Author: Kiersten Lopez

InMoment Signs "Don't Ban Equality" Pledge
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Don’t Ban Equality: InMoment Takes a Stand for Our Employees

By: The InMoment Team

This month, InMoment took a stand against policies that hinder people’s health, independence, and ability to fully succeed in the workplace by joining Don’t Ban Equality. 

The Don’t Ban Equality statement was created in response to states passing bans restricting access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare, including abortion. InMoment is proud to join 650+ globally respected companies in signing this pledge, including Lyft, Nordstrom, Twilio, Yelp, Zendesk, H&M, lululemon, and Etsy. 

Why We Signed the Pledge

Last fall, InMoment established its Inclusion & Diversity statement, grounded in our operational authenticity. In a business built on listening and action, we will drive our culture and growth in a way that celebrates our differences and advocates for inclusion and equity. Joining Don’t Ban Equality was an opportunity for us to put this commitment into action.

Access to comprehensive reproductive healthcare is central to gender equity and women’s full participation in the workplace. For InMoment, restricting access to healthcare is not only at odds with our company’s commitment to inclusion, equity, and diversity but also may affect our ability to deliver the greatest value to our customers. 

While we respect that our diverse workforce—and the customers we serve—have a range of views on this topic, InMoment will continue to advocate to protect the rights of our employees, not limit them. 

Our position is aligned with majority public opinion. In recent polling, 60 percent of Americans stated that the Supreme Court should uphold Roe v. Wade and three-quarters said abortion decisions should be left to women and their doctors. Additionally, roughly 7 in 10 respondents (69%) say access to reproductive health care, including abortion, should be part of the issues companies address when it comes to gender issues in the workplace, according to a recent poll by PerryUndem. 

Our company, communities, and economy improve when everyone is empowered to succeed.

If you want to learn more about the “Don’t Ban Equality” pledge here. You can read more about InMoment’s commitment to inclusion and diversity here.

What Is Brand Equity?
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What is Brand Equity? The Benefits and How to Build It

By: The InMoment Team

When customers are looking for a solution to a problem, they will often turn to a company they trust. Sometimes, they will choose that company even if the product is slightly more expensive because they recognize and trust the name. For example, if a customer is looking for a quick OTC pain reliever, they may turn to Tylenol over a drugstore generic alternative because they know the brand and trust it. That is the essence of brand equity. 

What is Brand Equity?

Brand equity is the measure of the perceived worth of a brand’s product, especially when compared to a generic equivalent product. Essentially, brand equity is a measurement of how much customers trust your brand’s product over another similar product, which can indicate how much more likely a customer is to pick your product over others. The better your brand equity, theoretically the better your company will perform in sales and public perception in relation to other brands. If your brand consistently impresses customers and reaches their expectations, your brand equity will be positively affected. If your brand fails to satisfy your customers because of negative experiences or perceptions, your brand equity will be negatively affected. 

It can be difficult to definitively measure your brand equity, but there are a few ways to gain further insight into how your brand is doing. These are some of the quantitative methods that reflect your brand equity: 

  • Profit margins
  • Price sensitivity 
  • Profitability
  • Growth rate
  • Market share percentage
  • Purchasing frequency

Interviews, social media presence, and customer feedback surveys are another way to gauge how your brand equity is performing. 

Brand equity can help increase your profit margins and how customers view your brand, so it’s an important aspect of your business to nurture. We’ll walk you through the important aspects of brand equity, how to build good brand equity, and why it matters to help you get started nurturing your brand equity. 

Elements of Brand Equity

What is brand equity made up of? Good brand equity comprises several elements. Nurturing each of these elements will help create a full and balanced brand equity that can reach customers and improve public perception of your brand. 

Brand Perception

Brand perception is how customers view and regard a product or service. This is separate from what a company is saying about its own product. Essentially, brand perception is what a customer believes your product or service does—not what a marketing department publishes about the product. While it’s completely possible that brand perception of a product lines up with how a company discusses its own product, it’s not a given. 

There are two sub-stages of brand perception can happen in: brand recognition and brand awareness. Brand recognition is when products are identifiable as belonging to a particular brand. Basically, if a customer sees a product from your company, they would easily be able to identify that it belongs to your brand. Logos and jingles can all be a part of brand recognition. Brand recognition can help your brand become a household name and improve your brand equity. 

Brand awareness is knowing what a brand stands for. While brand recognition means customers recognize your brand, brand awareness shows they understand your brand. Brand awareness is about knowledge, values, and beliefs. A way to think about brand awareness is to think about a customer choosing which brand of laptop to buy. If a customer has a lot of knowledge about how a company crafts their laptops, they have brand awareness for that company. That brand awareness may sway their choice of which laptop to buy, potentially over something like price. Because while one laptop may be cheaper, the customer may be more likely to buy the laptop they feel they understand better and can trust. 

Customer Experience

Customers that have a positive experience with your company are more likely to trust your brand, which can increase your brand equity. Any time a customer comes into contact with your brand is an opportunity to improve their experience and ultimately their perception of your brand. That quality experience with your brand can create a positive impression of your company—and hopefully improve brand equity. The reverse can also be true. Bad experiences with a company can create a negative association with the brand. Doing what you can to improve your customer experience can go a long way with brand equity. 

Quality

Your brand is associated with more than just a product. Brands are also associated with the supply chain, reputation, and trust. Quality across all of these parts of your brand can affect your brand equity. For example, a company that is effective at shipping quickly, restocking, and supplying vendors could increase the quality of its brand equity. In addition, a company with strong leadership, good financial performance, and excellent innovation will also have brand quality—ultimately creating more brand equity. 

Customer Preference

Customers have preferences of brands they buy from, and that can come into play with your brand equity. For example, customers that grew up on a certain brand of cereal are more likely to choose that brand of cereal even as an adult. They simply have a preference for it—as well as more trust and experience with the brand. The same can be said for any brand in any industry. Working with customer preferences as part of your brand equity can help draw and keep customers in the long run. 

