Everyone has an intrinsic desire to know who and where they come from–it’s deeply human. Ancestry, the global leader in family history and consumer genomics, has helped millions of people worldwide explore and discover their roots. In late 2017, David Yin joined Ancestry to build a Customer Insights function. Formerly with the Global Consumer Insights team at Clorox and Head of Global Research and Brand Strategy at Fitbit, David took a crawl, walk, run approach that delivered early wins to build momentum and respect for the Voice of the Customer across the company.

Challenge: Deliver immediate value

Having started several Consumer Insights functions from scratch, David turned to his playbook to get the department underway. To create early impact, he partnered with Ancestry’s Product team to extract further value from an existing Net Promoter Score program. Ancestry’s teams understood the importance of ongoing customer listening, but interpreting the NPS data was a challenge.

Obstacle: Understanding the “why” behind NPS feedback at scale

Ancestry was collecting unstructured feedback from thousands of customers via NPS surveys. Yet, the teams weren’t utilizing that data at scale to understand the “why” behind the score. “It is easy for teams to get overly focused on the score, but the numbers alone don’t tell you enough to take action,” says David, “For decades, market researchers have been trying to manage and interpret open-end feedback – before there was even CX! There are open-ends in almost every kind of survey. Extracting insights from text data, especially with the high volume generated by modern survey technologies, has plagued the industry. At Ancestry, we had to quickly get to the meat of our CX issues. Our existing tools weren’t meeting our needs, so we began looking for a better software solution to fill the gap.”

Why Wootric for text & sentiment analytics

Ancestry’s team evaluated several software providers that focus on text and sentiment analytics for customer feedback. “It quickly became clear that it made the most sense to work with Wootric. Compared to other solutions, the tools were simple and the platform delivered data in an easy to interpret format.”

Superior analytics.
Ancestry imports survey responses to the Wootric platform where machine learning assigns themes and sentiment to customer comments, automatically.  “An important capability that was not available from most providers we evaluated was multi-theme categorization. It gives us the ability to say ‘this comment is about more than one topic’. Additionally, Wootric’s specific focus on customer experience data gave us better initial results/themes compared to more general text analytics providers.”

Flexible, yet simple platform that can scale as Ancestry’s Customer Insights function matures.
The ability to be nimble and focused initially, and then scale as needed was important to David. “There were existing investments in CX tools that hadn’t been adopted. I had to find a solution that would provide early value at a reasonable cost. We’d had providers try to convince us to invest a couple hundred thousand dollars on an end-to-end VOC system just to get to the basics. That wasn’t going to happen.”

He also appreciates that Wootric’s CXInsight™ platform is simple to use. “It was critical to find a system where we could share access with other teams and let them independently dig into the data for insights.”

The flexibility to export data from the Wootric platform was valuable, as well.  “The category tags generated by Wootric are usable metadata. We can export and combine them with internal data for broader analytics work. It was powerful to be able to tell the analytics teams that it was possible to build on top of the data we were already collecting.”

CX consultants help Ancestry with strategy and problem-solving.
“Most of the providers we evaluated were pure software and not bringing a problem-solving lens.  Wootric, as an expert in both data collection and analysis, was able to help us think about the broader framework, potential pitfalls, and best practices.  To partner with a team that could bring perspective from different companies of similar size in similar industries was invaluable – and actually pretty unique.”

Results: Driving impact with customer insights

David Yin shared the early results of using Wootric’s text and sentiment analysis to drive impact:

Ancestry has real data to guide decisions.  “We’re now able to highlight important customer feedback themes to the organization. We were able to show senior executives what was happening in a concise way and the Product and Marketing teams have a richer perspective on the customer experience. Before, anecdotes might describe a single product issue in a bunch of different ways. Now with Wootric, we’re pulling everything together into one place, into one story. We can also now quantify that an issue is affecting a specific percentage of people in a specific segment of our user base. What gets fixed is no longer as dependent on what internal person happens to be louder or have data. ”

It’s no longer about the score. “The biggest value to me in CX work is getting text & sentiment analytics right. It brings humanity to the data: What are your customers actually trying to tell you? It brings to life the real problem to solve. It’s not that the number is down.”

Now there is alignment.  “Consumer data is like currency. Once marketing, product, and senior management believe the data and can agree it has value, it’s a massive unlock to getting work done in service of the customer.”