LARA for Social Excellence
Listen, Analyze, Relate and Act on Customer Conversations

The rise of social media is changing how companies interact with customers. A wealth of information is available for enterprises looking to enhance their efforts in voice of the customer analysis, customer response and agent and self-service.

Many companies are seeking guidance to leverage this information for organizational excellence. The LARA framework was designed to meet these challenges, providing a customized program enabling you to effectively LISTEN to customer conversations, ANALYZE those conversations, RELATE those conversations to existing enterprise information and ACT.

Listen
The first step in LARA involves developing a comprehensive listening post program. Do your existing call center and CRM systems hold valuable information that can help you accomplish your business objectives? Are you listening to social media, or do you need to extend existing social media programs? Are you currently surveying your customers? Do you provide customer communities and forums? An effective vendor should be able to recommend ways to take advantage of existing conversations, and create new opportunities for conversation where none exist.

Analyze
When evaluating vendors, you will want to ensure that they have a history of experience in analyzing customer conversations. You should evaluate closely the approach the vendor takes toward their analysis. A comprehensive system should utilize technology that automatically reveals the products, concerns, sentiment and other information hidden in text. Your vendor should work with you to tailor this analysis to your specific business objectives, creating a semantically rich, accurate stream of data that can be leveraged in the ACT phase. For example, you might want to use customer information to detect potential problems in the field, to refine messaging, to uncover new product opportunities or to improve your call center responsiveness.

Transforming text into true “first-person intelligence” requires accurate text analysis technology. A good text analysis system lets the text itself tell the story, as opposed to a “search” paradigm, where someone has to instruct the system on what to look for.

For example, let’s take a look at a hypothetical review:

I bought a Toro lawn mower for my mom in your Sunnyvale store last week. I really like how easy it was to set up, but I don’t like how small the bag is. (If you offered a bigger bag as an accessory, I would buy one.) I also wish the Toro was lighter to maneuver.

From this text, you should be able to automatically extract:

• Entities (brands, people, locations, times, products...);
• Events and relationships (I : buy : this Toro lawn mower | I : buy : for mom);
• Sentiment (extreme positive, positive, negative, extreme negative);
• Intent (to purchase, to leave); and
• Suggestions.

You will also want to ensure that if you change the way you look at the data, you don’t need to rerun your entire dataset. For more details, request the Why Accuracy Matters: Can You Trust Your Data white paper.

Relate
Next, your vendor should examine the structured data within your organization (databases, CRM systems, etc.) and work with you to relate the newly uncovered information with that structured data, to reveal the “whys” behind the numbers. For example, you might want to understand in a survey the top issues expressed by customers who have rated your products a “4.” Or you might want to better understand how the content or sentiment expressed in customer emails affects call center time-to-resolution, or how various actions affect your net promoter scores.

Act: mine and report on information
Using this information, along with an understanding of your business objectives, your vendor should then be able to help you most effectively act on this information. Whether you need to more effectively unify and automate routing and response to customer conversations across channels, need to provide better self-service and agent-service capabilities or need to mine and report on information to understand the voice of your customer, a strong vendor will be able to create a comprehensive action plan that allows you to effectively leverage your existing investments while providing new capabilities that will move your organization to a state of customer excellence. 

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For additional information, visit www.attensity.com