customer experience management

Engaged Employees :: Engaged Customers

The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important and then get out of their way while they do it.
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- Jack Welch, General Electric

Sentiment and Text Analytics from Clarabridge

Customers talk, and with all the different ways they can communicate with you today theyre doing it louder and more often. By implementing sentiment and text analytics software from Clarabridge, organizations can take their customer feedback and translate it into action items, so that every department benefits. Many of the worlds largest organizations employ software from Clarabridge. Core to the technology is Clarabridges deep NLP engine, which deconstructs unstructured data (verbatims) down to the concept level, understanding not only the subject and context of a sentence, but the relationships between words. Each concept is tagged for sentiment on an 11 point intensity scale, and then married to any structured attributes that were gathered. All this information is then categorized for faster analysis based on an industry specific model that is refined to reflect the nuances of a given organizations structure and even culture. Clarabridge allows for both a top-down, human driven, as well as bottoms-up, data driven approach to classification. Once categorized, users can slice and dice the insights to extract actionable information from within Clarabridge or using any of a variety of reporting and analysis tools.

Whats the most critical component of your company?

As a Human Capital professional, you already know the answerits your people. Not only do employees represent the greatest annual expensesome 70%, for most major enterprisesbut also our best source of ideas and innovation, especially when it comes to customer relationships and satisfaction. Human Capital professionals recognize the correlation between employee engagement and positive business outcomes like talent retention, customer satisfaction scores, and innovation, yet few organizations have successful employee engagement programs. Fewer still harness employee opinions and suggestions automatically across the organization in order to improve the customer experience. This paper will examine the powerful benefits that effective employee engagement has on staff as well on customer experience. Well share a checklist of what to look for in a text analytics solution that makes sense for you to use. It will demonstrate how Clarabridge helps departments like yours to leverage employee feedback to bring about a significant increase in employee engagement. We will show how Human Capital professionals can easily and efficiently analyze massive stores of employee feedback using existing staff resources, and how it improves employee engagement as well as customer satisfaction, thereby increasing the all-important bottom line. Finally, well provide examples of the many Clarabridge customers that have had success in utilizing employee feedback to greatly enhance their Voice of the Customer program.

Why the Emphasis on Employee Engagement?

Human Capital professionals in 73% of the 340 fastest growing businesses in America have named employee retention as their top management issue. Given the enormous effort, expense and peoplepower inherent in hiring, training and replacing employees, employee retention is critical to ensure a companys future. Thats where employee engagement comes into play: Employee engagement programs accomplish four things: 1. Increases motivation. When employees feel that they have a voice and that their opinions are heard, they are motivated to work harder and support the team. 2. Increases productivity. Engaged employees experience a greater sense of well-being that comes from feeling that they are making a difference.
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3. Increases retention. Studies show that the number one reason employees look for new opportunities is not cash. Employees who feel over-looked and under-appreciated will sooner or later jump ship. 4. Improves the bottom line. According to the American Society for Training and Development (ASTD), higher reported levels of engagement are correlated with higher levels of market performance, as gauged by self reports in the areas of revenue growth, market share, profitability and customer satisfaction1.

We believe that aligning employees values, goals, and aspirations with those of the organization is the best method for achieving the sustainable employee engagement required for an organization to thrive. Blessing White, Employee Engagement Report 2011 Employee Engagement: The New Business Metric
Research from Towers Watson (ISR), Gallup, Manpower and SHRM all link high engagement with discretionary effort, innovation, customer loyalty, quality, profitability, earnings per share (EPS) and productivity. How can active employee engagement move your companys financial needle? To answer, lets look first at the mechanics of employee engagement. Employee engagement focuses on the contributions that the individual makes to the organization, as well as the personal satisfaction they experience in their job. Although participation and enthusiasm are outward-facing, and fulfillment comes from within, the two are intrinsically intertwined. The more the individual feels that they contribute to the success of the company the more satisfaction they feel. The happier they are in their position, the more likely they are to engage positively with peers, with management and with customers. In todays massively competitive climate, a motivated and dedicated workforce is vital to business survival yet infinitely more challenging to achieve and sustain given cutbacks, salary freezes, and layoffs. Consider these statistics from a 2010 Gallup study on employee engagement in the United States: 29 percent are engaged 54 percent of employees are not engaged 17 percent are disengaged Organizations have their work cut out for them to bring disenchanted and detached workers back to the fold. Human Capital organizations must give employees every opportunity to be heard, and demonstrate that they are truly listening to what employees have to say.

1. ASTD/i4cp Learning and Engagement Study

For a clearer reading of employee sentiment, HR departments turned to traditional tools to gauge attitudes at each phase of the employee experience cycle: interview notes, surveys, performance anagement systems and online resources. The problem with relying solely on conventional tools to form a clear picture of employee sentiment is that they only tell part of the story.

