Solutions

Products

Build an Integrated CX Program

Download our guide to build an integrated CX program in 10 steps.

XI Platform

Enterprise Architecture

2024 Gartner CX Magic Quadrant for VoC

Read the report to find out why InMoment was named a Leader

Learn & Connect

About InMoment

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

Get insights on review and rating data in key industries and verticals

Schedule a Demo

2024 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2024

 
Schedule a Demo

2024 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2024

Author: Cameron Opartkiettikul

Brand Experience
Back to Blog

2 Things Metrics Can’t Tell You About Your Brand Experience

By: The InMoment Team

Customer experience (CX) programs have been laser-focused on numbers ever since the experience space came into being. A lot of organizations consider achieving high scores in NPS, OSAT, and the like to be the holy grail of customer experience, and a goal that every program must be tuned to. After all, if scores are high, that must mean customers are consistently happy, right?

The truth is a bit more nuanced than that, which isn’t to say that metrics aren’t useful—they’re great for letting an organization know that a problem might be occurring at one touchpoint or another. Unfortunately, that’s about all they can telegraph. They’re good for letting brands know that a problem is occurring somewhere in the process, but there are two major brand experience factors beyond that that they can’t clue brands into: brand perception and shared values.

Key #1: Brand Perception

Numbers alone cannot tell you how customers perceive you. The only way to gather that insight is by allowing your customers to submit unstructured, open-ended feedback, then analyzing that feedback for intelligence that you can act upon. Understanding how your brand is perceived can be tricky, even frustrating if you’re contending with perceptions you feel are beyond your control. However, knowing how your customers perceive you is vital to building long-term relationships with them.

More directly, brand perception plays a huge part in individual customer transactions and product experience. In many respects, it may not seem like perception should impact individual interactions, but remember that how customers see you influences whether they want to do business with you in the first place! Understanding how your brand is perceived can give you an opportunity to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), so compare customers’ unstructured feedback to your own messaging goals and work on the gaps preventing a bridge between the two.

Key #2: Shared Values

Every brand has a perception it wants to achieve for both its target audience and the wider world. We’re sure you’ve seen how many companies strive for an environmentally friendly or ethical image. That idea of shared values is also tremendously important to customer relationships, customer experience, and brand experience, and it’s another factor that brands can’t account for with numbers alone.

Much of customers’ trust in your brand is built on the values and identity they feel they share with you, even in a product experience sense. So, similarly to brand perception, go beyond numbers by letting customers tell you why they feel that bond with you, or why they may not. You can then create experience initiatives that build upon what customers see, or want to see, in your organization and the values that you express in your brand mission. When customers feel that fundamental connection to a brand, they’ll continue to come to you even when competition and other market forces are intense.

Click here to read our full-length point of view paper on brand experience. Expert Simon Fraser takes a deep dive into how these forces impact everything from transactions to relationships, and how your organization can leverage them to create Experience Improvement!

Customer Experience Survey
Back to Blog

Three Tips for Shortening Your Customer Experience Surveys

By: The InMoment Team

Let’s face it: shortening your customer experience survey can be overwhelming. You have so many priorities, stakeholders, and initiatives to inform and consider, but you want to capture that information with as few questions as possible in order to avoid survey fatigue.

However tedious the process may be, there’s no denying that CX surveys are one of the best ways to gather feedback for your company. InMoment research has found that responding to a survey was customers’ most preferred feedback method, with the second being to send an electronic message to the company. 

So, How Long Should My Customer Survey Be?

The general rule is that your survey should ask as few questions as possible while still getting your business all the answers you need. Ideally, they would take five minutes or less.

Remember: customers want to give direct feedback—but they also don’t want to spend more than a few minutes doing so. If you’re looking to simplify and optimize your surveys, here are three useful tips to remember when shortening your CX surveys!

  1. Shortening Your Surveys Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Higher Response Rate
  2. Think of Others Before Cutting a Question
  3. Aim for Short, but Complete Surveys

Tip #1: Shortening Your Surveys Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Higher Response Rates

Having a compact survey is helpful to produce more valuable responses, but it doesn’t directly correlate with a higher response rate. According to our study, survey respondents acknowledged that the frequency of receiving surveys has gone up (an increase of 42%), but that their willingness to complete those surveys has stayed about the same (58%). From these results, we can glean that customers aren’t feeling overwhelmed by the increase in survey requests. But what about length?

The vast majority of non-response actually occurs on the first page of the survey or when respondents never open the survey after receiving an invite. In fact, in some of our CX measurement programs, when respondents are asked if they would be willing to continue answering additional questions about 50% to 75% agree to continue. This doesn’t mean that you should make your surveys as long as you want. But it does show, to an extent, that a shorter survey won’t equal more responses.

Tip #2: Think of Others Before Cutting a Question

A brand typically shortens its surveys because it isn’t using all the information. This makes complete sense, but the reality is that data can often become siloed, keeping other departments in the company in the dark. Corporate research managers may forget how their information can be useful for other departments (e.g., marketing, product development). So make sure that your questions don’t just support your department, but your brand as a whole! 

