Three Considerations When Leveraging Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Regulatory Compliance

Companies are investing heavily in artificial intelligence (AI) to save money and time—especially those in industries who have to constantly deal with regulatory compliance documents. After all, who wants to sift through endless amounts of tables and lists? Those working in legal, medical, or financial sectors are often all too familiar with this infamous struggle. And considering this, it makes sense that PwC predicts AI could contribute $15.7 trillion to the global economy in the near future. Busy work, laborious practices, and the humdrum of paperwork are not the most ideal job duty for any employee. This poses an important question: is AI powerful enough so that no employee will ever have to touch a regulatory compliance document again?

To help you answer that question, here are the top three things you need to consider:

Consideration #1: What Is Artificial Intelligence?

Fundamentally, we should think of artificial intelligence as a tool rather than a replacement for human expertise. AI doesn’t accomplish anything without a proper wielder to fully comprehend how to use it. Therefore, it’s key to rethink your AI strategy. Ask yourself, how are you approaching AI? 

Let’s first take a look at the problem at hand. Regulatory compliance documents require an extreme attention to detail due to their naturally complex text structure. That’s why traditional text analytics don’t necessarily do the trick. Essentially, what you want AI to do is to read, check, and extract data from a document that’s written and filled out by humans. 

The thing is these documents aren’t standardized, resulting in arbitrary changes in format and other elements. This puts AI in a tough situation. As a technology that functions through learning from examples, how can it learn if the examples change unpredictably?

Consideration #2: AI Cannot Succeed Alone

That doesn’t mean you should totally scrap AI, it just needs a little help. In the case of regulatory compliance, AI cannot succeed alone, but it can be a core part of your success. To tackle regulatory compliance documents, you need a combination of three technologies: 

  • Semi-Structured Data Parsing
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Machine Learning and AI

Each of these technologies supply needed functions, such as extracting text, understanding the meaning of a text, pattern recognition and response, etc. But with all these helpful aids, the human eye still remains the most reliable. Technology may not be able to totally replace humans in this context, but it can certainly provide a solution that mitigates the heavy burden of regulatory compliance.

Consideration #3: Designing an Effective and Personal AI Strategy

It’s likely that your specific industry and country encounters problems other companies outside of your field or location don’t. In that way, making sure that your AI implementation covers all bases in the documents you process can feel like a solo battle. And that’s why you need to invest in a platform that will allow for the customization your brand needs. Regulatory compliance documents vary depending on the business setting and thus have unique requirements for AI to fulfill.

Wrapping It Up

So the short answer is no, in this case AI cannot fully replace humans in regulatory compliance. But it can certainly aid businesses in working more efficiently and effectively. Rather than approaching this as AI or humans, one or the other, it should instead be AI for humans. Many AI for compliance tools fail to provide useful solutions because they don’t understand this complex relationship.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to sharpen your approach to AI for regulatory compliance, read the full white paper where we also include specific case examples!

What’s On Your Customer Experience Governance Checklist? Three Must-Haves

The term “customer experience (CX) program” refers to an immensely broad concept. But at the same time, a “customer experience program” encompasses countless daily actions and processes. How do you keep track of all your efforts? And what do you need to do to keep them going? That’s where a customer experience governance foundation comes in—and more specifically, where this governance checklist we put together for you becomes the most useful.

Think of it as the ultimate cheat sheet you need to ensure that your program is meeting all the standards it needs to make an impact. If you are able to cross off all the elements, you’ll be able to put in place the right framework—allowing your organization to continuously match your customers’ needs. Additionally, you’ll bring everyone together towards a consistent company mission. To help you start off your own CX governance checklist, let’s take a look at three must-haves:

Must-Have #1: Defined CX Leaders

Customer experience governance begins with a dedicated council to support your ongoing program’s initiatives and efforts. The key here is inviting a diverse range of stakeholders to the larger CX conversation. What should each team contribute and receive so that the program is distributing significant value across the board? 

Not only is enabling leaders important to understanding the needs of the business and customers, but it also establishes a successful foundation for cross-business communication. The worst you can do for your program is to set it in a silo where no one is being heard. Customer experience improvement should be a company-wide investment because it can make a company-wide impact.

Must-Have #2: CX Program’s Rules and Regulations

Without rules and regulations, your CX governance structure will collapse. Clearly mapping out your program’s goals, outcomes, KPIs, etc. on a realistic timeframe sets you up for success. Teams across the business will be more enthusiastic and determined to overcome challenges if they’re directly involved in the planning process. Rather than someone from the outside demanding that a team meet certain KPIs by a certain time; it’s more likely that employees will be able to deliver on those requests through the support and understanding of their manager’s personal engagement with the program. And that’s how a healthy CX culture can be cultivated in the workplace—with a healthy customer experience governance foundation.

Must-Have #3: Ongoing Inspiration for Teammates Across the Company

Oftentimes, there needs to be an even greater push to drive a CX program to the forefront of your business initiatives. For that to happen, you need to broadcast what your program is, the value it produces based on concrete data or customer stories, and how it’s working wonders for customers. The more teams on board with your program will help sustain it in the long run and produce greater results. 

