How to Create Winning CX Surveys for Bank Customers

Constant engagement is key to creating a quality, meaningfully improved customer experience (CX). And for banks especially, the quality of the experiences customers have with a brand is the key factor in determining a customer’s longevity and willingness to maintain a relationship with a company. While an integrated CX approach demands that you go beyond the survey and look at data from everywhere – social reviews, call transcripts, chat logs, email threads, and more, CX surveys are the foundation. Banks can and should engage with customers via CX surveys and other feedback methods to see what customers love about the experience and what might need a little tweaking. Even more importantly, banks should engage with customers to let them know that they’re cared for not just as customers, but people.

Customers who feel heard and seen in this way will keep coming back even when the competition out there is fierce (and as you well know, it’s always fierce in the banking world). But what best practices should you follow to create winning CX surveys for bank customers?

Most banks rely on surveys to engage with their customers and gather this valuable intelligence, which is why today’s conversation focuses not ‘just’ on how to build a great survey, but how to do so in a way that speaks effectively to banking customers. So, with that in mind, let’s kick things off by going over our two favorite survey types: relationship surveys and transactional surveys.

Relationship Surveys

Relationship surveys are all about the big picture—brands in every industry use them to get a glimpse of the entire customer-company relationship instead of one or two transactions. A good relationship survey gives banks not only how their customers feel about experiences now, but also helps highlight which experience elements might be even more influential tomorrow.

What follows is the secret sauce for a great relationship survey. You want to include metrics that measure overall satisfaction and loyalty. You also need questions about brand perception, channel usage and satisfaction, product usage and satisfaction, and the experiences that impacted, or are impacting, your customers the most. Questions about marketing communication perception never hurt either! All of these questions, when used together, will give your bank a 360-degree view of customer relationships that goes a long way toward Experience Improvement (XI).

Transactional Surveys

As its name suggests, a transactional survey is all about how well (or not) a transaction at your bank went for your customer. These surveys can be tuned to both in-person interactions and online banking. Though transactional surveys are of a smaller scale than relationship ones, they’re also much more specific, which is great when you’re trying to get into the details of individual interactions.

Generally speaking, you want your transactional survey to ask how well the transaction went, overall satisfaction with elements like application processes and bank teller interactions, and whether there were any problems with either the transaction itself or the resolution that followed. All of that makes for a good enough survey, but we challenge you to go beyond by also asking about elements like how knowledgeable your customers think your reps are, how complete your information is, and whether it’s easy to jump between channels for a more fluid experience.

The Next Step

Whether you’re looking to design your first survey or double-checking whether your current one is up to scratch, we also challenge you to bear something else in mind: having a survey is great, but knowing when and where to deploy it is even better. Hot alerts, contextual survey deployments, and being able to analyze unstructured survey feedback can help take your bank straight to the top.

Interested in learning more on how to do all that? Click here to read our full-length eBook on how banks like yours can use surveys to meaningfully improve experiences, strengthen your bottom line, and build meaningful relationships with customers!

Looking to Update Your Customer Experience Program? Here’s How.

As a customer experience (CX) professional, you’ve experienced the thrill of starting and growing the program in many forms whether it be: the beginning stage, getting those quick wins, and growing a reputation of excellence across your company.

But then there’s the dreaded plateau. This can happen after you’ve been steadily gaining momentum, then all of a sudden, it seems as if your initiatives are no longer moving the needle. That’s when you know it’s time to update your customer experience program.

Why Refresh Your Customer Experience Program?

  1. Design with the End in Mind
  2. Understand Successes and Shortcomings
  3. Look at Short-term and Long-term Actions

Like most things in the world, your customers—and your market—are not stagnant. They’re constantly changing and adapting to world events, new trends, upgraded technology, and more. And that’s a good thing! It simply means that in order to meet the needs of your customers and your business, you need to consistently evolve your program according to new circumstances and objectives.

We understand it may seem intimidating, but over our 19 years of experience helping the world’s most popular brands ace their customer experience, we’ve learned a few things about how to systematically and strategically review your CX program, and pinpoint the actions you need to take for success. In this blog, we’ve gathered a few of the top tips from our experts to help guide your refresh efforts. You’ll find them all below!

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

We’ve said it before, and you’re about to hear us say it again: you need to design your CX program with your current goals for both your experience and your business in mind. Your experience-level goals may look like increasing your net promoter score (NPS) by a certain number in the next year, or launching QR codes surveys. On the other hand, your business goals may be to increase customer tenure or lower cost to serve. Your CX program can help you meet all of those goals, but first, you need to have those goals set in stone!

Tip #2: Understand Successes and Shortcomings 

Every CX program has something it does well—and something that isn’t quite hitting the mark. It’s important that you understand current strengths and weaknesses when you start to update your customer experience program. The “current” part of this mandate is emphasized because you must recognize that just because an initiative was working before doesn’t mean it’s the best solution now.

For instance, one of our clients, Volvo, had a post-transaction survey that had served it well in the past. However, that survey was, in a few words, too long to maintain customers’ attention. That’s why we challenged the brand to take a critical look at each question and ask itself, “is this information already available to us?” The result was a significantly shorter microsurvey that asked intentional and open-ended questions which garnered more responses, more context, and more actionable intelligence. (You can read more about Volvo’s story here.)

Tip #3: Look at Short-term and Long-term Actions

Now that you’ve identified areas of opportunity, it’s time to come up with an action plan to implement successful initiatives more widely and remove points of friction across the customer experience. In order to prioritize (and avoid overwhelm), it’s important to break your action plan up into phases.

Check out this checklist to see how you can build a max-impact CX strategy for a small CX team!

First, identify short-term goals or initiatives you can get started on immediately and implement in the next few weeks. These short-term goals can be something like updating a survey, pulling together a CX cross-functional team, etc. Next, you need to identify the more complex goals, such as proving the ROI of customer experience at your company, implementing employee training based on intelligence, and the like. These more long-term goals will require multiple steps, stakeholders, and approvals. But just because they’re long term doesn’t mean you should put them on the back burner. It merely means that you need to get the ball rolling and prepare for the long haul. 

Still Unsure of How to Get Started?

Our Strategic Insights Team leads InMoment clients through a service we like to call XI Blueprint, in which our experts help brands assess their existing CX blueprint and determine an action plan for both short- and long-term objectives that meet the current needs of their business.

Want to learn more about it? In this video, our Senior Director of Strategic Insights Funda Whitaker paints a clear picture of how XI Blueprint can get CX programs “unstuck.” Watch it here!

You can also hear our client, Harvard Pilgrim, discuss its XI Blueprint success story here!

How to Improve the Contact Center Experience in 5 Easy Steps

A lot of customer experiences hinge on your contact center’s effectiveness, which is why it’s important to ensure it’s a resource your customers find helpful, professional, and expedient.

However, building an effective, consistent contact center experiences can be overwhelming. That’s why we’ve taken everything we have learned by working with best-in-class brands and distilled those learnings into five simple steps you can follow to make sure you build a contact center that works for you, and works for your customers.

  1. Utilize Automation
  2. Explore Customer Issues to Create Self-Serve Content
  3. Engage and Enable Employees
  4. Data Is a Gold Mine
  5. Closing the Loop

Improve Contact Center Experience Step #1: Utilize Automation

The term ‘automation’ can scare customers because they often associate it with navigating phone trees and having to repeat themselves to a robot listener, but the truth is that automation is incredibly useful when contact centers leverage it correctly. Using automation within online chats, online reviews, or survey feedback, for example, allows your brand to direct customers to solutions for smaller problems. This frees your call center agents up to deal with more complicated problems while also reducing call volumes, saving your brand both time and money.

Improve Contact Center Experience Step #2: Explore Customer Issues to Create Self-Serve Content

Utilizing customer feedback to guide them toward solutions is a valuable practice, but it’s only one part of the equation. This feedback becomes even more valuable when you can harness a data platform that utilizes unstructured data analytics and creates actionable insights. This approach proves incredibly beneficial for identifying recurring issues faced by your customers, escalating these concerns to your development team, and creating relevant self-service resources to empower customers in resolving problems independently. Also, it also serves as a proactive strategy for safeguarding your customer experience, addressing potential issues before they even arise.

Improve Contact Center Experience Step #3: Engage and Enable Employees

While it’s not uncommon for brands to provide training for their employees in customer interactions, organizations can unlock even greater potential by actively encouraging their staff to share their unique perspectives on customer problems. This approach not only equips brands with insights into issues that customers might not have formally reported but also empowers employees to proactively drive Experience Improvement (XI) initiatives. By fostering a culture of open communication, brands can tap into the collective expertise of their workforce and gain a deeper understanding of customer pain points, leading to more effective solutions.