Additionally, before cutting a question out, make sure you know who “owned” that question, and notify them as to why it’s being cut. For instance, if the information that stakeholder needs is readily available via customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce, let them know. That way you are serving both your internal stakeholders and your customers’ needs for a shorter survey at the same time.

Similarly, when shortening your customer experience survey, always keep the customer in mind. When we asked customers why they respond to CX surveys, the top reason was because they believed that companies valued their input. Asking meaningful questions shows the customer that your business actually cares. And you can go even further! For example, an InMoment client that manufactures medical devices and supplies  tells customers they care by sending them letter updates explaining how they’ve taken action based on their survey responses.

Tip #3: Aim for Short, but Complete Surveys

We are going to refer back to the guiding principle we spoke about above: when creating a survey, ask as few questions as you can while still getting all the answers you need. Yes, that’s easier said than done, but not impossible! We recommend using a backward research process where you first ask your internal team, “what decisions do we want to make when we get our survey results, and what information do we want to be able to tell others?” Having other corporate departments in mind will help you create a more condensed and complete survey.

Additionally, your survey should include an open-ended question that allows your customers to talk about whatever they want. Your brand will get a better idea of what customers care about and want changed—and what you need to do to take action. However, keep in mind that “short for shortness’ sake” is not necessarily a good thing. Customers are willing to take longer surveys, but it’s the thoughtfulness and quality of each question on a survey that’s important—not the survey being short itself. 

Your survey should be long enough to allow your customer to completely express themselves and tell their story. With that context, your CX platform will be able to identify opportunities to maximize success and minimize friction—and isn’t that what we all want at the end of the day?

We’ve gone through a couple tips for shortening your customer experience survey. Looking for more?  Click here to understand the empirical evidence that supports shorter customer experience surveys!

ROI
Back to Blog

Three Ideas for Showing the ROI of Experience Improvement (Once and For All)

By: Andrew Crowhurst, NZ Country Manager

Let’s be frank—establishing a customer experience (CX) program’s return on investment (ROI) is one of the greatest challenges that CX practitioners and the organisations they serve face in the modern experience landscape. 

Did you know, according to Forrester research, only 14% of CX Professionals strongly agreed that ROI from CX is well established in their firm?

Across all businesses, the entire C-Suite leadership team is looking to validate an experience program by understanding: what is the financial impact of my CX investment?

The dilemma we face as CX and EX professionals is that across our organisations people can rationalise the need and function of excellent customer experiences with relative ease. We easily create an “emotional connection” and take the leap of faith that our belief will be true.

However, at a business level, when we are looking to make decisions to invest more in our voice of customer and voice of employee programs, we as CX/EX professionals often struggle to show the return on the CX and EX investment and thus can miss out on further invested funds as the rational minds look to maximise returns on what is tangible.

Here are some suggestions I’ve put together to enable the organisation to be customer centric, but also to understand how that centricity adds value to the organisation beyond “emotional connection”.

First Up: Map Your Program to Economic Pillars

In order to prove business value, it’s essential to draw a line back to economic pillars. Here are a few examples of economic pillars that could be affected by your experience program:

  1. Customer Acquisition. Understand the market environment and changing consumer preferences.
  2. Customer Retention. Address organisational or procedural issues that negatively impact customer experience.
  3. Cross-sell and Upsell. Identify opportunities to expand loyalty and share of wallet within existing customer base.
  4. Minimise Costs. Find areas for achieving greater efficiency, eliminating unnecessary elements.

Next: Understand Your Driver Tree

While the industry conditions and expectations for a CX investment vary from one organisation to another, there are basic ingredients across the board that should be included in your benefits driver tree. 

CX practitioners have a much greater chance of proving financial linkage between CX and ROI if they can demonstrate CX’s ability to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce capital.

These pillars are fundamental to how a company’s CEO and CFO manage a business (and how both shareholders and the broader market evaluate a brand’s future viability).

When looking at the wider driver tree there are some more common areas of focus the VoC programs can focus on like a reduction on failure demand costs, a reduction of churn, an increase in tenure and more—see graph below.

Finally: Build Your Financial ROI Roadmap

To win the minds of your executive leadership team, it’s really important for each listening post (i.e. survey program) to think about the related operational and finance measures already being used by the business and link to those so the program is relevant. In other words, you need a financial ROI roadmap to continually point back to.

For example, your roadmap might include steps to reduce repeat calls or reduce wait times. An in-person brand could be focused on sales, basket size, queue time. For an episode survey like onboarding, it could be increasing product/service uptake or reducing early tenure churn. Your organisation already has success metrics that it’s focused on. Find out what these are and draw a link.

Focus where you can on cost saving assumptions first, as these models are typically easier to defend than revenue based models (e.g. reducing churn, increasing share of wallet, increasing average tenure or LTV). They generally require less calculations, less assumptions, and less time to prove an impact. For example, failure demand—where you identify the issues that drive avoidable contacts into the organisation—can be much quicker to identify and act upon. Empowering frontline teams to deliver better outcomes, increasing engagement and reducing staff attrition (or turnover) is another. But something like proving the multiplier effect on acquisition (so how WOM drives new business) is often a lot harder.

