6 steps to building an amazing CX Insights report for your organization

This is the third and final blog in a series describing our journey to deploying CX Insights here at Khoros. If you haven’t already, check out our first and second blogs!

If you read our other blogs in this series, Khoros is implementing our own Customer Experience Insights (CXI) as part of our customer engagement strategy. Last time, we talked about how helpful it was to see our first CXI report, and how we wanted to iterate on that success moving forward. Well, that’s exactly what we did.

In our second report, covering February to July (our financial first half of the year), we asked ourselves, what specific customer friction points or growth opportunities can CXI uncover for us to take action on? Here’s what we’ve been doing:

Khoros has had CXI for over a year, which means for our use case, we've had a healthy amount of time to collect data and see trends surface.

Seeing trends evolve is where the real magic of CXI happens because it gives us more insight than a small snapshot of customer engagement.

When we set up the CXI platform, we created specific keyword categories and searches for commonly mentioned topics related to our customer partnership. These keyword and search term groupings fell into three basic categories:

1. We grouped keywords by solution: Marketing, Communities, Care, Flow, and, of course, Insights. This allowed us to track customer sentiment related to specific products to help pinpoint issues more quickly.

2. We created searches using keywords for issues: “Slow response time,” “confusion,” etc., allowing us to find issues that ranged across different products and services.

3. We tagged specific parts of Khoros’ customer journey, such as Professional Services and Strategic Services, to identify potential friction points at each stage of our customer support.

After grouping tags and tracking trends, we partnered with our CXI analysis team (the same one Khoros CXI customers use) to create our insights report. They asked us to create a wishlist of the areas we'd like to better understand so they could narrow down the CXI report to what would be feasible and helpful. Here’s what we came up with:

Product Specific insights:

• Bugs and defects

• Customization, including:

  • Features

  • Areas of improvement

  • Product limitations

• Likely to escalate

• Escalation and churn

• ARR and revenue Impact

Other insights:

• Cross-selling and upselling opportunities

• Competitor analysis

• Slow response time

• Training gap and enablement

• Insights specific to Professional Services, customer support, and tech support

From there, we leveraged our previously created searches and keywords to create Bookmarks. Bookmarks allowed us to refine our searches further and look at the data with different dimensions. This allowed us to build a detailed and thorough report.

After running the report, CXI pulled detailed, directional insights on key areas of our customer’s journey — exactly what we were looking for at the beginning. The most notable insights covered five categories: sales processes, product perception, user learning and resource queries, technical support, and renewal (compared to competitors).

In each category, the report drew attention to key verbatim quotes from customers to illustrate what we were doing well and what could use some attention. This gave the team a better understanding of the problem and how we might solve it.

Our goal was to tackle the low-hanging fruit in this CXI report — that is, the areas where it was easiest to take action first. According to the CXI analysis team, quick wins are the best way to prove CXI’s impact on the organization.

Using our cost analysis of Khoros’ support cases, we found that by taking action on just one or two of the customer issues that come through support, we could make a big impact.

An issue the report highlighted was customer confusion over access to knowledge-share resources ( e.g. how-to guides, or advanced platform literature). It identified over 2,400 conversations on requests for documentation, issues accessing learning resources, and clarifying awareness on where to find these resources. Assuming 50% of these conversations convert into a support case, we estimated we could yield $50K+ in cost savings by preventing at least 20% of these support cases.

Plus, the solution to this problem was simple: we created extra communications for our customers on where to locate our existing knowledge source Atlas (our online community).

This quick fix would also deflect volume away from our support center – saving even more money on costs by providing our customer support team additional time to focus on the more complex and important cases.

We shared our new knowledge with company stakeholders using our insights template. The first group we shared our insights with was our executive leadership team. To avoid overwhelming stakeholders, we focused our presentation on an executive summary slide which gave a 10,000 foot overview of the key insights discovered. After the presentation, we shared the comprehensive report with our executive team so they could leverage it in strategy sessions and take a deeper dive into the full insight details.

After sharing the insights with our executive team, it was time to disseminate the information to other stakeholders, including support, product, and sales leadership. In these meetings, we briefly touched on the executive summary, but mainly focused on the insights that were specific to their department. When sharing these insights, we highlighted the volume of customers impacted and verbatim examples from specific conversations to provide deeper context into the issue and drive urgency and buy-in from key department stakeholders. By providing granular insights and detailed context, it made it easy for the team’s to identify where and how they should focus their efforts to make meaningful improvements.

Now that we are up and running with CXI, we’re continuing to focus on making improvements for our customers. By maintaining a quarterly reporting cadence, we can track the volume of conversations around these uncovered insights using our saved searches and bookmarks, and understand how our efforts have an impact on the customer experience.