This collaborative approach also sends a powerful message to contact center employees, demonstrating that the organization values their input and is genuinely committed to using an integrated CX approach to improve customer experience. By turning employees from mere service providers into valued contributors to the customer-centric mission, brands can effectively transform detractors into enthusiastic promoters. In doing so, they not only improve customer satisfaction but also cultivate a great employee experience that is also  an engaged workforce dedicated to delivering exceptional service.

Improve Contact Center Experience Step #4: Data Is a Gold Mine

Your brand generates mountains of data every day. Having a lot of information is great, but in this day and age, having so much of it can make figuring out where to start difficult. We’ve found that contact center improvement hinges on three kinds of data: customer feedback, social media data, and web analytics. You can complete the puzzle of Experience Improvement by using this information as a foundation for unlocking your organization’s voice of the customer (VoC). Having all of this data in one place gives your brand a united, holistic perception of the customer, which is vital to knowing how you might make some fixes and refinements to your contact center.

Improve Contact Center Experience Step #5: Closing the Loop

The value of closing the loop cannot be stressed enough. It’s not actually enough to stop at solving the problem; following up with your customers afterward goes a long way toward making them feel cared about as people. In other words, a follow-up lets customers know you’re as interested in the relationship they have with your brand as the transaction. Follow up with employees, too! Not sure where to start? Check out this resource that outlines the 7 steps for implementing a closed loop system!

Gathering intel and opinions from all these folks will give you chances to improve both your contact center and your overall customer experience, strengthening human connections and your bottom line.

Click here to learn even more about these processes in our full-length contact center eBook. We take a deep dive into additional methods and best practices you can leverage to begin improving your contact center, customer experience, and employee experiences today!

Surveys Are Boring, It’s What You Do with Them That’s Exciting: Three Ideas for Beating Survey Fatigue

In the world of customer experience, surveys have been a reliable feedback-collecting source for decades. As we make our way forward with new CX technologies and approaches, survey fatigue remains a key operational concern. CX professionals are finding it more challenging than ever to keep program momentum alive. Today, I’m going to share some tips for reviewing your survey program for better response rates, higher program engagement, and better representative results. Use these tips to deliver excellent experiences for your customers while demonstrating that their voice is being heard!

The Road to Alleviate Survey Fatigue 

As our approaches to customer experience advance, so does the challenge of survey fatigue. This is a hurdle that CX professionals confront head-on as they strive to maintain the momentum of their survey programs. In the following sections, I will delve into strategies that not only increase your response rate but also invigorate program engagement and yield more representative results. By implementing these techniques, you’ll not only provide outstanding customer experiences but also emphasize that their feedback is not just heard, but genuinely valued.

#1. Make Surveys Shorter. A LOT Shorter.

How many times have you called a customer service representative and thought, “I am your customer—you should already know all these details about me.” Well, people are potentially thinking this about your surveys, too. Ideally, experience surveys should take 2-4 minutes to complete, which can be easily achieved by cutting out the questions to which you already know the answers. You can start your journey to beating survey fatigue with shortening surveys further by removing surplus demographic or operational data that could be sourced from your CRM or data lake (e.g. age, products held, customer tenure), and ultimately improved response rates.

Another technique to fight survey fatigue that is successful for many brands is to leverage microsurveys for mobile and other digital environments. A survey can be set up at each key digital touchpoint (like on a mobile app or website) to send a one or two question microsurvey with an open text box to capture immediate, in-the-moment responses from customers.

Learn how Hootsuite tripled their Net Promoter Score by using InMoment’s microsurveys!

#2. Ask Survey Questions That Drive Action.

Whilst “good” survey questions vary from industry to industry, there are some overarching considerations that you need to keep in mind when drafting customer survey questions:

  • Make sure each survey question has an owner within your organisation;
  • Consider the type of action that can be taken within your organisation from this question
  • Minimise words used in your questions. If the idea is clear without excess words, trim down wherever possible
  • Confirm each survey question is either aligned to customer experience goals and / or targets (e.g. expected front line behaviour or a KPI).

By keeping each of these principles in mind, you’ll ensure that each question can drive action within your organisation, which could in turn be used in comms to demonstrate you’ve listened to customer feedback and taken action to drive an improved customer experience!

Want to see what a survey that drives action looks like? Learn how Pizza Hut UK partnered with InMoment to optimise survey design which resulted in double the average number of survey responses. Read the full Pizza Hut customer story today!

#3. Make Your Surveys Count: Pull Transactional and Journey Surveys Into Your Case Management Program

Surveys can be seen as the starting point of a customer conversation. Case management programs—also known as closed loop feedback (CLF) programs—enable trained staff to connect with customers one on one. Frontline staff call back customers to understand why an experience was either great or has room for improvement, and provide a chance to really connect with customers and hear their stories first hand. This can help drive continuous improvement initiatives, or provide customer-driven evidence to support larger initiatives that may require a business-case. Further, and if conducted with a treatment / control approach (e.g. 50% of CLF qualifying customers receive a call), you can track how customers’ behaviour has changed after you close the loop. 

Don’t underestimate the potential positive brand impact you’ll see when customers receive a call from a representative after clicking “submit” on their survey. By optimising case management, it will give your program the opportunity to evolve outside of analytics, and start directly contributing more to other operational areas of the business.

In this world where we can reach customers in so many different ways, asking customers “how would you rate XYZ”, “why did you rate XYZ”, and “thinking over these elements, how would you rate…” can be boring, let’s be honest, especially if it is a long survey. Instead, we encourage you to make your surveys shorter to fight survey fatigue and look beyond the questions to discover how the customer’s voice can influence your organisation’s operational performance through CLF and actionable insights. 


To learn more about what makes a great survey and how to combat survey fatigue, we’ve put together a framework in this new paper, Transactional Customer Experience Survey Best Practices. Download for free today!

Customer Experience Survey Best Practices: Three Steps You Should Take Before You Send

Customer experience surveys have served us well when it comes to collecting customer feedback data. When we have questions about our brand’s customer experience (CX), there’s no better way to get answers than by asking our customers directly, right? But how do you make sure you’re sending the best possible customer experience survey? Asking the right questions? Sending your survey at time? 

Keep reading to find the answers to these questions and more in this overview of customer experience survey facts, best practices, and beyond.

What Is a Customer Experience Survey?

Customer experience surveys are customizable questionnaires sent to targeted customer segments to determine how a brand is performing, uncover areas where customers are satisfied, and detect areas in need of improvement across the customer journey. The end goal of these surveys is to improve customer experiences and impact business metrics.

Why Use Customer Experience Surveys?

Customer experience surveys are more vital than ever before due to an extremely competitive market in every industry as well as empowered consumers. In mere seconds, customers can compare your brand’s products and services with that of your competitors. Therefore, you cannot afford to overlook any areas of dissatisfaction that may prevent customers from purchasing from you.

When you deploy customer experience surveys and other methods of customer listening, however, you are placing your customer and their satisfaction at the heart of everything you do—and that pays. In fact, customer-centric companies are 60% more profitable than

companies who don’t focus on customers. This is largely due to the fact that brands who are customer centric leverage the insights they gain from customer experience surveys to make improvements for their customers, which improve the following metrics:

  • Customer Acquisition: Create exceptional experiences that attract new customers via word of mouth, and also leverage your voice of customer to create more targeted marketing campaigns.
  • Customer Retention: Reduce customer churn by resolving points of friction throughout your customer journey and leverage predictive analytics to identify customers who are likely to leave so you can implement a rescue plan.
  • Higher Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Understand what keeps customers around so you can continue to not only satisfy their needs, but go above and beyond to delight them, keeping them around for a lifetime
  • Lower Cost to Serve: Identify areas where you can eliminate duplicate efforts and inefficient processes so you can fine tune your approach to save time, effort, and money.

Different Types of Customer Experience Surveys

There are four popular types of customer experience surveys many businesses leverage across the customer journey to gauge their brand reputation, customer satisfaction, customer effort, and other more targeted metrics.

#1: Net Promoter Score (NPS) 

What Is Net Promoter Score?

Net Promoter Score or NPS is a method of measuring brand customer satisfaction that was released in 2003 by Fred Reichheld, a partner at Bain & Company. It is among the most popular customer experience metrics as 48% of companies with more than $500 million

in revenue are using NPS as their primary indicator for measuring the customer experience success.

How Is Net Promoter Score Measured?

The Net Promoter Score is based on one question: “What is the likelihood that you would recommend company x to a friend or colleague?” NPS then categorizes customers into three types. The customer type is based on their likelihood to recommend your brand on a scale of 0-10:

  • Promoters (10-9)
  • Passives (8-7)
  • Detractors (6-0)

Your Net Promoter Score is calculated by subtracting the percentage total of detractors from the percentage total of promoters.

