I D C

C U S T O M E R

S P O T L I G H T

Whirlpool Corporation's Digital Detectives:

Attensity Provides the Lens
March 2011
Sponsored by Attensity

Introduction
Whirlpool Corporation is the world's largest manufacturer of
home appliances. Founded in 1911, the company has
71,000 employees and brought in $18.3 billion in 2010. It
maintains 66 manufacturing and research centers
worldwide, and in addition to Whirlpool Corporation, its
brands include Whirlpool Corporation, Maytag, Jenn-Air,
Amana, KitchenAid, JennAir, Bauknecht, Brastemp, and
Consul. The company celebrates its centenary in
November 2011.
Whirlpool Corporation and its many brands receive an
abundance of communications from customers using
multiple channels. The company's products and services
are also the subject of discussions in social media blogs,
Twitter, Facebook, and various forums. The company
needed to understand what customers were saying through
these many channels in order to improve its services and
products.
Whirlpool Corporation was an early customer of Attensity, a
developer of integrated customer-experience management
applications, which Whirlpool Corporation has used for six
years to monitor and make sense of its traditional customer
relationship management (CRM) data, emails, surveys, and
repair notes. In 2009, the company decided to add
Attensity 360 --Attensitys social media monitoring
application-- to the mix as well. This project was designed
to make sense of Whirlpool Corporation's scattered data on
customers and what they were saying, but also to provide
feedback and customer ideas to the company's product
developers. There are approximately 300 to 400 Attensity
users at Whirlpool Corporation today.

Solution Snapshot
Organization: Whirlpool
Operational Challenge: To discover
what Whirlpool's customers and
prospects were saying about their
products and services by monitoring
social media channels; to create a
"public voice" that could respond to
customers with assistance and
information.
Solution: Attensity360 for continuous
monitoring and analysis of social media
conversations in review sites, blogs,
forums, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube
videos, and mainstream news.
Attensity Voice of the Customer
analytics for indentifying what
customers have done previously, and
incorporating text analytics findings into
models to successfully predict
customer churn, loyalty, satisfaction,
and more.
Benefits: Increased interaction with
customers, with improved
responsiveness and positive
experiences; using customer feedback
for better product development and
planning.

Whirlpool Corporation's goals were the following:

To discover where online people were discussing Whirlpool Corporation and what they were
saying

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To integrate the many customer information streams into a single application in order to get a
complete picture of customer interactions, trends, discussions, suggestions and opinions

To enable Whirlpool Corporation's "Digital Detectives" to contact customers directly (publicly and
privately) in order to solve their problems

To create a public voice for Whirlpool Corporation on social media sites to demonstrate that it
was following up on complaints and suggestions, and to answer the questions that had been
raised publicly. This feedback is designed to be positive, helping customers find answers to their
questions easily.

To add product managers to the feedback loop so that they could see suggestions and
incorporate them in their next products and to make improvements to existing products

Implementation
Whirlpool Corporation takes a collaborative approach to social media, with the Digital Marketing,
Customer Care, and Public Relations teams all working together to provide a consistent and credible
brand voice to its consumers. Whirlpool Corporation was already realizing significant value from its
use of Attensity's Voice of the Customer software for managing internal data, so the decision to add
Attensity360 and Attensity Respond was straightforward. The Customer Care and Manufacturing
teams adopted Attensity360 and Attensity Respond to better understand and respond to what's being
said about the company.
Implementing Attensity360 added a very large source of customer information, and also changed
some internal processes for the better. For example, Whirlpool Corporation had been monitoring
social media through a manual process of Web scraping and manual searches. With the new
automated approach, Attensity helps Whirlpool Corporation "get through the weeds so we can get
right to the customer to take action," according to Bryan Snyder, Senior Manager, Social and
Emerging Media.

Measuring Success
Whirlpool Corporation had the following three main goals when it rolled out Attensity's Voice of the
Customer and Attensity360:

Discover what customers were saying about the company

Improve performance and effectiveness in responding to what customers were saying

Increase capacity for monitoring large streams of comments, as well as increase the number of
channels Whirlpool Corporation was able to monitor

Proving the value of massive monitoring projects is often a problem, since the value tends to be
qualitative rather than quantitative. However, as mentioned, Whirlpool Corporation is experienced in
using Voice of the Customer applications and has created the following set of metrics from which it
plans to develop customer data by brand:

Number of responses

Number of consumers contacted

Time elapsed between complaint or comment and contacting the customer

Length of the interaction

2011 IDC

The size of the online general conversation about appliances

Within this conversation, the number of negative comments and number of positive
comments about their products and their competitors' products

Sentiment analysis by brand

Number of satisfied completed interactions

Feedback from the customer (not a survey, but if the customer contacts them)

Benefits
While metrics are important, the effect of Attensity is felt beyond the sheer increase in number of
sources and customers that Whirlpool Corporation can now reach and monitor. Whirlpool Corporation
uses Attensity broadly throughout its product development and planning. The company mines the
Web to find suggestions for desirable appliance features. It also monitors competitors, and uses the
aggregated information to inform its marketing plans. In short, Attensity's platform has become not
just a call-center tool, but an enterprise-wide tool to help Whirlpool Corporation get a handle on its
business and its customers.
Alex Petrov, Director of Whirlpool Corporation's Transformation Office, says, "The basic process that
has made this project so valuable is that they are able to listen, respond, and then measure. Listening
is paramount, and Attensity allows Whirlpool Corporation to listen at a scale unachievable by manual
means."
Methodology
Information for this customer case study was gathered through interviews with Alex Petrov (Director
of Whirlpool Corporation's Transformation Office), Drew Hartman (Operations Manager for Customer
Experience), and Brian Snyder (Senior Manager, Social and Emerging Media) at Whirlpool
Corporation. Additional information about the features in Attensity's products was gathered through
briefings with Attensity.

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