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Author: Kiersten Lopez

Customer Journey: Understanding Every Interaction

The customer journey is the path a consumer takes to become a customer. Improving the customer journey can drive acquisition, retention, and loyalty for your organization.
Sales associate providing a positive customer journey

Did you know that 38% of Millennials and 39% of Gen Z consumers reported that they are most likely to give up solving a problem with a product or service if they cannot find a solution themselves? With younger generations becoming the dominating force in the overall consumer base it is more important than ever to be able to identify their needs and understand how they want to interact with your brand. 

As a matter of fact, 56% of customer service leaders said they plan to invest more into their customer journey, which would be a first-time investment for 45% of them. These investments highlight how crucial the customer journey is to a great customer experience and creating lifelong customer relationships.

What Is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from awareness to purchasing and beyond. To provide an exceptional customer journey, you need to understand your customers—how they interact with your website and what they’re looking for. It’s important to point out that the customer journey is different from the customer experience. Customer journeys are what your customers are doing, while the experience is how they’re feeling. A fully optimized customer journey can help improve your customer experience. 

Why Is the Customer Journey Important?

The customer journey is so important because it is the foundation on which customer acquisition and customer loyalty are built. Most consumers express a desire to interact with a brand across multiple channels, but 77% of brands admit they struggle to create a cohesive customer journey across those channels. 

If a customer chooses to interact with your organization, it is your responsibility to have a customer journey that gives them a stress-free experience. Without a customer journey, you could have low acquisition rates or increased customer churn rates. 

Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey

When your organization understands the customer journey and can give your customers what they need at the right time, you will realize benefits that will improve your overall business performance. Some of the benefits include: 

  • Improved Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey will give your customers a better end-to-end customer experience, which will result in increased customer satisfaction. 
  • Increased Customer Retention: An understanding of the customer journey allows your business to proactively address issues and provide timely support, which will increase the likelihood of repeat business and long-term customer retention.
  • Increased Conversion Rates: By identifying and removing friction points, your business can guide potential customers through the sales process more smoothly. 

What are the Principles of Customer Journey?

While there are no set principles of the customer journey, an important step to understanding and designing the customer journey in your organization is to create your own set of customer journey principles that represent an effort to develop long-term customer relationships. Some possible principles include: 

Customer Empathy 

Customer empathy refers to working to understand the emotional states of customers at each stage of the customer journey. By understanding how customers will feel at certain points, rather than focusing on what action you want them to take, you will create a journey that is easier and less stressful. 

Customer Empowerment

Give customers the ability to manage their journey by offering self-service options and transparent processes. Empowered customers feel more in control and satisfied with their experience.

Proactive Engagement

At some point in the customer journey, your customers will connect with you. When they do, be sure to be equipped with the right information in a timely manner to assist them during the customer journey. 

These principles are an example of what the principles of customer journey could look like in your organization. The exact principles you choose will depend on your business and the journey you build for your customers. However, they should be customer-focused and put your organization in a position to make the customer experience better. 

What Are the Customer Journey Phases?

While the exact steps in the customer journey can vary, these are the six most important parts of the journey for any business: 

The Problem

First, customers need to realize they have a problem, a need, or a want that must be solved. Once they recognize a problem, they can begin looking for solutions, which should hopefully lead them to your company. 

Awareness

During this stage, the customer is gathering information, researching, and looking for options to solve the problem. Hopefully, with your marketing efforts and channels, the customer will come across your company and become aware of your solution to their problem. They’ll still be weighing options and researching what suits them best, but this stage is a great place to use content to showcase your brand. 

Consideration

During this stage, your customer will be considering using your product or service. They may be deciding between you and another option debating pricing options, prioritizing features, and weighing drawbacks. When a customer is considering, brand recognition is crucial. Having a trusted and well-established brand could be what sways a customer toward your product during this stage. 

Purchase

The customer decides on your product and makes the purchase. Even once they’ve purchased your product, companies benefit from reaching out to customers and acknowledging the purchase. 

Retention

Once a customer has bought a product or service, it doesn’t mean they will return to your company again. A key part of the customer journey is retaining the customer for future purchases. Providing support is important to improve customer retention. You want customers to come back repeatedly and look for your product or service when faced with a problem. 

Loyalty

Once your customer comes back to you a few times, they’ll start to develop loyalty to your brand. Loyal customers will almost always come to your company if they can because they trust your products, services, and customer experience. Getting to the loyalty stage takes effort, but loyal customers are the goal of every company. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Journey

Businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and retailers have to consider certain aspects of their locations when creating a customer journey such as signage, lighting, walkways, and more. Most other businesses, however, will only ever interact with their customers through digital channels. The digital customer journey is just as important as any customer journey and is crucial to a positive digital experience. 