Why Does Net Promoter Score Matter?

NPS helps brands to get a brand-level tracking study of their overall customer experience because it gives them a single metric to measure their brand health. Additionally, NPS helps brands adopt an easy-to-understand, common language by giving them one singular metric to keep track of. 

Net Promoter Score Survey Template

If you are looking to deploy a NPS customer experience survey, you can use the following template to craft a Microsurvey for in-app, in-site, or in-platform feedback, or even for an email survey or SMS survey.

Example of a net promoter score customer experience survey
Net Promoter Score Customer Experience Survey Example

#2: Customer Satisfaction Score

What Is a Customer Satisfaction Score?

Customer Satisfaction Score or CSAT measures a customer’s level of contentment after a specific interaction, transaction, or general satisfaction with a specific feature within a product or service.

CSAT customer experience surveys ask “how satisfied are you with your recent experience at BRAND X?”

How Is Customer Satisfaction Score Measured?

Customer Satisfaction Score is equal to the total number of satisfied responses (with respondents who rated a 4-5 on a scale of 1-5 considered to be “Satisfied Responses”) divided by the total number of responses, then multiplied by 100. The final results should be rounded to the nearest whole number.

Why Does Customer Satisfaction Score Matter?

Customer Satisfaction Score is relatively easy to understand as it correlates to a single question on a survey. Also, it makes benchmarking against other brands simple and straightforward. 

Additionally, CSAT customer experience surveys allow brands to get a snapshot of the customer experience at a specific touchpoint, which allows them to more easily identify areas that need improvement. 

Customer Satisfaction Score Template

Looking to use CSAT post transaction or at another touchpoint? Check out this customer satisfaction score template:

An example of a CSAT customer experience survey via mobile
Customer Satisfaction Score Customer Experience Survey on Mobile

#3: Customer Effort Score

What Is Customer Effort Score?

Customer Effort Score or CES is a customer experience survey metric that allows brands to measure the ease of customer interaction and resolution during a request.

The Customer Effort metric became popular in the 1990s as companies realized that understanding the amount of effort it takes a customer to do business with them is critical. The thinking was that effort should be low for easy interactions whereas customers should expect to put in more effort for complicated or involved experiences. Effort plus satisfaction would help the organizations understand whether they were delivering on expectations.

How Is Customer Effort Score Calculated?

CES appears on a customer experience survey by asking customers to rate whether they agree or disagree with this statement: “The company made it easy for me to handle my issue.”Customers answer according to a scale from 1-7 with 1 being “Strongly Disagree” and 7 being “Strongly Agree.” 

Organizations then take the number of those who responded with 5 and above then divide by the total respondents to calculate the CES.

Why Does Customer Effort Score Matter?

CES is especially popular in contact centers, but it is becoming more popular with other industries. It also allows companies to focus on one goal: doing whatever it takes to make things easy for their customers. Therefore, they can unify their efforts and work toward

that desired outcome.

Customer Effort Score Template

If you’re looking for a Customer Effort Score template, you’ve come to the right place! Take a look below:

Image of a Customer Effort Score Customer Experience Survey via Chat
Customer Effort Score Customer Experience Survey via Chat

#4: Custom Customer Experience Surveys

When to Use a Custom Customer Experience Survey?

A customer CX survey allows you to ask more specific questions to targeted customer segments about a product, interaction, or service. These questions allow you to get into the details of your customer experiences to add more context to specific initiatives, such as product development, employee training initiatives, and beyond. 

These customer customer experience surveys should be extremely targeted and designed to trigger at a very specific time, for instance, right after a customer performs the specific action your team is trying to fine tune.

There are plenty of benefits to using custom customer experience surveys, but the primary benefit has to be the fact that these surveys allow you to fill in any knowledge gaps or blind spots in your brand’s customer journey (more on this later). 

How to Take Action on a Customer Experience Survey

Leveraging the metrics we’ve discussed so far is a great way to get a specific score associated with either your overall customer experience or customer satisfaction or ease at a specific touchpoint, but what about taking action on that metric to improve experiences? That’s why you need to get the story behind the score with a follow up question.

A follow up question comes after a metric-based question and simply asks, “What is the reason behind your score?” (or a variation of that question) and then leaves a text box open for customers to type in their explanation. 

Net Promoter Customer Experience Survey With a Follow Up Question
Net Promoter Customer Experience Survey With a Follow Up Question

This is where the most impactful insights will come from. Leveraging text analytics, you’ll be able to analyze the unstructured data from the text box to get to the why behind the score. It’s the difference between knowing an experience needs to be improved and knowing how an experience can be improved.

The best customer experience solutions will also provide dashboards within their platforms that identify the key drivers of specific experiences, which let you and your team know what elements of the customer experience you need to get right. Additionally, some CX platforms even can suggest action plans based on the unstructured data you collect via your customer experience surveys.

Customer Experience Survey Best Practices

When to Send a Customer Experience Survey?

When you should send a customer experience survey depends on why you are sending a survey. More relationship driven surveys with overarching questions like Net Promoter Score can have more flexible sending times, as you are gauging the overall satisfaction with a brand.

For more transaction- or interaction-based questions such as CSAT or CES, however, timing is everything. You want to make sure these surveys are sent right after the interaction in question. If there is a delay, you risk inaccurate data or lower response rates as the interaction or transaction is no longer top of mind for the customer.

You also want to make sure you aren’t sending surveys too frequently or you risk survey fatigue. If you’re reaching out to your customers every time you have a question, there’s a serious possibility that they’ll get tired of your questions and stop participating. This leads to lower response rates, which can affect the quality of the results you receive. Even worse, it can even cause over-surveyed customers to have a negative perception of your brand. 

Where to Send a Customer Experience Survey?

There are various distribution channels you can leverage for your customer experience survey:

  • Social Media Surveys
  • SMS Surveys
  • Email Surveys
  • Mobile App Surveys
  • Website Surveys (or Intercept Surveys)
  • In-Platform Surveys
  • Phone Surveys
  • QR Code Surveys
  • Mail Surveys
  • Chatbot Surveys
  • In-Person Surveys
  • In-Store Surveys (via tablet, point of service, or push-button terminal)
  • Surveys via Push Notification

There are plenty of options, but the most important factor to consider is where your customers prefer to leave feedback. When you meet customers where they are and on the channels they frequent most often, you have a higher likelihood of sufficient response rates and more valuable and actionable feedback data.

Three Steps to Take Before Sending a Customer Experience Survey

Today, there are also so many other ways to collect customer feedback other than customer experience surveys. For instance, research shows that today’s customers are less likely to leave feedback via a traditional long form survey. However methods like Microsurveys, as well as social media and review sites and chatbots have grown in popularity. 

Now, that doesn’t mean we need to abandon surveys all together! In fact, it’s just the opposite. It just means we need to send them at the right time and for the right reasons.

Below, we’ll talk through three expert-advised steps you should take before you send that customer experience survey. 

Step #1: Ask, “What Am I Trying to Achieve With This Customer Experience Survey?”

This first step may seem a little rudimental, but we find that it is often the most vital, yet overlooked element of a successful customer experience survey strategy. We often tell our clients to “design with the end in mind,” meaning to think about not just what you want to accomplish tomorrow or even a few months from now, but when you think about your ideal future state of your customer experience, what does it look like? Only then will you be able to accurately identify how to get from point A to point B. 

Failure to pinpoint your goals when it comes to survey strategy often looks like sending too many surveys with too many questions, leading to too much data—and therefore, too little intelligence. 

That’s why we suggest getting your team together (and maybe including some expert consultants like our Strategic Insights Team) to decide what problem you’re trying to solve or what you’re trying to improve. 

For example, are you striving to increase market share? Retain existing customers? Knowing the answers and setting goals right off the bat will help you narrow down the areas to listen (because if you listen everywhere, you end up with a lot of data and no answers).

Step #2: Take a Look at Your Current Customer Feedback Data

Wondering what questions will surely cause survey fatigue? The ones that you should have the answers to already. That’s why it’s so important to take a look at your existing customer data. This can be inferred data (such as customer relationship management data) or internal data (from emails, slack, and the like).

Today, there is no shortage of data. So, why would you want to add even more to your pile when your existing data might already hold the answers you seek? 

Using the same example from step one, if you are looking to increase retention, you may be able to use inferred/internal data to identify that 30% of your churn is driven by a lack of personalized experiences. That gives you an area in which to take action, all without sending a single survey!

Step #3: Consider Existing External Data

So you’ve decided what you’re trying to achieve and sorted through your existing inferred and internal data. Now what? Next comes the data that already exists, but maybe you don’t have access to it yet.

We are of course referring to indirect data, such as comments and ratings from Glassdoor or other review sites as well as social media comments, credit card and IP targeting data, and the like. The right Experience Improvement partner should be able to help you access this data and the insights it holds.