There are endless ways to share customer experience with and inspire your teammates—whether it’s an elevator pitch presentation of why a CX program matters or sending consistent updates of how the program is making impactful changes among your customer base. You might need to think a little creatively as each industry operates differently. But there are no shortage of avenues to reach the employees who would support your cause through and through.

Now a Customer Experience governance checklist isn’t a static one. It calls for continuous revision, additions, and hopefully completions! So this isn’t the end. There are probably countless boxes you can think of right now that need to be filled. Get a headstart adding to your checklist today by reading the full white paper where we give an in-depth look at what will make your program stick.

The Cost of Deprioritising Customer Experience During Tough Times

It’s no secret that the Head Of Operations and the Head Of Customer Experience often have differing priorities. This happens because each party, due to their experience, sees the business through a different lens. In fact, COVID-19 has further encouraged most businesses to prioritise a more operational lens, decreasing their focus on the customer experience. As things begin to open up, however, this lack of emphasis on creating positive customer experiences could prove to be problematic as the care a company has put into CX initiatives during this pandemic will surely affect their business post-pandemic.

My name is Justin Rehayem, Head of APAC Solution Designer at InMoment, and I’ve seen this first-hand. To be clear, I do not believe that businesses prioritising operations over customer experience the past few years means that they do not care about the customer experience. However, decreasing CX initiatives in the short term can truly cause some long term effects, especially when it comes to customer churn. 

We can’t change the past, but what we can do is learn from it. When future times of crisis present themselves (as they’re sure to do) we as CX professionals can carry forward this lesson: that both operations and customer experience need to be prioritised in order to make it through hard times. 

Balancing Operations and Customer Experience: A Case Study

To get a better look at this concept, let’s analyse a policy at an ANZ airline.

First, some context for our international readers. New Zealand’s international border remains closed to the world until at least April 30th 2022, with arrivals having to undergo a 14 day hotel quarantine. In April 2021 however, New Zealand entered into a quarantine free travel agreement with Australia leading to a surge of flight bookings throughout 2021 and into 2022. Unfortunately, due to the rise of the Delta variant, this quarantine free travel agreement was short lived. With quarantine back on the table, as you would expect, airlines had to cancel their international flights and offer credits or refunds to their customers. 

But what about domestic flights within New Zealand? You would expect those to be converted into a credit as well since the international visitors cannot enter the country and board the plane. Well, not all airlines agree. Some airlines took a stance that since domestic borders are open, and since the domestic flight can take off, then ‘normal fare rules apply.’

An operations leader might view this situation as the customer’s fault since the international visitor chose not to purchase a flexi fare. Therefore, they should not be entitled to a credit, and must pay the change fee of $50 if they wish to move their flight.

What complicates the policy above is the fact that now there is no certainty when New Zealand’s international borders will open quarantine free, what with the rise of the Omicron variant and nations reverting back to lockdown measures. So what does an international visitor do? Do they change their flight to a future date and pay $50? And risk paying another $50 if the borders are not opened, or just forfeit their airline ticket all together?

Whatever they choose, I can tell you with certainty that when customers have a negative experience, they develop a negative perception of the brand. And this negative perception doesn’t stop with one person, research indicates that an individual’s negative experience with a brand is shared with at least five other people. 

A customer-focused policy will view the long term impact this policy can have on a customer’s lifetime value and compare it against the financial impact that a customer centric policy will have on the business. This must be at the root of their reasoning as they advocate for the customer, showing the financial impact of both operations-focused and customer-focused policies side by side. Why? Numbers are the universal cross-functional language spoken by the CEO, CFO, and COO. 

What Is the Financial Impact of Customer Churn?

As an example, let’s quantify the possible financial impact to an airline with a less customer-focused policy.

You probably will have gathered by now that I am one of those unlucky customers that have been impacted by the policy having lost $260 on two economy tickets. My partner and I fly at least twice a year to visit family, and you probably can guess by now that I won’t be flying with an airline that doesn’t have customer-focused policies in place. And at $600 a return flight per person, that equates to $2400 in lost revenue per year I choose to fly with a competitor. 

Remember how I said that an individual’s negative experience with a brand is shared with at least five other people? Well in my case that number is around 100—since I have around 100 international guests flying overseas for my wedding. With airline tickets so competitively priced, who do you think they will be flying with? So assuming that all my guests follow through on their promise to book a customer-focused airline, then that’s already $60,000 in lost revenue. 

So what did this airline gain from deprioritising the customer experience? In my specific circumstances, they may have gained back my forfeited economy flights for $260, but they also forfeited $62,400 in lost revenue over the next 12 months. If the business had offered its international visitors a flight credit for their domestic flight, what would they have lost? The answer is not much, especially compared to the cost of a disgruntled customer.

Wrapping Up: Customer Churn Is Always Costly to Businesses

It’s important for businesses to take into account customer stories like this one when designing policies. A policy focusing that deprioritises customer experience has the potential to cost your business big time when it comes to recurring revenue.  