How to Build Good Brand Equity

Actively investing in each component of brand equity can improve your brand equity. Refining customer experience, improving quality, and working with customer preferences can help build good brand equity. In addition, building brand awareness, emphasizing positive associations, and forming good relationships with customers are also important to building good brand equity. 

Build Brand Awareness

It’s hard to have positive brand equity when potential customers aren’t sure what your brand is or what it stands for. When customers understand your brand and your products, they are more likely to consider buying them—even when there’s a price difference. You can build brand awareness with strong advertising and marketing, as well as making your brand’s values very clear and visible. 

Emphasize Positive Associations 

Making sure your brand is associated with positive things is an important part of improving your brand equity. To do this, ensure that your business is using responsible and ethical business practices. Those go a long way in giving your company a positive association for customers. In addition, emphasize any time your brand comes into contact with something positive or makes a positive connection or collaboration with an influential organization or person. 

Form Good Relationships

In the end, good relationships with customers are what will truly strengthen your brand equity. Stay in touch with your customers on social media and through any other viable channels. In addition, provide them with excellent customer service through every step of the customer journey. Keep track of negative feedback and use it to smooth out problems in your customers’ experiences with your brand. Ultimately, be authentic with your customers and foster those relationships. 

Benefits of Brand Equity

Brand equity can have a meaningful impact on your company. While it’s obvious that brand equity improves public perception and recognition, there are several other benefits of nurturing brand equity that can really help your company. 

Dedicated Customers

One great benefit of improved brand equity is that you have the opportunity to develop a strong base of dedicated customers. At the end of the day, dedicated customers who support your brand are one of the most important factors for your business future. Loyal customers tend to spend more on average than new customers, and they become advocates for your brand and products. Strong positive experiences with your brand and products through brand equity can help your company reach this. 

Loyal Customer Base: Brand Equity Example

So many brands have been use brand equity to cultivate this passionate customer base. For example, Coca-Cola has actively used brand equity to create a strong sense of brand recognition which keeps drawing customers to its company time and time again. With unique marketing campaigns and recognition as one of the top soda companies, Coca-Cola has developed a loyal customer base that understands what the brand stands for and will continue to purchase its products.  

Extending Product Lines

Positive customer experiences with current products not only improve brand equity, but can also give your company the opportunity to extend its product lines. Once customers trust your brand and know what it stands for, they often more likely to trust future products and services your company offers. That gives your company the opportunity to expand product offerings. A good brand equity will win you lifelong customers that are more willing to purchase new products—ultimately making product line expansion beneficial and profitable. 

Product Line Extension – Brand Equity Example

Many brands have used their brand equity to their advantage in extending product lines. One example is Tiffany & Co, famous for high-end jewelry and engagement rings. Because of the success the company has in jewelry, they have expanded its brand to encompass games, home decor, watches, perfumes, and more. Not only does Tiffany & Co have numerous brand extensions because of its brand equity, but they can also charge a premium for every product sold.

More Impact for Good: Brand Equity Example

One example of a company that has used brand equity to increase their influence for good is Foot Locker. Foot Locker, famous for athletic footwear, has collaborated with NBA stars to award scholarships to student athletes and students in need. They have also worked to be inclusive and diversify their customer base through projects and grants aimed at helping people impacted by discrimination. It comes to show that the more brand equity you can create, the more good your company can do.

Great Impact as a Company

When your company has good brand equity, it is able to make better connections that increase your impact as a company. For example, more success as a brand can lead to brand collaborations that benefit your company and bring more recognition. Your company can also find new investment opportunities or supplier rates that allow you to have greater impact. 

Increased ROI

When customers trust your brand, they are more likely to make future purchases from your companies. If customers are continuing to purchase from your company, you are going to see a return on investment for what you put into improving your brand equity. Brand equity isn’t something that will leave your company without visible results. The ROI for your efforts can be seen in product lines. 

Overall, brand equity is an important measurement of the perceived worth of your company’s products and services over generic alternatives. Brand equity can be cultivated through many aspects of your business, including awareness and building relationships. When your company is nurturing brand equity, your brand can extend product lines and see ROI on investments made in brand equity. 

Here at InMoment, we want to help your company build its brand equity and CX reputation. It’s time to start nurturing your brand equity with InMoment.

Request a demo of our CX solution to see how InMoment can help you improve your brand equity.

ROI-Focused CX Program
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4 Keys to Transforming Your CX Program to an ROI-Focused, Revenue Generating Machine

By: The InMoment Team

2022 is being branded as “The Year of the Squeeze.” Challenging economic conditions that are bordering on a recession have forced businesses to either raise prices, cut costs, or a combination of both. And due to these conditions, businesses need to justify the return on investment (ROI) for every initiative—including their customer experience (CX) program.

CX Network, an online CX organization sponsored by InMoment, recently asked a panel of over 250 customer experience experts across the globe what the top obstacles complicating customer experience investments were and compiled them into a report. Unsurprisingly, the answers were return on investment, finding budget space, and enabling stakeholder buy-in. 

The key to facing these challenges is to build an ROI-focused customer experience from the ground up (and not as an afterthought). Customer experience strategist Simon Fraser has developed a list of four tools, tips, and techniques to help do just that!

4 Keys to an ROI-Focused CX Program

  1. C-Suite Buy-In
  2. Design with the End in Mind
  3. Holistic View
  4. Don’t Stop

#1: C-Suite Buy-In

Before you can further invest in your CX program, you’ll need the approval of your board or c-suite. In order to do this, you need to talk about the situation and possible complications, as well as answer any questions they are going to ask. 

The situation refers to the environment or sector that your business is operating in. Then, it is important you state the complication. What is giving your c-suite headaches? What problems are they facing? What are they worried about in regards to a customer experience program? Lastly, what questions are they asking that you need to be able to answer through your customer experience program? 

One common question is, ”How can I hold on to my happy, loyal customers who prefer the way things have been, and are opposed to change?” Your customer experience program needs to be able to provide those answers. 

You also need to be able to prove the value of what you are doing in regards to your customer experience program in the terms that matter most to the c-suite. At InMoment, we focus on four economic pillars that most businesses are trying to focus on. 