 By leveraging indirect data, you are gaining additional insights from existing customers and employees, but also non-buyers and non-employees. For instance, if you examine Glassdoor data from competitors, you can identify why their job postings are attracting candidates. You can then leverage that data to improve your own postings.

Now You Can Send That Survey!

Still have questions? Great! These are the perfect candidates for sending a quick survey. By following the three preceding steps, you can rest assured that you have exhausted all of your considerable data resources, and can send out a strategic, minimal survey without risking survey fatigue.

Want to learn if your customer experience surveys are the best they could possibly be? Our experts have developed an assessment that allows you to optimize your surveys and make sure that they will provide actionable insights that drive business results! Check out the Survey Assessment

7 Common Types of Surveys

Customer Experience 101

Surveys are a way to compile data from a group of people, but they can be more than that. Surveys are also direct insight into your customers and information about how they feel about your company, products, and services. How did your customers perceive your most recent product launch? How do they feel about your company’s social media presence? Surveys are a direct line to find out and glean valuable information about your customers and your company. 

But not all surveys are the same, and different types of surveys can provide different insights. There are many types of surveys your company can choose from, and it can be hard to determine which one would be the best for your needs. So to help you figure out the right type of surveys for your needs, we’ll walk you through the most common survey types, the benefits of using surveys, and how to get started today. 

How to Choose the Right Survey Method

Prior to launching a survey, it’s imperative to consider what resources are available to you to conduct the surveys, your goals and objectives, the sample and population size and many other factors to consider:

  • Time: Typically in-person surveys require more time than online surveys. Consider how much time you have available and how soon you need results. 
  • Money: Consider what your budget is and how much it will cost to conduct your survey of choice. 
  • Audience: Consider your audience demographic. Online surveys are typically more difficult for an older population. Consider what type of surveys yield a higher response rate for your audience.
  • Technology Capabilities: Consider whether you have the proper technology that can handle your data analytics. 
  • Research Expertise: Consider whether you have the proper research knowledge such as clearly defined problems, objectives, a target audience, proper data tracking capabilities etc. 
  • Responses: Consider whether you have strategies in place to combat slow response or no response rates.

The Most Common Types of Surveys

There are so many survey types, but we’ll explore 7 types of surveys in depth since these are the most common and beneficial for most companies. 

Online Surveys

Types of Surveys - Online Surveys

Online surveys are one of the most popular types of surveys and for good reason. Online surveys are easy to create, disseminate, and gather responses—challenges many other survey types face. Using an online survey platform, your company can create a survey easily and quickly—often with a wide range of question types—and send it out to customers within seconds. Your customers can then answer the survey at their convenience and send their responses back to you instantaneously. 

In addition, online surveys are beneficial for companies that have a wide reach and customers around the world. Online surveys are accessible by anyone anywhere with only the click of a button. You can reach a wide audience with this type of survey. 

But like any survey type, online surveys do have their cons. Online surveys could be accessed anywhere, but the survey recipient has to have internet access. There are parts of the globe and some households that don’t have internet access (or easy access to public internet) that could be valuable contributors to your survey. In addition, online surveys can provide a wealth of information, but they fall short in some depth. There’s no organic way to ask follow up questions or to probe deeper into an answer when you want more insights. 

Paper Surveys

Paper surveys are sometimes looked at as old fashioned, but they do still reach an audience that can’t access many other types of surveys. Many audiences—like senior citizens or those without internet access—are far more likely to respond or far more comfortable with paper surveys than online surveys. Plus paper surveys are often easier to read for many since they’re printed in large fonts with black text on white paper. 

But one major con of paper surveys is that they can be one of the pricier types of surveys. Paper surveys have to be printed off, sometimes in large quantities, to reach your audience. That can add up if you’re trying to reach a large amount of people. In addition, paper surveys aren’t the most environmentally friendly way to survey. 

Mail Surveys

Mail surveys are one of the most traditional types of surveys. While some people may look at them as old fashioned, there’s a reason this method has been around for so long: it feels authentic and offers you access to an audience that may be less inclined to respond online. Those demographics who are less likely to answer an online email survey are often familiar with mail surveys and will be willing to respond. In addition, mail surveys also have a wide geographic reach since most places are accessible by post. 

When it comes to mail surveys, there are a couple of things to plan for in advance. First, creating the surveys can often be simple, and you do only need to print them off to distribute. But you should keep in mind that your response rate will often be lower if you don’t pre-paid return envelopes for the participants. One drawback of mail surveys is that they require some extra work on the part of the survey participants—something that often lowers response rates. You’ll want to reduce that level of work as much as possible by providing return envelopes that simply need to be dropped in a mailbox. 

That brings up the second con of mail surveys: they can cost your company a little bit more. The cost of printing, envelopes, and postage can add up—but could be worth it for the responses you receive. Second, when it comes to response rate, less is more. Mail surveys have a better completion rate if they’re short. Try to keep your survey to about a page. Not only will that increase your chances of completed responses, short surveys also reduce printing and postage costs. 

Telephone Surveys

Telephone surveys are another more old fashioned method of surveying that has been around since landlines. Now that nearly everyone carries a phone with them or has one at phone, telephone surveys are alive and well in surveying methods. For a telephone survey, a real live interviewer will ask a series of questions and record responses. With modern technology, it’s easy for interviewers to insert responses directly into a computer system to chart and track data. In addition, telephone surveys let interviewers add a personal touch to the conversation that isn’t possible for online, mail, or paper surveys. The chance to ask follow-up questions can give the interviewers a chance to probe for deeper insights and emotions. 

Telephone surveys still face a few cons. These surveys may be cost effective, but they should be kept short. Fifteen minutes is the cap for an effective phone survey. In addition, phone surveys run the risk of looking like a telemarketing call or being ignored. With the saturation of telemarketing calls, many cell phone users don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Some even block all unknown numbers. While telephone surveys can be effective, your team of interviewers will first have to be ignored a decent amount. 

In-Person Surveys

While paper and online surveys lack a personal touch, in-person surveys excel at that. With these surveys, interviewers are able to directly interact with a respondent and to ask follow up questions that really delve into the nuances and intricacies of a response. These surveys provide accuracy and profound insights. In addition, in-person interviews are a great way to collect responses from audiences with low literacy—something that may hinder groups from participating in other methods. 

While the insights gleaned from these surveys can be immensely valuable, there are still some cons to consider. In-person surveys can be time consuming. Your team will need to prepare a venue, schedule interviews, and spend the time actually performing the interviews. It’s a very hands-on process the entire time. In addition, in-person interviews run the risk of interviewer bias or inexperience. The interviewer is crucial to getting usable insights, so you will need to spend the time and money training or hiring one. Even a well-trained interviewer can still lead to interviewer bias skewing your information. 

Panel Surveys

Panel sampling is when you select a group of people to survey repeatedly over a period of time. Your respondents will be randomly selected from your target audience, and they’ll respond to several surveys over a determined period of time. Longitudinal studies are a great example of panel surveying. These surveys can provide long-term insights and show in-depth understanding of a target audience. In addition, your company could use a third-party research company to perform a large bulk of the research and to ensure it’s done at a high level of quality. 

But panel surveying takes time and preparation to make them effective and usable. In addition, some participants may choose to stop responding to surveys part way through the study, leaving you with gaps. Your company may need to provide incentives to encourage participants to follow through with the entire surveying process.  

Focus Group Surveys

Focus groups are a variation of in-person surveying methods that includes a panel of 6–10 people that represent the target population. All of these people will answer questions and hold a discussion, moderated by a professional who attempts to keep everything on track and as unbiased as possible. These surveys can reveal personal attitudes and perceptions for a sampling of your entire target population—something that can be very valuable for market research. 

The cons of focus groups, though, include the costs of preparing a moderator and participants. It can take time to select just the right panel of participants to make sure you are accurately exploring your target audience. You may also need to pay for the travel expenses and time of an effective moderator. Oftentimes you may also need to survey your focus group participants a second time to gather quantitative data, and that takes additional time and preparation. 

Benefits of Using Surveys

If surveys take time, preparation, and work, why do companies keep turning them for market research? Aren’t there easier ways? Well, there may be, but there are few ways that can give you such insight into your target populations and how your brand is performing. Surveys provide strategic benefits based on customer feedback that can help improve CX and improve brand loyalty.

