From messy AI projects to measurable impact.

From messy AI projects to measurable impact.
It’s not just about comms, it’s about context
Improve Financial Results & Strengthen Customer Relationships
The tools we rely on? They’re firing too late to make a real difference.
Discover how to identify struggling households early, reducing debt and enhancing customer outcomes.
AI now shapes, not just predicts, customer behaviour and outcomes
Customer Churn Reduction: Your Hidden Growth Strategy
It was inspiring to see such a strong focus on supporting vulnerable customers and driving meaningful change.
AI is creating a buzz across industries, and its potential for retail energy providers (REPs) is immense.
EMC21 is the largest Retail Energy Conference in North America. The theme for March 2024 is Mitigating Risk in Retail Energy.
There is a “golden window” of opportunity to identify potential future debt early and step in to help before emotions become heated.
Early intervention delivers a win-win for the energy retailer and the customer.
Are you looking to take your CX and marketing strategies to the next level?
Read the Top 7 insights from Customer Smarts podcaster Justin Stafford’s interview with SmartMeasures cofounder.
SmartMeasures helps energy retailers reach out to assist consumers who are having difficulty with energy bills.
AI powered by customer data and behavioural science helps you retain customers.
Are your CX metrics predicting actual retention behaviours to drive your retention strategy, or ‘aspirational’ indicators likely missing the mark?
CX executives use traditional metrics to report the performance of marketing initiatives — but are these the numbers the CEO wants?
When there is high churn, a lot of effort is spent winning lost customers back, but is that the right approach?
The average customer doesn’t exist. Learn how to use prediction to improve the ROI on your retention activity.
Happy customers make a business thrive, unhappy customers can bring down a business. It’s critical to understand your customers’ health.
Customer retention is the best strategy to deliver business growth and it’s lower cost focusing purely on customer acquisition strategies.
Hear the story behind SmartMeasures from the founders
Discover how you can implement your own solution to retain customers at Enlit Melbourne 16-17 March
In developing AI applications, objectives and intentions must be well communicated to the business and to users to earn trust.
Energy retailers who provide proactive customer experience can greatly improve customer retention rates.
To grow their business energy retailers need to be able to retain their existing customers.
Retail energy providers collect and store a tremendous amount of data about their customers.
Energy retailers need to change their game if they are to maintain profitability and grow their business.
Surveys only capture customer sentiment at a point in time and NPS doesn’t help you improve!
Focus on the money – the most important CX metric according to Forrester!
On Thursday night SmartMeasures as the 2018 B3000 Overall Business of the Year winners, were thrilled to pass the 2019 Award to Jarrod Briffa at Kinfolk. Not only did Kinfolk take out the Overall Business of the Year award, they also won the Social Enterprise category.
Special guests were for the evening were Hon. Adem Somyurek, Minister for Local Government and Small Business and Mark Schramm, Acting Small Business Commissioner
The other category winners are:
What did winning the B3000 Award mean to SmartMeasures?
When the co-founders Mike Crooks and Libby Dale started work on their submission in April 2018, they had just launched SmartMeasures at the Salesforce World Tour in Sydney and were promoting their new product to Energy Retailers in Melbourne.
Libby Dale – “We had been working hard for many years on the idea and developing the product. Entering the awards gave us the opportunity to engage in the process of thoroughly documenting our plans. We would not have done such a deep dive into our business and the submission has effectively been the foundation for where we are a year later. The recognition of winning served to validate our idea and gave us confidence to push on.”
Mike Crooks – “2018 was a big year for SmartMeasures, launching our product in March and winning B3000 in June through to signing our first Energy Retailer in October. Winning the B3000 Innovation Award was an important part of our first year in market as it gave us, and our customers the confidence that SmartMeasures was a winning idea.”
The SmartMeasures team has grown substantially with five of the team in attendance and enjoying the festivities of the Award night. The new members of the SmartMeasures team are:
What’s the difference between a dissatisfied customer and an unhappy or angry customer?
A dissatisfied customer is likely to feel frustrated or annoyed about an aspect of your service. Service delivery may have been a bit slow. Or a minor mistake was made. The incident may be quickly resolved and soon forgotten. An unhappy customer, however, will not be easily placated. They have the potential to do real damage to your brand.
As with the difference between a satisfied and happy customer, it’s about the emotional connection. Just as an emotionally engaged and happy customer is a great benefit to your business, unhappy customers are a threat to your business. They will vent their dissatisfaction to friends and family. Leave damning reviews on social media and forums.
Not only will you lose their business. You will lose the business from other potential customers.