For more ideas on building a business case for your CFO (or anyone else!) check out this guide of our most frequently asked questions.

Post-COVID Workplace
Back to Blog

COVID Changed Workplaces. Here’s How Yours Must Adapt

By: The InMoment Team

COVID-19 may finally be receding from many parts of the world, but the changes the pandemic left behind aren’t going away anytime soon. The workplace, for example, changed virtually overnight, as many employees suddenly found themselves working from home and under strict lockdown. This shift in the Post-COVID workplace created a number of paradigm changes that a lot of organizations are still trying to catch up to.

If your brand is one of those organizations, we have you covered! What follows is a brief discussion about the post-COVID workplace. We’ll set the stage by going a bit more in-depth on those changes we mentioned earlier, and end by leaving you a few ideas on how your brand, workplace, and culture can adapt!

The Work-from-Home Paradigm Shift

For a lot of people, starting to work from home wasn’t as simple as setting up a laptop in the living room. Concurrent school closures meant that many employees had to balance homeschooling their kids with work responsibilities in real time. Childcare wasn’t the only home responsibility to blend into work, either—errands, laundry, and the like came together with work to create a previously unthinkable new paradigm. Couple that with waiting for lockdowns to end, and you have what one of our thought leaders fittingly calls “time soup,” a home reality in which everything is stirred together.

Working from home brought about some macro-level changes, too. It’s more difficult for employees to create connections when they’re physically separated, and this poses new challenges for brands that want to create cohesive cultures. Every company that wants to succeed needs a good workplace culture, so the question must be asked: how can brands like yours navigate this new work-life balance and this new culture landscape to find success and Experience Improvement (XI)? Don’t worry; we have a few ideas on that!

How to Adapt

The first key to adapting to the post-COVID workplace isn’t just to accept that working from home is the new normal—it’s figuring out how to make that new normal work for your organization. Think about the work factors unique to your organization—office footprint, nature of work, local COVID restrictions, and your employees’ current setups—without being afraid to try new things. Leaders at the messaging service Slack have said they want to take this time to question everything they thought they knew about the workplace… and that’s a great attitude! Challenge long-held assumptions as you establish what the new normal looks like for you.

Additionally, always be on the lookout for ways to create human connectivity at a time where physical contact is still a relative rarity. Your teams have already probably had Zoom happy hours and the like for the last 18 years, but don’t stop there! Get teams who don’t usually interact with each other into the same chat if you can. Connecting people whose paths don’t normally cross helps create that workplace culture that is so important to brand success. It also gives you a chance to sync different teams’ perceptions of your customer, which is vital for consistent experiences.

The overarching theme here is that adapting to this new workplace the right way isn’t ‘just’ good for employees; it can help you meaningfully transform your workplace culture and positively impact customer experiences, too! To learn more, click here to read the full-length point of view on this subject by our CHRO, Wendy Rand, who can show you more on how to not just adapt to this new normal, but thrive in it.

Experience Improvement
Back to Blog

From Boardroom to Breakroom: How to Make Your Organization an Experience Improvement Machine

By: The InMoment Team

You’ve heard us talk about how your employees are the best resource you have when it comes to experience improvement, but how do you truly harness their power? What decisions and changes can you make in the boardroom that empower employees in the breakroom to deliver on customer experience?

The truth is that training for a customer-centric culture on a location-by-location basis is simply not enough. Because when it comes down to it, turning your employees into your best customer experience advocates is an initiative that needs to be led, enforced, and encouraged on an organizational scale.  

If you’re looking to get started and lead the way for your organization, we’ve broken down your mission into four key parts. And we’re including specific actions you can take to transform your employee culture into something that puts the customer at the heart of everything. Let’s dive in!

Mission #1: Dial in on Core Competencies 

To get anywhere, you first need to understand where you’re headed, right? This is especially true for your Experience Improvement (XI) strategy. 

At the beginning of your journey to a customer-centric culture, you must first craft detailed definitions of the competencies required for employees to deliver on your organization’s ideal customer experience. Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt to audit the level of the required competencies in staff who are currently carrying out customer experience management roles and compare them to your required standards.

Once you understand where you are and where you want to be, you can implement a competency development plan that includes a mix of formal training, on-the-job coaching, mentoring, self-learning, etc. 

Examining legacy and new training initiatives that impact customer-facing staff allows you to ensure that the messages and techniques employees promote are consistent with your organization’s customer experience strategy.

Mission #2: Publicly Encourage a Customer-Centric Culture

Now that you know what your end goal is, don’t let your mission of creating a customer-centric culture be an afterthought in your organization. Be loud about it! 

You should have plenty of examples of best-case scenario customer/employee interactions from your feedback data, so take advantage of them. Regularly share examples of behaviors that illustrate your organization’s desired customer culture. You should include perspectives about what individuals did and indicate why those specific actions had such a positive impact on customers. You can do this in an internal newsletter or use our Moments app to share with company leaders.

