Whirlpool Corporation's Digital Detectives: Attensity Provides the Lens

I D C C U S T O M E R S P O T L I G H T Whirlpool Corporation's Digital Detectives: Attensity Provides the Lens March 2011 Sponsored by Attensity Introduction Whirlpool Corporation is the world's largest manufacturer of Solution Snapshot home appliances. Founded in 1911, the company has Organization: Whirlpool 71,000 employees and brought in $18.3 billion in 2010. It Operational Challenge: To discover maintains 66 manufacturing and research centers what Whirlpool's customers and worldwide, and in addition to Whirlpool Corporation, its prospects were saying about their brands include Whirlpool Corporation, Maytag, Jenn-Air, products and services by monitoring Amana, KitchenAid, Jenn‐Air, Bauknecht, Brastemp, and social media channels; to create a Consul. The company celebrates its centenary in "public voice" that could respond to November 2011. customers with assistance and information. Whirlpool Corporation and its many brands receive an Solution: Attensity360 for continuous abundance of communications from customers using monitoring and analysis of social media multiple channels. The company's products and services conversations in review sites, blogs, are also the subject of discussions in social media — blogs, forums, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube Twitter, Facebook, and various forums. The company videos, and mainstream news. needed to understand what customers were saying through Attensity Voice of the Customer these many channels in order to improve its services and analytics for indentifying what products. customers have done previously, and incorporating text analytics findings into Whirlpool Corporation was an early customer of Attensity, a models to successfully predict developer of integrated customer-experience management customer churn, loyalty, satisfaction, applications, which Whirlpool Corporation has used for six and more. years to monitor and make sense of its traditional customer relationship management (CRM) data, emails, surveys, and Benefits: Increased interaction with repair notes. In 2009, the company decided to add customers, with improved Attensity 360 --Attensity’s social media monitoring responsiveness and positive experiences; using customer feedback application-- to the mix as well. This project was designed for better product development and to make sense of Whirlpool Corporation's scattered data on planning. customers and what they were saying, but also to provide feedback and customer ideas to the company's product developers. There are approximately 300 to 400 Attensity users at Whirlpool Corporation today. Whirlpool Corporation's goals were the following: To discover where online people were discussing Whirlpool Corporation and what they were saying IDC 1102 To integrate the many customer information streams into a single application in order to get a complete picture of customer interactions, trends, discussions, suggestions and opinions To enable Whirlpool Corporation's "Digital Detectives" to contact customers directly (publicly and privately) in order to solve their problems To create a public voice for Whirlpool Corporation on social media sites to demonstrate that it was following up on complaints and suggestions, and to answer the questions that had been raised publicly. This feedback is designed to be positive, helping customers find answers to their questions easily. To add product managers to the feedback loop so that they could see suggestions and incorporate them in their next products and to make improvements to existing products Implementation Whirlpool Corporation takes a collaborative approach to social media, with the Digital Marketing, Customer Care, and Public Relations teams all working together to provide a consistent and credible brand voice to its consumers. Whirlpool Corporation was already realizing significant value from its use of Attensity's Voice of the Customer software for managing internal data, so the decision to add Attensity360 and Attensity Respond was straightforward. The Customer Care and Manufacturing teams adopted Attensity360 and Attensity Respond to better understand and respond to what's being said about the company. Implementing Attensity360 added a very large source of customer information, and also changed some internal processes — for the better. For example, Whirlpool Corporation had been monitoring social media through a manual process of Web scraping and manual searches. With the new automated approach, Attensity helps Whirlpool Corporation "get through the weeds so we can get right to the customer to take action," according to Bryan Snyder, Senior Manager, Social and Emerging Media. Measuring Success Whirlpool Corporation had the following three main goals when it rolled out Attensity's Voice of the Customer and Attensity360: Discover what customers were saying about the company Improve performance and effectiveness in responding to what customers were saying Increase capacity for monitoring large streams of comments, as well as increase the number of channels Whirlpool Corporation was able to monitor Proving the value of massive monitoring projects is often a problem, since the value tends to be qualitative rather than quantitative. However, as mentioned, Whirlpool Corporation is experienced in using Voice of the Customer applications and has created the following set of metrics from which it plans to develop customer data by brand: Number of responses Number of consumers contacted Time elapsed between complaint or comment and contacting the customer Length of the interaction 2 ©2011 IDC The size of the online general conversation about appliances • Within this conversation, the number of negative comments and number of positive comments about their products and their competitors' products Sentiment analysis by brand Number of satisfied completed interactions Feedback from the customer (not a survey, but if the customer contacts them) Benefits While metrics are important, the effect of Attensity is felt beyond the sheer increase in number of sources and customers that Whirlpool Corporation can now reach and monitor. Whirlpool Corporation uses Attensity broadly throughout its product development and planning. The company mines the Web to find suggestions for desirable appliance features. It also monitors competitors, and uses the aggregated information to inform its marketing plans. In short, Attensity's platform has become not just a call-center tool, but an enterprise-wide tool to help Whirlpool Corporation get a handle on its business and its customers. Alex Petrov, Director of Whirlpool Corporation's Transformation Office, says, "The basic process that has made this project so valuable is that they are able to listen, respond, and then measure. Listening is paramount, and Attensity allows Whirlpool Corporation to listen at a scale unachievable by manual means." Methodology Information for this customer case study was gathered through interviews with Alex Petrov (Director of Whirlpool Corporation's Transformation Office), Drew Hartman (Operations Manager for Customer Experience), and Brian Snyder (Senior Manager, Social and Emerging Media) at Whirlpool Corporation. Additional information about the features in Attensity's products was gathered through briefings with Attensity. ABOUT THIS PUBLICA TION This publication was produced by IDC Go-to-Market Services. The opinion, analysis, and research results presented herein are drawn from more detailed research and analysis independently conducted and published by IDC, unless specific vendor sponsorship is noted. IDC Go-to-Market Services makes IDC content available in a wide range of formats for distribution by various companies. A license to distribute IDC content does not imply endorsement of or opinion about the licensee. COP YRIGHT AND RES TRICTI ONS Any IDC information or reference to IDC that is to be used in advertising, press releases, or promotional materials requires prior written approval from IDC. For permission requests contact the GMS information line at 508-988-7610 or gms@idc.com. Translation and/or localization of this document requires an additional license from IDC. 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