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Author: Cameron Opartkiettikul

customer experience research
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3 Ways Market Research Supercharges Experience Programs

By: Jessica Petrie, Senior Strategic Insights Consultant, InMoment

Market research is seen by a lot of companies and organizations as a nice-to-have. The reality, though, is that it’s a necessity. Market research provides the mapping tools you can use to chart your business landscape, understand its various features, and more importantly, get to know the groups and audiences that populate it. 

This goal is especially important within the context of experience programs, especially if you want to achieve real Experience Improvement (XI) for your customers, employees, and overall marketplace. Today’s conversation covers three specific ways market experience (MX) and its research can make a difference for you when it comes to becoming a leader in your vertical:

  1. Identifying Audience Segments
  2. Understanding Unsolicited Data
  3. Identifying Emerging Trends

#1. Identifying Audience Segments

There are many experience vendors out there whose approach revolves around two audience groups: new customers and existing customers. Those two audiences are important, of course, but so too are the litany of other customer and non-customer groups that populate your marketplace landscape. Identifying each segment and the amount of business it does with your brand is key to understanding both your vertical and how to become its leader.

More specifically, MX tools and platforms enable you to identify not ‘just’ your loyal customers, but also non-customers, past customers, and individuals who cross-shop with you and with competitors. You can then use your tools to research why these segments shop with you as often as they do (or don’t) and, more to the point, what you can do to turn them into loyal, invested customers.

#2. Understanding Unsolicited Data

Audience segments aren’t the only experience program element that market experience and market research can dramatically broaden. Another key component of understanding your marketplace is looking for and understanding unsolicited data, which MX tools can also help you achieve. Solicited data is important, but as with audience segments, understanding all of the data out there, solicited and otherwise, is the only way to truly understand your vertical.

As a quick reminder, unsolicited data refers to sources of information like social media and what you can infer from your market research. You can find this data once you’ve identified where the audience segments in your marketplace like to shop, which will lead you to more of the data you need to understand them. In other words, adding unsolicited data to the mix helps turn your picture of your marketplace from a snapshot to a landscape portrait.

#3. Identifying Emerging Trends

One of the secrets to building a truly remarkable customer experience isn’t ‘just’ being able to quickly react to problems or listen intently to your existing customers—it’s the ability to understand what all of your customers and audiences will want before they themselves even know. That’s the true power of market research, and it’s a culmination of understanding your vertical from both an audience segment viewpoint and a data one.

Once you’ve nailed down how to identify and capitalize on emerging trends, you’ll be well on your way to marketplace leadership if you’re not there already. Customers respond to experiences that make them feel seen and known as humans, and an MX-fueled initiative will create that Experience Improvement for them.

Taking a Closer Look

Knowing that these MX tools, methodologies, and possibilities is one thing—what’s the next step for understanding more about them and how to leverage them to your organization’s advantage? Click here to read my full-length Point of View on this subject to learn more about what market experience, market research, and all their tools can accomplish for you!

A group of people enjoying Inclusive Customer Experiences
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3 Things You Can Do Right Now to Create More Inclusive Employee & Customer Experiences

By: Stephan Thun, President & Managing Director

Diversity and inclusion initiatives have become front and center for many organizations in recent years. It’s important for brands to create diverse and inclusive customer experiences (CX) and employee experiences (EX)—not ‘just’ because being more inclusive is the right thing to do, but also because organizations have a lot to gain from accommodating greater diversity in every experience they create.

Of course, an organization stating diversity and inclusion goals is a good start, but how can brands like yours translate such goals into tangible Experience Improvement (XI) strategies and tactics that create more inclusive customer experiences? There are many, many opportunities here, but the most important thing to do is to just get started. 

So, here are three quick thoughts you should apply right now to create more inclusive employee and customer experiences.

3 Keys to Creating More Inclusive Customer Experiences

  1. Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes
  2. Key #2: Engage New and All Audiences
  3. Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

Key #1: Don’t Be Afraid to Make Mistakes

It’s understandable for organizations to be intimidated by the prospect of making mistakes while attempting to accommodate and include new audiences. Such mistakes can quickly become viral via social media, review sites, and other tools, creating headaches both for brands and the customers (or employees) at the heart of such events.

Though this worry is certainly a valid concern, it’s better to accept that mistakes might be made and press forward with your diversity and inclusion efforts than to allow timidity to outright impede either. These are the growing pains of becoming more inclusive with your customer and employee experiences, and facing them head-on will also give your team an opportunity to consider how best to handle such mistakes and learn from them. 

Experience shows that both customers and employees accept that mistakes inevitably occur and are a result of activity. Being passive is not an option when trying to create more inclusive customer experiences. Overcome the fear of making mistakes and concentrate on a transparent and authentic way to deal with them when they occur.

Key #2: Engage All Audiences

If you’re still concerned about how best to connect to audiences you haven’t consistently talked to before, this is the section for you. For many years now, the big idea behind CX and EX programs has been to simply gather as much feedback as possible from as many people as possible. However, before turning any listening posts on, you should sit down with your team and design (or reorient) your experience initiatives with your end goals in mind. You must ensure that you give all audiences you want to hear from the opportunity to provide feedback. 