Here are some other key benefits of using surveys: 

  • Large sampling size. Surveying can reach many customers in many locations or with many limitations. With a variety of surveys, you can reach people all over the world, people who don’t use the internet, and people who can’t normally participate in other marketing research methods. 
  • More cost-effective. Even the pricier types of surveying are fairly cost effective when compared to the valuable insights you can gain. 
  • Reliable and usable information. Surveys can give you information and insights that are a reliable reflection of your audience, especially of how they feel toward many parts of your brand. In addition, this information can actually be usable (with the right analysis) to improve your brand, customer experience, and, ultimately, ROI. 
  • Improve the brand experience. Your customers deserve a brand they trust and have a positive experience with. Using surveys, you can get real feedback from your customers and improve your brand experience in meaningful ways. 

How InMoment Can Help

Types of Surveys - InMoment Microsurveys

If you’re ready to get started with surveying, InMoment can help today. InMoment’s customer listening solutions provide your company with the tools you need to create strong surveys that will reach your audience and provide your team with the insights you need. InMoment surveys are conversational and designed to reduce survey fatigue while ultimately capturing every customer story, so you can design products that will benefit them. 

Once you have survey data, the next step is to analyze it and thoroughly glean insights from the responses. Being able to make sense of information is where you’ll be able to create opportunities to increase revenue. InMoment’s text analytics can help your company find actionable insights and feedback. 

Overall, surveys come in every shape and form—each one offering your team a new way to understand your customers and improve your customer experience and brand loyalty.

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Schedule a Demo & Get Started on Surveys!

With InMoment’s solutions, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the benefits of surveying and really understand your customers and be able to use that for actionable insights and informed business decisions. Conduct surveys and improve your customer experience with InMoment today!

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April Is Stress Awareness Month: 3 Ways Your Employees Can Combat Stress Year Round

Did you know that April is Stress Awareness Month? Merriam-Webster defines stress as “a physical, chemical, or emotional factor that causes bodily or mental tension and may be a factor in disease causation.” And looking at the world around us, there are many elements that could lead to immense feelings of stress. 

Rather than rattling off a list of possible stressors, we want to talk about how you and your employees can manage these feelings year round with practical, accessible tools and coping strategies. So without further ado, let’s get zen!

3 Tools to Share with Employees for Stress Awareness Month

Tool #1: Leverage Company Mental Health Resources

Mental health is just as important and physical health. And just as they provide medical benefits to help provide for their physical health, many businesses today are also making mental health resources available to employees.

If you are on your company’s human resources team, it might be worth reiterating available resources to your employees via email or your company’s internal communications channels (especially since it’s Stress Awareness Month). This communication should also feature clear instructions on how to access those resources to increase accessibility. Having those resources is only helpful if your employees are aware of and using them!

Tool #2: Create Space with Meditation

Stress can create feelings of helplessness, decrease ability to focus, and stir up racing, negative thoughts. To combat this, encourage employees to create mental space with meditation. 

Meditation will look different for everyone, but the goal is to “focus your attention and eliminate the stream of jumbled thoughts that may be crowding your mind and causing stress.” One common method is to sit quietly and focus solely on your breath for at least two minutes. If you get distracted, that’s okay! Just refocus your attention on your breath.

There are also apps and websites that provide guided meditations and tools to help achieve a meditative state. At InMoment, we provide our team members with access to an app called Sanvello, a mental health app that supports people through self care, peer support, coaching, and therapy. One of the tools available on Sanvello is guided meditations.

“We are so happy to give our InMoment Team access to Sanvello, a mental health app that focuses on the importance of checking in with yourself,” said an InMoment HR representative. “Employees will be able to leverage the app to access self care tools like daily mood tracking, guided journeys, coping tools like meditation, and more to help them manage stress in a world full of noise. This is a wonderful step to support our team both inside and outside of the workplace.”

In addition to apps like Sanvello, you can also find free guided meditations on Youtube and other sites. These resources can be communicated via the same method we mentioned in tool number one.

Tool #3: Plan for Moments That Matter

At InMoment, we have this saying: “Own the Moments That Matter.” And though this is applicable for improving experiences for customers and employees, we also mean that it’s important to really be present in the moments that matter most to you personally. 

We each have our own “moments that matter,” whether it’s going on a walk with our dog, taking an exercise class, spending quality time with our family and friends… the list goes on! In these stressful times, it’s more important than ever that we are deliberate about setting time aside for the things that make us feel our best. 

At the beginning of each week, set aside time in your schedule to do something for yourself, and encourage your employees to do that too! It can be something as simple as taking 20 minutes to get up from your desk to stretch, or you could even utilize your paid time off to have an extended weekend. Whatever it is, we each need to take the time to create (and own) our own moments that matter.

Encouraging a Self-Care Culture

It’s simple: companies are most successful when their employees are successful—and this stretches beyond professional success. To be their best at work, employees need to know that their employers encourage them to do what they need to in order to thrive. That means companies must clearly communicate about mental health resources and provide the tools necessary to assist their employees year round—not only during Stress Awareness Month. Doing so clearly displays employee commitment, and will lead to cultural and business success long term.

What is employee commitment? And how can brands demonstrate that? Learn all about it from InMoment employee experience experts here.

Do You Need a Customer Experience (CX) Manager?

CX operations, or customer experience operations, are all about the systems, automation, and lines of communication that make possible a unified, cross-functional approach to improving customer experience.  Do you need a customer experience manager dedicated to managing this effort? Let’s find out.

Getting customers to fall in love with your company requires understanding the entire customer journey—so you can deliver a seamless experience at every touchpoint. 

That’s not too tall an order if you are a young startup with only a handful of employees, all focused on customer experience (CX). After all, in those early stages, they have no choice but to study every step in the journey. By nature, a startup is all about the big picture. 

However, as your company begins to scale, you may face the same challenges as large enterprises. CX efforts then become more specialized, and that’s when silos begin to form. Before you know it, you’ve got different departments using separate technologies and focusing on different metrics—fragmenting your understanding of the customer experience. 

That’s when it’s time to consider hiring or appointing a CX manager. At this point, you need someone who can break down those silos, unify your tech stack, and unite your directors, VPs, and business units in the ultimate goal of creating a friction-free, productive, and delightful customer experience—from onboarding to renewal and advocacy.

What Is a Customer Experience Manager (CX Manager) ?

In order to understand what a CX Manager does—and why the role is so vital as companies scale—let’s picture a growing SaaS company, for example, that is considering adding this role. They’ve got a sales team focused on enterprise sales, a customer success team that largely spends its time making onboarding simple and straightforward, and a customer support team that’s available to fix problems. And of course, they’ve got a product team constantly working to improve their software with customers in mind.

Obviously, they have plenty of other departments, and each affects the customer experience to varying degrees (e.g., marketing, finance), but let’s focus on these four for the point of illustration. Each department has its own set of metrics, uses its own software, and focuses its attention on one specific leg of the customer journey. 

The issue? You’ve got four different departments using different technology to record different metrics and measure their own aspect of the customer journey. It’s like the old story about the blind men who discover an elephant in the forest. They each know only one part of the elephant—the part they can touch—so nobody can agree what an elephant is actually like. After all, they’re each focused on a different body part (the trunk, the body, the leg, the tail).

If your CX efforts feel like parable of the blind men and the elephant, you might need a customer experience manager (CX manager)
Image from Patheos.com

So, let’s return to our original question:

The role of a CX manager is to determine, implement, and refine the CX technology and vision required to see the entire customer journey from the customer’s perspective.

This role determines the best way to collect, analyze, and act on voice of customer data at key touchpoints across the customer journey. 

  • Determine how, technically, to monitor sentiment at critical touchpoints. For example, what system “knows” when a user is “onboarded”? How can that data be used to trigger a request for feedback? In what customer experience management platform? 
  • Facilitate close-the-loop action. Enable stakeholders to respond to customer feedback quickly by moving feedback into the systems they use everyday. 
  • Democratize insight and action.  This can mean creating CX dashboards that provide stakeholders with the ability to monitor and research what they care about. And, more importantly, to understand what actions they need to take in order to improve the over all customer experience. 

So, What Does a CX Manager in Action Look Like?

The Salesforce Solution Architect and Senior Application Engineer who holds the cross-functional CX technology vision at Glassdoor shares, “The InMoment platform allows our Support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that contribute to optimizing our support function, and it can also reveal bottlenecks that are best addressed by improving product features or design.”

You can learn how Glassdoor, DocuSign, Hubspot and other InMoment customers tackle CX operations in this article, How to Use CX Metrics to Find Bottlenecks to Product-Led Growth, but here are a few quick pointers for now:

  • Define a single source of truth for the voice of the customer (VoC). This can include determining where data will be aggregated into a single VoC feedback hub for research into and across journey points.
  • Work with vendors and cross-functional stakeholders to implement the technology vision. Often this happens in a phased project approach, touchpoint by touchpoint. 
  • Keep the focus on the big picture—to understand that the elephant is more than the trunk, the body, the leg, or the tail.