  • Customer Acquisition: This comes from supporting the brand positioning and positive word of mouth.
  • Customer Retention: Forrester research shows that a customer who receives a positive experience is 2.7x’s likely to remain with your brand as opposed to a customer who has had a negative experience. 
  • Increasing Customer Lifetime Value: Additionally, Forrester research also proves that a customer who receives great experiences is 2.7x’s more likely to purchase additional products.
  • Minimize Costs: This can take many different forms. It might be how you focus to try and move customers to a digital experience or how you can improve to receive less complaints. 

You need to ask yourself: What is it that my business is looking to solve and how am I designing a customer experience program that supports each of these pillars? That is what the c-suite is hungry to understand.

#2: Design with the End in Mind

Have you ever undergone a major home renovation? If you have, you’ll know that during the first meeting with the architect, you don’t discuss where the power outlets are going to be. Instead, the architect asks why you are doing this renovation, what lifestyle you hope to achieve with it, and what will that look like in five years? 

The same train of thought can be used for CX programs and CX strategy. Everything should be tied into your vision as a business. While designing surveys and preparing email marketing campaigns are important, you need to make sure the designs are in line with your customer vision and brand promise, and that your customer experience program can support the changes that you need to deliver. 

#3: Holistic View

A fully functioning CX program cannot rely on transactional surveys alone. You need to be measuring and managing customer journeys, not just transactional data, so that you can improve on the customer experience as a whole. 

There are four categories of data to be examining to accurately run your CX program:

  • Customer Surveys: Aside from transactional surveys, you need to be measuring journeys from a customer perspective and being able to access those points
  • Other Feedback: To build on customer surveys, you need to be managing complaints, social media, and creating a space where your employees feel comfortable providing feedback. 
  • Internal Data: Most businesses will have a strong customer relationship management system (CRM) that will store all customer and behavioral data. Along with that, it will also store financial and operational data from within your business. Integrating this data against your CX metrics is essential to the success of your business. 
  • Market Data: You need to know what your competitors are offering so that you can continue to improve your customer experience and keep delivering on your brand promises. It is also important to know how your potential customers are feeling and what changes you can make to convert them. 

You need to be listening to social media, complaints, and your employees who are likely to understand where your paint points are. By measuring data from transactions, along with internal data, market data, and miscellaneous data, you’ll be able to complete the picture of your customer’s experience. 

#4: Don’t Stop

It is vital that you maintain momentum in your CX program transformation. Remember, customer experience is not a linear piece. Rather, it is a continuous improvement journey. 

You need to ensure that you have the governance around your customer experience program to drive change. Most businesses are looking at experience data that has happened in the past. What you need to be doing, is measuring and managing your CX program and making sure it is continuously evolving with your business. Furthermore, it’s important to develop a “Culture of Commitment” where every employee across every department is focused on continuous Experience Improvement (XI) and understands (and is dedicated to) that mission. Only then will your CX program be truly ROI-focused—and achieve all the success it’s capable of.

For more in depth information on these four steps to building an ROI focused customer experience program, watch the full webinar here!

Customer experience experts singapore
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3 Highlights from Customer Experience Experts at the XI Forum Singapore

By: The InMoment Team

This year, the InMoment team put together the first ever XI Forum Singapore—and what a day it was! With 100 delegates and five customer experience experts from the leading brands in Southeast Asia, this day was one to remember.

On the main stage, customer experience experts from Alliance, HSBC, and Foot Locker taught delegates what to do to elevate their experience program. In case you missed it, here are three things you can apply to your own program to start seeing high impact.

3 Things Customer Experience Experts Had to Say at XI Forum Singapore

Highlight #1: For Customer Retention, Closing the Loop Is a Must

Put simply, “closing the loop” means following up with each dissatisfied customer to try and mitigate their negative experience. This is a big job, and typically has an entire team dedicated to closing the loop on customer feedback. To make sure these teams can act as quickly impossible, brands can empower the individuals in their teams to act autonomously. Set up escalation alerts tied to poor customer experiences to trigger the teams to take immediate action.

Highlight #2: Your Frontline Employees Are Your Greatest Asset—Keep Them Incentivised

We know that frontline employees are in charge of delivering customer experiences every day—and we also know that in some businesses, these are contractors or third parties that you don’t exactly have control over. What’s the key to incentivising these third party employees? These frontline employees need strategic communication. If you explain to them WHY they need to deliver good experiences, you are likely to see a higher uptick in excellent customer service. On the flip side, you can explain to them that if customers have negative experiences, they are less likely to return, which has negative implications for the third party contractors. It’s a tricky job to keep these employees engaged, but it’s possible with the right communication and action plan. 

Highlight #3: Capture Internal Data from Employees To Unlock Insights Into Emerging Markets

Again, employees can be a goldmine of information—but are you listening to them? In Foot Locker’s case, the brand relies on employee data to understand when and how to expand into emerging markets. With your employees interacting with customers every day, don’t forget to ask them what they’re seeing and experiencing—chances are their insights will point to cost savings and retention opportunities.

Keep an eye out for our Q&A interviews with the speakers in the coming weeks, and check out the full post-event wrap up here!

InMoment Announcements 2022
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In Case You Missed It: 3 Major InMoment Announcements You Need to Know About

By: The InMoment Team

It’s been a huge month for those of us in the InMoment Community! We’re always looking for the next opportunity to take Experience Improvement (and the experience industry as whole) to the next level, and this month, we made three major InMoment announcements that tell the world about the next steps in our mission: InMoment’s acquisition of ReviewTrackers, InMoment being named a leader in “The Forrester Wave™: People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms, Q2 2022,” and, finally, the launch of the latest XI Platform capabilities.

Want to know more about these headlines? We’ve put together a quick guide to help you navigate the three latest InMoment announcements and what they mean for you. Keep reading to get the 411!

Your Guide to the Three Latest InMoment Announcements

Announcement #1: InMoment Acquires Leading Customer Review Management Company ReviewTrackers

The InMoment family just keeps growing! Our latest addition, ReviewTrackers, empowers over 175,000+ business locations to better understand and manage their customer reviews across 100+ sites with their review management technology. 

