The Complicated Path of the Customer Journey
What is the customer journey? It’s the sum total of all interactions that a customer has with your brand and company in the course of a transaction or an experience. The customer journey happens in stages. As much as we might want it to be, rarely is the entire journey smooth. There are bumps and hiccups along the way. What business leaders struggle with is knowing exactly where in the journey those bumps occur.
What complicates the analysis of the customer journey is the volume of data to monitor and analyze at each stage. Today, much of this data arrives in an unstructured format, like social media or text messages or conversations with customer service staff. Deciphering that data means determining the underlying sentiment and intent behind a customer’s words. Most analytics tools offer only frequency-based insights. That means all they reveal is how often a specific word is used. What helpful information does word frequency offer? Very little. How much insight does word frequency give about where in the journey an issue occurred? Practically none. If you’re using frequency-based analysis tools, you’re missing the very information that could help you provide a better customer experience.
Customer Journey Mapping Made Simpler with Concept Clouds
Rather than frequency-based “word clouds,” Semeon Analytics instead offers “concept clouds.” Concept clouds reveal far more than single word frequency. Instead they show entire sentences or phrases of what your customers are saying. Beyond that, the Semeon platform also uses color coding to make clear at a glance which statements are positive (green), negative (red), or neutral (grey).
Concept clouds highlight the complete opinions from your customers, revealing statistically relevant data about what your customers think and want from your company and brand. This easy-to-understand visual clarification helps business leaders understand the context of customer comments. That clarity makes it easy to extract insights that can then be acted upon.
Precise Interpretation Drives Precise Action at the Relevant Customer Journey Stage
The Semeon platform is industry agnostic, and can precisely track any customer journey and customer experience. Let’s imagine one customer type: an airline. The customer journey and experience with an airline has many stages. There’s the ticket hunting experience, the ticket purchase, seat choice options, add-on offers, agent or kiosk interactions at the airport, security line concerns, baggage handling, the boarding process, in-flight services such as food and entertainment, cleanliness of plane bathrooms during the flight, flight attendant interactions, disembarkation, and baggage retrieval.
Obviously, air travel has many stages and places where the customer experience can go awry. Fortunately, the Semeon platform can segment customer sentiment along every phase of the journey. With automated tracking of customer satisfaction levels, the Semeon platform can show precisely which part of the journey demands improvements from the customer’s point of view. This ability to break out segments of the journey helps the airline, or any business, understand what works well versus what needs improvement. By mapping to specific journey points, the airline can learn about overall customer satisfaction levels (such as most customers are very happy with the ticketing process) but also quite specific customer journey issues (for example, on Flight 196 from Houston to New York, customers found bathrooms to be filthy). With Semeon, insight can be derived from each part of the journey, from the general to the specific, and can then be acted upon. In the case of Flight 196, the insight can be learned and acted upon in real time. The airline avoids a customer service nightmare, and in fact proves to customers that their words are heard and responded to.
Actionable Insight Allows Better Customer Experience
Insight is only one part of the process. As the airline example showed, action is the key to improving the customer experience and removing customer pain points that occur during the customer journey. Semeon’s concept clouds provide precise insights tracked to specific customer journey stages. “Unclean” mattered greatly to the passengers on Flight 196. Their social media comments, tracked by the Semeon platform, revealed the concern. In our fictional example, let’s say the platform discovered in real time that 15% of comments about the flight experience mentioned lack of bathroom cleanliness. Those comments occurred towards the middle of the trip. With this actionable information, flight staff could be prompted to address the cleanliness, which then would improve customer satisfaction and remove the pain point.
The Semeon platform and analytics ability allow any business to parse millions of data points every day, even in real time. With Semeon, the clarity and precision offered by journey mapping and concept clouds means your business can focus on what matters—creating a better customer experience at every point of the customer journey.
