Enriching customer conversations with artificial intelligence

by Matt Gullett | published on September 21, 2020

Illustration of an oversized computer screen when a check on one side and x on the other side of the screen to represent consumer comments.Every consumer holds a potential wealth of actionable business insights. When engaged in a survey consumers are willing to share their concerns, experiences, opinions, and ideas. Researchers and customer experience analysts need to mine this valuable resource effectively and responsibly to improve their business, identify strengths and weaknesses, and take corrective action where needed.

The research challenge

The pressure to have ever shorter surveys is creating new challenges for insight professionals as we fight for the consumer's attention. The myriad of ratings and close-ended answers that once powered page upon page of tabulation reports and PowerPoint decks is being replaced by fewer and fewer survey questions.

The tools to mine opinions and ideas from consumers are growing in some respects while shrinking rapidly in others. Tools like PowerBI and Tableau democratize access to data visualization, yet the data available is shifting from traditional quantitative opinion metrics to behavioral data and more qualitative stories and opinion snippets.


Bellomy's The cover of Bellomy's whitepaper titled "Five text analytics myths you should stop believing." Unstructured data is complex and so are the tools used to analyze it. Make sure you’re not falling for one of these five common text analytics misconceptions — but here's what to do about it if you are.


Enabling greater insights with less intrusive surveys

The insights delivery process describes the lifecycle of how research goes from inception (a client's need) to actionable insights. Maintaining this process requires new approaches, techniques, and technologies. Bellomy’s innovative SmartIDEAS platform enables researchers to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance our research process to sustain and grow insights while improving the respondent experience and leveraging the available behavioral data.

Our core survey platform is integrated with a powerful AI and research-focused, purpose-built natural language processor (NLP). It can analyze open-ended consumer comments to identify sentiment, emotion, topics, cries for help, questions, suggestions, and more. This real-time analysis can enable the introduction of additional questions for targeted consumers based on their verbatim responses.

Vague responses are an all too common outcome for traditional NPS surveys. The consumer is willing and ready to share their experience, yet the survey instrument is unable to reach the deeper details of the experience that might unlock immense business value.

With our advanced AI and NLP, we can analyze the verbatim response to determine that there is an opportunity for greater information from this consumer. The AI can automatically enable a follow-up question that digs deeper into the respondent experience to gain greater insights.

Survey question about the why the likeliness to recommend was rated a 6. Response: The agent who took my call was polite but could not answer my questions.

Instead of ending the conversation, AI and NLP analyze the consumer response in real-time and automatically enable a follow-up question. In the following example, much-needed information is shared by the consumer because they were simply asked. This information can help the business improve by providing more specific details about the customer experience. 

Survey question prompt: Could you help us understand what questions were not answered?Response: bill due date is unclear, I'm not sure what is happening.

Diagnose, then treat

Our purpose-built artificial intelligence is designed and trained to detect common consumer conversations found in surveys every day. We can customize that training on a client-by-client basis to identify their unique needs and enable these enriched consumer conversations. Specific conversations can be built based on sentiment, emotional expressions (or emotional expressions relative to consumer standing), topic classification, and more. This customization adds to the customer experience by making consumers feel understood, and confident in your ability to help solve their problems efficiently. 

Closing the loop on business actionability

Enriching the conversation does not end with the consumer survey; it can extend to the research clients as well. Generally, we work directly with our client's research staff. We can automatically identify cries for help, unsafe situations, legal risks, and more, as well as automatically trigger new cases in the case management system or email notifications to the appropriate business team members to enable rapid response.

Our text analytics tool can mine the entire pool of consumer responses to enable analysts and business users to identify a myriad of relevant insights. If you are interested in enhancing your customer experience with these customized tools as a feature on your site, contact us to learn more.