InMoment and ReviewTrackers joining forces is great news for today’s brands! Online reviews are a great source of unsolicited customer feedback, and they often offer perspective from a different segment of the customer base than surveys or other feedback channels. The combination of different sources for voice-of-customer provides a more holistic, integrated view of the customer experience, and therefore a more accurate representation of the broader customer experience. 

Leveraging InMoment AI, an intelligence layer of the XI Platform that utilizes natural language processing (NLP), natural language understanding (NLU) and machine learning (ML) to facilitate and automate action, this unstructured data is brought to life.

Now, more than ever, it’s vital to monitor, manage, and respond to online reviews from customers in order to accelerate new customer acquisition and improve customer retention—all while driving more authentic connections with customers. This acquisition empowers InMoment customers to do just that!

Read more here!

Announcement #2: InMoment Named a Leader in People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms Report for Q2, 2022

Our next InMoment announcement covers a report by third-party analyst, Forrester, entitled “The Forrester Wave™: People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms, Q2, 2022.” Forrester Research, Inc. evaluated 13 of the most significant text analytics vendors across 29 evaluation criteria, and named InMoment along with only four other vendors as a Leader in the evaluation. 

In its vendor profile of InMoment, Forrester states that the company’s acquisitions of MaritzCX in 2020 and Lexalytics in 2021 are “…paying off—the acquisitions beef up InMoment’s people-oriented text analytics capabilities and enable it to address all relevant use cases (beyond just VOC or CX analytics).” The report states “InMoment XI  is a solid choice for customers who want a platform with a well-balanced mix of knowledge and ML-based AI, the ability to deploy OOTB solutions quickly, and deep custom application development capabilities (especially for embedded analytics).”

“We are pleased to be named a Leader in Forrester’s People-Oriented Text Analytics Platforms report,” says Mehul Nagrani, General Manager, AI Product & Technology. “It validates for us our approach to providing an integrated platform with deep expertise in analyzing both structured and unstructured data, and reflects the hard work of the team to integrate key Lexalytics text analytics and machine learning technology into our product portfolio. We are committed to delivering AI-based technology  to further our ambition of helping businesses improve experiences for their employees and customers.”

Read more here!

Announcement #3: The Latest Updates to the Award-Winning XI Platform

We couldn’t be more excited about this InMoment announcement: the launch of the latest set of technology innovations on our market-leading XI Platform! With these additions and updates, organizations will be empowered to acquire new customers, retain and increase loyalty of existing customers, and drive improved business performance—all within one seamlessly integrated platform.

Want to know what’s new? Here’s a quick roundup:

  • Product Experience Cloud™: An experience ecosystem built to help product managers, developers, and UX designers understand friction points that need to be addressed while also providing perspective to customer experience teams on how product interaction impacts the larger customer experience.  
  • Data Exploration™: The industry’s first search-based text analytics solution that explores unstructured data from any source for a single integrated view of experiences based on key themes, underlying sentiment, relative customer effort, intent and emotion so businesses can explore feedback and take action faster.
  • Spotlight™: An award-winning, sophisticated AI-based and natural language processing (NLP) power-user application for real-time automated insights discovery from all types of customer experience signals to improve customer and employee acquisition or customer recovery and retention.
  • Moments™: InMoment’s real-time mobile app, built to socialize experience feedback through a curated data feed which can be displayed on your phone or tablet, or through monitor displays in an office environment to help teams drive improvement on the go by sharing feedback, adding experiences to a collection of like comments, and closing the feedback loop to grow stronger customer relationships.

In addition, enhancements have been made to existing XI applications to better facilitate inclusion, intelligent decision making, and sophisticated data workflows, all leveraging  industry-leading AI. They include:

  • Survey: The industry’s first WCAG 2.0 compliant feedback collection solution that uses a proprietary enhanced method, allowing businesses to efficiently integrate data workflows reducing errors and ultimately cost.
  • Reporting: Expert-designed industry and role-specific dashboards for the front line, CX teams, and C Level stakeholders that deliver an aggregate view of what’s happening by program, across regions, and through locations with flexible data views that unearth key business drivers.
  • Workflow: Automating the most time-consuming part of data analytics processing, Workflow seamlessly segments and drives automated action on your customer base within the XI Platform and triggers events in existing enterprise systems such as Slack, Hubspot, Marketo, Salesforce etc.
  • InMoment AI: Underpinning all XI applications is industry-leading InMoment AI, an intelligence engine powering both structured and unstructured analytics across the platform. InMoment AI combines advanced Machine Learning algorithms with industry specific taxonomies, near-universal language support and encapsulated vertical knowledge to deliver rich insights, predictive analytics, and actionable recommendations through the XI application ecosystem.

Read more here!

Realizing the InMoment Mission

​​Improving experiences is why InMoment exists. Our mission is to help our clients improve experiences at the intersection of value—where customer, employee, and business needs come together. These latest InMoment announcements are our next steps in realizing that mission. We can’t wait for the road ahead!

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customer experience speakers xi forum sydney
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5 Things We Learned from the Customer Experience Speakers at the Sydney XI Forum

By: The InMoment Team

After 14 customer experience speakers, 250 delegates, two hands-on workshops, and hours of networking on the Sydney Harbour cruise, the 2022 Sydney XI Forum is done and dusted. That means it’s time to take what you’ve learned and start doing the work to elevate your experience program! 

We heard from award-winning customer experience speakers from some of Australia’s biggest brands—Craveable Brands, The NRMA, Rest Super, Foxtel, and JAX Tyres & Auto—not to mention two of InMoment’s global leaders. The day was filled with practical tips that you can apply to your program from day one.

If you missed out on the event, don’t worry—here are five key takeaways you can use to apply to your experience program today! 

