Cannabidiol (CBD) has become one of the most emerging segments in the medical market and has captured the attention of the global consumer market within a short period. Constant shifts in customer needs and regulatory changes have made CBD one of the most dynamic market landscapes causing challenges for companies. With a significant consumer interest, CBD is turning it into a multi-billion-dollar industry on its own. Considering this strong consumer interest, if CBD companies or marketers manage to understand customer needs, strategize accordingly, and to leverage market opportunities. Before discussing in-depth on generating market insights, let’s discuss CBD and its benefits in detail.

What is CBD?

Cannabidiol (CBD) is the second most prevalent Cannabinoid, a type of chemical component extracted from Cannabis, a genus of flowering plants such as Hemp. The most popular Cannabinoid extracted from Cannabis is Delta-9-TetraHydroCannabinol or THC. Though both CBD and THC interact with the cannabinoid receptors in the body to treat various conditions, the lack of psychoactive effects is what differentiates CBD from TCH. In simple terms, THC mostly extracted from Marijuana, has intoxicating effects, whereas CBD is unlikely to cause such hallucinatory effects.

How CBD Products Works?

CBD produces effects in the body by interacting with two types of Cannabinoid receptors produced by our body, which form part of the endocannabinoid system.

CB1 receptors are present throughout the body, particularly in the brain. They co-ordinate movement, pain, emotion, mood, thinking, appetite, memories, and other functions.

CB2 receptors are more common in the immune system. They affect inflammation and pain.

CBD stimulates these receptors so that the body produces its own cannabinoids, known as endocannabinoids.

CBD Benefits

Growing research and development activities in recent times have helped in identifying the potential use of CBD in treating chronic pain, arthritis or joint pain, anxiety, and depression, PTSD, migraine, etc. While initially, CBD products were only available in oil form, now they are available in various edible formats such as drinks, bars, gummies, syrup, candies, and cookies. One new emerging trend is CBD infused food which has been catching up as a hot trend among chefs since 2019.

CBD Market

Based on a recent report by Grand View Research, the global market for CBD was estimated at USD 4.6 Billion in the year 2018 and is expected to reach USD 15.3 Billion by 2025 with a CAGR of 22.2%.

The market is highly competitive with continuous product and technological developments. Key factors driving the market include growing awareness of the merits of CBD, such as anti-inflammatory properties and other psychiatric benefits.

Understanding CBD Market and Customers

Customers drive the industry forward, especially when it’s an emerging market such as CBD. It is critical for businesses to understand their current and prospective consumers to be first to market while also capturing the consumer at their peak interest. As the market is still evolving, most brands tend to use their own customer data within their respective geographies such as sales and survey information to make market decisions. However, with limited sample size, this data is not truly representative of this rapidly moving market and can be inefficient in producing insights that would drive the brand towards success. Gaining a more global perspective on trends in the marketplace can help guide companies on growth trends and what’s to come.

Having data-driven insights on customer expectations is the key to CBD brands in developing marketing and sales strategies to prevail in this dynamic market. With the massive influx of consumers sharing their experiences using CBD products online, brands can leverage this data to understand ever-evolving customer expectations and pain points.

SetuServ’s VOCIS platform provides customer insights and market intelligence for the CBD and cannabis industry globally. It uses a proprietary text-mining algorithm that’s capable of extracting relevant customer conversations from online sources such as social media, e-commerce websites, blogs, and discussion forums. Insights can be viewed by various filters including geography, form, product, brand, etc. The platform employs AI-powered natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis algorithms in uncovering deep insights on customer needs and gaps between customer expectation and realization. Combining these automated insights along with human SME intelligence, CBD insights helps brands to better understand the market landscape and navigate market challenges.

 

HCPs are becoming increasingly active in expressing their opinions on social media and online research publications. As Wall Street Journal noted in this article, this is driven by their desire to provide credible information online to help people stay updated with the latest developments in research and healthcare, especially during this Covid-19 crisis. For example, Bob Wachter, the chairman of the department of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco takes at least 2 hours of his busy schedule on most days to put out content on Twitter.

Our own research has shown that physicians have become quite active across a variety of social channels. From a random sample of 1,000 hematologists, we found that ~40% of them are present on at least one of the online platforms.

As the following example of Dr. Anthony Mato (an opinion leader in Hematology) illustrates, Hematologists are not only active with research publications in Pubmed/Clinical Trials.gov, but also in social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.

Efficient pre-call research using this social data

These research and social posts published by physicians are valuable sources of insight for Pharma companies and their sales reps.  Many HCPs feel that the sales reps tend to be delivering a scripted pitch about the product and do not give details about new studies or data which support the need for using the product. To overcome this immense challenge, it’s critical for the reps to personalize the sales details to suit the specific interests of a physician. By researching a physician’s social and professional posts, sales reps can understand the top of the mind needs and concerns of HCPs, and tailor their pitch accordingly.  

