KitchenAid Cooks Up a Winner with CX Social

KitchenAid was started in 1919 by Hobart to produce stand mixers. For the nearly 100 years since, the Benton Harbor, Mich., company has been one of the most popular brand names when it comes to small kitchen appliances. But on social media, KitchenAid, which is now owned by Whirlpool, was a lot less recognized.

Another problem was that its response to queries on social media in relation to repairs or deliveries lacked the right level of speed and agility.

At least that was until June 2016, when it began using CX Social, a dedicated social media management solution from Clarabridge, to connect more closely with consumers on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, among other platforms.

CX Social is a social media management tool that allows companies to listen to their customers, engage them online, and understand them through advanced artificial intelligence and text analytics to build a stronger community and improve key metrics.

“We were already using CRM and other tools, but they didn’t give us the visibility we needed across the entire operation and all social channels so we could respond quickly to our customers,” recalls David Moreno, a digital marketing specialist at KitchenAid.

“Clarabridge CX Social has given us a 360-degree view using dashboards that show us how we are responding, where questions need to be escalated, and crucially, the trends in customer feedback that allow us to provide a better, more informed service,” Moreno says.

“We are still working through the process of making our interactions with customers very efficient, and this is helped by CX Social, which can support us in many different ways,” Moreno continues. “We are learning so much more than we expected in terms of what our customers need, how they cook, how they think and feel about our products, and what they want from them, and this is informing our product development pipeline. This will enhance relationships with our customers and demonstrate that we are as serious about food as they are, which is why a trusted partnership with Clarabridge is so important to us.”

In choosing Clarabridge, several other factors were important considerations. Ease of use was certainly at the top of the list. “The CX Social dashboards are intuitive and have allowed us to scale the product across the company,” Moreno says.

Equally important, KitchenAid really liked the fact that CX Social offered a very sophisticated and personalized product.

“Clarabridge’s sentiment and emotion analytics are top-notch and provide valuable insights that have helped the KitchenAid team uncover the true voice of the customer and develop solutions that address common complaints and concerns. As the number of channels our customers [use to] communicate with us increases, we also found the power of CX Social to gather and connect feedback from a myriad of sources extremely compelling,” Moreno says.

Since deploying CX Social, KitchenAid’s total social fan base has grown from 34,000 in December 2016 to 250,000 by June of this year. The total number of social media interactions jumped from 49,000 to 812,000 over the same period of time.

The CX Social deployment was not the company’s first encounter with Clarabridge. Parent company Whirlpool has been using Clarabridge’s CX Analytics since September 2014 to conduct global scorecarding, competitive benchmarking, and advanced survey analysis about its appliances and other aspects of its business, including home delivery services that are managed through third parties. CX Analytics also helps Whirlpool capture unstructured data (such as consumer ratings and reviews), filter results by individual product or service, and incorporate findings with insights from other data sources to inform comprehensive root cause analysis and product improvement.

Overall, KitchenAid employees are really happy with CX Social. Responding to inquiries via social media and deriving insights from feedback on so many channels used to be a hassle. Now, the team is excited to continue using CX Social to improve customer engagement and drive ROI for the business, Moreno says. 

The Payoff

Since deploying CX Social from Clarabridge, KitchenAid has seen the following results:

• its total social fan base has grown from 34,000 in December 2016 to 250,000 by June of this year; and
• the total number of social media interactions jumped from 49,000 to 812,000 over the same period of time.