Additionally, make sure you’re in constant communication with human resources. You need to ensure that recruitment processes have explicit steps in place in order to check that potential candidates possess the attitudes and beliefs that are consistent with your organization’s customer culture. That way, any person you bring in is already on the same customer-centric path as your company.

Mission #3: Engage and Motivate Employees

You’ve started openly and actively discussing your customer-first perspective; now it’s time to get employees motivated to join in.

Within key teams, identify social leaders or customer experience all-stars and harness their influence by asking them to lead training exercises. Be sure to arm them with coaching materials and other collateral that break down your organization’s approach to customer experience. You can even supply them with feedback data so they can relay to the team exactly what behaviors or processes need to be replicated or improved.

At the same time as you want to be a cheerleader for your initiatives, it’s also important to understand the questions and potential resistance some line managers and supervisors may face when implementing any changes. That’s why it’s vital to hear them out and  support them via training, supplemental materials, and processes to implement desired actions and maintain continuous improvement.

Additionally, you need to be mindful when it comes to employee incentives. You want to be sure that reward structures reflect your customer strategy. For example, many CX programs have shifted their focus from metrics to big-picture business improvements via customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell efforts, or by reducing costs. When they make this shift, they often change their rewards programs from incentivizing customer surveys to rewarding employees who have been shouted out by customers for providing an exceptional experience.

Mission #4: Organize with Customers in Mind

Just as your training initiatives and rewards programs need to be aligned with your Experience Improvement strategy, so too must your org chart and processes be equally aligned. 

Review existing barriers to delivering your desired customer experience, paying particular attention to handoffs between functions/departments and to potential conflicts in functional objectives and targets. 

For instance, let’s say that customers are complaining that it takes too long to have an issue resolved in your online portal. You investigate and find that, in order for any online portal issues to be fixed, a customer must call up your contact center, which in turn must hand that customer off to the IT team in order to actually fix the issue. An organizational solution to such a problem would be to have a team in your contact center dedicated specifically to online portal issues so there is no lengthy handoff.

Additionally, your customer team should have a window into any proposed organizational change to assess—and, if necessary, mitigate—any potential negative impact that changes might have on the customer experience. Remember, your goal is to have everything in your organization—including the way your org chart is structured—work toward the good of your customers. 

Strategizing for Experience Improvement

In the end, Experience Improvement isn’t something that can merely happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication to create a customer experience that keeps customers choosing you over the competition. And, in a world where customers have more options than ever before, being able to differentiate on the experience means everything, making your experience improvement strategy something everyone—board members and frontline employees alike—can get behind.


If you’d like to learn more about how your employees can help to foster your ideal customer experience and fuel your financial success, check out our new infographic, “How Employees Can Help You Grow Customer Loyalty & Value”

Upselling and cross-selling customers
Back to Blog

Proving ROI: A Holistic Approach to Upselling and Cross-selling Customers

By: The InMoment Team

Cross-selling and upselling customers gets a bad rap in the world of customer experience (CX). A lot of brands hesitate to enact full-on initiatives because they don’t want to come off like the worst stereotype of a pushy car salesperson to their clients, and while that’s a worthwhile concern, it’s not the true nature of cross-selling and upselling. In fact, when handled properly, cross-selling can let your customers know that you’re not just interested in their money; you’re invested in their success and the part you play in achieving that. If you want to learn how to telegraph that to your customers, you’re in the right place!

Being Mindful

The first tip we can provide for good cross-selling/upselling is to be mindful of what your client expects. This doesn’t ‘just’ apply to your product—it also applies to your relationships with your point(s) of contact and when customers expect you to reach out to them. Knowing that cadence is its own reward, but it also helps clients stay secure in the fact that you respect their time and bandwidth.

Another, deeper factor here is the notion of a holistic customer, which means getting your company’s departments together and working off of a singular, 360-degree view of said customer. Not only does this help your brand deliver a better experience, but it also helps you know what your customer expects, which informs your cross-selling/upselling strategy.

Best Practices

When you’re ready to upsell, make sure you reach the right point of contact. We know; that point sounds obvious, right? But consider that each part of your offering could sound more or less relevant to multiple people. So don’t bother reaching out to finance about your new marketing tool; instead, take the time to figure out who to talk to in marketing (CX tools are great for this legwork). That way, you’ll be able to reach the person who actually cares about a given part of your product, and they’ll appreciate that you did your homework to find them.

Once you find that person, be prepared to quantify your new feature’s business value. Don’t just reach out to clients thinking that they’ll appreciate a new element solely because it’s new—that approach is guaranteed to give off boiler room telemarketer vibes. Rather, focus not just on knowing what your new feature would do, but how it can help your customer specifically. Case studies, proposed use cases, and the like are extremely powerful tools here.

