About SAGE Publishing

SAGE is a leading provider of innovative, high-quality academic content, publishing over 1000 journals and 800 new books each year, as well as a growing portfolio of digital library products such as archives, datasets, case studies and videos. The organisation has grown exponentially since its inception in 1965 and now has over 1500 employees worldwide with offices in Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore, Washington DC and Melbourne.

Searching for the ‘why’ behind the scores

Sage has a strong track record of innovation and has used Freshdesk for several years as its core platform to optimise productivity across its global support operations. A vital part of this process was always the measurement of customer satisfaction. However, Sage wanted to understand the ‘why’ behind the satisfaction scores to drive performance against their Customer Experience objectives.

A better understanding of customer experience

‘We were always searching for the right questions to get the drivers behind our scores. However, the more questions we asked, the lower the response rate, so we were forever trying to get the balance right.’ says Graeme Doswell, Associate Vice President, Global Circulation and Customer Service & Fulfilment Productivity at Sage. ‘We also saw a contradiction between low scores given and then very complimentary comments, which lead to a distrust in the overall results.’

Why Opinyin

Sage was intrigued by Opinyin’s approach of limiting the number of questions whilst focusing more of the customers’ time on providing verbatim feedback about what is important to them and how they felt. Opinyin could demonstrate that this achieved a balance of excellent response rates whilst still getting rich insight into the customer’s experience, extracted automatically by Opinyin’s unique AI text analytics. They also liked Opinyin’s novel approach to using the text analysis of the free text feedback to provide a Comparative Linguistic Analysis Score (CLAS), comparable to the standard score, i.e. Net Promoter Score, as this could resolve their distrust of the scores.   For Sage, this needed to be delivered in their Freshdesk platform as it’s where the teams collaborated. They also did not want to complicate their data protection compliance by exporting customer data to another system.  Fortunately, Freshdesk provides an excellent application development environment that delivered the Opinyin solution as a marketplace App integrated directly within the platform. 

‘I’m always keen to work with people as they are establishing technologies so I can contribute from the outset.’ says Graeme, ‘I saw it as fairly low risk as we could always move back to the standard tool, but the result is great. Opinyin have been patient with us, listening carefully to our use case and feedback, and responding quickly with positive changes to the App.’  

The Opinyin impact

The Opinyin App for Freshdesk has delivered a cost-effective solution that has been quick and easy to implement without the training data overhead of alternative text analysis solutions. It’s given Agents, Supervisors and Managers invaluable real-time insights into how customer’s feel about Sage, empowering them to deliver on their Customer Experience objectives. The results have been undeniable, such that Sage is now rolling it out as their primary customer service survey tool across their global operations:

Excellent response rates: The Opinyin solution has allowed Sage to achieve the balance they were searching for with great response rates and rich insights into Customer Experience drivers.

More confidence in scores: Opinyin’s Comparative Linguistic Analysis Score has given Sage more confidence in its scores, quickly indicating discrepancies and providing a fascinating new insight into their customers.

Better customer survey experience: The Opinyin marketplace App gave Sage the new options to decide when and how customers received surveys when tickets are closed, allowing them to get their all-important survey engagement timing just right.

Data protection compliance maintained: With the whole surveying process automated by the Opinyin marketplace App, no customer data ever has to leave Freshdesk.

Empowerment of teams to own and deliver customer experience objectives: Sage Agents can now have a real-time dashboard for themselves and their assigned groups, further enhancing collaboration opportunities and their ownership of Customer Experience. Supervisors and Managers get the data at every level they need to deliver performance against Customer Experience objectives.

Plans for the future

As the Opinyin platform is available for more than just Customer Experience measurement, Sage now has the option to consider its use for Employee and Content Author experience measurement, both of which are key contributors to delivering excellent Customer Experience.