To learn more about customer churn and its impact to your business, check out this article, “Understanding the “Why” Behind Customer Churn”

Three Elements that Create and Sustain Employee Engagement

Employee engagement has become a hotter topic than ever in the age of The Great Resignation. Millions of employees are quitting their jobs and heading elsewhere, leaving countless organizations scrambling to retain their remaining talent and/or evaluate why their workforce is in such flux. If your org is in that boat right now, we can help you keep sailing with a look at three elements that create and sustain employee engagement:

  1. Organizational Culture
  2. Customer-Focused Processes
  3. Ambassadorial Behavior

Element 1: Organizational Culture

One of the hard truths about The Great Resignation is that many departing employees feel that their former organizations lacked a supportive workplace culture. Contrary to popular belief, feelings like these existed long before the COVID-19 pandemic; that event, and the stress that came with it, simply added fuel to an existing fire. Culture is fundamental to an employee’s sense of purpose and belonging, so see whether that word is cropping up in feedback from current and former workers. If it is, you should take a hard look at why employees are feeling that way, ideally with the assistance of an experience platform that can isolate actionable insights from unstructured feedback.

Element 2: Customer-Focused Processes

Another element that’s key to employee satisfaction is the chance to make a difference for customers. What this means for organizations like yours is not just giving those chances to frontline employees, but also giving other departments that aren’t customer-facing a chance to see how their work contributes to making that difference. Sharing data in this way is also handy for making customer experiences more consistent, because it gives everyone in your organization the same holistic, 360-degree view of your customer to reference.

Element 3: Ambassadorial Behavior

Improving workplace culture and refining customer processes are involved and difficult tasks. However, it’s well worth brands’ time to invest in both not just for the sake of retention, but also for creating bold, human connections with your customers that transcend individual interactions. When employees feel meaningfully supported by their organizations and that they have a chance to make a difference in customers’ lives, they won’t ‘just’ stick around—they’ll feed that passion directly into customer relationships and help you maintain an audience with unwavering brand loyalty. In this way, ensuring your employees are happy creates a feedback loop that keeps your customers happy (and keeps them from seeking out your competitors).

A Closer Look

How else can greater employee engagement improve your workplace, your brand, and your experiences? Click here to read our full-length point of view document on employee advocacy. Inveterate employee experience (EX) expert Michael Lowenstein draws on decades of research to sketch out a clear, helpful perspective on how best to advocate for your employees and meaningfully improve experiences for everyone!

3 Ways to Capture Non-Purchaser Feedback to Improve Experiences

When it comes to collecting feedback, of course we want to hear what our actual customers have to say about their experience. But, what about those individuals who have yet to make a purchase? Without a transaction, these non-purchasers won’t receive an invitation to take a survey—but, their experience is just as important to listen to and understand. In fact, non-purchaser feedback can offer you additional perspective that you wouldn’t get otherwise.

Non-purchaser feedback is valuable for many reasons—it can help point your brand to the reasons why customers might not be completing transactions as well as help you discover critical experience gaps in the customer journey

Here are three customer experience (CX) solutions you can use to connect with and understand the experience of non-purchasers:

Solution #1: Use a Digital Intercept on Your Website

One of the most prominent solutions is to use digital intercepts on your website. An example of this is Foot Locker—this retail brand uses an ‘always on’ listening tab on their homepage that collects feedback from both customers and non-purchasers. 


When it comes to connecting with customers that haven’t completed a purchase, digital intercepts are a creative solution for collecting feedback. For example, Foot Locker uses a web survey that pops up in an iframe after customers browse for more than five minutes, if they abandon their cart items, or if they return using the same IP address multiple times without completing a transaction. 

These are all opportunities to engage with your customers and better understand their experience, allowing you to better inform your business on what actions need to be taken to improve these experiences—and improve conversation rates.  

Solution #2: Encourage Employees to Invite Non-Purchasers to Participate 

Because the employee experience (EX) is tied so closely to the customer experience (CX), of course we recommend to involve your frontline staff as much as possible in your overall CX program. These employees can be your greatest asset when it comes to connecting with non-purchasers. 

Many retailers use posters throughout the store to encourage feedback, and others will hand out QR codes on cards to shoppers if they leave empty handed. Simply asking staff to promote the feedback program to both customers and non-purchasers will boost the volume of feedback and insights for your business, and help you understand more about the in-store experience gaps and opportunities to improve. 

Having a CX program that incorporates the voice of employee is a modern day ‘must’. Make sure you have an easily accessible channel for your employees to share the feedback that they are hearing from customers each day. It is far too valuable to ignore! 

Solution #3: Consolidate Your Solicited Customer Feedback with Your Unsolicited Social Feedback

Let’s face it, 80% or more of the customer feedback you’ll collect will come from customers, people that have made one or many purchases from your brand. A channel that is already rich in non-purchaser feedback is social. There are loads of reviews that exist today about your brand, about your website, or about the in-store experience that a non-purchaser has already shared. If you are reading and acting on these already, that’s terrific. 

The next step is then to consolidate all this rich non-purchaser feedback into your broader CX program. Having all your feedback in one location improves your level of understanding, broadens the range of customers you’ll hear from and leads to much clearer decision making across the whole of your business.