Good Intentions

This approach to cross-selling and upselling takes more time and effort than reactively reaching out to clients every time you have something new… but it’s also a much more successful tactic. Yes, getting the upsell is great, but doing the due diligence that our approach calls for also lets your clients know that you’re genuinely interested in their business success! When you’ve demonstrated that interest, your clients won’t just be quicker to pick up the phone at the same time next month; they’re going to actively anticipate what you come up with next. In other words, cross-selling and upselling the right way meaningfully improves customers’ interactions with your brand, making it simple to strengthen your bottom line and those relationships in a single motion.


Want to read more about how you can inform successful cross-selling and upselling efforts that will positively impact your bottom line? Read the full article by experience expert Jim Katzman here!

Customer Journey Analytics
Back to Blog

How to Leverage Customer Journey Analytics to Improve Experiences

By: The InMoment Team

Each key touchpoint throughout the customer journey plays a huge role in how a customer judges their experience as a whole. This means that at every touchpoint, the stakes are high and there’s a risk of damaging your brands’ reputation. And the scariest thing? It’s not enough to do the work to understand the customer journey at one point in time; businesses need to constantly keep up because customer journeys evolve overtime. That’s where customer journey analytics can come into the picture!

With the appropriate analytics and action, your company can prevent mistakes along the customer journey from happening. Our eBook, Understand and Predict Your Customers’ Needs with Customer Journey Analytics, breaks down a three step process to improving your brands’ customer journey. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Get the Inside Scoop
  2. Pinpoint the Target Areas
  3. Strategize for the Future

Step #1: Get the Inside Scoop 

The customer journey can often feel like a never-ending puzzle. How do we create the best experience for a bunch of strangers? Well, that’s correct, customers are technically strangers, which makes it infinitely harder to cater to them. A logical first step then is to get to know your customers!

With powerful customer experience technology, InMoment can help your brand eliminate silos and combine data according to segmented groups, so you can feasibly sort through all sources of customer feedback, whether they’re solicited (phone, email, or text surveys etc.) or unsolicited (social, third party review sites, and more). Seeing these data points altogether can give you a general idea of how your customers behave, what they care about, and more. When you have an inside scoop on how your customers are interacting with your brand, suddenly, customers aren’t strangers anymore but people you can get to know better and better!

Step #2: Pinpoint the Target Areas

One of the benefits of having data collected from a myriad of sources is the ability to statistically analyze trends, patterns, and anomalies. By measuring what topics have the most traffic, your company can focus its priorities on the issues that matter. Leveraging customer journey analytics to identify the impact of a topic often proves to be a big time saver!

InMoment’s advanced analytics can generate all the associated comments and details about an issue, where it’s happening, the words and themes most commonly associated with it, how widespread it is, what impact it has on your business, and more. It can also generate actionable alerts so you can closely monitor problems that arise—and take action. 

Step #3: Strategize for the Future

With so much data to manage, businesses often forget the potential for feedback to predict customer concerns and behavior. These predictions allow brands to execute dynamic offers, personalized incentives, and customer-focused policies that build loyalty and drive new business. By utilizing your customer journey analytics to predict future problem points and subsequently implement an effective strategy, your company can proactively meet customers’ needs.

Predictive models work the best when they forecast risks and opportunities, including churn/attrition, revenue, customer segments, likelihood to return/recommend, and potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities. With these forecasts, your brand can maintain an informed and preemptive action plan that will keep customers loyal. Customer journey analytics are not only useful today, but for making business improvements in the long run!


You’ve just learned a bit about how to leverage customer journey analytics in your CX Program—but if you’re looking for a more in depth guide to understanding and predicting customers’ needs, read our eBook!

implementing a CX Program
Back to Blog

Implementing a Customer Experience Platform? Here’s Three Things CIOs Need To Know

By: Robert Van Veenendaal, Head of Delivery APAC

Implementing a customer experience program (or any new technology) is exciting—it takes a massive effort from your whole team to get through the RFP process, work out what your new experience technology will look like, how it will integrate with your existing systems, and sign the contracts. At this point, almost everyone in the business is ready to hit the ground running. That being said, there’s usually one team that feels nervous around this stage: the IT team. This team knows what it looks like to onboard a new partner, handle mass amounts of data, and actually get the project off the ground. 

After thousands of implementations globally, we at InMoment have seen every angle of what it’s like to migrate enterprise-level IT projects: the good, the bad, the ugly. What’s more, most of our clients are working with limited resources and stretched teams with no room for headaches. We’ve designed our entire InMoment Platform implementation process to mitigate our clients’ stress and make this one of the most seamless onboarding processes they have ever experienced.

Here’s three things you need to know about implementing a CX platform:

We Protect Your Team’s Time and Resources During the Implementation Process 

Whether this is your first time implementing a CX platform or you are migrating from another vendor, the implementation process has been carefully designed to minimise the effort on your side. During the onboarding process, our team will work with your IT team to design a robust, low maintenance integration with your existing systems—even out-of-the-box connectors to CRMs like Salesforce. 

Our cloud applications don’t require investments and installation of hardware and software, you should be able to get them running and productive in a fraction of the time compared with on-premise software. DNS configuration, digital certificates, and SSO integration are typically all that is needed to get started with the platform.