Key Components to Analyzing Employee Sentiment to Support a Successful Employee Engagement Program
Choosing the right solution for gathering and analyzing employee sentiment will facilitate a fruitful Employee Engagement program. Follow these recommendations when considering text analytics software. Your solution should: Automate the analysis of data company-wide. Your department is already stretched and often understaffed. A solution that does not automatically gather, analyze and report on employee sentiment will not sustain a robust employee engagement initiative. Expand your view. Unlike structured, choose the best answer feedback, unstructured data contains emotional language - sentiment. For example, frustrated employees might utilize Facebook, email or an online forum to express dissatisfaction with company policy. To prevent the dissatisfaction and departure of your best and brightest, you need a solution that can help you understand their motivation and the contributing factors that have led to that dissatisfaction. Remove dependence on structured scores from surveys. Todays employees, especially Millennials, have less and less interest in answering forms and surveys as a means of response. Instead, they are turning in growing numbers to easy and immediate feedback mechanisms that allow for unsolicited self-expression such as paper surveys, self evaluations and performance reviews; and online sources such as company intranets, internet surveys, chat rooms, forums and of course, social media. A solution like Clarabridge makes it simple to utilize any kind of data to understand employee trends and recognize trending topics. Eliminate manual processes. Employing traditionally intensive manual processes to read and code employee data from unstructured sources like social media or your internal portals is timeconsuming, inaccurate, and costly. Your solution should zip through reading and coding data. Un-silo data. By taking all of your structured and unstructured employee feedback out of the multiple silos of various HR areas (Benefits, Compensation, Recruitment) and from other areas across the enterprise into one central analytic solution, you avoid time-consuming, repetitive effort and gain a comprehensive perspective of your employees views on your business and your customers view of your employees. If your solution cannot centralize information for 360 analysis, you lose invaluable insights. Accurately analyze unstructured information. Tabulating surveys is one thing, but analyzing sentiment and extracting actionable insights from millions of freeform data points from many sourcesin many languagesis quite another. Dont lose rich nuggets of employee information that can guide your department to making positive inroads.

 Be easy to use by business user standards. It takes specialized analytical and programming expertise to manually extrapolate, process and analyze large volumes of unstructured data skills not abundantly available in an organization as a whole, much less in the Human Capital department. A solution that handles multiple sources automatically without expert intervention is highly recommended. Designed for business users, Clarabridge automatically collects, reads, codes, analyzes, provides sentiment analysis, and delivers reports, while detecting and alerting you and other stakeholders in your organization to emerging employee issues.

Unilever Harnessing the Power of Social Media and Text Analytics for Employee Research
Clarabridge customers gain new insights from their employees by analyzing data from employee surveys and intranets, websites and social media. These insights are crucial, particularly in situations where a valuable workforce segment is highly dispersed. On behalf of Unilever, Silverman Research (2) implemented an innovative method of collecting and analyzing employee insights from around the globe, using Clarabridge to analyze unstructured feedback. Unilever, the global consumer goods company, has a large community of current and former International Assignees (IAs) employees that move from their home country to work for the business in another country. Previous changes to IA policies had not been well received and, as a consequence, Unilever embarked on a review a major part of which was to gain insight from the IA community itself. The unique aspect of this project was the innovative way in which this insight was obtained. Silverman Research worked with computer scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, to implement a new online research tool that used social media principles and the latest data visualization technology.

Visualized Voice of the Employee feedback

2 www.silvermanresearch.com

The tool plots each participant in a visual Opinion Space allowing participants to see where they stand in relation to others and to rate each others suggestions. This overcomes the problems with existing social media research tools that use a traditional discussion forum/message board format and linear lists of comments (sometimes alongside clumsy voting mechanisms to rate comments). Unilever found that these tools made it impossible for employees to navigate each others comments and were, therefore, incapable of sustaining a large number of participants. Silverman Research utilized Clarabridges analytical solutions to analyze the large volumes of written feedback alongside other quantitative measures including participants rating of each others feedback. This added a rich dimension to Unilevers research. The project was beneficial for participants and for Unilever. Participants were able to see, instantly, where they stood in relation to other IAs and to read and rate the suggestions of their fellow IAs which they found very engaging. Employees really valued being given a real voice to say what they wanted. In total, over 900 IAs (50%) participated in the research an excellent response rate considering previous attempts to survey this population had achieved response rates as low as 20%. Moreover, the project was conducted at a fraction of the cost of a typical qualitative project involving discussion groups/interviews. For Unilever, radical policy changes have been implemented in response to the research findings. By having participants rate each others suggestions, Unilever was able to harness the wisdom of crowds. Mixed with the latest text and sentiment analysis techniques from Clarabridge, this provides a whole new level of insight.