5 Pieces of Advice from Our Customer Experience Speakers

#1: Managing Experiences Is Not Enough—The Future Is Experience Improvement

InMoment’s Global CMO, Kristi Knight, took us through the evolution of customer experience (CX). CX started out in the golden age of advertising, market research, and understanding consumers. Then, the internet was born, and online surveys were created to collect customer feedback in a timely manner. Next, we started managing experiences, and we recognised that the total experience a customer has is a collection of moments and interactions along their journey. The idea of simply “managing” metrics tells your business where you are and where you’ve been, not necessarily where you’re going. The future of CX is moving past managing experiences, to actually improving them through experience improvement. 

#2: Instead of Collecting More and More Data, Take Action On the Data Your Already Have

The CX industry has made big promises to brands; Essentially, if you listen to customers and act on that feedback, you’ll see results like loyalty, retention and other positive business outcomes. The XI Forum challenged our perspective on the traditional model of listening to feedback and collecting endless data. The ultimate goal for brands is to move beyond collecting operational and customer feedback, toward building differentiation from competitors, and ultimately designing and innovating new revenue streams and customer segments for the future. Make sure your CX platform is equipped to layer all types of feedback, whether that be direct (surveys) data, indirect data, or inferred (CRM) data.

#3: Make a Plan to Leverage AI in Your Experience Program

Like most industries, customer experience leaders are currently challenged to integrate AI into their programs to free up some of the manual tasks of improving experiences. If done correctly, AI can power your natural language understanding capabilities to show your business which actions to take to move the needle.  Ideally, every CX  platform should tell brands WHAT to do next.

To do that—survey data is not enough for AI to work properly, and there isn’t a robot sitting behind the platform making sense of your customer data and creating business insights for you. What you can do today is create bespoke AI models that will help make your platform smarter—for one, you can train your platform on what a churning customer looks like, and set up triggers to reach out to valuable clients when they are signaling dissatisfaction. 

#4: When It Comes to CX and the C-Suite, Optimise Your Dashboards

The C-Suite of any business is typically one of the most important stakeholders in your CX program. They need to be informed about what kind of CX initiatives are happening, where the CX problems are, and the plan to tackle them—AND they are extremely time poor. 

To solve this, optimise your C-Suite CX dashboards using these principles: 

  • Purpose: make the purpose of the dashboard crystal clear
  • Relevance: make sure each element of the dashboard will resonate with your audience, which may require bespoke configuration 
  • Engaging: these data visualisation on a C-Suite dashboard, should be simple and straightforward—take the guesswork out of convoluted charts and diagrams. Add branding, colours, and themes to make it visually appealing. 
  • Story: create and place the widgets in isolation and then decide the consumable order—the ultimate goal should be an overarching CX story that your C-Suite can easily understand 

#5: Level Up Your Experience Program by Marrying Together Multiple Voices

In the last keynote of the day, the CEO of JAX Tyres & Auto, Steve Grossrieder, described how their business is layering together voice of customer, voice of employees, and even voice of franchisees for a complete view of the customer journey. In doing so, the entire culture of the business is focused on the customer. For true customer centricity, it might be time for your brand to consider adding in another data set to further understand your employees, franchisees, partners, or other stakeholders.

Keep an eye out for our Q&A interviews with the speakers in the coming weeks, and check out the full post-event wrap up here!

Social Listening Solution
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How Two Companies Leveraged a Customized Social Listening Solution to Gain Game-Changing Insights

By: The InMoment Team

Many organizations are drowning in pools of untapped social data. Why? Because options to structure and analyze that data can be limited and even if businesses are able to compile that data, it often remains siloed from other data, such as voice of customer (VoC), call center, and more. That’s where InMoment’s game-changing customer social listening solution comes into play.

InMoment’s solution not only allows brands to access that data, but also to integrate that with other data sources, providing scalability and the deep, data-driven understanding that teams need to achieve their goals. 

But don’t just take our word for it! Check out the  three benefits real companies have realized leveraging InMoment’s customized social listening solution.

3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution 

Benefit #1: Greater Access to and Value from Social Data

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

Benefit #3: Effectively Filter Social Content to Only Extract Relevant Data

Benefit #1: Greater Access to and Value from Social Data

A consumer electronics brand who partnered with InMoment previously approached Voice of Customer by designing, distributing, and analyzing a wide range of surveys. The brand knew they needed to diversify and optimize their approach to customer experience (CX) to continue to improve, so they partnered with InMoment! Their new partnership allowed the company to integrate social media content with their VoC data. This push allowed them to: 

  • Reduce survey spend by substituting social signals where possible
  • “True up” social data with survey responses to explore the feasibility of reducing their survey spend
  • Identify common themes and correlations in the social data to use as a reliable, immediately-actionable proxy for customer survey responses

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

A leading architect firm has leveraged the InMoment platform to structure and analyze massive amounts of natural language feedback. The firm now has the ability to achieve a deep, data-driven understanding of customer experience in airports by mining omnichannel social media data from dozens of America’s airports. The result?

  • A data-driven voice of customer program that can help win contracts and build airports that better serve stakeholders and travelers alike
  • More meaningful and accessible analysis of social data via the platform’s intuitive functionality 

And to top it all off? The customized social listening solution had a one week integration time, encompassing three data sources, 869,973 words, 30,000 travelers, and the top ten airports!

Benefit #3: Effectively Filter Social Content to Only Extract Relevant Data

Both brands we mentioned before had what many companies think they need: large amounts of data. But the problem with so much data is that it is difficult to find the signal through the noise and filter out the insights that will really make a difference.  But with InMoment’s social listening solution’s ability to effectively filter out actionale, relevant data, these two companies were able to see incredible return on investment.

Here’s what the benefits look like:

  • Run better surveys by identifying insight gaps
  • Easily configure flexible one-off analyses while also establishing and validating long-term trends
  • Help leadership teams make better-informed decisions around marketing and product strategy

When it comes to mining social data, working smarter, not harder is always the best route to take. Many companies struggle to grasp a true understanding of their client experience, thinking they have an ear to the ground because the data is rolling in. But all data is not created equal! That’s why it’s essential to have  a customized social listening solution to unlock  structured data, analyze for key insights, and capitalize on the most relevant opportunities. 

Learn more about InMoment’s customized social listening solutions here!

