5-Steps to Revolutionize Your Customer Experience in the Healthy Market

Recent studies proved that a  solid customer experience (CX)  strategy might just be the difference between your brand and your competitors. For this reason,  LUISS  University,  in collaboration with  KPI6,  launched a  challenge about understanding value and the new customer experience. 

In KPI6 we are always eager to meet new talents, to collaborate with important institutions, and to launch innovative challenges.

We have recently started a collaboration with the LUISS Guido Carli University, participating in some classes of the Bachelor’s Degree course in “Management & Computer Science” held by prof. Francisco Villarroel Ordenes. The challenge wanted to test our young analysts on a real challenge that they will face up in one of their first job experiences.

The goal was to solve a problem for its management, using the data offered by KPI6 on the market, on the players, and above all on consumers. The challenges involved many industries, from automotive to technology, passing through retail and entertainment.

Students:

The goal of the health sector challenge consisted of creating a new CX to solve a managerial problem, using User Generated Content on social media, retrieved with KPI6’s market research suite.

We decided to focus on the Italian healthy market because of its early stage and conjunction with COVID-19. Which together caused a significant increment of interest in its products matched with an extensive information asymmetry. Given the absence of customer focus for the health industry in the  Italian scenario,  we concentrated on the foreign one to extract insights and take advantage of a possible market shift.

Establishing a customer-based process based on studying the consumers themselves and how they interact with you, through Buyer Personas. Following this idea, we have created a list of 5 steps to create a high-level customer experience.

First of all, to make a good pie, you need the right ingredients and thanks to KPI6 we based our work on two Twitter queries which helped us to retrieve insightful data on the best sector’s firms and their customers. Consequently, with Cognitive Service Face API and an  information extraction mechanism, we implemented our dataset by adding the obtained inferences.

Since now we have to prepare data and learn more about our customer’s behavior patterns, we transformed our raw data into a more comprehensible, clean, and normalized format.  After pre-processing, we split data by queries’ subjects creating 3 categories: food, cosmetics, and fitness. Given that a variety of products and customers fall under healthy market boundaries, we decided to split into the top 3 most representative and engaging categories to make inferences about Buyer Personas.

After pre-processing and splitting into categories, we dive into the K-Means Clustering algorithm. We applied it on demographic and tweet sentiment variables, the latter were directly provided by KPI6. The output consisted of 2 different market Personas per category, with different age, sex, job, and set of emotions.

This process begins by understanding segments and Personas, answering:

First, we started by picking the most representative biographical information like age, location, job, gender, even whether or not they wear makeup. Then we went further with our format of combining demographic data with qualitative data and market research. We went into details adding to the profile business information, benefits of buying from the category of which he/she is representative and his/her buying trigger.

For example, for the food category, we obtained:

Once your Personas are defined, you can start developing your marketing and communications strategies. For example, understanding your customers will help to set the right tone, voice, and words you use to reach the cluster of customers that you have identified as Buyer Personas. Understanding their pain points and goals will drive the content you create and how you prioritize it.

For example, the radar plot represents two Buyer Personas of the food category, who differ mostly in how they express disapproval online. Hence, we can target them through advertising in different ways. We can communicate with the blue one through very informative content (e.g., Digital Content Marketing), trying to explain all the pros and the rationale behind our product, and avoiding taking the willingness to buy as granted.

A deeper general understanding may help to overcome his eventual information asymmetries that were generating such negative reactions. A factor that may cause disapproval could be price, that for organic food is generally higher; Explaining the reasons, e.g., fewer pesticides, no antibiotics, GMO-free, etc., that led to such consequences could overcome the problem.   Instead, considering red’s characteristics a simple Call-to-Action might be sufficient.

Defining a Buyer Persona helped us in designing a customer experience that enhances engagement and boosts conversion, keeping in mind that given the tender age of the market, we must continually update profiling.