Try as they might, individual departments have a hard time seeing the big picture since they’re so specialized (and are rarely incentivized by big picture metrics). That’s where the CX Ops manager or CX manager enters the picture.

What Kind of Background Should a CX Manager Have?

We’ve seen a wide range of candidates succeed in the role of CX manager—from Salesforce Administrators to Senior Sales Ops professionals to Customer Success or Customer Experience/VoC leaders. Even marketing folks have successfully led CX ops efforts.

It makes sense that good CX people would come from different backgrounds, since this role is about as cross-functional as it gets. What we can tell you is that there are certain qualities and skill sets, rather than specific career trajectories, that predict success in this role. 

4 Qualities to Look for in a CX Manager

Quality #1: Diplomacy and Negotiation Skills

The person heading up CXOps must have some serious interpersonal skills, able to balance all the stakeholders’ needs and drives with the overarching goals and available resources. They’ll need to convince a range of departments—not just the customer-facing ones—just how vital these efforts are to the long term success of the company. 

They will lead team meetings, communicate strategies, and move projects forward while holding everyone to a timeline (including executives). On top of that, they must be able to obtain a clear mandate and buy-in from their C-suite sponsors (or the head of CX, at the very least). In other words, they must possess both empathy and assertiveness in spades.

Quality #2: Deep Understanding of How the Tech Stack Works as a System

Your various technology platforms (Zendesk, InMoment, Gainsight, Salesforce, Slack, Segment, etc.) need to work together as a system. Otherwise, your information silos stay intact and your customer journey remains fragmented. 

On top of that, they’ll need to find the gaps in your current capabilities and identify solutions to fill them. Sometimes this involves purchasing entirely new systems, other times it’s simply a matter of integrating what you’re currently working with. Usually, it’s a bit of both.

Quality #3: Project Management Mastery

Your Customer Experience Operations Manager will need some serious project management chops, including the ability to plan out timelines and budgets end-to-end (and get everybody to stick to them). They also need to know how to purchase from vendors without using an RFP.

Quality #4: A Strong Understanding of Procurement

“Let’s spend more money on systems just because we can!” Said no executive, ever. 

Executives have grown wary of new B2B software that promises to solve all their problems, and middle-management is rarely overjoyed at the prospect of retraining staff on new platforms. That said, sometimes the current systems don’t cut it, and it’s up to the CX ops manager to understand the tradeoffs when evaluating new technology and delivering an integrated system that gets the job done.

Use Case: What a Fully-Integrated CX Initiative Looks Like

Every integrated CX initiative will look different depending on your existing technology, current integrations, and where you are in your growth cycle. That said, the following is a bird’s eye view of a solid CX initiative, and it should help get you started.

We’ll assume you have created a customer journey map and can tell your CX ops manager the make-or-break touchpoints that you want to optimize. You’ll also be responsible for forming a cross-functional team of stakeholders that are committed to improving the journey and to supporting the efforts of the CX manager. 

Technology Needs Assessment

The CX ops manager should meet with each stakeholder team to understand:

  • The technology they are using today
  • Their CX data needs. This goes beyond metrics. It includes the customer data each team needs to make data segmentation and analysis useful.  For example, support may need to associate customer satisfaction (CSAT) feedback with an agent. Success might need to know the user’s account, role, or pricing plan. Product may want to know how long a survey respondent has been a platform user.   

Gather Voice-of-the-Customer (VOC) data (examples)

  • Relationship data: Gather Net Promoter Score (NPS) data in-app or via email, or wherever you interact with customers.
  • Onboarding data: Calculate Customer Effort Score (CES) from surveys  following the WalkMe onboarding tour (via Segment event data or Salesforce workflows)
  • Customer satisfaction data: Conduct CSAT surveys after Zendesk or Service Cloud case closures.
  • Product satisfaction data: Collect PSAT data after feature use (in-app) and after closing the loop on customer service interactions (in chat or via email)
  • Support tickets: The content of support inquiries is a source of VOC.
  • Reviews: What are customers saying about your on Capterra or G2?
  • Brand or user surveys: Any open-ended feedback from lengthy surveys.

Addressing Customer Pain Points and Closing the Loop

Strengthen the front line: Make it easy for teams to respond directly to customers by getting survey responses into the systems they live in. Populate the data in real time. For example, send InMoment survey responses to contact and account records in Salesforce for the sales team, to Intercom for Support, to Gainsight for Success or to Slack for the product team. 

Leverage your happiest customers: Send review and referral requests to promoters via Marketo, HubSpot, or another customer communication platform like Intercom

Big Picture Analysis

  • Create a roadmap: Allow qualitative feedback to drive your plan for CX improvement. Use it to understand the why behind the metrics, prioritize projects by predicting the potential impact on customer lifetime value. Build text analytics dashboards and reports that are customized for each team (support, success, Product, etc.) in your CXM platform. (Hint: InMoment can do this!)
  • Centralize your data: Build a central voice of customer (VoC) repository for deep analysis. This can mean augmenting customer journey feedback with support ticket content, online reviews, and brand surveys. 
  • Integrate CX into business analysis: Export metrics and metadata to the company’s data lake/business intelligence tool.
Note: It’s absolutely vital to use a CX management platform that integrates smoothly with new and existing systems. 

The Value of Executive Buy-in and Support

As you can see, the success of your integration efforts will rest largely on the shoulders of your new CX manager, who will have their finger on the pulse of the entire customer experience. They’ll connect departments that normally go days or weeks without interacting, so in order to set them up for success, they’ll need support from senior management.

Why is that so important? It’s all about in-group bias. It’s human nature to think of the world in terms of “us” vs. them,” or “our department” vs. “their department.” This potentially puts CX ops at odds with, well… literally every department they encounter—unless the executive sponsor puts those worried minds at ease.

With executive buy-in and support, the CX ops Manager will have the authority and credibility they need to suggest the (sometimes) sweeping changes that would otherwise produce fear and resentment in those who have grown comfortable in their silo. A supportive c-suite executive can assure skeptics that this is the natural evolution of their efforts to serve customers at every stage in the journey. In turn, this paves the way for long term growth and success for the organization as a whole.Customer Experience Operations leaders chose InMoment for customer experience management. Book a consultative demo today.

4 CX Webinars to Supercharge Your Program in The New Year!

It’s been a crazy year for customer experience (CX), hasn’t it? Customers are factoring all sorts of new challenges and preferences into their brand decisions, and lots of companies have been busily playing catch up!

As we take off for the holidays (and hopefully get a chance to catch a relaxing break!) It’s normal to look toward the new year and wonder what’s next. Well, at InMoment, knowing what’s next is in our DNA, and we’ve put together some of this year’s tip-top webinars to share what we’re seeing and help you make 2023 your best CX year yet! 

4 Must-Watch CX Webinars

Webinar #1: Designing, Actioning, and Proving an ROI-Focused CX Program

ROI has always been a hot topic in the CX world, and it only got hotter in 2022. A lot of organizations struggle to link their CX efforts to ROI, which makes securing additional support and funding very difficult. In this first webinar, experts Jim Katzman and Eric Smuda take a look at this common, fundamental CX challenge and pour decades of experience into helping you overcome it. The webinar dives into:

  • The state of experience ROI & how we can bridge the gap
  • Connecting efforts to acquisition and retention
  • Driving growth and reducing cost to serve
  • Socializing successes and encouraging buy-in

Watch the whole thing right here!

Webinar #2: Leveraging Customer Data to Craft Seamless, Differentiated Experiences In-Store and Online

Data was another big topic in 2022, and we can already tell it’s going to blow up even bigger next year. As we often say, data is as much an art as it is a science. Having data is great, but finding ways to sort through the noise to find actionable insights is what’s going to create actual Experience Improvement (XI).

We got two of our very own CX gurus, Radi Hindawi and David van Brocklin, to spill the beans on this data journey and how everyone, brands and customers, can get the most out of it, including:

How democratizing your data for an integrated view of experience creates consistency

  • How to increase organizational intelligence across your different stakeholders (from frontline to c-suite)
  • How can you increase loyalty and advocacy in this constantly changing market?

Watch the webinar to see what insights they shared!

Webinar #3: Digital Acceleration: How to Start the Next Digital Trend

Being a trendsetter in your marketplace isn’t just fun; it helps your customers have meaningful experiences and helps you stay at the top! We put together a webinar on how organizations can create trends, not just follow them, and the insights from experts Radi Hindawi and Chris Chan made it a hit! 

To give a quick recap, Radi and Chris talked about how digital transformation should no longer be the goal for companies; just a baseline. They then dove into the four steps that every brand should take to become a trendsetter in their verticals. 

Want to see what those steps are? You can watch and find out here!

Webinar #4: Everything You Wanted to Know About CX ROI But Were Afraid to Ask

Like we said up top, ROI was a big topic this year. So big that we couldn’t confine it to one webinar!