Customer Onboarding Experience Surveys
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How to Write the Best Customer Onboarding Surveys & Improve the Experience

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

It’s no secret that customer onboarding is one of the most crucial (and oftentimes challenging) stages in a customer’s journey with your brand. Indeed, the onboarding process usually ends up setting the tone for their subsequent interactions with your employees, their  perception of your messaging, and even their product experience (PX). These and other variables make a well-designed onboarding experience of utmost importance to organisations and their customer experience (CX) initiatives.

Today’s conversation briefly touches on how your organisation can ensure that its onboarding experience isn’t just up to par, but built to ensure bold, human, and dynamic relationships with your customers. There are several reasons a lot of brands have mediocre or subpar customer onboarding; one of the biggest is because they don’t design their onboarding surveys with the end in mind.

What Is Designing with the End in Mind?

One of the most commonly held beliefs in the customer experience world is that a CX programme that gathers incoming data is a CX programme that’s good enough. This isn’t the case. Your initiative should be more than a metaphorical trawler net for data, especially if you want to fundamentally improve your customer onboarding processes. This is especially true for onboarding surveys.

Rather than aiming to collect data and then attempt to mine insights after the fact, brands should design their onboarding surveys with the end goal in mind before collecting any feedback from new or prospective customers. This approach may seem a bit unorthodox, but I promise it will save you time, resources, and customers. Designing with the end in mind will also make it much simpler to actually improve opportunity areas, not just identify them.

How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?

There are a few best practices to bear in mind when designing (or redesigning) your surveys with the end in mind. Additionally, remember that these practices don’t have to apply solely to your surveys; you can aim them toward any facet of your experience programme and any goal that you need it to achieve.

First, take a hard look at your existing onboarding survey; evaluate what your existing customers have said it accomplished well and where it could’ve been better. Gather similar feedback from customer-facing and CX teams as needed. Identifying factors like these before you deploy your survey will give it (and indeed your wider programme) a proverbial north star, which will help you decide which audience segments and channels to devote your CX resources to.

Additionally, once you’ve identified the data you need your survey to collect, spell your related onboarding improvement goals out in concrete, quantifiable terms. Defining your goals with numbers will help you identify improvements much more precisely, and will also give you something tangible to present to the boardroom when you move to secure additional funding. A lot of programmes get stuck in defining their objectives abstractly, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether any improvements were actually made. This approach nullifies that problem.

Click here to learn how Virgin Money was able to improve their customer onboarding experience.

Meaningful Experience Improvement

Designing with the end in mind is not a simple task for any element of a CX initiative. It’s an approach that demands a great deal of time and discipline at the start of the process, followed by continuous dedication as you begin to collect insights. However, if your organisation is ready to invest that effort, you’ll begin to see much more promising results from your surveys than if you simply turn your listening posts on and dredge your data lake for anything potentially useful. Designing with the end in mind saves you and your team a great deal of both time and effort down the line.

Why? Because this approach will grant you only the most pertinent insights and feedback, enabling you to create meaningful Experience Improvement (XI).

Click here to read my full-length point of view article on what else your organisation can do to create consistent, successful, and peerless customer onboarding experiences. I present a few other best practices I’ve observed (and executed) in my many years within this space, and know that they will help you on your journey to improved customer onboarding.

Customer Aggression in the Workplace and how it impacts the employee experince
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How Customer Aggression in the Workplace Has Forever Changed Employee Experience

By: The InMoment Team

We know that everyone is sick of talking about COVID, but the pandemic has had far-reaching effects on customer experience (CX) and employee experience (EX) that will persist long after the virus is finally contained. Staying on top of these effects is hugely important to continuous Experience Improvement (XI), which is why today we want to take you through one of the biggest elements we noticed in our recent experience trends report: customer aggression in the workplace.

Even if aggressive customers haven’t been a problem for your brand specifically, you’ve no doubt heard all the horror stories about employees and brands for whom they have been. The problem has become widespread enough that it’s changed many employees’ workplace expectations, and it’s in that context that we all need to consider a few questions. Why has this become so much more common, and how has that problem changed employee experience?

The Roots of Heightened Customer Aggression

Figuring out how best to respond to aggressive customers begins with finding out why this problem is ramping up to begin with. The answer probably won’t surprise you: the pandemic has been, to put it lightly, an extremely stressful time. Our research and that of many other organizations have found a direct correlation between that stress and the customer aggression we’re seeing in workplaces around the world.

As you might expect, this aggression has resulted in big changes when it comes to employee expectations. Whether it’s diffusing unruly airline passengers or a fight over Pokemon cards (not even kidding), many employees are experiencing enforcement fatigue from attempting to uphold COVID regulations in the face of hostile customers. As a result, many employees are expecting brands to make some pretty big changes in the post-pandemic era.

How Customers and Employees View This Problem

Another factor critical to addressing aggressive customers is understanding how experience stakeholders view the problem. That was another element to all of this that we closely researched, evaluating both customers and employees across a few different demographics. What these folks had to say might surprise you!

For example, when asked “what would you think if you witnessed a customer acting aggressively toward an employee at a place of business?” only 48% of customers said they’d perceive that behavior negatively. 6% of customers would develop a negative perception of the employee and the brand. Finally, when we looked at this data against a more generational backdrop, it became clear immediately that Generation Z shoppers would be the most likely to feel empathetic toward the employee.

Impact of Customer Aggression on Employee Experience and Brand Perception
Image #1: Customer responses to the question,“What would you think if you witnessed a customer acting aggressively toward an employee at a place of business?”

To be clear, this question was asked under the assumption that the employee remained calm while the customer was being aggressive. But what happens when we change the scenario to both parties being aggressive toward each other? With that change thrown into the mix, 24% of customers had a negative perception of all customer behavior, Generation Z shoppers became less empathetic toward the employee, and negative sentiment toward the brand among all customers skyrocketed from 6% to a whopping 35%.

Customer Aggression and Employee Aggression
Image #2: Responses if the employee was aggressive in return

Clearly, mutually assured aggression isn’t the solution. What is? 