Three Steps Chevron Federal Credit Union Took to Reinvigorate its CX Program

Stagnant NPS scores. Data silos. Slow response rates. Chevron Federal Credit Union realized it needed a change. As a not-for-profit, member-owned organization, Chevron Federal Credit Union’s mission is to provide the highest level of personalized service to customers. But when it became difficult to effectively measure and improve experiences, Chevron Federal Credit Union partnered with InMoment to create a holistic strategy for its customer service initiatives—and were able to power some incredible results.

Here are the three steps Chevron Federal Credit Union took to reinvigorate its customer experience (CX) program:

Step #1: Streamline Surveys to Align CX Objectives Across the Business

Instead of sending surveys irregularly without a clear plan, Chevron Federal Credit Union began to streamline its surveys for a more integrated approach. Developing and sequencing surveys takes preparation, so this meant Chevron Federal Credit Union had to align its many business sections to set a precedent for consistent survey sendouts. Even though the surveys were unique to its department, Chevron Federal Credit Union’s partnership with InMoment gave them the opportunity to combine data from across the board. This holistic view of their data allowed them to understand how different sources of information were informing one another and telling a greater story.

Step #2: Implement Advanced Text Analytics to Enable Closed Loop Feedback

To enable closed loop feedback, Chevron Federal Credit Union implemented the technology platform’s advanced text analytics capabilities. This allowed the organization to capitalize on the data collected from the new survey approach. With the ability to automatically collect, normalize, and analyze open-ended survey responses as well as online comments and reviews, Chevron Federal Credit Union was able to immediately identify the areas in which to take action. Unified survey management and customized dashboards could support all of Chevron Federal Credit Union’s customer experience objectives going forward—and so the next step was obvious.

Step #3: Turn Member Feedback into Experience Improvement

With more than 110,000 members in eight states, how do you turn survey data and feedback into efficient action? Chevron Federal Credit Union integrated the platform with the Salesforce case management solution so that the right people would be instantly notified whenever a customer gave a low survey score. Before it’s partnership with InMoment, it took Chevron Federal Credit Union a few weeks to process survey data and present that information to front-line managers and employees. Now, case management allows for actionable responses within the same day a survey is submitted. Having a reliable follow-up procedure helps Chevron Federal Credit Union maintain its vision to provide members with the quality service that keeps them coming back year after year.

Making Meaningful, Long-term Improvements

Chevron Federal Credit Union overcame customer experience problems many businesses struggle with: turning survey metrics to meaning, systematizing structured and unstructured data, and providing excellent customer support.

Here’s what Chevron Federal Credit Union’s President and CEO John Berlin had to say:

“We realized that to improve our NPS score and other metrics, we needed to move beyond the basic survey tools we’d been using to create a more modern, cohesive, and data-driven customer experience program. This was a big, ambitious step for us, so we knew we would also need an experienced, capable CX partner to help us get there.”

This success story can be your success story too. Read the full case study to learn more.

Using Holistic Listening to Retain Employees—and Customers

It’s popular to believe that COVID-19 created the unprecedented employee exodus we’ve all come to know as The Great Resignation. For months now, we’ve seen brands struggle to retain employees as millions of workers across virtually every sector of the economy and society leave their jobs, citing a similarly diverse range of reasons for leaving. These include, but are by no means limited to, insufficient pay, hazardous work environments, and having to put up with belligerent customers.

What’s at the Root of the Struggle with Employee Retention?

Though it’s natural to assume that the timing of this event means it’s strictly a product of COVID, the truth about the Great Resignation and employee disengagement in general is that the pandemic didn’t create either phenomenon; it simply exacerbated existing employee issues. Factors like low pay or dangerous work existed long before COVID, which means that the disease isn’t the root cause of The Great Resignation so much as it’s the straw that broke the camel’s back.

The other hard truth that feeds into The Great Resignation is that, frankly, a lot of companies are having trouble retaining their workers because they never understood or invested in improving the employee experience (EX). These brands thus lack the resources, infrastructure, and capabilities necessary to rescue at-risk employee relationships, acquire new talent, and deliver on customer expectations in a time of great turmoil. 

No matter where your organization falls on the EX maturity spectrum, one thing has become clear: improving employee engagement, retention, and acquisition requires a new, more holistic means of addressing employee behavior and commitment.

A Quick Note on Employee Burnout, Disengagement, and the Like

Before we get to those holistic means, though, I think it would be helpful to briefly touch on the difference between disengagement, disconnection, and another term I’m sure you’ve heard a lot recently: burnout. 

The terms are not interchangeable; disengagement and disconnection refer to an employee’s lack of interest and/or investment in their work and organization’s mission. Meanwhile, burnout denotes feeling overwhelmed and mentally unwell as a result of said work or mission. 

My goal with this piece is to help you anticipate and solve for disengagement before it leads to that burnout.

3 Elements of Holistic Employee Engagement

Element #1: Anticipate Changing Needs

The first element of thinking about employee engagement and commitment more holistically is being cognizant of how employee needs and systems will change tomorrow, not ‘just’ what they’re like today. This is particularly important to consider as Millennials’ and Gen Z-ers’ slice of the workforce continues to grow. One of the most important things these digital natives want is a chance for meaningful growth, and if they feel that your brand isn’t considering that or how their needs will change, they will quickly turn elsewhere to find it. With the rise of remote and hybrid work environments, respectively, employees have more options here than ever before.