Our PharmaSignals platform helps sales reps by consolidating conversations across channels and sending them via email. Sales reps can use this to identify conversation starters of interest for the HCP. Below is an example of a weekly email that is sent to a sales director that is currently using our platform.

Our PharmaSignals platform reduces the manual effort of tracking each of these targets across various social media platforms and media sites. Thus, giving readymade access to their content and increasing the chances of having better conversations with HCPs.

Businesses today have evolved from being solely brick and mortar stores to extending their offerings across multiple digital channels. With the increase in internet and smart device penetration, digital channels have become the primary touchpoint for customers to interact with brands. This distancing from in-person brick and mortar stores might seem like customer connections have diminished, however with the omnichannel and ubiquitous digital presence, businesses are now interacting with customers more than ever. This online relationship with customers has also enabled the brands to track and measure each and every interaction in the realm of cyberspace, thus more accurately predicting and delivering what their customers want. 

The abundance of customer data might sound like a big boon, but it also poses a particular problem to be solved – access and analysis at scale. With more than 80% of the customer data unstructured, semi-structured, and textual in nature, it’s quite challenging to process and extract insights compared to structured data. However,  text analytics presents itself to be an apt solution to overcoming this problem. In this blog post, we explore how text analytics helps customer experience (CX) and marketing teams attract, engage, and satisfy customers while staying ahead of the competition.

What is Text Analytics?

Text Analytics/ text mining is an Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology that leverages Natural Language Processing (NLP) algorithms to convert unstructured and semi-structured textual data into normalized structured data that’s suitable for analysis.

Source: Practical Text Mining and Statistical Analysis for Non-structured Text Data Applications - Book

 

 

Use cases in which customer experience and marketing teams leverage

Text analytics has a wide range of applications and can be applied anywhere where unstructured textual data exists. The following are some of the key use cases where text analytics comes in handy.

Text analytics for marketing teams

It is quintessential for the marketing teams to understand the customers deeply in order to acquire, engage, and delight customers. Marketing teams also need to be aware of the customer pain points, ways customers perceive the product or service, and crucial factors influencing their buying decisions. In order to access customer insights,  marketing teams conventionally rely on methods such as surveys, interviews, and feedback. However, these methods are prone to bias and error that makes them inefficient. To overcome this, the application of text analytics enables marketing teams to access customer conversations from text-based data sources such as social media, discussion forums, and blogs, and transform them into useful insights to boost customer satisfaction and revenue generation.

Early customer trend detection

With the rise of social media and other digital mediums, customers share more of their daily lives online. This abundance of customer data can help businesses identify emerging trends. Uncovering these emerging trends provides brands new opportunities and an edge against their competitors. Text analytics serves to ingest a large volume of online data and identifies customer trends or emerging brands that could become a threat to the business.

Voice of the customer report

The voice of customer report provides a comprehensive, yet granular, view of customer sentiment and emotion related to a brand, product, or service. These insights help in improving customer experiences, increase revenue and drive customer engagement. However, tracking the triggers that influence customer opinions about brands, products, or services across various touchpoints is challenging. Text analytics facilitates the analysis of customer conversations and feedback from various online sources and serves them up as useful data and insights at scale. These insights guide the marketing team to strategize campaigns for better output and engagement.

 

Text Analytics for Customer Care Teams

Customer experience teams are often inundated with high volumes of customer communications on any given day. With a magnitude of textual data involved, CX teams often leverage text analytics to automate repetitive tasks and identify areas to improve Net Promoter Score (NPS) and other customer satisfaction KPIs.

Conversation analysis

The internet has become the predominant medium for customers to communicate with businesses via multiple modes such as emails, support tickets, social media, and chat. These customer conversations provide a wealth of insights for understanding customer needs and contributing to business growth. Applying text analytics enables us to analyze customer interactions and communications at scale to find data-driven insights that highlight critical customer issues and improve customer experience.

Automated ticket prioritization and routing

Customers expect and value timely, effective, and personalized customer service interactions. However, businesses are falling short of resources and efficient workflows in place to handle customer queries efficiently. Managing a high volume of customer queries can be challenging as manually tagging tickets and routing them through the right human agent is a time-consuming process prone to errors and may also create bottlenecks and delayed response times. However, text analytics can automatically categorize the support ticket and assign it to the most suitable pool of agents. In addition, with sentiment analysis, the systems can determine the urgency of resolution based on the tone of the customer communication and prioritize the tickets.

 

SetuServ offers a variety of text analytics solutions or companies that want to support growth while maintaining a strong customer connection.  Our methodology combines Artificial Intelligence (AI) & Human Intelligence (HI) to provide accurate insights. SetuServ’s Voice of Consumer Insights and Signals (VOCIS) platform serves a majority of industries with offerings across departments For much more complex and industry-specific solutions, SetuServ offers custom AI solutions based on the specific customer use cases.