Customer experience (CX) has always been a ripe area of data collection and analysis. It helps businesses get a health check on their customers – or potential customers – to help steer their product road maps or get smarter about what to do next. These are the insights that Alchemer synthesizes.
“Maybe you just bought a video game, and they want to know after the first 10-hours of playing, are you still finding the game interesting?” said Alchemer Chief Customer Officer, Ryan Tamminga. “And so we can start to inject feedback mechanisms throughout the course of the customer journey.”
According to Tamminga during a recent discussion with Localogy Insider, Alchemer has 10,000 customers that span SMBs to Fortune 500s. And though customer experience is a broad horizontal market that Alchemer serves, it specializes in key verticals such as government, education, gaming, and local businesses.
This all takes shape in survey mechanisms that Alchemer itself administers, or through its APIs and integrations with customers’ own systems. For example, feedback mechanisms can be embedded in a multi-location restaurant’s delivery app. That way, the brand can meet customers where they are.
“Imagine I’m a quick service restaurant,” said Tamminga. “I want to find customers who bought certain products and have been through my drive-throughs in certain regions. If you qualify for all of those characteristics, I’m going to deliver a survey about next quarter’s product releases.”
Alchemer Elevates on the Growing Importance of Reputation Management
Enterprise Nervous System
Beyond vertical segmentation, Tamminga divides the world into direct and indirect feedback. The former is everything noted above, while the latter involves online sentiment and feedback mediums like customer reviews. These are greater in number and can scale up a brand’s sentiment analysis.
“We as a platform bring all of those voices together to help people understand what people are saying, when they’re saying it, and where they’re saying it,” said Tamminga. “Then our analytic engine comes in and makes sense of it at scale. So you can really hyper focus on what’s happening and what’s changing and evolving within your business, depending on what’s happening within your customer base.”
This is where Alchemer has always overlapped with local reputation management, which then went into hyperdrive when the company acquired Chatmeter last year. This equipped Alchemer with tools to better put its finger on the pulse of customer sentiment for any brand, especially multi-location brands.
But according to Tamminga, it’s not just about collecting feedback: the value is in implementing it. And that’s all about tight feedback loops and smart systems where the insights are channeled to the right places. To that end, Alchemer has about 400 integrations with enterprise CRM, ERP, and other systems.
“A lot of our competitors want to be the brain of their customers… we want to be the nervous system,” said Tamminga. “It’s great to collect feedback and understand it. It’s even better if you can do it at scale and speed. But how do you actually deploy the intelligence back into the business, into the hands of the people that can do something with it?”
Wiring Everything Together
Beyond smart deployment of feedback to improve products and brand operations, Alchemer has built systems around processing feedback in other strategic ways. For example, its smart routing can direct low NPS or review scores to different people or departments (think: damage control) than high ones.
For example, one key function for any brand is deflection. Engaging with negative reviews immediately, they can make customers feel heard. Not only is this aligned with customer service best practices, but it lets customers expel frustrations with the brand directly… rather than taking the fight to social media.
“It’s all about wiring everything together into the systems that run your business,” said Tamminga. “Then you supercharge it with AI [for] smart routing, so it intelligently moves things around and responds to the right reviews and escalates them to the right person. So it’s really about empowering the teams that are responsible for turning feedback into business results to focus on the things that really matter.”
As for what’s next for Alchemer, Tamminga points to continued technical integrations with Chatmeter’s platform, as well as more AI to tie it all together. That will pay dividends on the front end in terms of unified natural-language tools for customers, and on the back end with deeper data integrations.
“We’ll be wrapping all of the AI that sits within all of our products today, and bringing it up a level,” said Tamminga. “It’s going to be one single UI or AI agent that talks to all of the AI across the platforms – so people are spending more time working on their feedback and actioning it; and less time collecting it.”