Element #2: Readily Recognize Value

A second element that can affect employee engagement and commitment is whether or not they feel valued. It’s easy for employees who contribute to organization success to disengage if their contributions aren’t being recognized. In other words, if they feel underappreciated despite their commitment and day-to-day effort, they’ll become discontent and, ultimately, churn. 

There are a number of ways to solve for this problem, such as creating a closed-loop process by which employees can contribute their insights and ideas. These processes are well-honed at best-in-class organizations—some brands not only incentivize idea submissions, but also give employees a cut of the savings their ideas generate.

Element #3: Foster Meaningful Connections

Finally, with the significant workplace changes we’re seeing, creating meaningful connections amongst coworkers and teams has become a critical challenge for leaders. Building sustainable workplace camaraderie in an often-remote work environment, the kind that truly leads to high-performing teams, is easier said than done. 

But the same principles leading to healthy workplace relationships (communication, trust, vulnerability, empathy, kindness) must still exist and be built anew as team composition evolves. Brand leaders who can pull this off will have not only driven improved business outcomes like operational efficiency, but also have built a culture of high employee engagement, commitment, and retention.

Ensuring employees feel heard, understood, and connected are essential to your organization’s success, so the ability to ingest solicited, unsolicited, structured, and unstructured employee feedback is invaluable to finding actionable intelligence. This is especially important when you consider that employee perception of work is the next great diversity frontier. Sex, race, and gender identity are all highly important for organizations to consider, but I firmly believe that diversity in how we as employees  perceive an efficient, effective workplace should be considered in a similar context.

A Better Tomorrow

Considering employee needs, making employees feel valued, creating sustainable camaraderie, and appreciating workplace diversity are all vital to engaging employees holistically, not just to preventing disengagement. Creating and sustaining a workplace environment built on these four pillars is no small task, but it’s what brands will need to achieve if they want to create meaningful experiences for their employees. 

Do that, and your employees will return the favor in the form of greater passion and, ultimately, a greater investment in your customers’ experiences, creating greater success for your organization.

3 Factors to Consider if You Have a CX Incentives Program

Though customer experience (CX) programs are always changing and evolving, one element that many brands constantly consider is whether to add a CX incentives program to those initiatives. 

On its face, such a program may seem quite straightforward—directly reward experience outcomes or add incentives to existing programs, and you’re good to go. However, there are actually quite a few factors that organizations need to look at while weighing an incentives program, not the least of which is ensuring that such programs aren’t subject to abuse or distortion (check out this eBook to read about the cons of incentivizing your CX program). We’ve put together a few lenses through which to view CX incentives. Let’s go through them!

  1. Behaviors
  2. Feedback-Based Incentives
  3. Incentivizing Existing Behaviors

Lens #1: Behaviors

This lens is fundamental to any rewards program because it challenges you to consider which behaviors you’re trying to change. Perhaps more importantly, in whom are you trying to change those behaviors? Taking a behavioral magnifying glass to a potential rewards program helps define its purpose. At the same time, though, brands need to be mindful that behavioral reporting can be skewed. Consider that possibility as you establish which behaviors you’d like to see change and how such changes are reported; that consideration goes a long way toward skew-proofing your CX incentives. 

Lens #2: Feedback-Based Rewards

This question is a bit more specific to EX initiatives, but we’ve seen it come up a lot when working with clients on their rewards programs. It’s hardly uncommon for organizations to reward employees, but whether you’re incentivizing above-and-beyond behavior or encouraging higher engagement, there’s always the risk that some reporting could be exaggerated. The best way to sidestep this potential obstacle is to base your incentive rewards on customer feedback. It’s a pretty safe bet that your employees deserve recognition if the insistence on it is coming directly from your customers!

Lens #3: Incentivizing Existing Behaviors

Most CX incentives programs are built with the goal of changing or improving certain behaviors in mind, but what about staying the course? If your brand is in a good place right now (i.e., most of your employees are passionate about your organization’s mission and you’ve formed bold, human, and invested relationships with your customers), there’s nothing wrong with incentivizing everyone to just keep doing what they’re doing. Even if you see room for improvement in your CX or EX spheres, incentivizing existing behaviors can help provide a good foundation for rewards initiatives before taking things higher. As always, though, remember to consider how that behavior is being reported and how else it could be tamper-proofed.

The Next Step

Considering the purpose and effectiveness of your CX incentives program is of obvious importance, but what else do organizations need to strategize as they build or refurbish such initiatives? Additionally, how can incentives programs help directly stimulate meaningful change and Experience Improvement (XI)? 

Click here to read our full-length white paper on the world of CX incentives programs, in which expert David Ensing considers these initiatives from every angle and presents a carefully researched perspective you can leverage.

Digital Intercept: How to Collect Customer Feedback Without Ruining the Experience

We’ve all been there. You’re shopping for something online and you start to compare options on different websites. You’re excited to explore a particular item, but as soon as you click into the brand’s website, a little window pops up asking you what you think of the website experience. “What experience?” you think. “I barely just entered the page!”