Dissatisfied versus unhappy or angry customers
An unhappy or dissatisfied customer have one thing in common – they are both bad for your business. Dissatisfied customers will be more passive. Their feelings are less intense and short lived. They are unlikely to complain or let you know they are dissatisfied. If they take any action it’s likely to be that they won’t use your products or services again. They may also tell a number of friends about their experience.
Angry customers will let you and the rest of the world know their feelings. They will leave angry one star reviews on Google and Facebook. They will take any opportunity they can to complain about your business and explain why you are hopeless.
From dissatisfaction to anger
Most dissatisfied customers can be handled with an apology and a commitment to rectify the mistake that was made. However, if the same problem, despite the apologies, keeps happening, the minor feelings of annoyance or frustration will deepen. Instead of extreme dissatisfaction, customers will start feeling betrayed by the business from promises constantly being broken.
Feelings of betrayal will turn to anger. Angry Customers will respond strongly and in many cases seek to punish the business.
The costs
The costs to a business from dissatisfied customers is enormous. Research shows a typical business hears from just 4 percent of its dissatisfied customers—and of those 96 percent who never voice complaints, 91 percent will never come back. According to research from Vision Critical businesses across the world are losing trillions of dollars due to dissatisfied and unhappy customers.
It’s not possible to keep every customer constantly happy and satisfied. Mistakes will happen. Miscommunications will happen. It’s how you handle those mistakes and how well you keep the promises you make to customers that will make them happy or make them feel betrayed.
Happy customers are cheaper to service, less price sensitive and less likely to churn. Customer happiness goes beyond customer satisfaction by creating an emotional connection with a brand’s products and services. The challenge lies in understanding what makes customers happy and how much value this brings to the business?
Most organisations have developed extensive surveys and tools to analyse and assess customer satisfaction. CSAT and NPS provide time tested metrics for assessing satisfaction from customers willing to participate in a survey. CSAT surveys typically ask customers to rate experiences by the following criteria:
But customer happiness is very different to customer satisfaction. The ability to define and measure happiness is far more challenging, though the potential benefits far exceed the benefits gained from customers who are merely satisfied.
The difference between satisfaction and happiness
Customer satisfaction implies that customers feel ok about their experiences with a brand. It’s an emotionally neutral state where customers’ expectations are being met. Satisfaction does not mean there is an emotional connection with the brand or its products and services
An article from Gallup highlights how satisfying customers without creating an emotional connection has no real value. For satisfaction without an emotional connection has no impact on loyalty or churn reduction. A customer may be satisfied with the last interaction they had with a company but would readily switch to a competitor for a better deal.
Creating an emotional connection
Cliff Condon from Forrester comments, “If brands want to break away from the pack and become CX leaders, they must focus on emotion. Best-in-class brands average 17 emotionally positive experiences for every negative experience, while the lowest-performing brands provided only two emotionally positive experiences for each negative one. Emotion is critical to a brand’s bottom line.”
To establish an emotional connection between a customer and the brand, means designing customer experiences that tap into emotional motivators such as a desire to feel a sense of belonging, to succeed in life, or to feel secure. So customers are not just satisfied with a transaction or an experience, but that sense of satisfaction is matched with a deeper emotional connection.
The benefits
It’s happiness not satisfaction that drives customer loyalty and engagement as well as the propensity for customers to recommend the brand to others. Research published in HBR demonstrates that emotionally connected customers are more than twice as valuable as very satisfied customers.
Emotionally connected customers will buy more products and services, be less price sensitive and recommend the brand and its products to others. In 2018 research from Adobe found repeat customers:
Other statistics include:
The statistics are compelling. Maximising customer happiness is a powerful means for maximising customer value.
In your family, friendship circle, amongst work colleagues, apologies are part of what maintains trust. It seems common sense that if you let someone down or fail to deliver what you have promised, you need to apologise. This applies just as much to a brand and its customers as to our private relationships with friends and family.
Customer satisfaction surveys and exit surveys
How far can an apology reverse the damage done and help retain disgruntled customers?
The economics of an apology
A field experiment conducted in September 2018 on 1.5million Uber customers who had experienced late rides suggested there was a financial impact. Their analysis found that “absent any apology, a rider who experienced a late trip spends 5-10% less on the platform than can otherwise be expected.”
Apologies matter. They have an impact on customer retention and future spend. People are more than likely to forgive a company that says sorry. A financial incentive may help sweeten the deal, but in many cases that may not be necessary. An apology recognises the pain or frustration the customer has felt. If the pain felt is minor, financial compensation is most properly unnecessary.
But an apology is also a promise that things in the future will be better. If the customer continues to experience the same problem, they will become far less forgiving after each incident.