Employee Insights Enhance the Customer Experience

Engaged employees are a critical component of a successful Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. Their informed opinions on everything from how to improve customer service to how to stock an eyecatching display can be nuggets of gold to the company that will listen. Unfortunately, the majority of VoC programs dont incorporate valuable feedback from customer-facing employees. Instead, decisions are made by management, who may never come into contact with actual customers. Bad idea. Employees on the front lines can provide insights that management cannot; for example, they can suggest ways to improve training programs, and share incidents theyve encountered that illustrate high or low points in the customer experience.

Employee-centric VoC programs are good for employees and for customers. They increase worker satisfaction, identify issues and opportunities for improving the customer experience, and shorten the response time required to address them. But without a mechanism to analyze unstructured employee feedback, VoC success is just a pipe-dream. Lets take a look at one Clarabridge customers success in creating an employee-centric Voice of the Customer program.

Sourcing Insights on Customer Loyalty

By analyzing the insights embedded in employee experience data, organizations gain an added advantagea greater understanding of those motivating factors that drive customer satisfaction and loyalty, as practiced by frontline employees. At Clarabridge, we refer to this effort as customer experience management (CEM)3, the practice of listening actively to customers across various touch points, analyzing what they are saying to make better business decisions, then measuring the impact of those decisions to drive organizational performance and loyalty. Today, the worlds largest companies power their Customer Experience Management (CEM) initiatives through Clarabridge. As the leader in CEM solutions providing substantial returns, Clarabridge currently has the largest number of active implementations in place in its industry.

Clarabridge Client Success: Best Buy Voice of the Customer Program If we really care about our customers, we will share what they say and make a difference in their lives. Dick Schulz, Founder and Chairman, Best Buy

Best Buy is a multinational retailer of technology and entertainment products and services. The company employs about 180,000 people worldwide. Best Buy implemented a VoC program that hinges on the employee feedback it receives on a daily basis using text analytics from Clarabridge, to track issues in real time. Heres how it works: Employee feedback is gathered from a variety of sources, including forums, surveys, texting/SMS, focus groups and councils, phone calls, in-store/inperson, and email. Employees are motivated to enter feedback because they see their store and district managers make changes based on the information. A dedicated analyst team compiles customer insights from employees and shares those insights with retail and corporate partners.

3. For more on Customer Experience Management, download our paper, Shaping Your CEM Strategy from our website at www.clarabridge.com/resources.aspx

The program is governed by four guiding principles: 1. Make sharing consumer insights part of the job expectation and culture 2. Make the process simple and the tools easy to use 3. Be sure to acknowledge employee contributions by recognizing important insights 4. Primary focus must be on leveraging insights locally, NOT to deliver insights to corporate Open-ended or unsolicited feedback from stores, analyzed using Clarabridge, is shared weekly. A dedicated analyst team focuses on key trends and themes from categories like products, promotions, policies and merchandising. The team also creates spike reports when a particular issue requires deeper analysis. Reports are sent to the stores each week, recognizing their input, and the team makes recommendations to corporate based on the insights they receive. Best Buy receives between 3,500 and 4,000 insights per week, and the findings have led to numerous changes to the customer experience. For example, employees at one store reported customer frustration around the in-store pick up process and told senior leadership. The district managers then went to the store to work with the employees who submitted the issue. They started a taskforce aimed at improving the in-store pickup process, and eventually the store saw a 30 percent increase in the number of customers picking up in the store.

Recruit Clarabridge for Your Team

As the marketplace becomes even more competitive and the cost of doing business escalates beyond what we ever thought possible, Clarabridge helps you retain both employees and customers by providing you with a universal view of your two most important assets. In todays competitive climate, capturing the intelligence contained in unstructured employee feedback online can make all the difference in maintaining a positive and productive workforce while limiting turnover costs. Clarabridge can help your company stay on top of shifting employee sentiments untapped by traditional research, giving your HR efforts the clout and command to deliver resultsand retain your top talent.

About Clarabridge
Clarabridge is the leading provider of text analytics software for customer experience management. Clarabridge provides Global 1000 enterprises an analytical view of text-based verbatim found in voice of the customer feedback channels such as call center notes, qualitative survey feedback, Web 2.0 content, online forums, social media sites, reviews, and customer warranty forms. As a result, businesses can improve marketing, product/ service management and customer service delivery. Clarabridge is privately held with headquarters in Reston, Va. Clarabridge customers include AOL, B/E Aerospace, Capital One, Choice Hotels, Expedia, Gaylord Hotels, H&R Block, Intuit, Marriott International, Sage North America, QVC, United Airlines, Wal-Mart and Walgreens.

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