Customer AI Starter Guide

The initial Customer AI workspace setup is relatively quick but we recommend setting aside a few hours for this. It's crucial to take the time to set up as it will influence the quality of insights you can derive from your customer feedback.

We will walk you through each step and provide links to further resources. Once you complete all the steps you will have successfully automated your customer feedback analysis process.

In this article

Connect your data sources
Build your topic taxonomy
Invite your team
Get insights

Step 1: Connect your data sources

Customer AI is designed to analyze your existing customer feedback so the first step is to connect apps and services that gather customer feedback in your organization.

You can import feedback via:

• Direct integrations with popular support tools such as Intercom, Zendesk, and Freshdesk

• Zapier which allows you to feed data from 2,000+ apps and services such as Typeform, Delighted and Google Sheets

• Reviews from 85 popular review sites such as Trustpilot, App Store and G2Crowd

• Our API from virtually any source programmatically.

Once you setup your data sources, Customer AI will immediately begin syncing and analyzing your historic data. How far back it goes will depend on the integration and your subscription. Please note that it might take up to 24 hours for your initial results to appear.

Step 2: Build your topic taxonomy

Once you have some data in your Customer AI workspace, you can begin creating your topic taxonomy which will act as a framework for your data analysis.

Topics can come from two sources:

• Topic Suggestions

• Your own Custom Topics

Goal: 20-30 topics created to cover key areas mentioned by the users

Review your Topic Suggestions

To make sure you catch new issues before they escalate, Customer AI scans your mentions on a daily basis and automatically surfaces new topics in your Topic Suggestions tab.

Start generating your topic taxonomy by reviewing and sorting your Topic Suggestion cards:

1. Add useful suggestions to your topic list by clicking Track Topic

2. Dismiss the unwanted suggestions by clicking Hide

3. Continue this process until you hit "inbox zero".

Review Topic Suggestions Learn more about topic suggestions here.

Create your own Custom Topics

Now you should have at least 10 topics in your list but don't stop here. The next step is to expand your list by creating Custom Topics.

How to create a topic:

1. Go to Topics and click Create Topic

2. Type in a keyword you want to learn more about (e.g. "price") and click Include

3. On the right-hand panel, you will see matching results which can help you verify the query

4. Expand your topic by adding synonyms or alternate ways your users might describe the topic such as "cost" and "expensive"

5. Once you are happy with your topic, give it a name and confirm with Save Topic.

You can update your topic criteria at any time and your results will instantly reflect the matches both retrospectively and from that point onwards.

Some key areas to consider creating topics around:

• Key products or features

• Common questions

• Known issues

• Known requests

• Billing queries

Repeat the above process until you covered all areas of your business and product line.

Create custom topics Learn how to create good topics here.

Break Topics into Subtopics

To get actionable insight sometimes you might need to drill-down further into a Topic. You can use the  Subtopic feature to sub-divide any Topic into Subtopics by defining a set of keywords for a Subtopic similar to how you would create a Topic.

For example in a topic “Cancel Account”, you might want to create the following Subtopics to track potential churn reasons:

• Pricing

• Bugs

• Support

• Features

Each sub-topic can be defined by one or more keywords. For example, for “Pricing” you might want to set “cost”, “price”, “expensive”, “cheap”, “afford”, “budget” as trigger words.

This means that when people mention cancelling their account  and any of the keywords that define “Pricing” then all mentions will be aggregated into that Subtopic.👉

Create Subtopics See more examples and learn about Subtopics here.

Organize Topics into Projects

Projects are a way of organizing your topics to track high-level themes. Adding a topic to a project will allow you to track the combined statistics of topics that belong to the same project.

For example, if you create a topic for each technical issue, you might want to assign all of them to a "Bugs" project so you can track the number of reported defects as a whole.

The quickest way to group topics into projects is from the Topic list view by clicking Add to project and searching for or creating a project.

Add topics to projects

Step 3: Invite your team

Data and insights are only valuable when they help you take decisive action. The main benefit of Playvox Customer AI is that it democratises access to customer insights and allows anyone in the organization to understand customer needs and inform their projects.

Product, Support, and Customer Success teams are the primary users of Customer AI but since most roles somehow connect to customers we've also seen usage from:

• Researchers

• Data Scientists and Analysts

• C-Suite and leadership

• Marketers

• Designers

• Sales Managers

• Software Engineers and others...

Goal: key teammates are onboarded on Customer AI

To invite teammates:

1. In the top navigation bar, click Invite Team

2. Enter one or more e-mail addresses of your teammates

3. Customer AI will automatically send the joining instructions to the invited members.

Invite your team

You might find it helpful to organize a session where you showcase how to use Customer AI to make sure everyone who needs it has access and can use it by themselves.

Step 4: Get insights

Now that you have set up your topic taxonomy, you are ready to explore your reports.

Regular Reporting

As new mentions come in, Customer AI automatically sorts them by topic based on the topics you defined so all that's left to do is to regularly review your key reports on a weekly basis to gauge how your customer needs are changing.

Choose your timeframe

In the corner of each report, you will see a date picker. Choose a time frame for your report.

Top volume drivers

On the Topics widget in your Dashboard, you will see a real-time list of topics that drive your volume. Each topic has a number of metrics:

• Volume

• Change from last period

• Trend

• Sentiment breakdown

Top trending topics

If you would like to see which topics are trending, click on the trend column header to sort the list by trend.

Top shrinking topics

As your team addresses various customer issues, you will want to know what impact it had on the volume. If you click once more on the Trend column name, the list will resort by trend to show topics that shrunk the most.

Top Projects

For tracking high-level themes you can use the Projects widget in the Dashboard. It works in a similar way as the Topic Widget but displays metrics in aggregate.

Topic Exploration

Once you have a good overview of your most popular topics, the next step is drill-down and understand each topic in more detail.

Key insights you can learn on the Topic view:

• Mention Chart can show the pattern of mentions. Is the topic growing or shrinking? Is it affected by seasonality? Are there sporadic spikes?

• Sentiment Widget can give you an idea of how users feel about a particular topic. If the sentiment is mostly negative that might indicate friction or poor experiences that need to be addressed.

• Mentions Widget helps you to get the context behind the numbers. By reading example mentions you will be able to get a deep understanding of the underlying problems.

• Subtopics Widget is very powerful in breaking down large topics into smaller chunks that describe more specific issues.

Great work 👏 You have now built your own automated Voice of the Customer system!

We offer free onboarding calls to all our customers so make sure you secure a slot.

If you need any further help please check out our Help Center and feel free to drop us a line.