Beyond desktop support we do not expect our customer’s IT teams to assist the users in the use of the application itself.

The InMoment Platform uses a built-in ETL tool called “XI Workflow,” which is a data processing and workflow engine built for the needs of large programs. 

XI Workflow minimises data work on your side by:

  • Configuring business rules and calculations
  • Automating data imports and exports
  • Transforming data from its raw source to consumption
  • Establishing data processes through drag and drop features
  • Simplifying and accelerating implementation processes

Furthermore, our data warehouse exports are designed in a way in which introducing new surveys or questions does not require any change to the interface itself. 

Don’t just take it from us—we have endless experience integrating data across some of the biggest brands across Asia-Pacific, and they are happy to endorse the seamlessness of the integration process.

You Can Give Different Employees Varying Levels of Access to Data

The InMoment Platform is able to grant specific authority to different user groups. A single report or dashboard can be shared with different users across the organisation, from C-Suite to the frontline. Using flexible hierarchies, this single report or dashboards can have embedded permissions levels and will automatically open on a drill down level that is meaningful to the user.  

If You Need Support After Your Program is Implemented, We’ve Got You Covered

What sets InMoment apart is our award-winning partnership approach to client relationships. Kicking off from the implementation phase, InMoment has technical resources available globally (including in the APAC region) to act as an extension of your team. Beyond desktop support, we do not expect our customer’s IT teams to assist the users in the use of the application itself.

InMoment offers 24/7 support, which means you’ll always be able to connect to a human and resolve any issue that may surface.  From there, our team at InMoment partners with clients through our Continuous Improvement Framework, so they can evolve their programs as their CX and EX maturity grows. 

Interested in learning more? We’ve outlined thirteen Q&As from leading CIOs here in this guide. Get your free copy here! 

Prove ROI
Back to Blog

The Holy Grail of Experience: How Your CX Program Can Prove ROI

By: The InMoment Team

Every brand wants to crack the code to prove a skyrocketing customer experience (CX) return on investment (ROI). But obtaining stellar ROI is not a simple process, especially if businesses can easily become discouraged when it seems as if their CX programs aren’t producing the amazing results they expected. That’s why some consider it the “holy  grail” of customer experience! But proving the value of your CX program shouldn’t be a process that starts only after the work is done; to successfully show the value of your efforts, you need to consider how you plan to prove ROI from the very beginning. 

Additionally, it’s important to first recognize that the factors impacting ROI cannot be understood linearly. Every department within your company has a different perspective on how their area of the business affects ROI. This makes measuring ROI by customer experience not so straightforward. Your business needs a holistic view of your brand, customers, employees, and the market to drive ROI successfully. 

Here are three tips based on our eBook, “Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program,” that will help your company build a CX program that directly increases revenue. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Design with the End in Mind
  2. Understand Your Customer
  3. Tailor Employee Behavior

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

Designing an experience for customers means not just meeting the present need, but the future one as well. This means optimizing the customer journey by adapting to what customers want—even if your business had never considered those ideas before. 

Your company needs to be ready to remove from, add to, and revise its CX program overtime. For example, our eBook 2021 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report, discusses how digital has been a trend in America and Canada long before the pandemic. The main point is that digital will stay relevant after the government removes restrictions, so businesses need to prepare for the future of digital customer journeys. 

As you already know, your CX program is a powerful tool. When your brand designs with careful attention to the intelligence informing you of incoming issues in the customer experience, your chances of increasing ROI improve immensely. In fact, one study found that a focus on the buyer’s journey reaps over 50 percent greater return on marketing investments than those that don’t. 

Tip #2: Understand Your Customer

Actionable intelligence stems from all kinds of sources and each type of data can contribute to your company’s overall knowledge of your customers. From CRM, to VoC, to loyalty, financial, transactional, and beyond, don’t underestimate the value of tons and tons of diverse information. 

By taking advantage of various data channels, Hawaiian Airlines was able to gain a deeper insight into their customers’ experiences. “InMoment appends upwards of 300 customer-specific data points to each response. As a result, Hawaiian Airlines understands the impact that seat location, aircraft type, departure time, delays, food, flight crew, stops, travel history, and other variables play in each customer experience. This extremely detailed analysis enables Hawaiian Airlines to understand trends and pinpoint the exact factors most likely to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction.”

The combination of CX, market experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) data gave Hawaiian Airlines the holistic viewpoint it needed to direct its CX Program towards greater business outcomes. And that’s the key! The right data can be a customer experience game changer and lead to better business performance.

Tip #3: Tailor Employee Behavior 

Now that your brand knows its customers, it can train employees to accommodate them according to their specific needs. Employees are often the most crucial contact point with a customer because they act as company representatives. What customer would stay loyal to your brand or purchase anything if they encounter an employee who fails to meet their standards?

This case study shows that there was a growth in NPS when the business conducted behavioral initiatives instead of primarily focusing on operational improvements. The data tells the truth! By involving employees your brand learns not only about the employee experience but the customer experience through their lens. When both business and employees work in tandem your CX program reaches a higher potential to increase ROI.

