Armen Berjikly- Who You Know or What You Know in Sales?

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Kevin Price, Host of the Price of Business on Business Talk 1110 AM KTEK (on Bloomberg’s home in Houston) recently interviewed Armen Berjikly.

About the interviewee

Armen Berjikly founded the company in 2007 and serves as its President and CEO. Armen has both his undergraduate Computer Science and master’s Management Science degrees from Stanford University, where his research focus was Human-Computer Interaction. Previously, he started numerous successful internet startups, which includes FileDemon, the first meta-search engine for files, Do Everything– the first comparison music shopping engine, and multiple online patient health communities designed to sponsor hope through research and community.

Tell me about your firm (number of employees, location, type of companies you work with, etc.). 

Kanjoya believes in delivering human understanding through technology. The only technology solution for emotional analytics, Kanjoya’s marketing solutions apply automated emotional intelligence to turn unstructured customer data– from social search to survey — into profit acceleration. Kanjoya’s solutions directly answer the who, what, when, where, why and how of marketing campaigns, to maximize emotional engagement.

Kanjoya tackles the data discovery problem — helping marketers from Fortune 500 companies understand the customer experience secrets hidden within their data. We believe that understanding the emotion that people have for your advertising, products, service, and brand is the next major arena of monetizable insights. Kanjoya’s decade of work building proprietary data, technology and methods focused on emotional intelligence place it in the leading position to deliver on this promise. Kanjoya is headquartered in San Francisco, employs 50 employees, and is privately held and backed by Baseline Ventures, SV Angel, Floodgate Fund, and D.E. Shaw.

What type and size of companies do you have as clients?

Kanjoya works exclusively with leading brands from Fortune 500 firms that are committed to viewing customers as more than a set of numbers. Kanjoya’s technology delivers across every vertical, and produces real-time emotional insights today for retail, hospitality, financial services, automotive, oil and gas, and telecommunications. Our technology solutions span key customer channels, deploy instantly, and return benefits immediately.

What comes to mind when you see this topic?

In the age of the digital savvy consumer and with the explosion of opinion scoring social platforms, customer expectations are higher than ever before. Understanding the voice of customer continues to remain paramount, but who can keep up with consumer opinion on such a massive, big data scale? Twitter, Facebook, CRM systems, contact centers, survey data – there is a perpetually never ending stream of unstructured data channels that combine to present a daunting challenge to customer experience and voice of customer professionals. Kanjoya’s technology applied to large unstructured data sets reveals deep insights into the emotions driving consumer behavior. Understanding the emotions and key terms tied to a brand unlocks actionable intelligence that improves reach, resonance and drives market share.

What are the best practices when it comes to this issue?

Companies are inundated with reviews, ratings, and opinions that cumulatively make customer satisfaction an increasing complex equation. The key to staying ahead of your competitors is to focus on the voice of customer. The challenge is to aggregate and understand a vast sea of unstructured customer data. Our proprietary technology goes beyond the simple positive / negative of sentiment analysis to decipher emotions within expression. Built for massive scale, our technology automatically ingests vast sets of unstructured data, from social to internal surveys, search trends, and forum posts. We model the different meanings words can have based on topic and speaker, accounting for regular English language usage and conversations riddled with emoticons, colloquialisms, and slang. By incorporating factors like culture, linguistic nuances, connotations and varying contexts, our technology turns unstructured customer data into emotional and qualitative insights on the motivations for purchase, loyalty, and churn.