Maru Group
Counting the 'Emotion' Factor in CX

Commercial enterprises have known the value of a satisfied customer since humans first started trading. Systematic tracking and measuring of the customer experience (CX), however, are still relatively young. As consumer choice increased, companies realized they needed to better understand the experiences their customers were having. Today, technology provided by companies like Maru Group has made it simpler for brands to implement CX programs and less expensive to run. With insights explaining what customers think about brand interactions, and data on how they behave, firms can efficiently adapt strategies and optimize processes to grow their revenue. After initial success improving experiences through operational changes, enterprises often encounter diminishing returns from the traditional CX data they produce. The ability to uncover and act on additional, deeper insights is essential to drive continuous improvement and outpace competitors.

To achieve this feat, Maru Group, a world leading CX and insights software and advisory services company, has taken customer experience management to the next level. By applying their proprietary technology and game-changing intellectual property, they are helping to drive excellence for some of the world’s top brands. Fundamentally, a customer experience is an emotional experience. While most decisions are driven by subconscious thought processes based on emotions, traditional CX companies have exclusively measured rational consideration. By focusing only on what customers think, and how they behave, enterprises miss what is really driving behaviour: emotion. By adding the ability to understand how customers feel about their experience to traditional measures of how they think, and behave, Maru empowers clients to achieve a more holistic and accurate indication of future behaviour and loyalty.

Maru delivers enterprise-class customer experience programs through a combination of software and advisory services, delivering CX data to clients in real-time via their unique service model. The company’s software platform marries traditional scalar survey questions with a series of applications that reflect its IP including implicit association testing (IAT), visual semiotics, and AI-based tools that allow them to measure how respondents feel. This fully scalable, secure capability can process tens of millions of surveys per year, analyse the feedback in realtime realtime, be augmented with external data sources and create persona-based dashboards for 1,000s of users across the business.

Understanding emotions is about much more than simply asking customers how they feel. Maru employs customer centric cutting-edge tools like IAT to help uncover elements that respondents can’t or won’t share through traditional questions by tapping into subconscious thought processes. This questioning adds new depth to insights, enhancing traditional tracking and helping brands to improve their current performance and truly deliver beyond customer expectations. This is particularly key for brands that have an almost static CX performance. “By evaluating CX through both subconscious System 1 and rational System 2 types of thinking and combining with behavioural data sets, we provide a connected and holistic view of consumer response, delivering a radical new approach to CX,” states Gary Topiol, CEO of Maru/HUB.

An aspect that truly differentiates Maru from others in the industry is its unique combination of software and advisory services. The company has spent two decades building its proprietary SaaS CX and Feedback Management platform and reinforces it with industry-focused CX experts.

Maru has successfully delivered major national and international CX and CEM program for enterprise organizations and continue to provide their expertise to a wide and growing range of clients. For instance, Maru delivers a worldwide program for a major global travel services provider, helping them listen to customers and use the results to improve their customers’ experience. The initiative captures 1.8 million responses annually for seven brands, across 32 markets and in 30 different languages.

The Maru software ecosystem has the broadest capability set available on the market. Going forward, the company plans to continue to invest in development of IP to facilitate the real-time analysis of behavioural, transactional, and attitudinal information required to deliver insights at speed, and help their clients produce extraordinary customer experiences.