This little pop-up window is more commonly known in the customer experience (CX) industry as an intercept or digital intercept. Though the use of a digital intercept has great intentions, the unfortunate truth is that it can often harm the customer experience more than it improves the experience. 

How Traditional Intercepts Damage the Experience

The ultimate goal of digital intercepts should be to get valuable feedback about your website and user experience so you can innovate and improve; however, some common practices can actually be perceived as intrusive, ill-timed, or irrelevant.

  1. Intrusive

When a customer is casually perusing a site, a random pop-up can feel intrusive to the overall experience; they can feel hassled or like their interaction with your site has been interrupted. Ultimately, what may have been meant as a well-intentioned prompt can feel invasive and could cause a customer to abandon your page.

  1. Ill-timed

If a survey window pops up as soon as a customer arrives at your homepage, your customer has not been able to get a good look at the full page, much less get an impression of how it functions or if they have any suggestions. Therefore, they most likely won’t have much feedback to give you—if they choose to participate in the survey at all. 

  1. Irrelevant

Traditional practices with intercepts are one-size-fits-all; very rarely are they customized to ask the right questions at the right time. This lack of customization means the questions asked are not directly relevant to a customer’s individual experience, leaving the brand with shallow feedback that won’t make a real difference.

What Are Best Practices for Digital Intercepts? 

The end goal of an intercept is not about collecting as much data as possible, but about giving customers the opportunity to provide useful data at the right time.

Here are some suggestions on how brands can do just that: 

Don’t: Create One-size-fits-all Intercept Surveys

Do: Map Out Possible Site Pathways for Customization

Instead of drafting one intercept survey to serve your entire site, consider all the different touchpoints you want to collect data from and then craft questions.

  • Keep in mind how users are browsing your site and craft intercepts around that information. For instance, a feedback tab may be perfect for desktop users, but it’s far too small in size for mobile users. Consider using a banner on your mobile site instead.
  • Be creative! Triggers can be used together to target specific user groups for feedback. For example, if you want to collect more feedback from customers in a specific state, you can set a trigger based on IP addresses.

Don’t: Ask Unnecessary or Irrelevant Questions

Do: Gear Questions Toward the User’s Specific Experience

In order to get the best feedback possible, you have to ask the right questions about the right experience for each type of customer. For instance, a question asking about the checkout experience would be irrelevant to a customer who has yet to make a purchase. Instead, set a trigger for an intercept to appear for a customer with a few lingering items in their bag to learn why they haven’t taken the plunge. 

  • Keep it simple. Surveys that are too long are less likely to be completed and also take away from the user experience. Try to keep it to a few high-quality questions so you can get the information you need without losing your customer’s attention.
  • Revisit the map of possible visitor pathways you created to help prescribe questions to specific user situations. The more tailored your questions can be to a customer scenario, the better. For example, you can ask specific questions targeting those who use the mobile site in order to improve the mobile design and experience.

Don’t: Have Something Pop Up Right Away

Do: Give Customers Time to Provide Informed Feedback 

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is especially relevant when you’re collecting data; if you aren’t collecting quality feedback, your insights won’t create real business impact. This is why it’s especially important to give your customers the opportunity to navigate your site before asking them to give you feedback.

  • Strategically place a feedback tab or another always-available channel on the website for instant feedback. This way, customers have the ability to provide you with feedback outside of the triggers you’ve set up.
  • Set up an intercept for customers who have lingered on the site for some time but haven’t made a purchase or reached out. This allows you to check in and see if they have any questions or concerns.

Enhance, Don’t Interrupt

Whenever you set up an intercept survey on your website, you should ask yourself if it will enhance or interrupt your customer’s experience. If you seek to enhance the experience with every question, you are well on your way to the best feedback, insights, and positive business impact.

Elves Rule: Employees ‘Make’ The Customer Experience, and Should Be Recognized for It

This article was originally published on CustomerThink

Santa Claus (with the help of Mrs. Claus) gets much of the credit for spreading Yule joy; but, isn’t it really the elves who are most responsible? Several years ago, business consultant Matthew T. Grant interviewed me for his blog site (http://www.matthewtgrant.com) and the subject was how, through their employees, companies can move beyond satisfaction to create real customer loyalty behavior. Years later, much of what we discussed still rings true, like a silver carol bell. Here is some of what was covered.