Employee Commitment 

The conventional wisdom for a lot of brands here is to closely support employees as incidents like these occur. That’s certainly important, but as The Great Resignation is demonstrating, strictly reactive support is insufficient for employee Experience Improvement (XI).

The answer, then, is for brands to dig much deeper in their employee support, going from reactive employee advocacy to something more fundamental and progressive: employee commitment. You can achieve employee commitment by working hard to drive trust, transparency, and communication, with the end goal being to help employees feel a human, emotional connection to their work. Taking this proactive tack with your employees won’t ‘just’ empower them to deal with aggressive customers; it will help your organization retain talent amid all this unprecedented churn.

Defining how exactly to go about employee commitment is going to look different from company to company. The work isn’t easy and can take some initial time, especially as you identify the end goals your commitment initiative needs to fulfill and then design that program around them. But that guiding ethos of trust, transparency, and communication makes a world of difference for employees who are feeling fatigued from aggressive customers. It’s an approach that will make them feel truly supported instead of just patronized, which will inspire them to handle these situations gracefully and create Experience Improvement for themselves.

Understanding and dealing with customer aggression is extremely important, but there’s a lot more to this experience universe for brands to consider. Want to learn more about the trends we’re seeing amid employees and customers in 2022? Click here to read our full-length trends report for this year, where we take a deep dive into everything brands need to know for their experience initiatives!

XI Forum Sydney, APAC's CX Event
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Six Reasons to Attend XI Forum Sydney 2022

By: The InMoment Team

We are just one week away from the XI Forum Sydney on June 1st! The InMoment Team is so excited for this year’s event, which will be in-person for the first time since the pandemic hit—and we know that this is an incredible opportunity for anyone, whether you’re just starting out on your CX journey or you’re ready to shake things up.

We’ve designed this all-in-one-day conference to make sure each delegate leaves with the best, most actionable information to inspire their experience program. At the end of the day, we want you to be confident that you gained as much value as possible from the break-out sessions, one-of-a-kind stories, and unique experience programs presented.

With all we have planned, we are confident XI Forum Sydney will do just that. Here are six reasons to attend!

6 Reasons to Attend APAC’s Next CX Event, XI Forum Sydney

The Most Hands-On Content in the Industry

Whichever part of the customer journey you’re in charge of, you can expect the latest thought leadership to stay ahead of the curve, transcend challenges, and drive transformational change at scale.

Update from InMoment’s Global CMO

Kicking off our stellar speaker line-up, you will hear from InMoment’s CMO Kristi Knight as she discusses her vision for the company, our products, and the customer experience industry as a whole.

Award-Winning Speakers

The best in the industry will be sharing their experience and  learnings to help you ELEVATE your CX program in 2022 and beyond. Learn the CX transformation journey from JAX Tyres & Auto, Rest Super, The NRMA, and more!

Breakthrough Breakout Sessions

There are two sessions to choose from, and both are designed to be hands-on, leaving you with an action plan for your program.

Form New Connections

More than 200 of the top CX professionals in Australia attend the XI Forum each year. Take the opportunity to meet like minded people and form new, long lasting industry relationships. 

Spectacular Entertainment

And after a day of illuminating case studies, we’ll take in the lights of Vivid Sydney from the best vantage point in town—dinner and drinks onboard our spectacular harbour cruise!

These are only a few of the reasons that will make XI Forum an unforgettable event, but don’t just take our word for it. Register today and experience the event for yourself! https://inmoment.com/en-au/xi-forum-2022-sydney/

How to Grow Employee Experience Maturity
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The Employee Experience Maturity Path: How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

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

This article was originally posted on CustomerThink.com

Sacagawea, a knowledgeable young Shoshone woman, successfully guided Lewis & Clark through the Louisiana Purchase territory, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Tenzing Norgay, a Sherpa, whose backyard was the Himalayas, successfully guided Edmund Hillary on the first successful ascent of Mount Everest. Ports around the world have skilled and experienced pilots whose detailed knowledge and map-memory of local shoals, sandbars and currents is essential to guide arriving ships to their berths. 

In the modern era, Tim Berners-Lee was the trailblazer of computer science—the inventor and mapmaker of the World Wide Web and HTML—without whom we simply wouldn’t have the internet of today. And then there’s Steve Wozniak, the technical pathfinder behind the initial system for Apple products and services. Every successful journey greatly benefits from having a reliable, capable, amply proven guide, especially one using a detailed, user-friendly map with signposts to mark steps needed to reach the intended goal. It is as true with employee experience (EX) improvement. There is a clear path to greater employee experience maturity and employee insights success, with a map and signposts to aid the guide.

4 Signposts on the Employee Experience Maturity Path Map 

There are four distinctive signposts which serve as a guide up the employee experience maturity path, each one bringing organizations closer to their goal of optimal employee behavior and value as enterprise assets. These signposts, or markers, represent the points along the path, or the trajectory, employee experience has taken, as companies become more mature in a) how they consider employee contribution, in other words the importance attached to it, and b) what role, or roles, employees have in enterprise culture, strategy, and business outcomes.

#1: Employee Satisfaction

The enterprise EX improvement and insights journey path often begins with very basic employee satisfaction, as companies are principally looking to manage and measure behavior at a macro level. For the employee experience maturity trajectory, it is the point of embarkation. Employee satisfaction will typically include job-related factors like compensation, workload, perceptions of management and leadership, flexibility, teamwork, resource availability, etc. 

#2: Employee Engagement

The next, and first real, EX journey signpost brings many organizations to employee engagement. Engaged employees have a stronger sense of purpose within the organization. Here, the predominant, HR-formed, construct is to consider employees as costs of doing the company’s business, and the overall objective is for their fit, utility, and productivity within the enterprise.

#3: Employee Commitment

This signpost represents and recognizes arrival on the path of a deeper awareness of what creates and shapes the full EX landscape: employee commitment to the organization, to its product and service value proposition ,and customers – and plan to optimize business outcomes and stakeholder value. Part of this more progressive awareness is also understanding, and mitigating, things which can impede EX success. Employee fit, utility, and productivity are certainly important, but they are insufficient where real employee experience and linkage to customer value delivery are concerned. Organizations need to have more contemporary and actionable insight into what motivates employees, connects them to the culture and customers, and drives their behavior as invested, highly contributory enterprise assets. 