We just explained three tips to capture more revenue through customer experience, but there’s more! Read this eBook that goes over five essential steps on how to focus your CX Program on ROI.

Employee Experience
Back to Blog

The Wrong Way (and the Right Way) to Grow a Customer Experience Culture

By: The InMoment Team

In a post-COVID landscape, businesses across the board have struggled to adapt to evolving customer expectations and, therefore, to keep their focus on a customer experience culture. Some have adapted brilliantly, like Foodstuffs and New Zealand Post. Others, not so much.

Looking to the future, we know there is a certain level of change we can expect, and many of these are outside of everyone’s control. Sometimes, this will involve macro factors like economics, politics, or market trends, and sometimes change will involve micro factors like the demands from a new customer segment or employee health and wellbeing. If brands don’t respond to these factors, chances are, they will disappear.

While there are many things we can’t change, there are two things necessary for a customer experience culture that brands can control:

  1.  Establish loyal raving customers
  2.  Make sure your employees are highly engaged 

This blog is all about the second factor within our control: making sure your employees are switched on and delivering excellent customer service. We know this will in turn affect revenue, retention, and growth.

According to Diane Gherson, head of HR at IBM, employee engagement drives two-thirds of her company’s client experience scores. That proves what Gherson and her team knew intuitively: If employees feel good about IBM, clients do, too.

Transforming Employee Culture: The Wrong Way

InMoment’s Thomas Lorenzo, Sales Director of New Zealand, tells us his point of view on transforming employee culture to be customer-centric. 

Did you know that employee engagement has more of a connection with customer satisfaction than sleeping pills have on reducing insomnia? It’s true:

SLEEPING PILLS & IMPROVEMENT IN INSOMNIA: R = .30

EMPLOYEE ENGAGEMENT & CUSTOMER SATISFACTION:R = .43 ¹

Many businesses make the mistake of relying on external data alone to inform their decisions, which trickles down into employee culture. You might know of a brand who is always trying to match what competitors are doing, digging into market data to solve business challenges, and ultimately looking outside the business for the answers. 

While these factors definitely have a place, relying on this external data alone isn’t the only way to inform your business decisions. By doing so, your employees are likely to feel disengaged and unmotivated. If employees are not brought along the journey, this could lead to big problems for culture. 

So, What is the Right Way To Transform Employee Culture?

The answer to an engaged workforce is to use a combination of data and employee listening. Employees are the lifeblood of your business; therefore, it’s essential to ensure their experiences receive as much attention as customer experiences. To get the most out of your employees, you need to understand their needs and desires including purpose, growth, and satisfaction. Employee feedback is an important part of the data puzzle, and it’s essential to delivering excellent customer experiences.

The data around employee engagement and its impact on revenue has been growing. The Harvard Business Review reported that 71 percent of businesses surveyed ranked employee engagement as “very important” in achieving overall organisational success. Additionally, companies with high employee engagement scores have twice the customer loyalty of companies with average employee engagement levels. 

These results reinforce that the success of employee engagement is measured not just by satisfaction scores, but also employee desire to provide a better experience. Employees are people, and people have an innate desire to engage in meaningful activities. It’s no surprise that employees who are invested in the experience of their individual customers not only create a better experience, but engender loyal brand advocates

Paying Attention to Listening Posts and Taking Action

Listening to market, customer, and employee data together is the best way to make informed decisions in an ever-changing business landscape. All of these play an important role in informing the complete picture of the customer and employee journey with your business, and highlight points in the journey that need to be improved or innovated to stay competitive.

Customer Experience Culture Begins with Employees

To learn more about transforming employee culture which in turn changes the employee experience for the better, we recommend that you take a look at this paper “Better CX Begins with Employees”.

Unstructured Customer Feedback
Back to Blog

Three Ways Unstructured Customer Feedback Helps You Improve Experiences

By: The InMoment Team

It’s no secret that businesses need unstructured customer feedback to have a successful customer experience (CX) program. Without honest, detailed criticism or praise, it’s hard to assess how well a product or service is doing, but it’s also difficult to understand the “why” and take action to improve. That’s why more and more, customers are seeing open-ended questions in surveys instead of metric-based ones: unstructured feedback can lead to a more authentic insight into the customer experience.

But how should brands harness the power of unstructured feedback in their existing surveys? And how can they take the next step of not only collecting that feedback, but derive actionable intelligence from it so they can improve experiences? Our latest eBook, “Unstructured CustomerFeedback: The Key to Unlocking the True Voice of Customer,” walks you through best practices we’ve learned from our many years of experience. This blog will spell out the major benefits of employing those best practices. Let’s get started!

Three Ways Unstructured Customer Feedback Improves Experiences

  1. Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses
  2. Collects the Missing Pieces
  3. Follows the Right Patterns

Benefit #1: Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses

What makes for a “good” survey? Businesses often make the mistake of only asking metric-based questions, which prompt customers to answer very specific questions in very specific ways. This leaves brands only learning what they want to learn and possibly missing other important aspects of the customer experience.