  • Positive customer experience with employees at your company has a far greater impact on loyalty than does satisfaction with a product or service. Indeed, studies have shown that 70 percent of customer behavior is driven not by product quality or efficiency of delivery or advertising, but instead by interactions with your people.
  • You cannot create, or sustain, customer loyalty behavior without committed employees. More than commitment to the company or the brand, more than commitment to productivity or innovation or even the organization itself, we are talking about commitment to the customer. The key is to focus on developing and supporting employees so that they, in turn, focus on the customer. Ideally, you want every employee to be not just a brand champion, but an advocate for the value provided by the organization.
  • Employee advocacy is a framework for linking employee commitment to business results by emphasizing the need for the entire organization to create unique, value-add customer experiences. Optimizing customer experience, then, is everybody’s job.
  • The focus on customer experience, inherent to employee advocacy, reflects the core concept of ‘value’. Value has two components: a rational, functional side and an emotionally-based, relationship side. Most companies focus on optimizing the functional side through quality management and process improvement.
  • Functional elements of value can be important when it comes to meeting customers’ basic expectations, but they often aren’t particularly differentiating and they don’t drive long-term customer trust and customer loyalty behavior. The latter are more frequently engendered by the emotional connection with the company, which in turn is fostered by the attitudes and actions of employees toward the customers.
  • While “loyalty” is generally a term associated with marketing, organizational behavior and employee development are not. Accordingly, the impetus for change usually comes from outside marketing. The move toward commitment and advocacy is generally driven, and championed, by senior executives, though, of course, they can’t do it alone. A traditionally successful partnership will consist of senior leadership working in concert with operations, market research and human resources.
  • Market research provides the employee advocacy data and the insights. The biggest impact this has rests in demonstrating the difference between internal perception of value and external perception. Service managers and representatives, salespeople, and other employees are often out of sync with customers in terms of perceived value of services, products, and features.
  • One way to uncover just how in-sync or out of sync employees are is to ‘mirror’ customer surveys. For example, ask representatives from the organization to answer questions posed to customers as they believe the customers themselves would answer them. Conducting this kind of research will quickly uncover the gaps in perception and help highlight the need for change.
  • For their part, HR can help institutionalize and formalize employee advocacy, and can help cascade this out to the rest of the organization. You want and need their help, but you also need to make sure that you are building in redundancies and diagnostics so that they feel comfortable.
  • Senior management needs to get everyone marching behind the banner of ‘optimizing the customer experience.’ They need to state and restate this again and again. Before they do that, of course, they have to accept that organizational focus and stakeholder centricity are issues of concern. And that can be a real challenge.

Who in the organization doesn’t own the relationship with the customer, either directly or indirectly? Recalling the work of W. Edwards Deming, he believed that everyone in the organization is “either serving the customer or supporting someone who does.” This means that the ideal of commitment and advocacy needs to permeate the entire enterprise.

Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. Instead, many companies find that about 10 percent of their staff exhibit advocate qualities, 15 percent may be actively sabotaging the customer relationship and experience, and the remaining 75 percent are neither saboteurs nor advocates, but could, potentially, move in one direction or the other. What is needed is the kind of research and analysis which will find out where there is overlap between the advocating and committed elite and the rank and file. What is dragging them down toward negativism, and what are they already doing that just needs to be encouraged?

The real question is this: Do you want everyone to be like the advocates and is the enterprise willing to do what it takes to get them there? We can take a lesson from Santa and his corps of elves, the advocates of a joyous Christmas.

Apple Is Tightening Privacy Regulations: What Does This Mean for CX Practitioners?

You might have seen Apple’s latest announcement about their updated privacy regulations, which gives users even more power to control which apps and websites are able to collect their personal information. Apple announced it is cracking down, protecting data from third parties, checking up on app privacy, and enhancing internet privacy.

For instance, a new feature in the Mail app, Mail Privacy Protection, stops senders from using invisible pixels to collect information about the user. This helps users prevent senders (like your brand) from knowing when they open an email.

What These Privacy Regulations Mean for Customer Experience

What this means for CX professionals is that soon we won’t be able to see open rates and click through rates for survey invitations from Apple products (just like Gmail). Since you could lose these success metrics for email campaigns, it’s vital to make sure your surveys are operating at best practice. Otherwise, the emails will land straight in the spam folder.  

My name is Mohammed Shameer, Implementation Specialist at InMoment, and I’ve outlined five ideas for making sure your email invitations are optimised to make sure you are getting the highest possible response rates:

Tip #1: Optimise the Time You Send Out Email Survey Invitations 

It’s important to understand your customers’ frame of mind. One way to do this is to keep an eye on what time of day your consumers are typically responding to surveys. COVID-19 has changed what time of day people are opening emails, and the aggregate data shows that these trends are ‘flatter’ than ever. Since fewer people are commuting to and from work, they are using that new-found time to check emails periodically throughout the day. 

Be sure to analyse your customer feedback data through your tracking pixels to see if the best time to send post-transaction email invites for your business, whether that’s straight after the transaction, a day later, or another time. 

Tip #2: Add a Salutation with a Fallback Option to All Emails

By adding a salutation to your email survey invitations, research shows you will increase your open rates by 29% and your click through rates 41%. If you don’t have a first name for your customer, add a fallback option like “hey there” to make it as personalised as possible.

Tip #3: Get a Pro to Work On Your Coding

Chances are, you know someone in your organisation that can put together an email invitation that will work well enough. But, you might consider a professional’s input to capture even more people. We’re constantly analysing trends here at InMoment, so our coders are at the cutting edge of email survey invitation best practices. 

Additionally, a professional will catch those pesky small mistakes in your code that aren’t as visible—which spam catchers are sending straight into the junk folder (yikes). 

