand customer praises, complaints, suggestions, and questions​ 

• Dashboarding, cross-tabbing and data visualization 

• Case management and issue resolution to close the loop and address complex issues early — before they escalate​  

Mine unstructured data for CX insights 

A standout in the Research Cloud, the AI-driven Bellomy AI Analytics for Text tool combines the latest natural language processing (NLP) with a made-for-actionability user experience. The tool equips organizations to uncover trends, problems, and business opportunities by mining unstructured data from a variety of sources, including:​ 

• Open-ended survey responses​ 

• Tracking studies​ 

• Business/product reviews (social media posts and comments, search engine results, etc.)​ 

• Non-survey ad hoc research results (focus groups, in-depth interviews, etc.)​ 

• Transcripts (call center, emails and website chats, video, etc.) 

It's AI-driven topic modeling function (focused and trained to achieve more than 90 percent sentiment accuracy) ​is designed to provide compelling insights across industries, and user interactions can effectively mine thousands of open ends to track customer inquiries, understand differences in complaints based on store/region, and help inform business decisions.

Working with the AI Assistant across features including cross tabs, dashboards, and workflows, users can: 

• Monitor and analyze customer behavior over time​ 

• Drill down customer data to a specific respondent or location 

• Examine qualitative and quantitative data simultaneously 

• Query our recommendations engine for prescriptive, data-driven advice 

• Extract insights on trends, reputation, sentiment and more from online reviews​ 

• Identify perceptions and pain points​ 

• Uncover opportunities to differentiate​ 

• Capitalize on authentic VOC content across social channels 

• Detect and analyze the trends, themes, and sentiments in customer conversations​ 

• Protect brand reputation by detecting and analyzing negative sentiment and emotion​ 

• Pinpoint differentiators and specific areas of focus by subgroup 

Case Studies: Customer experience examples

Business challenge 1

A retail chain with more than 1,100 stores was rated no. 1 in customer experience overall, across 20-plus industries. But the company wanted to get even better by improving its customer voice assistance program — which uses receipts as survey invitations to evaluate the shopping experience. 

Bellomy solution 

Bellomy developed a CX solution using analytics and technology that:  

• Allowed the retailer to prioritize continuous improvement initiatives via analytic approaches and access the results in a comprehensive platform based on role to drive initiatives at each level of the organization 

• Expanded insights beyond the overall voice of the consumer through an intelligent receipt-based routing system to narrow in on issues at the store level 

Business outcome 

The retailer now has a robust, intelligent platform to capture customer voice. Analyst tools in the platform enable the insights team to respond much more quickly to stakeholder requests, maximizing their time to focus on strategic initiatives. 

Business challenge 2 

A utility company didn’t have an easy mechanism to monitor the customer experience across touchpoints. They wanted to take the pulse of their customer experience across key channels of transaction including phone and online. They desired daily information updates so they could act quickly. Additionally, the utility requested rapid access to its residential and business customers to explore hot topics and test concepts. 

Bellomy solution 

• A CX solution developed to capture and integrate all the responses across channels of transaction and delivered to a variety of stakeholders via online platform 

• A case management tool to efficiently and proactively address customer concerns via integrated access to operational information and survey results for each customer

• A panel of residential and business customers that facilitates rapid exploration and testing of marketing and CX hypotheses, driving a more agile business approach from frontline learning to executive decision-making 

Business outcome 

The utility leverages Bellomy’s synthesized reports to evaluate KPI trends on daily, monthly, and yearly cadences. The marriage between the utility’s transaction research and Bellomy’s CX platform informs team decisions as well as broader organizational efforts. The panel provides relevant answers to immediate research needs and time-sensitive questions, enabling better prioritization and agile, informed decision-making. 

Elevate your customer satisfaction with a custom CX solution 

Your CX solution is critical to business growth. To maximize the likelihood of its success, find a partner equipped with insights and analytics expertise, advanced technology, the capability to customize solutions based on your business objectives, a human-centric approach, and an overriding commitment to your success.

If your customer experience needs attention and you either do not have a CX solution or your current solution fails to meet your standards for the service and technology you need for actionable insights, please request a consultation at www.Bellomy.Com/consultation.