In this case, if your goal is to create more inclusive experiences, you should consider which audiences you need to reach out to and how to do so. This means doing some legwork to find out how those audiences communicate, what their preferences are, and bringing all of those insights to bear when meaningfully improving your experiences to accommodate diversity and inclusion. 

Also, don’t forget: You need the right tool to collect feedback from all audiences as well as to disseminate that information to all members of your organization. Make sure you are using accessibility tools like screen readers, larger font sizes, higher contrasts, etc.

Key #3: Apply What You’ve Learned

You can and should apply the above mindset to any experience goal you have across the entirety of your business. Applying it here will give you the intelligence and landscape map you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI) for new audiences. 

However, intelligence and roadmaps are only half the battle; taking action is imperative to actually making your experiences more inclusive. The work is ceaseless and oftentimes difficult, but if your team is ready to continue making an effort, you can be assured that the audiences you need to reach will respond.

As you continue to take action on what those audiences tell you, you’ll be able to meaningfully transform your business and realize your goal of a more inclusive experience. Being more inclusive is an invaluable component of marketplace leadership, but it’s also what will set your organization apart from your competitors in your customers’ eyes. The result is a mutually beneficial, meaningfully improved experience that will demonstrate to all your organization’s commitment to diversity and inclusion as well as faster revenue growth and higher profitability.

Click here to learn more about the importance of diverse and inclusive experiences in my full-length point of view article. I take a closer look at the topics explored here and go over a few other best practices you might not have had the chance to read about elsewhere.

CX Goals
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3 CX Goals that Create Experience Improvement, Not Just More Data

By: Jessica Petrie, Senior Strategic Insights Consultant, InMoment

It’s a commonly held belief among many brands—and the customer experience (CX) vendors that partner with them—that all it takes to solve your business challenges and meet CX goals is to turn on as many listening posts as possible. The idea behind this approach is to gather a mountain of ‘big data’ and thus be armed with every possible piece of information about your customers, your employees, other audience segments, and all their preferences.

The truth, though, is that there’s a gap between data and business challenges that just having data isn’t enough to bridge. A lot of CX vendors and programs fail to account for this gap, and thus many of these initiatives fail to make a difference. The secret to making a difference? A principle called designing with the end in mind, and connecting your CX program to quantifiable goals before any listening posts are even activated. I’m going to take you through three such goals that will help your CX program be the best it can be. Those goals are:

  • CX Goal #1: Customer Retention
  • CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling
  • CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition

CX Goal #1: Customer Retention

Given how much more expensive it is to onboard new customers than to keep existing ones, customer retention is a goal that permeates most every department of most every organization. A lot of brands want to use their CX program to retain customers, but they usually end up gathering a mountain of data and then trying to manually carve insights about their existing audience out of it.

It turns out that using this approach means that you’re working backwards. Rather than try to gather actionable insights only after accruing data, it’s far better for brands to dedicate at least part of their program design phase to figuring out which goals they need to achieve for their customer base. Which audience segments do you need to listen to? What channels do they use? Building your program around these questions will end up saving not ‘just’ customers, but a great deal of time and effort on your part.

CX Goal #2: Cross-Selling/Upselling

Once you’ve established which audience segments and channels suit your business goals, you can dive a bit deeper by identifying cross-selling and upselling opportunities within your customer base. This work requires nuance, but you can use the same design-with-the-end-in-mind approach here as with retaining your customers to unveil new revenue sources without having to onboard new customers. 

This goal ends up being something that a lot of brands overlook, but it should be a core driving ethos of your CX program. You should also make room within this goal for cross-shoppers and customers who transacted with you in the past but aren’t currently. With a well-designed CX program, the sky here is the limit.

CX Goal #3: Customer Acquisition

Acquiring new customers can be expensive, but everyone knows it’s a necessary goal to shoot for to sustain growth and market share. You can use the same audience segment and channel identification ethos here as with customer retention; the result will be the ability to find where new business lives and be there for it when your competitors can’t or won’t. In fact, researched properly, you can arm yourself with an idea of what these new customers will want before they themselves know!

Bridging The Gap

These three goals form a solid foundation for any customer experience program, and designing your program around them before activating your listening posts will enable you to actually bridge the gap between your big data and achieving Experience Improvement (XI). Knowing your audience and your marketplace landscape are integral parts of market experience (MX).

To learn more about how market experience shapes CX program goals and how best to get the lay of your marketplace landscape, click here to read my full-length PoV on using a combination of tech and market research to find and grow audience segments. Achieving an MX perspective takes time and effort, but the brands that master it are the masters of their verticals far more often than not.

Employee Experience EX
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11 Articles You Need to Read About Today’s Employee and EX Landscape

By: The InMoment Team

In the midst of the fallout of a global pandemic and the Great Resignation, the employee experience (EX) is an incredibly hot topic. With such a complex EX landscape, what do brands need to do to retain their employees, inspire their commitment and advocacy, and attract new talent?

If you’re looking for the answers to these questions, say no more—InMoment EX expert Michael Lowenstein is here to help with all the thought leadership you need. Check out these must read articles below!

#1: Employee Engagement: Does the Defense’s Case Still Hold Water? 

When it comes to optimizing the employee experience, does an engagement-based approach still work? More and more, we are finding that employee commitment represents a more progressive and actionable EX construct. It better reflects the realities employers face in today’s talent landscape, and how employees are making job-related decisions.  

Read It Here!

