Today’s interview is with Nate Sanders, the co-founder and CEO of Artifact, the customer experience forecasting company. Nate joins me today to talk about the recent guest post that he wrote for my site called “Obituary: The Survey (1920s – 2023)” [It caused a bit of stir on LinkedIn], where we are at re surveys, VoC, data and insight, why companies don’t necessarily need more insight or customer feedback data and what they should be doing instead.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – When we talk about attention, we’re actually talking about engagement – Interview with Walter Flaat of dentsu Canada – and is number 481 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

NOTE: A big thank you goes out to the folks at CGS for sponsoring my podcast for the coming month.

Now, CGS is a company you might not have heard of.

But, they have been delivering brand-building and customer experiences for 40 years for global brands that you will definitely have heard of.

Over that time, they have developed deep expertise in both outsourcing and technology, so you should definitely pay attention to what they have to say.

They’ve recently put together a free ebook and video that I’d like to point you to. It’s called The Transformative Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT and has been authored by CGS’ Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, John Samuel. It’s a really comprehensive guide and is designed to deliver insights, summarize research, and inspire creative problem-solving.

Follow this link to check out the free ebook and video.

Here are the highlights of my conversation with Nate:

• Nate recently provided me with a guest post called Obituary: The Survey (1920s – 2023) and I posted it on my site. I subsequently shared it on LinkedIn and it generated over 25k impressions and quite a stir and a bit of debate.
• The era of relying on a survey as the only feedback touch point and input to the voice of the customer is gone.
• It’s not an effective way to understand the customer, the customer voice, etc.
• Survey data is just one aspect of the customer’s voice.
• An organization receives all sorts of qualitative feedback, which is unsolicited and informal, all of the time and it comes through all sorts of different channels, including face-to-face meetings, phone calls, emails, messaging channels, social media etc. Much of which is not captured or analysed.
• Companies don’t necessarily need more insight or feedback data, they actually just need to focus on what they actually already have and, in particular, the unstructured data/feedback they receive.
• Survey data typically makes up under 10% of all the unstructured data and the response data that companies typically get from their customers.
• There’s an enormous amount of information that is coming in to your company through sales calls, support tickets, the call center, customer interviews, surveys, review data etc.
• A survey is still an isolated snapshot of a single point in time and not a full representation of what is happening with the customer.
• Artifact centralises every single qualitative unstructured data point that orgs have through authentication or API keys and syncs it historically and conducts identity resolution so that every single interaction or moment that you have with the customer is tied back to the same customers record.
• They then use artificial intelligence to do two things:
  • 1. Topic modeling – so that you can really understand what’s happening with the customer experience across their whole journey, and
  • 2. Event detection – where they use AI to be able to detect things like anomalies, trends and emerging themes and that you wouldn’t normally see in your customer service data.
• Data hygienics: It’s striking how many organizations don’t think about their unstructured qualitative data as a part of a data lake initiative.
• Ask yourself this: Do we receive unsolicited informal qualitative feedback from our customers? And if so, how so, and what do we do about it?
• Example in practice: Pura, an IoT scent device manufacturer, uses Artifact and it has helped them to identify wifi connectivity issues with new versions of their diffuser that they had just shipped. These problems weren’t showing up in their air logs or bug logs as it only affected large homes that had over five diffusers inside of their home. As a result, they were able to fix and proactively push out a firmware update before they started hearing about this problem via customer support.
• The customer voice is the customer voice no matter where and who it comes from.
• Nate’s best advice for someone wanting to improve their customer or employee experience: Centralize every customer conversation and do the hard work to be able to understand and measure it.
• Nate’s Punk CX word(s): Permission-less
• Nate’s Punk XL brand: Torus and AirBnB.

About Nate

Nate Sanders is a product development enthusiast and lover of all things user and customer experience. Nate has worked with early to mid-stage SaaS startups for most of his career, accruing strong heuristics around how products people love and want are actually built. Nate is dogmatic about the fact that teams should ship opinionated theories instead of conjectures. Nate has worked with startups like Degreed, BambooHR, Canopy, Pluralsight and current is the CEO & Cofounder of Artifact, where he has championed and built the product team and user centered processes from the ground up.

Check out Artifact and please send messages of condolence to Nate on LinkedIn here.

Credit: Image by Reto Scheiwiller from Pixabay