A successful digital customer journey can be difficult to create because you need to make your customers feel understood and wanted, without being able to talk to them in person. This can be done by creating easy self-service options and being readily available through support channels in case they have any questions or concerns. 

A Customer Journey Example

To see what the customer journey looks like in action, let’s walk through the journey a manager might take to improve operations. 

1. Recognizing the Problem

A hypothetical manager at a finance company recognizes an ongoing issue with managing data for customers. Realizing that this is affecting their efficiency, they start looking for a data management solution. 

2. Researching Potential Solutions

The manager starts exploring different data management tools. A friend in the industry recommends a solution they use, while another contact from networking suggests a different option. The manager also conducts internet searches and reads online reviews to find more potential solutions. Meanwhile, targeted ads on Google and social media bring additional products to their attention. Using reviews and priorities, they narrow the list down to two companies. 

3. Comparing Final Options

Once they have their two favorites, they use the companies’ software demos and pricing packages to consider each one. They make their selection based on which one works best for their company and is the most affordable.

4. Making the Purchase

After purchasing the data management software, the company immediately acknowledges and thanks the manager for their business. This gesture makes the manager feel valued, reinforcing a positive customer experience.

5. Returning for Future Purchases 

A few months later, this same manager is looking for data architecture solutions that will provide security and big data management. They remember their experience with the data management company and start their search on that particular website. When they see they offer software for their needs, they spend less time in the consideration stage and move quickly into purchasing. They also begin recommending the company to other people in the industry when they’re looking for similar products.

The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey 

Spending time and resources focusing on the customer journey may seem like a luxury, but the benefits it can have for your organization are a necessity in today’s business environment. Here are some statistics about the importance of focusing on the customer journey:

  • 87% of companies use their understanding of the customer journey as a decision-making tool
  • 89% of companies can identify gaps in their service by looking at the customer journey
  • 91% of companies say an improved customer journey led to increased sales

Overall, this shows that companies that focus on customer journeys can benefit in revenue and profitability. Optimizing the customer journey also helps decision-makers at the company to stay focused on customers. It also helps improve the customer experience and your brand. A well-optimized customer journey makes the purchasing process easier and more enjoyable for the customers, which improves their experience. 

Customer Journey Management Best Practices

Successful customer journey management requires every interaction a customer has with your brand to be satisfying while also aligning with business goals. To have an effective customer journey management strategy, you will need to consider these best practices:

1. Map the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is a great way to visualize every expected touchpoint a customer will have with your brand. A customer journey map can help you understand the flow of the customer experience. 

2. Segment Your Customers

Not every consumer will have the same customer journey, nor will they want to. By segmenting your customers based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and buying habits, you can create tailored versions of the customer journey to meet the specific needs of these different customers. 

3. Utilize Data and Analytics

Customer journey analytics are important to gain insight into how customers interact with your organization. You can start to use customer journey analytics by identifying customer journey touchpoints. Your touchpoints could be ads, your website homepage, a physical storefront, reviews, newsletters, phone calls with sales, or emails. 

Once you identify all the touchpoints, you can start to measure how customers interact with them. By keeping track of your customer journey touchpoints, you can optimize them to keep your customers moving through your customer journey seamlessly. 

A dashboard showing phases of the customer journey and how much revenue has been realized over a set period.

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a method of tracking and analyzing every interaction a customer has with your brand across various customer journey touchpoints. By leveraging customer journey analytics, businesses can measure each phase of the customer journey in a detailed and data-driven manner. This includes understanding how customers discover your brand, how they interact with your content, their decision-making process, and the quality of their post-purchase experiences.
This approach provides insights into the effectiveness of your overall customer experience strategy. By evaluating key metrics at every stage, such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction scores, businesses can pinpoint areas of success and identify potential bottlenecks or pain points.

A customer journey analytics dashboard

Customer Journey Metrics to Track

Once you have created your customer journey, you should be able to track where a customer is based on what checkpoints they hit. This may include a free trial, demo appointment, payment, or other points. Since you can track where customers are, you should also be tracking metrics that give you an insight into how effectively your customers move through those stages. Here are some common customer journey metrics you can track:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer, including marketing, sales, and advertising expenses. Tracking CAC can help you evaluate how efficient your customer journey is and help you identify the most cost-effective paths that customers take. 

2. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate shows the percentage of potential customers who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or completing a demo. By monitoring your conversion rates, you can identify any possible bottlenecks that may be hindering customers from moving forward in the customer journey. 

3. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period. This is an important metric to track because it reminds businesses that the customer journey does not end with a purchase. A high churn rate indicates that you may need to improve your customer retention efforts. On the other hand, a low churn rate suggests that your customers value your brand. 

4. Customer Satisfaction 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a key metric for evaluating how happy customers are with their overall experience. This metric can be used to track satisfaction levels at various stages of the customer journey or track overall satisfaction. 

5. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to others. NPS provides insight into whether or not your customer journey is producing strong advocates of your brand that will promote your products or services. 

Customer Journey Software

Customer journey software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to map, track, and optimize the interactions customers have with their brands throughout the entire customer journey. Customer journey software platforms provide valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points, which allow companies to create more personalized experiences. Here’s how customer journey software can benefit your business:

1. Visual Journey Mapping

Customer journey software gives you the tools needed to create a customer journey map. This feature helps you visualize the customer journey and understand what metrics can be tracked and where. It can also be a useful sharing tool to get the rest of your CX team on board with the customer journey improvement process. 

2. Multi-Channel Tracking

Modern digital customer journeys are often non-linear and span multiple channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and in-store interactions With customer journey software, you can integrate data from various channels to get a unified view of the customer journey. This helps deliver a cohesive and consistent experience to the customer regardless of where or how they engaged with your business. 

3. Behavioral Analytics

Customer journey software can track user behaviors such as click paths, product views, time spent on site, and more. This will help your business identify patterns and behaviors that indicate customer intent. 

Improve the Customer Journey with InMoment

Improving your customer journey will help your customers learn about your company, products, and services. It will also help you keep your customers moving seamlessly through to the purchasing stage. But ultimately, your customer journey can help you improve your customer experience. 

Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them.
To improve your customers’ journey, you’ll need tools to understand your customers and to utilize your customer journey touchpoints. InMoment CX solutions provide feedback and active listening tools to help you understand where to tighten your process and bring more customers to your brand. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can help you improve the customer journey. 

References 

Gartner. Top Priorities for Customer Service Leaders in 2024. (https://www.gartner.com/en/customer-service-support/insights/service-leaders-priorities). Accessed 9/3/2024. 

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 9/4/2024. 

Hanover Research. The Power of Customer Journey Mapping. (https://www.hanoverresearch.com/reports-and-briefs/corporate/power-customer-journey-mapping/). Accessed 9/5/2024.

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The Power of Brand Equity: Why It Matters for Your Business

Brand equity is the unique value people give to a business because they recognize and trust it. With positive brand equity, a company can charge higher prices since consumers perceive its products as of higher quality than those of its competitors. Thus, building brand equity is a crucial strategy for any company.
What Is 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. 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. 

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

Why is Brand Equity Important?

Theoretically, the better your brand equity, the better your company will perform in sales and public perception compared to other brands. If your brand consistently impresses customers and reaches their expectations, you will develop more positive brand equity. If your brand fails to satisfy your customers because of negative experiences or perceptions, your brand will experience more negative brand equity. 

Positive Brand Equity vs. Negative Brand Equity

When discussing brand equity, the terms positive and negative brand equity will arise. Understanding the difference between positive and negative brand equity is crucial for businesses aiming to build a strong, reputable brand.

Positive brand equity leads to high levels of customer loyalty and advocacy. Customers who perceive a brand positively are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. This loyalty translates into stable revenue and organic growth through word-of-mouth marketing. 

Conversely, negative brand equity results in customer distrust and attrition. Customers who have negative perceptions of a brand are likely to switch to competitors, leading to a decline in market share. Negative experiences, such as poor product quality or inadequate customer service, can severely damage a brand’s reputation. For example, scandals involving product safety can lead to widespread distrust and loss of customers.

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 help your company. 

Increased Customer Loyalty

One of the primary benefits of strong brand equity is increased customer loyalty. Customers who trust and have positive associations with a brand are more likely to become repeat buyers. This loyalty not only ensures steady revenue but also reduces marketing costs, as retaining existing customers is often more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. 

Enhanced Marketing Effectiveness

Marketing efforts are more effective when a brand has strong equity. Consumers are more receptive to marketing messages from brands they know and trust, leading to higher engagement and conversion rates. Additionally, positive customer feedback such as Google reviews from loyal customers can amplify marketing campaigns, extending their reach and impact without additional cost.

Competitive Advantage

Strong brand equity provides a significant competitive advantage. It differentiates a company’s products and services from those of competitors, making it harder for new entrants to capture market share. Established brands with strong equity enjoy top-of-mind awareness among consumers, making them the preferred choice in their respective categories. This competitive edge is crucial for long-term success and market leadership.

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Increased ROI

When customers trust your brand, they are more likely to make future purchases from your company. If customers continue 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. If you want to see how other efforts, such as a strong reputation management strategy, can provide you with ROI, check out our ROI calculator!

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. 

What Makes Up Brand Equity?

Good brand equity comprises several elements. Nurturing each of these elements will help create 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 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 product, it’s not a given. 