#2: What Causes Employee Turnover? How Does Today’s Unprecedented Employee Churn Impact Customers Tomorrow?

Today, there are multiple drivers, or causes, of employee turnover. And, there are definite connections, or links, to how the rate of employee resignations can, and does, impact customer experiences and perceptions of value. So, how will unprecedented employee churn today impact customers tomorrow?   

Check It Out!

#3:  The Key Post-Pandemic EX Holy Grail for All Companies: We’re Now in the Era of Required Employee Commitment and Linkage to CX

The COVID-19 pandemic has actively contributed to a reassessment of priorities by both employees and employers. Employees are reconsidering the personal value represented by their jobs and roles. Employers are reconsidering methods for building connections as well as performance. So, post-pandemic, what are the key enterprise considerations for improving employee experience?    

Discover the EX Holy Grail

#4:  The Impact of YOLO on Employee and Customer Experience

YOLO (You Only Live Once) is a current societal force which has been over 250 years in the making. Today, it is directly fueling the Great Resignation—especially among GenZ and Millennial employees. This has contributed to greater attention to factors of YOLO which influence employee behavior, especially employer disconnection and churn. So, what is the impact of YOLO on employee and customer experience?   

Find the Answers

#5:  In EX, Quo Vadis? Translated from Latin: Where Are We Going with Employee Experience Improvement?

The employee landscape is undergoing dramatic and rapid change, with a heightened emphasis on emotional drivers and connection to the employer’s culture. For instance, organizations are coming to understand that everyone in the organization is responsible for developing and delivering customer value. So, where is employee experience headed? 

 Learn the Direction

#6:  Do Companies Recognize the High CX Value of Employee Advocates? Shouldn’t They Want to Cultivate the Kind of Behavior Advocacy Represents?

Employee commitment and advocacy behavior influences customer experience, on both an indirect and a direct basis. Significantly more than either satisfaction or engagement, where employees are viewed as costs, committed employees are key enterprise assets, delivering superior, differentiated customer value. So, how well do companies recognize the value of employee commitment and advocacy?  

Read Article

#7:  Diagnosing and Improving Employee Connection to Company Culture

Employees’ connection to, or disconnection from, the employer’s culture—its fairness, transparency, equity, humanity, career opportunities, communication, management trust, etc.—is perhaps the biggest contributor to today’s high resignation rates. Yet, traditional engagement research only minimally addresses, if at all, what cultural factors work, or don’t work, for employees. Through new and focused research approaches, there is a clear, actionable path to enterprise culture improvement. So, will organizations do more to understand the importance of, and level of employee connection to, company culture? 

 Connect Employees to Customer Culture

#8:  Potentially, How Will the Future of Work and ‘The Great Resignation’ Impact Customer Experience?

Today, many organizations are focused on how the future of work will affect both customer experience and employee experience.  A major challenge, however, is the continuing high level of employee turnover. This is largely because employees, who actively desire to work for companies with a more humanistic culture and a purpose which they can support, are too often finding these lacking in their present employer. These perceived shortcomings can be reversed. So, how will key realities in the employee landscape impact CX? 

 Uncover the Impact

#9:  It’s Time to Recognize the Impact and Value of Employee Behavior: Making Employee Experience an Organizational Priority

As organizations become more mature in their approaches to employee behavior and experience, a key question which needs to be addressed is the level of enterprise priority, and investment of resources, employee experience receives. And, directly connected to this question, companies need to understand the degree to which employees are recognized as key assets, not costs, when their research and initiatives still follow an engagement-based model. Moving the strategic focus to employee commitment is the next, more progressive, stage of employee experience maturity. So, are organizations making employee experience and employee behavior a priority?  

Make Employee Experience a Priority

#10:  Employee Advocates: Their Role as Committed Company Assets, Active Communicators, and Key Contributors to Stakeholder Value

Advocacy, where employees are identified as active contributors to business outcomes and are recognized and leveraged as significant enterprise assets, is the ultimate stage of EX maturity. Although developing a corps of such employees is attainable with focused discipline and investment, few organizations reach this level. Not only are employee advocates committed to the organization and its customers, they are emotionally connected to the culture and purpose of their employer. They are active partners in delivering superior customer value. So, do companies see employee advocates as essential enterprise assets?    

Learn More

#11: Elves Rule: Employees ‘Make’ the Experience for Customers, and They Should Be Recognized for It

Just before Christmas, good little children all around the world are preparing their lists of preferred gifts. They are told that the holiday presents they receive will come courtesy of Santa (and Ms.) Claus. But, isn’t it the elves, toiling in anonymity (except for the occasional movie) at their North Pole workshop, who—like employees everywhere—are those most responsible for creating customer joy? So, how well do organizations understand and recognize employees’ essential role in the customer experience and the creation of value?

Check It Out

CX Metrics
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3 Most Common CX Metrics Questions (And Their Answers)

By: The InMoment Team

Customer experience (CX) metrics are a CX program’s bread and butter. NPS, CSAT, and CES have historically been the main tools every program utilizes to have a systematic way of establishing a voice of customer (VoC) source and leveraging those findings to improve customer experiences. But it’s not easy—a CX metric score alone can’t create transformation.