#4: Employee Advocacy

This signpost has the EX parallel of the flag planted at the top of a mountain peak. Few organizations are able to reach this terminus point on the path (although it is certainly within reach, with strategic focus and discipline, for virtually any company). Companies with high rates of employee advocacy, and its accompanying strong set of business outcomes, are those which have embedded commitment and customer focus into the enterprise DNA, and where the culture, operations, and processes all flow through stakeholder value creation. 

How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

In looking at the progression from satisfaction to engagement to commitment and advocacy, we have examined research conducted over the past three decades. What we have observed are studies that examined some contributing factors of employee experience and value, such as reward and recognition, job fit, training, career opportunities, work environment, and departmental and management relationships. But the critical component often totally missing, or lightly addressed, from all of this material is the definitive linkage and commitment to customers.

Tony Hsieh, the late founder and CEO of Zappos, said: “The brand is just a lagging indicator of the company’s culture.” He hit the mark with that statement. Brand image needs to be complemented and supported by a culture and set of processes dedicated to both employee and customer experience. That brand promise has to be delivered for customers every time they interact with the company. Contribution to customer experience also needs to be fully, and strategically, baked into the organization and into every employee’s job description.

Consider how frequently your customers come in contact with your employees, either directly or indirectly. Whether it is through a computer screen in a customer service chat, on the telephone, or in person, every employee, whether customer-facing or not, should be an enthusiastic and committed representative for the brand. If, today, employee satisfaction and employee engagement are not designed to meet this critical objective of the customer experience, almost inevitably there will be a sub-optimal downstream result with regard to customer behavior.

The Importance of Creating a Culture of Commitment

In any group of employees, irrespective of whether it’s a service department, technical and operational division, or a branch office, there will be differing levels of commitment to the employer’s brand and the company itself, its value proposition, and its customers. If employees are negative to the point of undermining, and even sabotaging, customer experience value, they will actively work against business goals and outcomes. However, if employees are advocates, and whether they interact with customers directly, indirectly, or even not at all, they will better service and support customers.

For companies to create and sustain higher levels of employee advocacy, it’s also essential that the employee experience be given as much emphasis as the customer experience. If employee commitment and advocacy are to flourish, there must be value, and a sense of shared purpose, for the employee (as well as the company and customer) – in the form of recognition, reward(financial and training), and career opportunities. Combined with advanced analytics and other employee-related data, the advocacy concept can lead and enable any organization to be more stakeholder-centric, flexible, dynamic, and financially successful.

This is a clear path and map to EX maturity. Where is your company on the journey?

Buyer Interviews for B2B brands
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Interviews Aren’t Dead: How B2B Companies Can Learn More from Their Buyers

By: Josh Marans, Director Experience Improvement at InMoment

B2B purchasing decisions are complex. They’re financial. They’re political. But more than anything—they’re unpredictable. While B2B firms have more systems in place than ever to predict sales outcomes, they’re still blindsided when prospects choose another vendor.

But it doesn’t have to be that way! To avoid this fate, it’s critical to have a process in place for exploring, analyzing, and improving the buyer experience—win or lose. You might have already guessed it, but I’m talking about buyer interviews.

Using the Right Listening Technique

There’s no one right way to collect feedback. It depends on the audience, the timing, the circumstances, and ultimately—what you’re trying to learn. Whether you’re sending SMS surveys, analyzing social reviews, or conducting phone interviews, it’s about using the right listening technique for the situation to get the best results.

Following the methodology below, our own customer experience (CX) program (Elevate) is successfully getting feedback from upwards of 90% of closed sales opportunities in our best months—and the insights are invaluable.

Here’s what we’re doing and why we think it is successful. 

Building Human Connections

For our post-opportunity listening post, we’ve found that interviews are the most effective way to engage buyers. And the intelligence we glean from these “buyer interviews” is impactful across teams.

Interviews can either supplement or replace a post-sales survey. I’ve found that many buyers actually prefer spending 30 minutes on the phone with me rather than two-minutes completing a survey. 

Also, the suggestion of a phone call lets the client know that we’re willing to take the time to listen—that we care, we want to learn, and we want to improve. It’s all about building that human connection, and it is a great way to get sticky with new clients and show your investment from the start. 

Buyer Interviews Process

Now, I bet you’re wondering how we efficiently scale this largely manual process!

First, we conduct dozens of interviews each quarter. The open-ended nature of an interview allows us to ask all of the right questions and follow the conversation wherever the respondent takes it. And we use the robust insights to drive cross-functional action. Across all of our listening posts, I can confidently say buyer interviews have quickly become one of our most beloved data sources. 

The Insights

Here are some of the things we’ve learned—and the teams that have benefited—by rolling out our buyer interview program:

  • Pricing (sales ops)
  • Roadmap Investments (product)
  • Messaging, Packaging, and Competitive (product marketing)
  • Demos (solution consultants)
  • Presentations (sales directors)
  • Renewal Strategy (client success)

At a regular cadence, our “Experience Improvement Board” looks at the emerging themes, chooses projects and specific actions, and assigns an executive owner. This owner then forms a “tiger team” to research and tackle the project—and reports on progress each month! 

Time to Get Started!

If buyer interviews are not currently part of your post-opportunity strategy, they should be. They will not only increase your response rate, but will give you additional intelligence and insight into what your buyers expect from your company. It’s the most personal way to request feedback and build lasting relationships, win or lose.

I’m not done sharing the successes of our buyer interview program. In subsequent blogs, I will talk about some of the questions we ask during interviews, challenges you may face in your conversations (and how to overcome them), interview do’s and don’ts, how to build your “interview team,” and what sorts of insights you should specifically try to gain from interviews.

But in the meantime, if you have questions about launching or refining your own buyer interview program, I’d love to talk to you. I’m Josh Marans, Director Experience Improvement at InMoment, and you can find me on Linkedin.

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