Understand customer feedback at scale to make your team smarter using Idiomatic

Originally published at siftery.com.

Idiomatic allows companies to answer the age old question “what do my customers/users want?”. Idiomatic continuously analyzes the conversations that your support team is having with your customers — whether by email, chat, social media, or NPS survey. Simply point Idiomatic to your helpdesk, and it will automatically tag the text of your support tickets with very granular user issues, comment types, and sentiments; it also understand the context associated with each ticket.

Idiomatic organize all of that tagged data and provide it to you in an easy-to-use dashboard as well as simple, effortlessly customized reports that empower you to help your support team to work smarter!

Gerry Giacoman Colyer interviewed Christopher Martinez, Founder at Idiomatic to know more.

Can you tell us about what you’re working on? What is Idiomatic?

Idiomatic uses artificial intelligence to help customer support teams work smarter. The AI layer gives companies customer driven ways to improve the customer experience of their products and services by mining textual data to automatically understand and categorize free-form text from customers at scale. This lets companies know what their customers are saying and how they can improve.

In short, we plug into your CRM and use AI to categorize all the conversations with your customers so you know what’s happening and can quantify how frequently and extremely the customer experience is breaking down in specific ways.

Why are you building this? Was there a particular source of inspiration?

When running our previous companies, customer feedback had about a 1% impact on our roadmaps / decision making. We believe this number should be closer to 90%. I.e., if companies would simply fix what their customers are telling them is going wrong, they’d develop much better products and bigger audiences. The difficult part is how do you listen to all of your customers, in aggregate, at once. The good part about support is that they talk to customers all day long. We were never able to harness the data of the support team previously and have started Idiomatic to do so now.

How is Idiomatic different from what already exists in the market?
What’s unique about what you’re building and why do you think companies should use Idiomatic?

There is no other automatic classification tool which results in human understandable, sentence level classification of topics. The reason is that all of our competitors are 100% automated text analytics solutions. We add something new by involving humans in the analysis loop. Specifically, our data analysts work hand in hand with automation to get more actionable, specific, human understandable categories for the support data we analyze.

Who are the top competitors in your space right now?

Clarabridge on text analytics. Salesforce Einstein on the automated tagging.

Who uses Idiomatic?Can you tell us a bit about the different customer segments using Idiomatic? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies ?

We primarily sell to Support or Customer Experience teams. Our customers include Slack, Upwork and Intercom. While the purchaser is customer facing, once we’re analyzing the data many more people at the company use the tool. This includes product, engineering, executives, content, and anyone else that wants to know what the customers are experiencing.

How are your customers using Idiomatic? Could you share a few different use cases?

One use case is for product feedback, especially on new releases. We have one customers that uses Idiomatic to analyze any major product releases and what problems beta customers are having. They then fix those problems in the product before launching that beta feature to the wider audience. This way they launch better products.

We have another customer who used our tools ability to specifically highlight questions to figure out which questions they need to produce more content around to prevent tickets in the first place. Doing so, they were able to reduce contact rates such that they didn’t have to hire as many Support agents as they originally budgeted. This same client had previously had 2–3 people analyzing support data and they were able to completely redirect those employees to other projects.

Have there been unique use cases for Idiomatic for that you hadn’t thought of or expected?

We didn’t anticipate how many use cases there would be within the support organization when we originally launched. We were thinking more of the product feedback use case, but we found that this data is incredibly useful for tracking and improving a support organization as well.

Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?

Go inside our networks and ask for warm intros to friends of friends on linkedin. We still do this to today. We also are involved in several trade organizations, such as SOCAP and a slack group around Support called Support Driven.

What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?

We still struggle with the balance of time we’re spending between very tactical sales tasks and more long term marketing efforts. We are a limited team and on a bootstrapped budget.

What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?

We integrate with data sources our customers ask us to. What we can say is that integrating with account management tools (not just support desks) has helped broaden the scope of deals we can go after. So something like Salesforce has allowed us to serve Customer Success teams as well as we serve Customer Support teams.

What are the top tools that you depend on to run the company and how do you use them?

Google Apps — our primary video conferencing, email, document, spreadsheet, and presentation tool.

Slack — our primary communication tool. Our team is partially distributed so it is crucial we over communicate.

Google Analytics — to track usage on our website.

Streak — my CRM for outbound sales contacts (sits inside gmail).

Linkedin — prospecting and enriching sales leads

Idiomatic — on our own customer interactions to understand what our customers are saying :). We call it “Idiomatic squared”.

Do you use Idiomatic and recommend them? You can do it here https://siftery.com/idiomatic?recommend.