Rex

This issue was certainly not unique to Sage North America at the time. In 2006, when we started the Customer Relationship Program, CDC Respond reported that, while 95 percent of surveyed companies collected feedback in some form from their customers, only 35 percent used the data in some way. Furthermore, only about 10 percent made changes in response to the feedback—and just 5 percent told their customers what they had done in response to the suggestions.

At least we were leveraging the NPS scores and other quantitative data that we were collecting. And we always understood the potential value of the qualitative, textual feedback gathered in our surveys; we just didn't have a good, efficient way to convert that feedback into dependable, timely business intelligence.

Rex

This is one of the key goals of our Customer Relationship Program. We strive to contact and survey 200,000 customers quarterly, to ensure we stay in touch with what they need and how they feel about Sage North America's products.

When the Customer Relationship Program was launched three years ago, it was exclusively quantitative data on which we based our primary metrics for trending, ranking and assessing customer feedback. But the open-ended comments that were captured in the surveys could not be efficiently processed. The general managers for Sage CRM Solutions and our other products had to manually read and categorize this qualitative information. The process was complex and time-consuming, and it also was nearly impossible to accurately link customer loyalty metrics to customer behaviors.

Rex

A Commitment to Customer Centricity

Sage North America provides customizable business-management software and services for accounting, customer relationship management (CRM), human resources, merchant services and time tracking, as well as specialized solutions for customers in construction, distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, nonprofit and real estate, among other industries. About 2.9 million small and medium-sized businesses rely on our products, and their needs vary depending on applications and industries. We are dedicated to providing superior customer experience to the entire range of our clients, and that requires staying attuned to their unique and changing needs and desires.

Rex

In the case of Sage North America, complementing NPS with text mining-fueled CEM has uncovered the root cause behind the scores our customers give us. This has also given us the ability to engage new, high-value customers early in their relationships with Sage North America, which has resulted in dramatically higher NPS scores. Plus, text mining and CEM have significantly enhanced our ability to address the specific, qualitative comments of dissatisfied customers, "detractors," and convert them into "promoters."

Rex

The recent rise of text mining and CEM at large Fortune 1000 companies speaks volumes about the importance these companies are placing on making their customers happy. While CEM isn't necessarily a new philosophy, the way that companies are now able to capture and analyze customer opinions on products and services has changed drastically with the introduction of text mining. Drawing from survey verbatims and other text-based customer channels, text mining enables a company to tap into the true feelings of each of its customers. Text mining can automatically convert any text-based feedback from across and beyond the enterprise into timely, actionable business intelligence.

Rex

Sage North America, a provider of business management software, has long embraced the notion of customer centricity. This fact is evidenced in our reliance on Net Promoter Score (NPS), a score obtained by asking customers about their likelihood to recommend a product or service. Our product general managers gauge the relationship health of our business by monitoring NPS surveys, as well as other empirical diagnostics. But it wasn't until the adoption of a broader Customer Experience Management (CEM) program that also leverages text mining that Sage North America became capable of discerning the true voice of our customers.