CX metrics aren’t one-size-fits-all. Certain CX metrics are more fitting for specific industries—and even then your brand might not need to use the same metrics as your direct competitors. Case in point, there’s no one golden method to measuring CX metrics, which is actually why many businesses struggle to create a success framework. 

In our decades of experience helping brands to build programs (and the success frameworks that accompany them), we’ve noticed there are a few common obstacles companies face. Here are the three most common CX questions we get all the time: 

CX Metrics Question #1: What Metrics Can You Use to Determine Industry and Organizational Maturity?

Before you can answer this question for your company, there are three things you should answer first:

  • Are you measuring a customer experience—and is it satisfaction or NPS—or a metric that aligns with the goal you have?
  • What are you doing with it? How are the metrics of field services, retail, call-center, first-contact resolution, etc. used?
  • From an employee perspective, are you doing something beyond a basic employee engagement study? Or do you have an employee pulse metric by division, region, or queue?

There’s no one-size-fits-all metric that determines maturity—and should there be? Instead, you need to focus on where your company is on the journey toward your specific goals. Success, then, is determined by how close you are to achieving that goal, instead of a set of objective metrics that may not even relate to your business.  Truly mature organizations are aligned on specific business goals and have metrics directly attached to those individual goals. They frequently check in on those metrics and take action to move the needle and tie that success back to their experience programs.

CX Metrics Question #2: How Can You Tie Metrics Directly to CX and VoC Programs Versus Other Internal and External Factors?

The important thing is to look at your organization and how they talk about success—and learning to speak that language. Are you a finance, operations, or retention-focused organization? And how are you integrating operational, technical, and financial data with customer survey data?

Organizations that are technically or engineering focused often look for an extreme amount of precision. But survey data doesn’t always lead to one answer—or the answer you expect. The real question is, “how do you pull information together and communicate that collectively?” As much as the mathematical connections are crucial, so are the practical ones.

Ultimately, metrics can be tied either statistically or practically, but the latter is much more realistic for a business. For example, the broader benefits when enabling an entire organization is hard to quantify but there could be specific benefits your program has contributed to make a project more successful. Maybe the insights your program provided can take accountability for 10% of the project’s effects. Then you can say, “it wasn’t all from our VoC or CX program but we get credit for that 10%.”

Want to learn about the 4 areas where we see CX practitioners tie their efforts to the bottom line most successfully? Check out this infographic!

CX Metrics Question #3: When It Comes to Survey Analysis, What’s the Best Practice to Analyze Which Attributes Are Affecting NPS?

Let’s say your organization leadership is focusing in on NPS—where you are, what drives it, and so on. So, you try structural equation modeling, key driver analysis, or heavy duty analytics. That approach is equatable to killing a mosquito with a sledgehammer. Instead, you want to break methodology down to core factors—using statistical analysis or text analytics—to see what themes come out and categorize them according to where your organization is.

Now, at an executive level, you might not want to communicate the “R-squared” of the modeling. Usually, executives just want answers to the questions, “what’s driving NPS?” and “what should I do with it?” Your job is to articulate the answers in a clear and simple way throughout the organization. That will drive your success from the top down. But of course, you should still have in-depth analyses prepared in your back pocket if you encounter someone who is statistically oriented.

Wrapping Things Up

You probably still have a bunch of questions of your own. Like, “what are the best practices to make sure you’re appropriately capturing feedback across the customer journey?” Or, “how do you focus on the experiences that make the biggest impact to the bottomline?” 

If you’re looking for more resources and insight into CX metrics and ensuring your CX program delivers business value (ROI) to your organization, watch this webinar with third-party analyst firm, Forrester, to learn the answers.

E-Commerce Experience
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Four Tips for Using Customer Data to Improve the E-Commerce Experience

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

E-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries of this decade. Thanks to COVID, digital roadmaps across industries have quickly accelerated. If you weren’t yet online, it didn’t take long for brands to adapt when brick and mortar businesses across Asia Pacific were forced to shut down in 2020 and 2021.  

It’s not been easy for e-commerce brands. After a whirlwind of COVID-spurred digital transformation, rapid brand expansion, and supply chain woes, consumer expectations and their relationships with e-commerce brands have changed before our eyes. So what can these brands do to get ahead of customer expectations? The key is to dive into your customer data. And we’re here to help.

Tip #1: Rethink the Digital Customer Journey

Because of the rapid growth that businesses have undergone, e-commerce brands have not had an opportunity to slow down and evaluate the experience they are delivering. The acceleration of digital roadmaps during the pandemic has meant that many elements might have been half-baked. Now that the “new normal” is underway, e-commerce brands should rethink the digital customer journey.

Tip #2: Invest in Customer Care

A lot of businesses had to scale back their customer care teams during the pandemic because they couldn’t cope with the sheer amount of call volumes enquiring about updated delivery processes and updated policies. We saw in these times of crisis that much of customer care is related to the digital journey. When customers have an inquiry, you need to find ways for customers to self-serve or use technology to reduce the number of enquiries that need to involve your care team.

Tip #3: Upgrade Your Technology

Advanced technology is now available to intercept customers browsing on site, and ask them questions to understand their current experience. InMoment’s Digital Intercept solution has the ability to capture rich data from logged in users when they’re taking a survey. 

You can also integrate InMoment’s Rapid Resolution Engine, which is designed to analyse customer verbatim in real time. The technology uses tags that are customised to your businesses to provide helpful links, ultimately resolving concern and complaints,  or “solve in survey,” before customers have to call into the contact centre. 