After wrapping up our first ROI webinar of the year, we knew there was still a lot of ground to cover when it came to this important topic. We also saw an opportunity to collaborate with our close friends at Forrester Analytics and invited one of their top researchers, Judy Weader, to share her research on the subject. She and our very own Jim Katzman teamed up to discuss:

  • How brands are proving the value and ROI of CX and why it should matter to you
  • The steps you can take today that will set you and your program up for success
  • What it takes to shift from just sending surveys to being truly customer centric 
  • The art of designing digital experiences that make a difference today

Click here to watch the full conversation!

CX Success in the New Year

These webinars cover important topics and will help you reach your experience goals in the new year. We had a lot of fun making them and hope that you’ll get a similar experience from watching them. Once you’re done, we have other resources you should check out as you consider your experience goals and how to keep owning the moments that matter. Happy Holidays!

What Is the Difference Between Voice of Customer and Market Research?

A lot of folks believe that voice of customer (VoC) programs and market research mean the same thing—but they’re actually quite different! In fact, each discipline differs in purpose, design, analysis and outcomes.

However, even though they’re different, it’s important to point out that one isn’t necessarily better than the other—and brands need both if they want their customer experience (CX) programs to reach their potential.

So, with that in mind, let’s get into a quick primer!

Breaking Down the Difference Between Voice of Customer & Market Research

What Is the Definition of Voice of Customer (VoC)?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering vital information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business.

How Does VoC Fit into Your CX Strategy

VoC programs are an essential part of any CX toolkit. They’re designed to fulfill many critical functions for your overall customer experience program, including, as their name implies, understanding customer needs. They’re also useful for understanding customer expectations, as well as what those individuals may want from you before even they know. This information can then be used to adjust operations, inform marketing efforts, and help your organization create both short- and long-term Experience Improvement (XI).

Not all VoC feedback comes from typical listening methods like surveys and focus groups, either. A lot of it comes from unsolicited feedback (website reviews, social media comments, etc). Unsolicited feedback is helpful because it gives customers a chance to express themselves entirely in their own terms, which may alert brands to problems and journey breakages that they weren’t aware of.

All of this boils down to the ability to not just capture individual and collective customer feedback, but act upon it. Taking action is crucial to Experience Improvement and building connective relationships.

What Is the Definition of Market Research?

Market research explores hidden relationships within industry data, collected by a market research firm, in order to predict and forecast future events and behavior within the market.

What Is the Role of Market Research in Your Business?

While Voice of Customer is all about feedback, market research takes a slightly wider lens by focusing on understanding the trends around your business.

Primary research is useful for testing new communications and services that your company wants to put out there, while secondary research looks at the dynamics and sizing of the marketplace around you. Conducting these types of research can help your company identify your target market, segment your customers, and identify growth opportunities.

Your company can supercharge its market research efforts by defining the population you want to target with a survey, then creating samples that ensure you’ll have a match. We’ve found that surveys like these are most effective when they’re blind, meaning that the customer or individual stays anonymous while taking them, and challenge you to do the same! This method is great for reducing response bias.

The Difference between Voice of Customer (VoC) and Market Research
This handy chart breaks down the differences between these two methods

So, Why Do You Need Both?

VoC and market research aren’t the same, but your CX program and your organization need both in order to truly understand your customers as people. That fundamental, holistic understanding fuels unforgettable experiences that build loyalty while also creating additional revenue! So be bold in your strategy and use both VoC and market research. Your customers will feel heard, your C-suite will be impressed, and the experiences you provide will be meaningfully transformed.

Click here to read our full-length white paper on why your brand needs both VoC and market research. Our very own Eric Smuda has spent decades in both fields and provides an in-depth look not just at why these disciplines are important, but how your organization can wield them effectively.

How to Use CX Metrics to Find Bottlenecks to Product Led Growth

We are all competing in the End User Era now.

Investor Blake Bartlett coined the term “End User Era” to capture an important shift that is happening on an organizational level across industries: “Today, software just shows up in the workplace unannounced. End users are finding products on their own and telling their bosses which ones to buy. And it’s all happening at lightning speed.”

Companies like DocuSign, Slack, Zoom, and Hubspot are examples of SaaS companies that are thriving in the End User Era. Their success is rooted in products that end-users love. Product Led Growth codifies this end user-focused growth model. PLG relies on the product itself as the primary driver of customer acquisition, conversion and expansion. This approach goes all-in on end user ease and productivity to drive growth, and is a radical shift away from the acquisition growth model so familiar in the software industry.

Customer experience (CX) metrics have an important role to play in this strategy—something we explored in-depth in a previous post: Customer Experience in the Era of Product Led Growth.

Customers Will Tell You Where Your Product Led Growth Bottlenecks Are

Metrics are essential to understanding progress on the product led growth curve. Typically the PLG model evaluates business and pipeline health based on user actions (clicks) and subscription revenue.

This is where CX metrics are so valuable. Voice of customer data illuminates the “why” behind the clicks and the cash. Classic CX surveys like NPS, PSAT, CSAT, and Customer Effort Score(CES) monitor customer sentiment—providing critical insight into behavioral and revenue metrics.

By analyzing the open-ended comments that accompany the rating-scale questions you can identify positive and negative themes in what customers are saying. Based on what you learn, you can confidently prioritize improvements to your product that will remove bottlenecks, the enemy of PLG success.

At the core, product led growth is about taking tasks that would traditionally be done manually and putting them into the product to create efficiency and a better customer experience. Step back and map out all of the steps in your funnel from acquiring an initial lead all the way through to turning that lead into a paying customer who sees value in the product. Where are the bottlenecks?

How do you know where your bottlenecks are, and whether you are eliminating them?

Let’s explore each metric to understand how it can help you identify and address bottlenecks, with real-world examples from our customers.

Net Promoter Score (NPS): Loyalty and More

Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys ask customers to evaluate how likely they are to recommend your product or company to a friend or colleague, this “propensity to refer” is an excellent predictor of future growth.

Unlike the other metrics covered here, which are flexible and easily customizable, true NPS surveys follow a very specific format when it comes to asking the first (of two) questions. By asking that first question in a specific way, using a standard scale, companies can compare their NPS scores to industry benchmarks. The second question, which gathers qualitative data regarding improvement opportunities, can (and often should) be customized.

NPS Surveys ask two questions…

  • Question #1: “How likely are you to recommend this product or company to a friend or colleague on a scale of 0-10?”
  • Question #2: “What can we improve about this experience?” (if they rated you 0-8) or “What did you love about this experience” (if they rated you a 9 or 10).

The first question allows you to calculate your Net Promoter Score, which is a number between -100 and +100 and serves as a benchmark for progress. For detailed information on how to calculate NPS, and what the number really means, take a look at our Net Promoter Score post.

The second NPS survey question is just as important, if not more so, than the score itself because this qualitative data tells you what you need to do to improve end user experience.

Why is NPS key to Product Led Growth? Traditionally viewed as an indicator of growth (as mentioned above), NPS is also a crystal ball when it comes to retention. NPS gives you a glimpse into the minds and hearts of your end users. It can provide a constant stream of feedback about bottlenecks and that will help you create products that enable the ease and productivity you are going for.

In short, NPS captures what’s most important to users, whether it’s documentation, training, or aspects of the product itself. NPS is typically the foundation of any CX program, and since you don’t want to get overwhelmed in the beginning, there’s nothing wrong with making NPS your sole CX metric at this stage.

NPS Example: DocuSign

Docusign logo
DocuSign uses NPS to gather feedback on product features and pinpoint any bottlenecks in the experience. They achieve this by customizing their NPS follow-up question (the one that asks users to explain their score). In the in-app survey pictured below, Docusign asks “Tell us about your experience sending an envelope.”

Wootric NPS Survey in DocuSign

Guneet Singh, Director of CX at DocuSign, believes that regardless of which metric you use, it’s vital to understand how customers feel about your product at key points in their journey. In other words, don’t wait to conduct an annual survey—gather continuous data and refine your product based on that feedback.

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Because Support Is a Bottleneck

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), like NPS, is another metric you can use at various points in the customer journey. The classic use case for CSAT is following up on a support interaction, where you can ask customers about their experience:

  • Solving their specific problem
  • Working with a particular CS agent
  • Working with your company in general

CSAT surveys can use a scale ranging from “very satisfied” or “very dissatisfied,” often followed by a question that asks the user to share the reason behind their score.

What makes this touchpoint so vital from a PLG perspective? Support calls, by definition, are a point of friction—nobody contacts customer support when things are going right.

Product Led Growth endeavors to eliminate support interactions altogether. When was the last time you reached out to customer support at Slack or DocuSign? Chances are, it’s never happened. That’s the seamlessness you’re going for.

