This paper demonstrates an innovative approach to deliver a seemingly prohibitively expensive capability with minimal investment that resulted in $MM new revenue in year 1 and ultimately becoming a major driver of company revenue.
The product analyzes unstructured text from “the voice of the customer” through a natural language processor making it easier to search, create custom topics to track, and accurately understand what customers are saying to help answer business questions. This allows companies to do a variety of revenue generating things such as analyzing the differences in what churning customers say compared to those who are very loyal, finding the optimal user experiences to drive loyalty, input to product decisions, or enabling operational workflows where, for example, a complaint about a specific aspect of a physical experience (like flying) can be routed to those who can address it most efficiently saving companies time and driving up loyalty.
The market for this product is called “Customer Experience” and this tool marketed itself as helping with “Customer Experience Management.” At the time of this innovation organizations were starting to recognize the value of this horizontal focus on user journeys and were increasingly hiring new CXOs (Chief Experience Officers) to the C-Suite of Fortune 1000. The one thing in common with all customers of this methodology and product–they all have millions of customers.
On and off again the sales and product team would encounter a customer with a very simple question: “Can we load call recording data into your platform?” The answer was “no”--the strength of the product was in its text analytics and had no support for voice. Competitive analysis and customer testimonials told the team that competition was not at the same quality of insights compared to the text analytics approach. The opportunity of finding a software solution to transcribe the data to text and play to the analytics engine’s strengths lingered in the product team’s mind as volumes of calls were a massive potential because the product’s business model was a consumption-based one. Looking inward with the CTO and engineering leaders the team did not have the skill set needed to deliver high quality results with audio data without diverting some of the best engineers to fully ramp up on a new space. Due to recent investments, acquisition was not an option either. Technologies on offer to integrate were of unknown quality and would take a team a significant amount of time to thoroughly analyze–plus the company did not have an internal call center and boon of recordings to test with. This left this functionality on the product backlog due to the largest relative effort from engineering despite a large perceived value to users. The idea sat waiting for favorable investing conditions or something else…
The answer to how to realize this value without a lot of spending came during a roadmap briefing with a large telecom company–one of the most mature flagship customers. They had been one of the largest customers to ask for voice analytical capabilities from the product as a single vendor–citing extreme displeasure with the quality and capability of the current platform and difficulty trying to integrate output from two solutions.
The innovation came in the form of a strong partnership between the product team and the account representative: the two team members would sell a proof of concept to the customer: Integrate a single month worth of data into 3 different transcription technologies which would be vetted by both companies and do a “real world” bake off. Key to the agreement was the customer’s willingness to let the product companies partner with each other to keep the selling relationship simple–but this also allowed the product team to plan this as a general feature bootstrapped by a paid engagement. This real world fully integrated approach and collaborative vendor selection process both contributed to the results below.
In 3 months the team completed the evaluation of the 3 potential technology partnerships. With marginal additional efforts from legal and finance, a project team of 3 was able to deliver a massive new capability in a general way for all users while making money. This feature was popular resulting in $MM of new revenue in year 1–having already secured its first reference customer. Today this speech capability is a cornerstone of revenue; helped by the volume of calls that exist as a feedback source and changing global circumstances further emphasizing the call center. This innovative approach removed cost constraints while validating design and product decisions in the tightest possible feedback loops.