Tip #4: Collect All Pieces of Data Possible: Explicit + Implicit + Operational

Most brands are proficient at collecting explicit data like NPS scores and customer verbatim. But have you considered layering implicit data over the top of it? Implicit data points like customer sentiment, emotion, cursor movement, and more can help you paint a more accurate picture of the customer experience. As a final step, adding in operational data like customer value and  segmentation will allow you to be really targeted to the best place to trigger a digital intercept along the customer journey. 

For more on upgrading customer experiences in e-commerce, check out this eBook “4 Digital Quick Wins” 

Customer Listening Experience Improvement
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Quality, Not Quantity: Strategic Customer Listening for Experience Improvement

By: The InMoment Team

For many years now, conventional wisdom has held that the best way to listen to as many customers as possible is to turn every customer listening post within your customer experience (CX) program on and simply capture all insights that come your way. This strategy makes a simple kind of sense on paper; if you’re listening to as many people as possible, you’re bound to hear something pertinent to your CX and organizational goals, right?

The answer to that question is more complicated than conventional wisdom would have you believe. While it’s true that this approach will gain you a lot of data, a large portion of it may be wholly irrelevant to the CX goals you’re trying to achieve. At the same time, you may miss out on highly relevant data when you focus only on customer listening posts while leaving other signals, such as behavioral and operational data, aside. 

So, is there a better, more efficient way to find data pertinent to what you need your program to achieve? As it happens, the answer is yes, and we’re going to get into it right now!

Where the Drive for Data Came From

If there’s a more targeted approach to gathering the data and insights you need to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), why is the standard approach to simply gather as much data as possible? To answer this question, we need to remember that over the last 20 years, the word “data” has been seen by many organizations as a prescription for any business, technology, or marketplace problem. At the same time, the cost to capture and analyze data has also gone down significantly.

But don’t be under any illusions;  just turning listening posts on and gathering as much data as possible does not translate directly to actionable business and experience solutions. Frankly, in most cases where CX programs are not focused and use all kinds of listening posts but rarely all relevant behavioral, operational, and contextual data, the resulting insights frequently leave brands with an endlessly tall mountain of white noise. That’s the state of affairs for far too many experience programs, and it’s why a lot of them fail.

A Better Approach

Rather than begin by flipping every light switch on and inhaling as much data as possible, brands should take a further step back when activating or refurbishing their experience program. They must, quite simply, design their program with their end goal in mind before any listening posts are even activated and before deciding which other data to ingest. 

Taking time to design with the end in mind also allows you to consider which audiences are most relevant to which goals, as well as the approaches you need to take in order to connect to each one. This is a more targeted methodology than simply lying in wait for a large lake of data, and while it requires more initial legwork, the end result is a wealth of actionable intelligence that by and large curates itself.

Starting with clarity on intended outcomes and getting company-wide agreement on key performance indicators (KPI’s)  gives your team concrete, quantifiable goals to connect your initiative to. It lays the basis for the management support and corporate buy-in you need to be successful.

Applying What You’ve Learned

Whether you’re intending to strengthen loyalty and grow your business with existing customers or to make efforts to win new ones, the approach I’ve laid out here makes all the difference when it comes not ‘just’ to ensuring the success of your CX program, but also creating Experience Improvement for your customers and employees that drives business outcomes. Patience and forethought will save you time that you’d otherwise spend attempting to connect data to business outcomes.

And, don’t forget to design your customer listening posts (and, consequently, your products and services) in an inclusive way. This is imperative not only from an ethical perspective, but also key to making your Experience Improvement initiatives truly effective from CX and EX standpoints.

Click here to read my full-length PoV on how customer listening with diversity and inclusion in mind can make the methodology I’ve detailed here even more beneficial for your customers, your employees, and your bottom line.

Customer Experience Trends Banks
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3 Employee and Customer Experience Trends for Banks, Wealth Advisors, and Credit Unions in 2022

By: The InMoment Team

What is the future for employee and customer experience trends in banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions? InMoment recently dove into the financial services industry’s 2022 outlook—and there’s a lot to unpack. 

Through our dedicated Strategic Insights Team, we collected data from bank, wealth advisor, and credit union consumers and employees across North America. This year’s trends report has unearthed a few key discoveries that these businesses must pay attention to if they want to differentiate themselves in this competitive market.

When you have both customer and employee perspectives, it’s easier to rethink the workplace and how one experience affects the other. Let’s think through this together to improve finserv experiences for the long haul:

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #1: Digital Experiences and Personal Engagement is Vital to Improving Experiences

One of the first questions we asked customers and employees was, “what experiences are you looking forward to in the following industries [in 2022]?” 

For Customers: Most banking customers responded with “tap-&-go or digital wallet” (Apple or Samsung). This hammers in a point this industry is all too aware of: digital transformation is a crucial element that all banks need to pay attention to as customer expectations evolve. And that extends to other types of financial services businesses as well, be it investment management or credit unions.

For Employees: On the other hand, employees have a unique perspective to add to this conversation. One stated that they would like:

“More time [spent] with customers around personal investments.” 

