Interview with Arianna McClain, Director of UX at Cruise Alyona: Arianna, you’ve had an amazing career in such a short time. You worked for IDEO and led user experience and customer insights at DoorDash and Cruise, two of the most successful YC companies. How did you get into this exciting field? Arianna: How did I get here? It was definitely accidental. When I grew up, I really thought only three careers existed. I thought I…
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– “Hey, aren’t you the creator of Maui?”– A few months ago, someone I didn’t know approached me at O’Reilly’s AI conference. – “Yes, I am”, I said, excited that someone still remembered my project, and a little sad too… It’s been almost 10 years since I’ve published Maui’s open-source code repository at the end of my PhD, and approximately 5 years since I stopped participating in its community forum. This is a story of…
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What do Chief Customer Officers have in common with YCombinator? They are both driven by creating products and services that people want. Last week, I attended the Chief Customer Officers & Influencers conference in Atlanta. I got a chance to give a keynote on how companies can disrupt themselves through customer insights and this post summarizes some of the key points I made. Disruption Silicon Valley – way Coming to Atlanta from a YCombinator startup…
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Last month, I had the pleasure to speak with Jeff Toister (CPLP, Author of “The Service Culture Handbook”) on his webinar on how to improve customer service with unstructured data. Contact centers often miss out on many opportunities on how to improve their team’s performance and deliver critical insights to the rest of the company, simply because the analysis of mountains of data they collect may seem daunting. As a result, strategic decisions are based…
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Do you gather vast amounts of customer feedback but don’t quite know how to get actionable, meaningful insights from it? You know the ones, insights that would help to influence your customer experience and overall business strategy.
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What is the customer feedback loop? The customer feedback loop is the practice of responding to customers meaningfully when they leave feedback. For example, if a customer complains about being overcharged, the company may respond with an apology and issue a refund.
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Are you receiving more feedback than you could ever read, let alone summarize? Maybe you’ve used Text Analytics methods to analyze free-form textual feedback? These methods range from simple techniques like word matching in Excel to neural networks trained on millions of data points.
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Are you responsible for measuring the progress in improving customer experience? If yes, I’m sure you needed to come up with a rationale on which metrics to choose for this: Is it an all ubiquitous Net Promoter Score (NPS), the traditional customer satisfaction CSAT, or a more recent invention Customer Effort Score (CES)?
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Over the past few weeks, we’ve reviewed several Text Analytics approaches to feedback analysis: word spotting in Excel, manual rules, text categorization, and topic modelling. Now, it’s time for Thematic Analysis.
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Last year, in 2017, my co-founder signed us up for the YCombinator’s Startup School (SUS). 10 weeks later, our lives had changed completely. We were admitted into the YC’s core program, moved to Silicon Valley and were growing faster than we could onboard customers. This year, YCombinator launched the second Startup School. And since my picture is listed on their homepage, I have received several questions about how to make the most out of this…
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