Let’s say a restaurant uses an NPS question to gauge the success of their customer experiences. The brand’s post transaction survey therefore reads, “on a scale of 1-10 how much would you recommend us?” Customers then respond with only a single number and the restaurant is left wondering why customers rate it as low as a 5. As you can see, this metric-based question can only measure the experience, and therefore fails to explain why a customer would or wouldn’t recommend the eatery. 

If the restaurant had followed up the first question with an open-ended “why” question, then its feedback would include the reasoning behind the score, and would help the business understand what it needs to do to improve the CX program. With open-ended questions, brands hear the voice of customer more clearly because customers have more freedom to candidly express themselves, telling your brand what they actually want to tell you, not what you want to hear.

Benefit #2: Collects the Missing Pieces

Open-ended questions mean unpredictable and varied responses, but that’s a good thing! The feedback you receive is so much more detailed, so it can answer questions and address issues your brand wouldn’t have considered in the first place.

One of our clients, a large hotel and entertainment brand, couldn’t figure out why one of its locations was receiving such low scores from guests. This is because it was using a metric that could only see that guests were unsatisfied with their stay, but not exactly why. Through text analytics, the brand was able to analyze its unstructured data and discover that an air filtration problem was allowing smoke from the casino to enter the rooms.

By leaving survey questions open-ended, your brand not only learns the genuine opinion of customers, but also about problems it might have never known about. At the same time, feedback is not always negative; it’s important for your business to know how well it’s executing at certain touchpoints along the customer journey! These game changing pieces of intelligence can help to fill in the blanks so you have a truly holistic view of the customer experience.

Benefit #3: Follows the Right Patterns 

Listening to the true voice of customer gives your business a greater capability to track common problems your customers are having over time. Your brand will then be able to identify and analyze patterns that emerge from responses and address those issues with an actionable plan.

For instance, let’s imagine that customers are having complications with your company’s website. A recent system update has caused a bug that’s disrupting functionability, leading to a seemingly random rise in customer frustration. With unstructured feedback, your brand would be able to recognize a new trend in responses, spot the platform issue, and take action to fix it. 

Unstructured responses make it easier to recognize both positive and negative trends in your CX program, and also helps you to pinpoint new areas to focus on as customer expectations develop over time. 

In the end, failure to employ unstructured feedback means that your CX program will have a hard time realizing its potential. Metrics alone can only measure the past; they can’t help you take action and create better experiences in the future. That’s why the stories you derive from open-ended questions are so vital to your big picture success—and to your bottomline.

 
Unstructured customer feedback can help your business improve customer experiences by unlocking the true Voice of Customer—but how do you best leverage that feedback in your program strategy? Read our latest eBook to read about the best practices recommended by our experts here!

customer journey mapping
Back to Blog

Customer Journey Mapping Explained: What Is It and Why Does it Matter?

By: Helene James, CX Consultant

If you’re in charge of customer experience (CX) at your organisation, you’ll know how important it is to take a walk in your customers’ shoes. But, do you know the true impact of visualising customer interactions? Brands who understand their customers’ journey stand out in the marketplace. InMoment’s global research found that organisations who have developed their customer journey map and understand experiences across these journeys reach the highest level of customer experience maturity. And, mature programs are aligned with outstanding business results. 

Mature businesses experience: 

  • 93% more profitability
  • 92% higher NPS scores
  • 89% greater retention

At InMoment, we believe experiences—the culmination of moments filled with emotions, judgments, learnings, and much, much more—shape the world we live in. And with every moment, there is an opportunity to make a positive impact; to leave a mark. 

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

When you look at the world through your customers’ eyes, you’ve started along a process called “customer journey mapping.” This process involves walking in the shoes of a typical customer as they discover your brand, interact with your products, and services, and decide if they’ll stay or switch to your competitor. Along their journey, there will be multiple opportunities to engage with them and deliver exceptional experiences. It’s time to understand—and own—the moments that matter to your customer.

Why Does Customer Journey Mapping Matter?

Customer journey mapping is a proven way to understand why people do what they do and what emotions drive them. With a customer journey framework, your business can take informed action to solve problems, provide a truly differentiated experience, and drive value for your customers, employees and business. 

How Can I Get My Hands on a Customer Journey Map Template?

Customer Journey Mapping is a flexible consulting engagement for organisations seeking more complete, accurate insights into what their customers really feel, perceive, and experience. It includes resources, expertise, and documentation—including detailed visual representations of the complete customer journey—to identify hidden moments that matter, and close the gap between internal CX perceptions and customer realities. At InMoment, we have in-house consultants who take on the challenge with you. 

Interested in learning more about customer journey mapping? This eBook “Five Steps to Uncovering the Real Customer Experience Journey,” breaks down the strategies you need to build, act on, and evolve your customer journey map. Read it here!

Change Region

Selecting a different region will change the language and content of inmoment.com

North America
United States/Canada (English)
Europe
DACH (Deutsch) United Kingdom (English)
Asia Pacific
Australia (English) New Zealand (English) Asia (English)