— Financial Services Wealth Advisor

Of course, different firms operate with different goals in mind, but what’s important to take away here is how the customer experience is impacting the employee experience and vice versa. With this insight in mind, businesses across the financial services industry should include the employee perspective in their customer experience efforts. What do your bank tellers know about friction points in the in-branch experience? What improvements do your advisors think can be made in client sessions? The answers could lead to major improvements in the customer experience and to bottom line influencing factors like customer retention.

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #2: Focus on Both Digital and In-Person Interactions to Serve All Customers

We’ve all seen the articles claiming that the “in-branch experience is dead,” but that couldn’t be further from the truth. According to our data, there are those customers that prefer 100% self-service capabilities, but there are also those customers that rely on in-person interactions—and there are employees that find fulfillment in serving those customers.

When asked what their primary expectations for their experiences were, the majority of consumers voiced their desire for self-serve options, specifically with investments profiles, banking services, or credit union interactions. At the same time, employees also expressed at the same time that they want training to support customers better, whether that is in a contact center, over live chat, or in-branch. 

To satisfy both employee and customer expectations for experiences, finserv businesses need to make sure they are focused on both digital and in-person interactions, and make sure they are consistent while they’re at it.

Employee and Customer Experience Trend #3: How to Optimize Talent Acquisition for Gen Z

Employee values tend to shift from generation to generation and it’s the responsibility for businesses to acknowledge those changes if they want to last. That’s why employers everywhere have been thinking more about Gen Z and how they’ll carve out a future for the workplace, and finserv businesses are no exception. 

To help banks, investment advisors, and other finserv employers understand Gen Z, we leveraged our latest trends report to dive into Market Pulse data as well as indirect and inferred transactional data and put together a pros and cons profile for the most critical factors in recruiting a Gen Z employee specifically in the finserv industry. Check it out below!

Based on these findings, Gen Z seems likely to be attracted to a work setting that prioritizes instilling a sense of purpose in employees and supporting a collaborative work community, on top of, understandably, ensuring financial security.

There are many ways to foster these attributes in your company’s work culture, but one thing is for sure: as Gen Z grows more prominent in the workforce, it is vital that businesses shape work cultures according to Gen Z ideals if they wish to attract top talent.

Not only did InMoment feature the financial services businesses like banks, wealth advisory firms, and credit unions in its newest Customer and Employee Experience Trends Report, but the research covers ten other industries as well! If you’d like to learn more about what’s happening in 2022’s experience realm, take a look at the full online version.

Unstructured Data
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Optimizing Employee Insights from Structured and Unstructured Data

By: The InMoment Team

Power from the People

Employee insights can come from a multitude of sources like unstructured data; and, with churn at record levels (overall turnover rate is estimated at 57.3 % per year, and with Gen Z changing jobs at a rate 134% higher than in pre-pandemic 2019)—and the cultural, operational, and customer value discontinuity this can create—it’s essential for every company to have, and apply, every piece of relevant data.  

Information from employees gives businesses power and can be leveraged to enhance customer experience, resulting in higher retention, more positive customer behavior, and stronger business outcomes.

Workforce Analytics and Voice of Employee

Employee data streams come from two principal frameworks: People Analytics and Voice of Employee (VoE).  People Analytics aka Workforce Analytics, are the data sets HR uses to make recruitment more effective, increase retention and longevity, and improve fit, alignment, and productivity. The pandemic has had a profound effect on people analytics, with challenges coming from differing industries, job/role types, and locations. Today’s most successful companies can and do, utilize internal and external data to enhance workforce strategy through better planning.

Voice of Employee is a bit more complex, and given today’s talent landscape and heightened set of employee responsibilities, perhaps even more crucial. VoE programs collect, analyze, and distill employee feedback to identify areas of performance, challenge, and opportunity. These programs were largely manual until recently, which is both costly and time-inefficient. Also, when traditional people analytics tools were applied to unstructured data, the resulting text analytics were superficial, yielding little real actionability. The best and most contemporary approach for employee-generated text analytics is natural language processing, or NLP.

…Organizations that use workforce analytics have the most engaged workforces, and they thrive in tough conditions. 

— Tim Ringo, Workforce Analytics Isn’t as Scary as It Sounds

Leveraging Natural Language Processing for VoE Analytics

With Natural Language Processing for VoE, organizations can gather an in-depth understanding of factors driving emotionally-based behavior and performance, resulting in clear and impactful programmatic recommendations that drive engagement, loyalty, and commitment. 

  • Gather: All data sources (surveys, reviews, messages, emails, chat threads, and other communication) can form a single stream
  • Process: NLP analyses can be run utilizing HR language, with customized dashboards, or they can be exported to the organization’s business intelligence tool
  • Analyze: Identify areas of focus and experience and emotionally-based sentiment with the power of NLP
  • Act:  NLP enables narratives on topics, trends, and patterns to be developed, along with root cause issues and supporting data

Figures 1&2 / Polarity data visualization from insurance company reviews

Using NLP helps businesses identify key topics, categories, themes, intentions from every document in the data stream, and detailed sentiment analysis. And, when compared to open source and traditional people analytics techniques, NLP is more efficient and requires less technical support. NLP is, as well, both highly configurable and completely secure with any infrastructure.  

All employees have stories about their experiences and those of customers. NLP helps organizations hear, understand, share, and leverage those stories to make business decisions that make work life and their customers’ lives better.