Here are some common mistakes that mean your emails are getting flagged as spam:

  • Spelling mistakes
  • Sender reputation
  • Image only emails (best practice is 70% text and 30% images)

Tip #4: Make Sure All Buttons Are in HTML

You might be tempted to add image-based buttons to your email, which are the easiest option. The drawback to image buttons is that when it’s time to edit them, you need to find the original source file, make an edit, slice, upload, and link. It will take you even more time if you can’t find the source file. Instead, consider HTML buttons—by embedding the buttons in HTML, you won’t get caught in a bind if your linked images become turned off. 

Tip #5: Add GIFs to Your Emails

Movement within emails catches the attention of your customers. If GIFs are done right, they can provide an extra layer of context and information to the customer reading your email invitation. This helps improve the sender reputation, and means that more emails will reach more of your customers. And ultimately, you’ll collect more customer feedback.

To learn more about how you can perfect your approach to email surveys, check out this new paper, “The Art and Science of Email Survey Invitations!”

Four Things to Consider When Choosing a Customer Feedback Management Platform

I may be dating myself here, but does anyone else remember sitting in a conference room surrounded by sets of data tables and analyses so  you could then manually pull numbers, read through all the comments, and manually populate reports? And after all of that, you still had to manually tweak those reports for each audience!  It took days to complete a report. And when I look back on all that, I couldn’t be more grateful for customer feedback management platforms (also known as CFM platforms).

Boy, how times have changed! Customer experience (CX) technology has taken what used to be a days-long process and condensed it to minutes. However, there are two areas the technology hasn’t mastered (yet):

  1. How to service itself 
  2. How to tell a story with feedback. 

Yes, customer feedback management platforms are very good about providing both a high-level snapshot of feedback and a convenient way to drill down into that feedback, but an online dashboard can only take an organization so far. CX professionals need to know what to do with their feedback, tell a story with that feedback, and be able to adapt their approach to the customer experience as their business and the market evolve. And their ability to do that is directly impacted by the CFM vendor they partner with.

How to Choose a Customer Feedback Management Platform

Selecting a CFM platform partner should be about more than just price, “sexy” graphics, branding, etc. In our experience, businesses start the process by distinguishing which  of two primary approaches to supporting a CFM platform work best for their business:

  1. Full-service where the company that provides the platform manages all aspects of the technology (programming, analysis, change management, etc.,) or 
  2. Self-service where a person or persons within the purchasing organization are responsible for all aspects of the ongoing technology usage.  

Of course, there is also a hybrid combination of the two that might be the best fit, but determining which structure is best for your organization depends on the answer to a few key questions.

Question #1: What Resources and Expertise Do You Have In-House?

Creating a best-in-class CX program requires expertise in dashboard and questionnaire design, governance to ensure alignment across programs, a structure that reduces the possibility of customers being over-surveyed, analytics, etc. Many organizations will have one or maybe two areas where they have some expertise, but very few have all the resources and expertise to successfully and smoothly execute a broad CX program.

Question #2: What Do You Want Your Team to Focus on?

Would you prefer that your team take the time to learn the new software and then manage dashboards and program surveys? Or would you prefer they are focused on helping drive change within the organization? Sure, the former will reduce the fee paid to your CX technology partner, but how does that fee compare to the salary you are paying your employee for what might be a better use of their time?

Question #3: How Will You Manage Complex Changes or Requests?

Every company will have unique branding, compliance, ADA, and other needs, and while there are many ways to accommodate these more customized requests, looking critically at how your organization has historically handled them will help inform how you may want to structure the support for your program. So, will you set aside hours in advance for support from the technology partner or will you prefer to use change orders when technology requests come up? The former may be a little more money upfront, but the latter will require getting contract teams involved for each and every request, and could create perceptions of ‘nickel and diming.’ 

Question #4: What Is Your Plan to Keep Your Team Current on Technology?

Your platform partner’s specialists work with the technology every day and are aware of the system’s nuances. And while most CX platform providers offer some type of training, there is always a learning curve for new users that may require more hands-on assistance, especially if the team doesn’t use the technology regularly. Likewise, if you dedicate one person to be your expert, what will your plan be if that person leaves the organization or takes on a new role? When these situations arise, you’ll need to reach out to your technology partner for help, but they will be unaware of what’s been built, which will require additional time to become familiarized.

Setting Yourself Up for Long Term Success

Each organization will  answer these questions differently, but one thing that we have seen repeatedly is the need to set aside some ongoing service support hours with your CFM partner from the beginning of the relationship.  If you wait til after the program has started and certain aspects of the program have already been built, you’ll need to spend additional time to bring your partner up to speed.

If they are there from the beginning, however, not only will they be able to assist more quickly, but they can also coach your team on the best practices for building a more insightful program in the most efficient way. Initially, having no service hours may seem ideal for your calendar, but in the long run, it can be less efficient, create staff frustration, and end up costing more money in the long term.  

Unfortunately, there is no one-size-fits-all solution that will apply to every organization but, on the brightside, there is a customer feedback management solution that will work for every organization, as long as you consider  the above questions. Although, I suppose we could go back to manually pulling all the information—I’ll be waiting for you in the conference room!

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