The Uber field experiment highlighted the following insights:
When customers enter into a commercial arrangement they are trusting the business to deliver on their promise. When something goes wrong, an apology can restore trust. The absence of an apology can message:
There is a saying in large organisations “Don’t poke the bear”. We hope the customer hasn’t noticed we have stuffed up. The fear is that if we admit our mistake and reach out to service the customer, it will be the catalyst for them to leave us.
But if we don’t apologise, in psychological terms, what message does it send to the customer? It says either we hadn’t realised we failed them, or that we didn’t care and they’re not that important to us.
This fits with the Forbes study that says 68% of all people leave a business because of a perceived indifference. Could this be related to a poor service experience and no recognition, apology or compensation?
With technology now, most large businesses can detect when something goes wrong for individual customers.
Apologies, to be truly effective and not simply saying sorry, are often difficult. An apology is due when trust is broken, and to restore trust the apology is the first step. No apology increases the potential of losing a customer. The apology is a promise that a problem will be rectified and will not happen again. If you fail to deliver on that promise than the consequences are likely to be more costly than if you never apologised in the first place.
Customer churn, sometimes called attrition, is when a customer switches to another supplier.
Let’s face it, times are tough for businesses, particularly energy retailers. Retail margins are under pressure, they are at the end of the supply chain and carry the high cost of customer churn.
While competition is a good thing, constant churn between providers is significantly detrimental to profitability and reputation.
There are a couple of misconceptions about customer churn:
Price alone drives customers to leave
If it’s not about price, then why do customers leave?
Forbes says that 68% of all people leave a business, because of ‘perceived indifference’.
While Bain & Co says a customer is 4 times more likely to defect to a competitor if the problem is service related than price or product related.
If we reflect on our own experiences and feelings as customers to large suppliers. We can probably relate to both these statements. As humans, we relate to being understood and appreciated and if we feel that we are being serviced too, then we are not even likely to entertain a conversation with a new supplier, let alone actually churn.
If we feel our supplier is looking after us, we stay, even at a price premium. Who wants the hassle of moving suppliers?
Now if we get an exceptional offer from another supplier at a good price, and we are unhappy with our current supplier, then we might consider switching if the price is attractive.
So, businesses need to focus on making us feel appreciated and on service, rather than on price. More on this later.
It’s too costly to try to keep customers.
We often hear – “It’s cheaper to let them go and replace them with new ones.”
HBR says “Acquiring a new customer is anywhere between 5 and 25 more expensive than retaining an existing one”
The truth is, the main focus on retention is when a customer has already decided to leave, and are in the process of changing suppliers. The existing supplier will often then attempt to win us back with an offer of a lower price and usually a gift or voucher to entice us to stay.
The cost of this retention activity, so late in the game, is high, and if it retains the customer there is usually some ill-will created. Why wasn’t I offered this price before now? It took someone else to pay attention to me for my existing supplier to notice me.
Retention effort at this late stage is expensive and doesn’t always work.
The trick is to be pro-active and get in early with service because it’s cheaper and more effective at retaining the customer.
Large businesses often have huge numbers of customers and it’s hard to see who is in need of service attention. So what should a business look out for? What factors reflect or impact customer sentiment?
There are 3 groups of data which, when combined, are quite effective at predicting customer churn:
Prediction
There is a lot of data across many systems and it’s constantly changing. What’s the best way to monitor the situation for every customer and predict when to take action to service those in need in real-time?
Most large businesses have data analytics programs to leverage their data to gain insights to take action. But is this may not be the best approach for churn prediction.
An alternative approach is presented in a recent HBR article – Alibaba and the Future of Business. This new approach has been labelled “Smart Business” and proposes running a continuous process of collecting data, analysing, learning and taking action in real-time.
In this example, for measuring individual customer health and predicting churn, the AI does the discovery and takes action based on findings. Historical data is collected to train the AI to predict customer sentiment and churn risk, then Operational, Behavioural and External data is collected real time to continuously assess the risk for every customer.
The AI alerts the business to when customers are ‘at-risk’ of churning and a Treatment Plan is initiated automatically to reach out to service the customer.
The Treatment Plans are designed in conjunction with the customer service team to ensure effectiveness and are optimised to ensure the cost of treatment is minimised and well below the replacement cost for that customer.
When an ‘at-risk’ customer is treated, the results are fed back into the AI to continuously learn and optimise costs.
The objective with a solution like this is to leverage all that existing data for the good of the customer AND for growing the business’s revenue.
Just imagine a business knowing their customers at an individual level, knowing if they’re happy or not. And if they’re not, knowing they have the systems in place to reach out and service individual customers BEFORE they think about leaving.
At SmartMeasures, we have built a software solution that does all this.
If this is something you would like to hear more about, please message me.
Libby Dale
Co-founder, SmartMeasures
[email protected]
+61400 633 729