Women's History Month
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Cultural Spotlight: What Women’s History Month Looks Like at InMoment

By: The InMoment Team

The month of March is Women’s History Month, an opportunity for all of us to celebrate the contributions and lives of incredible women everywhere—past and present. It’s also an opportunity to share stories, learn from one another, and emphasize the importance of creating a gender equal world.

At InMoment, our favorite of our core values (human, bold, and invested) is human. And we know that part of ensuring that we live out that value is making sure that inclusivity and diversity are front and center in our people strategy. That’s why we created our two employee resource groups, InMovement and Women of InMoment:

  • InMovement: A global, cross-functional group of inclusivity all-stars who drive formal and informal opportunities for education and improvement across the business.
  • Women of InMoment: A global employee resource group designed to support inclusion and diversity, provide the women of InMoment with opportunities to mentor and learn from one another, activate leadership skills, and connect with service and professional growth activities in the larger technology community.

For our Women’s History Month celebrations, our Women of InMoment council took the reins and scheduled events across the globe to get our team involved. Here’s a quick snapshot of what WHM looks like at InMoment!

InMoment’s Women’s History Month Celebrations

#1: Sharing Stories with Humans of InMoment

Our #HumansOfInMoment initiative is a forum for InMoment team members to share who they are with the InMoment community. We truly could not be more proud of the individuals on our team and the diverse backgrounds, experiences, and ideas they bring with them, so we celebrate those stories by composing them into fun graphics and sharing with the world!

For Women’s History Month, we curated a series of stories from women on our global team, where they talked about the women in their personal and professional lives who have helped to make them who they are today. You can read these stories on our LinkedIn page!

#2: An International Women’s Day Message from Our Leadership

March 8 marked International Women’s Day, and to celebrate the occasion, member’s of InMoment’s leadership team and the Women of InMoment committee got together to share a message surrounding this year’s theme, #BreakTheBias. 

Breaking the bias is all about coming together to create a world “ free of bias, stereotypes, and discrimination…that is diverse, equitable, and inclusive…where difference is valued and celebrated.” And that’s what we strive for every day at InMoment! Watch the video message below.

#3: A Live Fireside Chat with Jill Kozoil of Motherly

Next up on our list of scheduled events was a live fireside chat with Founder and CEO of Motherly, Jill Kozoil. In mid-March, our team was able to log into the webinar and watch a discussion with Jill and members of the Women of InMoment committee about the leap to entrepreneurship, leadership learnings, and redefining what it means to be a working mother.

Jill Koziol founded Motherly, a wellbeing destination that empowers mothers to thrive with expert content, innovative product solutions, and supportive community. She is also the co-author of “The Motherly Guide to Becoming Mama: Redefining the Pregnancy, Birth, and Postpartum Journey” and “This Is Motherhood: A Motherly Collection of Reflections and Practices.”

Jill is passionate about serving and empowering women and mothers because when mamas are successful, everyone wins. She is an advocate for families, female founders, and how to thrive with multiple sclerosis. Jill lives in Park City, Utah with her husband and two daughters. We are so grateful to her for joining us!

Living Out Our Values

Inclusion and diversity aren’t mere talking points to our team. They are goals that we strive for with every action we take. And at every chance, we celebrate the diversity that brings so much value to our team! 

Want to learn more about InMoment’s culture? Get more details about our team here! Thinking about joining our dream team? We’d love for you to check out open positions and reach out.

Regulatory Compliance
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How InMoment Assists with Regulatory Compliance

By: The InMoment Team

The challenges involved in regulatory compliance vary greatly between industries, countries, and companies. But many compliance tools lack flexibility or are missing key technologies for parsing complex structures in legal, medical and financial documents. That’s where InMoment comes in.

Leverage InMoment to Lower Your Regulatory Compliance Costs and Risks

InMoment helps you tackle compliance challenges involving text data through “semi-custom” solutions. We combine semi-structured data parsing, natural language processing (NLP), and machine learning with other features and technology suited to your specific problems. By working from our existing infrastructure through a staged Proof of Concept, we reduce your initial investment and deliver tangible results more quickly. 

We don’t “solve” or automate your entire industry. Instead, we help you improve existing compliance processes and scale your compliance teams more easily, resulting in lower costs and reduced risk across your organization.

Your Regulatory Compliance Technology Toolkit

Curious about the tech InMoment provides that will help you get the job done? Here’s an overview of your toolkit:

Natural Language Processing Features

  • Sentiment Analysis: Combine natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning techniques to assign weighted sentiment scores to the entities, topics, themes and categories within a sentence or phrase.
  • Theme Analysis: Use natural language processing (NLP) to break down sentences into n-grams and noun phrases and then evaluate the themes and facets within.
  • Entity Recognition:  Identify people, places, and things within a piece of text.
  • Categorization: Categorize customer reviews, support tickets, or any other type of text document into groups based on their contents.
  • Intention Extraction: Determine the expressed intent of customers and reviewers.
  • Summarization: Extract the most relevant sentences from each document so you can quickly understand the main ideas without spending valuable time reading the whole document.

Semi-Structured Data Parsing: A powerful tool for identifying and extracting text data from PDFs, .docx files and other “semi-structured” documents while understanding the structures and relationships of each element.

