How eBay uses interaction analytics to improve CX

By looking at how a customer interacts with a brand, marketing leaders are able to get a deeper understanding of its customer.

Interaction analytics retrieves insights from various communication channels the brand has with its customers.

At the Qualtrics X4 Summit in Sydney, Ben Bigelow, voice of the customer senior manager at eBay told Digital Nation how the organisation is getting better insights on their customers through interaction analytics.

Bigelow said eBay currently collects its insights from phone calls, emails and chats on the website and will eventually expand to social media.

He said interaction analytics is putting all the effort on the customer to tell the brand how they feel and what their problem is.

“Then you're also having to interpret their feedback in a way that doesn't necessarily line up with the reality of it,” he said.

An example of this is a customer explaining a problem in a survey but the way they’ve explained it is different to what the problem actually is.

Bigelow explained by looking at the interactions between the brand and the customer they are able to properly understand the problem.

“We can get a better read on how our customers feel and what their issues are by targeting the interactions themselves rather than by asking for feedback, at least at the scale that we that we operate at,” he said.

While using interaction analytics is still in its infancy for eBay, Bigelow said interaction analytics are giving eBay the full scope of a problem.

“We can go into a room with a stakeholder and talk to them about the full scope of a problem, which we have never been able to do before because we've never been looking at the full dataset. We've been looking at that fraction of a fraction that data set, it is extremely powerful,” he said.

“Most of the product owners and policy managers at eBay, when I have sat down with them in the past to show them our data, they get excited about it. They love customer sentiment, they love hearing about the pain points because that's what helps them make better decisions about where to spend the limited resources that they have. “

Before interaction analytics, eBay would have to understand a customer’s problem through survey results.

“Somewhere in the ballpark of three-quarters of our customers write something and then of those people that write something a lot of the time it's basic things. In general, it’s hard for us to understand what could we do to improve this,” he explained.

When organisations are trying to understand customers, Bigelow said one of the challenges is understanding what their issues are with particular phrases they use.

“It's understanding what that means in the context of your business. Customers will describe their problems in a way that is natural for them but that is almost never the language that is natural for the business,” he explained.

Bigelow said by looking at the interactions themselves, eBay eliminates the problem of using surveys to understand a customer’s problem.

“We don't have to rely on our customer's understanding of our business in order to understand the problem. We can either look at the customer side of that conversation, the agent side or ideally both of them,” he said.

All of this ultimately helps the company make decisions based on interaction analytics.

“What all of this means is that when it comes to making decisions about what policies need to be updated, we can go and say, we have policy X, let's go and see what that customer experience looks like and compare that to policy Y,” he said.

“How many people call about those two different things, of the people that do call, how do they feel about it, then we can again, at scale, use that to inform a decision-making process that has never been possible before.”