Daman helps financial services leader enhance customer management through social media

A Leader in Customer Satisfaction

A Fortune 500 diversified financial services company recently decided to leverage new systems and strategies to enhance customer service and satisfaction. This goal was in keeping with a century-long tradition of superior customer relationship management.

The company had already gathered a wealth of customer data through its highly successful online, mobile and social media strategies. Now it decided to supplement its existing understanding of the customer with data from various unstructured sources.

Accordingly, it launched a Voice of the Customer (VOC) program. Many of today’s market leaders use VOC programs to learn more about customer likes, dislikes and expectations. In this case, the company’s primary objective was to combine its rich, unstructured data sources with its existing store of structured data assets.

A few months into the initiative, however, the company began to face challenges that are common in many VOC initiatives:

  • Effectively sourcing data from “listening posts” that are conceptually very different from each other, such as XML-type sources as opposed to Twitter-like, clipped language sources.
  • Developing semantic layers at the appropriate level of granularity.
  • Finding an appropriate way of complementing unstructured data with structured data.
  • Generating reports and information that have high actionability.

The company realized that they needed expert help in developing a solution that brought together both traditional data assets and data from the latest social media and other text sources. Since a team of Daman professionals had already successfully delivered a number of structured data management projects for the company, Daman was engaged to assist in the VOC program.

An Assessment Focused on Actionability

Daman evaluated the VOC program across several dimensions: organization, technology, operations and overall strategy.

The review revealed several opportunities, both tactical and strategic. Focusing on actionable results and immediate ROI, Daman provided a number of specific recommendations for the program:

  • Leverage traditional business opportunity analysis and prioritization to sequence the vast array of available sources. Apply criteria such as degree of control on source, volume and morphology to sequence data acquisition.
  • Implement a two-pass process to segment transactional information versus customer commentary prior to acquisition.
  • Enhance semantic layer definition by defining category models at the appropriate level of granularity.
  • Enhance sentiment understanding and scoring techniques by improving phrase dictionary, regenerating phrasal lexicon as well as natural language processing (NLP) and tagging techniques.
  • Integrate structured data with the NLP engine to improve scoring and actionability.
  • Update reporting measures (co-occurrence, frequency, percentages, heatmaps, spark-lines, etc.) to reduce information sparsity and increase report actionability.
  • Establish a VOC communication channel that evangelizes its power while educating the customers on its limitations.

Architecture Refinement That Delivers Value

Daman continues to be engaged with the company in the continuous refinement of the VOC program. Our expertise has added value in the following areas:

  • Helping to prioritize sources to be included, based on the kind of analysis that each facilitates and the difficulty it presents in being “consumable” by the VOC environment.
  • Defining formats and dictionaries to third-party vendors (such as Bazaarvoice) to allow for consumption.
  • Analyzing data and usage needs and developing appropriate category models.
  • Supporting ETL into the unstructured staging tables and into the combined VOC data mart.
  • Assisting in enhanced reporting and actionability.

Leveraging the Full Benefits of VOC

With Daman, the company has developed a comprehensive VOC program that is widely recognized as one of the best in the industry, reaffirming the company’s leadership in service and customer relationship management.

More specifically, the VOC program now generates reviews from thousands of customers which are consolidated and then carefully analyzed by the company. The insights provided by this analysis help senior management to introduce new products and product improvements in alignment with market expectations, improve web site conversions, and increase the overall effectiveness of the company’s interactive marketing programs.

In addition, the VOC program enables the company to quantify the value of customer satisfaction by linking customer reviews with transactional data. By analyzing customers’ behavior during the year after submitting a product review, the company can correlate positive reviews with specific increases in the average incremental revenue per customer per year. This data is used to further refine the company’s product development and marketing efforts.