Machine Learning: Custom machine learning “micromodels” to tackle unique challenges in your data, such as entity recognition on ambiguous company names or classifying news articles into pre-defined topic lists.

Add-ons and Integrations: 

  • ​​Low-level NLP configuration
  • Custom user interfaces
  • Specific technology integrations
  • Feedback loops for model training
  • User and project management tools
  • Database/warehouse hookups
  • Upload wizards and connectors
  • …. And more

InMoment for Regulatory Compliance in Action: A Quick Case Study

InMoment has helped brands across healthcare, biotechnology, pharmaceuticals, financial services, and more, but today we will share a financial services case study.

An Australian financial services firm needed help ensuring their compliance with federal disclosure mandates across hundreds of Statement of Advice (SoA) documents. Before, the firm’s auditors manually reviewed a subset, but this process was slow and unreliable.

InMoment focused on improving the firm’s existing audit process. First, we trained our semi-structured data parser to understand the underlying structure of SoAs. Then we configured our NLP to identify, extract and analyze entities within each section. Finally, we built a connector to structure and export this data into an easy-to-scan spreadsheet.

“InMoment’s solution for financial services disclosure compliance identifies, analyzes and structures key data from Statement of Advice documents for internal review.”

This solution substantially reduces the firm’s noncompliance risk by empowering regulatory compliance auditors to review hundreds of documents in minutes. Now they can quickly and reliably spot missing disclosures, suspicious recommendations, and other areas where advisors may not be working in their clients’ best interests.

To learn more about how InMoment can help revolutionize your approach to regulatory compliance, check out our dedicated website here.

The Great Resignation - Employee Commitment
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Understanding “The Great Resignation” and Brands’ Own Role in Creating It

By: Michael Lowenstein, Senior Director, Employee Experience Consulting in Employee Experience

The news media has been rife this last year or so with stories of The Great Resignation—an unprecedented tidal wave of job market churn that has seen millions upon millions of employees quit their jobs. As with most topics related to employment and the economy, the finger-pointing over who and/or what’s behind this phenomenon has been incessant… and loud. No matter which lens the issue is viewed through, though, one fact is apparent to all: the phrase “I quit” has become one of the employee world’s loudest slogans.

Despite what all the debate over The Great Resignation might imply, though, there is in fact a hierarchy of causes and events that we can definitively track to what we’re seeing in the job market right now. What follows is a quick illustration (and examination) of the sequence of events that precipitated The Great Resignation, as well as what brands like yours might be able to do about it if you find that many of your employees are headed for the exit.

The Great Resignation’s Deep Roots

The first misconception about The Great Resignation that I’d like to dispel is the notion that the COVID-19 pandemic is directly responsible for its inception. This assumption is built almost exclusively on the close timing the two phenomena share, which, frankly, is correlative reasoning at best. Additionally, when the pundits pushing this idea actually care to delve deeper, they insist that the challenges and perspectives brought about by the pandemic caused many employees to reconsider their positions, hence the current job market churn.

The truth, however, is much more nuanced than that. As countless employee experience (EX) experts have been documenting for years now, many employees were feeling dissatisfied with their jobs or disconnected from their wider organization long before COVID-19 was even a term. Burnout, disengagement, and a lack of employee support have, unfortunately, been hallmarks at many organizations for many, many years. The pandemic, therefore, did not mark the beginning of the sentiments that culminated in The Great Resignation; it merely catalyzed employee sentiments that had already existed for a long time.

Culture, Infrastructure, and Operational Challenges

There’s more to the story of The Great Resignation than widespread employee dissatisfaction with their daily work or their disconnection from their employers’ brand purpose. In fact, much of the narrative is that many companies have insufficiently invested in employee support resources. Though you might expect that more brands would be proactive about countering declines in employee performance and tenure, the sheer and extraordinary amount of churn now being seen tells quite a different story. That story, unfortunately, is one of countless companies’ inability to provide even the most basic support and experience value for their most critical assets.

It’s pretty clear where this story is headed:  a combination of employee disconnection, perceived cultural toxicity, and burnout due to factors like lack of available support resources has directly impacted the job market. When the COVID-19 element was added to this set of challenges, with all of the disruption, stress and uncertainty it brought, it became a catalyst for The Great Resignation.  Many employees were already worn down from facing these issues, and their conclusion was to seek new roles not just outside of their current employer, but even beyond their own industry.

In other words, high percentages of employees, feeling they have only one life to live, said:  “I quit.”

A More Progressive Employee Experience Concept

Even if your brand isn’t one of the thousands of companies around the world currently scrambling to remedy its employee support investment problem, you’ve probably heard the phrase “employee engagement” get thrown around as a remedy to The Great Resignation. As the story around this approach goes, employee engagement espouses policy creation as the solution to employee disengagement and burnout. It’s built around discovering employee discontentment, reacting to it with new policy created within HR departments, and hopefully lowering costs all the while. 

However, while policy certainly has its place in any organization, employee engagement alone will leave any company falling woefully short of its retention goals. There’s a much higher strata of the employee world known as employee commitment that brands will need to reach not ‘just’ to survive The Great Resignation, but also to build fundamentally human connections with employees and thus achieve Experience Improvement (XI) for them.

Click here to read my full-length point of view document on employee commitment, and how it can help your brand achieve more foundational and transformative goals than what can be achieved with reactive policymaking.

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