Using customer sentiment and multi-channel engagement to get closer to a “customer of one” experience.
By: Jed Alpert, SVP of Digital Engagement at Upland Software
I am thrilled with our recent acquisition of Rant & Rave, a cloud-based customer engagement application that will offer our customers a level of innovation, performance, and service surpassing anything they have experienced before. The ability to gather customer sentiment and emotion at any moment, will help us to deliver smarter engagement and more measurable outcomes across the markets that we serve. And I am convinced that this technology brings us much closer to a unified platform that can provide truly personalized, multi-channel experiences across the entire customer journey resulting in improved end-customer loyalty.
Deeper and More Intuitive Customer Engagement Campaigns
Rant & Rave is a voice-of-customer (VOC) and voice-of-employee (VOE) solution that can capture and analyze how people feel across SMS/mobile, email, web, and social media. Companies like Sky, Mercedes Benz, Standard Life, Acer, Harrods, Marks & Spencer, and Sage rely on Rant & Rave every day to capture and measure emotion and enhance customer loyalty, measure frontline employee performance, and drive sales.
With Rant & Rave added to Upland, we will be able to provide more intelligent, immersive, and responsive digital engagement initiatives through text, email, voice, chat, and social channels, for Upland Mobile Messaging (UMM) customers. Customers already rely on the Upland Mobile Messaging platform to enable outcome-driven conversations with their audiences. Now, together with Rant & Rave, our customers will be able to measure end-user sentiment and engagement to analyze their connections to their audience, and use this data to build stronger relationships with supporters, consumers, and employees.
Here are some real-life examples that come to mind.
Restaurants and retailers who use UMM to communicate with customers could soon be able to use the Rant & Rave platform to gather and evaluate customer sentiment through mobile, as well as social, chat, voice, and web, and then use that data to drive more precise offers and coupons. For example, an Italian restaurant patron who has submitted a glowingly positive feedback about a new dish using Rant & Rave’s listening posts on Facebook Messenger, could receive an automated discount offer, the next day, for that same dish if they return within the next week.
Customers in advocacy and nonprofit, use the UMM platform today to drive social outreach campaigns and raise money. With Rant & Rave technology, these organizations could engage with larger supporter audiences across a number of channels and drive even more action-taking with personalized, data-based targeting efforts. For example, say you are an advocacy organization driving a get-out-the-vote campaign with poll-location assistance and gentle voting reminders. It’s now election day. How is your base feeling at the polls? Did they show up? Are they confident in their candidates and the results? By sending out a multi-channel (social, digital, mobile) feedback prompt and then aggregating those responses via Rant & Rave, you can start analyzing how your base is feeling, track changes over the course of the day, and provide relevant content, reminders, and prompts dependent upon the response. To drum up more voting activity, you can use this feedback to send out more precise messages to potential voters you haven’t heard from, to hit the polls.
Another example is in healthcare. Being able to track quality of care and provide communication through mobile is critical for ensuring better health outcomes. The Rant & Rave sentiment engine, along with UMM mobile delivery, could help healthcare organizations have an open-ear and are able to respond to patient inquiries with timely and corrective measures, allowing them to build a stronger relationship with each patient.
Today, Rant & Rave customers support large volumes of frontline end-customer interaction in financial services, utilities, retail, and travel & hospitality. Through this acquisition, these customers will benefit by being able to deliver deeper loyalty programs that marry Rant & Rave’s existing sentiment engine technology with UMM-driven automated, robust mobile customer outreach. For example, after experiencing an unusual spike in disgruntled customer calls to a regional utility call center related to unexpected rate increase, automated messages could be deployed via text with more information about the increase, along with a mobile wallet energy savings promotion for new insulation and window installation.
Over the Horizon, Opportunities Abound
In the not too distant future, our customers will be able to deliver true, consistently personalized multi-channel experiences across their entire end-customer lifecycle. Regardless of the channels used – email, text, web, social, audio, video – inevitably, our customers will have to deal with more and more unstructured data from which to determine end-customer need and act fast. And with more data ingested, there is an opportunity to deliver even deeper personalized service levels and initiate even more intelligent campaigns in new ways, based on preferences, behavior, time of day, location, or channel efficacy. Furthermore, by leveraging AI technology, these systems will be able to learn and constantly improve themselves in real time, driving increased loyalty, more donations, additional revenue, increased visits, more eyeballs, and more meaningful engagements — getting closer to a true “customer of one” experience.
The addition of Rant & Rave to the Upland Digital Engagement portfolio, and UMM in particular, is a real game-changer. I am excited to see what comes next as the industry, technology, and customer needs evolve.
Click here for more information on Upland’s acquisition of Rant & Rave.