This touchpoint is a rich source of insight into frustrations that customers face. Product teams that prioritize end user experience pay close attention to feedback from support as they improve product and design new features.

CSAT Example: Glassdoor
glassdoor logo
Glassdoor, the popular site for job listings and anonymous employer reviews, uses Customer Satisfaction surveys to gather feedback on support interactions. When a support case is closed in Salesforce, end users receive a personalized CSAT survey via email.

Carmen Woo, Salesforce Solution Architect and Senior Application Engineer, holds the cross-functional CX technology vision at Glassdoor. “What is intriguing about our use case is that we use machine learning to analyze feedback. Comments are tagged by topic themes and are assigned sentiment to capture the emotion behind the user’s words.

“The [InMoment] platform allows our Support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that contribute to optimizing our support function, and it can also reveal bottlenecks that are best addressed by improving product features or design,” says Carmen.

Product Satisfaction (PSAT): Adoption and Engagement Bottlenecks

PSAT surveys are highly flexible, and they can be structured the same way you structure Customer Satisfaction survey questions—asking customers to rate their level of satisfaction with a product using a scale from “very satisfied” to “very dissatisfied” (e.g., 1-3 or 1-5) or through a binary response (e.g., “happy face” or “sad face”).

PSAT surveys are best delivered within an app, when customers are using your product and can give you fresh, timely feedback. The customer sentiment derived from PSAT surveys is the necessary complement to behavioral metrics. Sure, you can see in the clicks that users are not adopting a feature, but why? PSAT helps to answer that question and guides optimization efforts.

PSAT Example: HubSpot

Marketers that use HubSpot, the popular CRM software, may recall responding to a Product Satisfaction survey when using a new feature for the first time. PSAT gives Hubspot immediate feedback on whether a new feature is delivering value to the end-user.

Even if you’ve done extensive user testing, getting feedback on a feature within the context of a user’s experience of the whole product is valuable. Is there friction? Should the feature be tweaked in some way?

This approach, which is a key aspect of lean UX design, ensures you don’t go too far down the rabbit hole with a product feature that sounded great in theory but didn’t serve your end-users in the real world. New features can bring complexity — the bain of end user ease. By continually asking for feedback in-product, you can better calibrate that balance and maintain a frictionless, easeful end-user experience.

Mobile CSAT survey for banking app
Example InMoment PSAT survey in a mobile app.

Customer Effort Score (CES): Identify Bottlenecks in Onboarding

A seamless onboarding experience is key to widespread adoption. If end-users have to work too hard to get up and running, they’ll give up and try a competitor’s product. Even if you have an enthusiastic champion within a company, if they have to prod others to adopt or spend time convincing them of your value, their own enthusiasm will wane. As such, it’s important to evaluate how much effort end users must put into getting started.

Customer Effort Score (CES) asks how difficult it was to accomplish a given task using a predefined scale (e.g., 1-7 or 1-5). Here is an example of a CES survey:

Customer Effort Score Survey in Intercom Messenger
Example InMoment CES Survey in Intercom

CES surveys are frequently used to follow up on support calls, but they’re also extremely valuable when evaluating the onboarding experience. Success teams know that the seeds of churn can be sown in the onboarding phase. They have been using feedback from CES surveys to both (1) follow up with that customer to fix the problem and (2) develop tasks and processes that will prevent future customers from experiencing the same bottlenecks.

However, in the context of PLG, addressing onboarding feedback isn’t just the domain of the Success or Support team. It is vital input to UX teams that seek to eliminate tasks that would traditionally be done manually and put them into the product to create efficiency and a better customer experience.

CES Example: Watermark

Watermark is in the EdTech space, and they’ve taken a comprehensive approach to optimizing user experience. Here’s how they do it, starting with Customer Effort Score surveys.

Watermark has a complex onboarding and training process, so they gather data at the end of each of three phases of training using CES surveys. The feedback goes to the implementation and training teams to both (1) improve the process and (2) identify customers who may need extra support. Then, of course, they look for larger trends and modify their onboarding experience accordingly.

Watermark also measures NPS & CSAT.  NPS is measured across six product lines, and Watermark studies the correlation between NPS and renewals. Higher NPS scores predict a greater likelihood for renewal, and improving products based on NPS survey results is key to Watermark’s customer retention strategy. CSAT surveys, triggered from Salesforce Service Cloud when a case is closed, help to evaluate and improve Customer Support.

And as Dave Hansen, the CX champion at Watermark, points out, they dig into the data to identify points of friction. “The feedback we’re getting tells us that there isn’t necessarily an issue with our overall solutions,” says Dave. “You may have issues running a certain report, or you may have issues with the way you have to click through to something.”

Product Led Growth Strategy Is About End User Experience

The four CX metrics covered in this post (NPS, CSAT, PSAT, and CES) offer insight into end user experience and augment behavioral data with the voice of your customer.

Remember, don’t allow scores to be your sole focus. There is gold in the open-ended feedback you receive. Without analyzing the open-ended feedback you receive, the metrics are just benchmarks that you’ll aimlessly try to identify bottlenecks through guesswork. In the end, that won’t get you very far.

Product Led Growth is all about creating a smoother experience in the moments that matter. CX metrics and voice of the customer comments help technology companies do just that.

Get the ebook, “CX FOR EVERY STAGE: How to Scale Your Voice of Customer Program from Startup to Enterprise.’ Learn how to improve user experience for product led growth and loyalty.

3 Reasons Human Expertise is Essential to Experience Improvement

A lot of companies and organizations have gotten a very specific idea of how experience programs and human expertise work into their collective minds these last 20 or so years. The impression is this: experience programs are fully autonomous solutions that can pretty much be set and forget. They can automatically gather data and use that information to solve your business challenges, build better relationships with customers, and help you achieve Experience Improvement (XI).

There’s a good reason this impression is so prevalent: it’s a pretty accurate description of a lot of the experience programs and vendors you’ll find out there. The catch, though, is that technology and data alone can’t actually address any of the factors I laid out in the preceding paragraph. There’s a gap between tech and outcomes that many vendors gloss over in their rush to provide reaction-based, purely DIY solutions, and that’s human expertise. 

What follows are three reasons human expertise is vital to actually bridging that tech-outcome gap and creating Experience Improvement for your customers, employees, and marketplace:

  1. Best Practices
  2. Problems and Priorities
  3. Marketplace Intel

Reason #1: Best Practices

When you boost your experience program with human expertise, you’ll have armed yourself with countless best technology practices. It’s true that technology has produced some extremely powerful tools, such as sentiment analysis, but you need human expertise and consultancy to help identify which sentiments are most relevant to your Experience Improvement goals. 

In other words, even a tech engine needs a driver. Putting a consultant or thought leader in that seat will make a world of difference for your experience program’s effectiveness. Take time to consider which goals you need your experience program to help realize, design that program with the end in mind, and keep someone at the helm who can make sure your initiative doesn’t stray from the path. 

Reason #2: Problems & Priorities

Another reason that fully autonomous experience solutions often fail the brands that use them is that they lack dynamism. They’re programmed with a specific set of parameters and will barge ahead even when problems arise or priorities shift. That’s another reason human expertise is invaluable in a CX setting; having someone handy who can identify problems when they arise or read new writing on the wall can feed that insight directly into your experience program, supercharging its effectiveness.

Even if some of the DIY experience tools out there allow users to tweak for factors like these, doing so without the aid of an experienced practitioner can still leave you open to mistakes. On the flip side, arming yourself with that expertise can make you aware of larger trends and deeper problems than a few cursory adjustments to program parameters can account for. 

Reason #3: Marketplace Intel

There’s a market research element to human expertise that can help take your experience program (and your brand) to the very top of your vertical. Experience initiative success stems from a few places, like successfully closing the loop and implementing meaningful transformations, but it also comes from a deep knowledge of your brand’s marketplace landscape. This means understanding customer segments, knowing where to find unsolicited data, and identifying new and emerging trends.

A versatile and powerful Experience Improvement platform can eventually come to account for factors like these, but only when guided by human experience and insight. It takes that expertise to identify audience segments, unsolicited data sources, and more. These experts can then help pour that context and insight directly into your platform, allowing your experience team to furnish specifical, meaningful solutions to your business challenges. It’ll also enable you to do something no DIY program can do: create bold, human, and meaningful relationships with customers that will stand the tests of time and competition.

Creating Experiences, Not Just Numbers

How else can human expertise help shape Experience Improvement success, and how best can brands combine their tech with expertise to create better outcomes for customers, employees, and their marketplace position? To learn more, click here to read my point of view document. I go into greater detail on the nature of human expertise and how intersecting that with technology the right way will help you realize the goals outlined here.

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