There are two sub-stages of brand perception development: Brand recognition and brand awareness. Brand recognition is when products are identifiable as belonging to a particular brand. 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. 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 who 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 or service. Brands are also associated with the supply chain, brand 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 for brands they buy from, and that can come into play with your brand equity. For example, customers who 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 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. 

1. 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 make your brand’s values very clear and visible. 

2. 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 with 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. 

3. 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. 

How to Measure Brand Equity

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 satisfaction 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. 

You may also be able to measure your brand equity by tracking your business’ core customer experience metrics, as these indicators reflect how customers perceive and interact with your brand. 

A collage of different reports such as CSAT, metrics, and areas to improve

For example, an increase in customer satisfaction over a measured time may reflect that your efforts to improve product quality, customer service, or brand communication are resonating well with your audience, thereby enhancing your brand’s perceived value and trustworthiness.

Brand Equity Examples

Understanding brand equity can be significantly enhanced by looking at real-world examples of companies that have successfully built and leveraged their brand equity. These examples illustrate how strong brand equity can lead to customer loyalty, market dominance, and the ability to extend product lines.

Foot Locker

Foot Locker has built its brand equity on a foundation of trust within the athletic and sneaker communities. Known for its wide selection of athletic footwear and apparel, Foot Locker has leveraged endorsements from popular athletes and collaborations with top brands to strengthen its market position. By actively engaging with its target audience through social media, events, and sponsorships, Foot Locker has developed a loyal customer base that views the brand as an integral part of sports and street culture.

La-Z-Boy

La-Z-Boy has established strong brand equity through its reputation for comfort, quality, and durability in furniture. Known for its iconic recliners, La-Z-Boy has expanded its product line to include a variety of home furnishings. The brand’s commitment to providing high-quality, comfortable furniture has earned it a loyal customer base. La-Z-Boy’s emphasis on innovation in comfort technology and stylish design has further reinforced its brand equity, allowing it to maintain a premium positioning in the market.

Improve Your Brand Equity with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform gives you the power to monitor feedback from every touchpoint, across every stage of the customer journey. Using the XI platform, your business will be able to track the progress of your business’ main metrics, which correlates to the growth of your brand equity. See what we can do for you by scheduling a demo today! 

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Can You Count on ChatGPT Customer Experience Survey Questions?

chatgpt for customer experience

It seems like the internet is full of ChatGPT “hacks” these days. We are all inundated by articles and webinars that start with  “How to Use ChatGPT to…” I have also had way too many conversations with my Gen-Z son and millennial colleagues about how they use the tool to make everyday tasks go by more quickly. And I wouldn’t be the true customer experience nerd that I am if I didn’t ask: “Could we customer experience (CX) professionals leverage ChatGPT customer experience survey questions?”

On the surface, it seems like an obvious application for a ChatGPT customer experience approach. A survey is pretty straightforward, correct? Not so fast.

Keep reading to find out what happened when I tested this approach and why it may not be the best way to go when it comes to your customer listening approach.

Testing ChatGPT for Customer Experience Questions

I started off with a simple question for ChatGPT, hoping for a simple customer satisfaction survey, typing in, “Write me a survey.” You can see the screenshot of the output below.

ChatGPT customer experience survey- Should you use ChatGPT to write customer experience surveys?
A ChatGPT Customer Experience Survey

After reviewing the generated answer, you may be asking, “what’s missing?” Well, to the untrained eye, there could be little to no difference between a traditionally written survey and a ChatGPT customer experience survey. After all, there are demographic questions, the typical “How satisfied were you with your experience,” and other basic survey asks.

But here is what stands out to me as a glaring absence. What is missing is pretty much the most important part of any survey: the link to the business questions you are trying to answer by launching a survey in the first place!

Quick PSA from Jim: Creating surveys is an important topic,  but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that while surveys are a tried-and-true method of collecting customer feedback, they are not the only way (or the best way, in many cases) to hear from customers. With so many channels available for you to monitor the voice of the customer, to restrict yourself to surveys alone is to limit your insights. This is another topic for another day (but if you’re interested, you can learn more about other listening channels here). End of PSA.

 For now, let’s talk about the risks of using AI like ChatGPT to write surveys!

ChatGPT Customer Experience Risks & Best Practices You Need to Know

ChatGPT Customer Experience Questions Miss the Point

Let me ask you a question: Is the point of your CX program to launch surveys? Now, many of you are likely rolling your eyes at me, but I promise, there’s a point to this. Hopefully, you answered no. Because the point of customer experience is not to ask questions, but to listen to customers and the market to help guide your path to achieving business goals. The questions are simply a vehicle to gain insight into what will help or hinder your business on the way to realizing those  goals.

When you look at the output of ChatGPT customer experience questions in the screenshot above, these questions really miss the point. Yes, they are generic questions that we have all likely seen in surveys before, but what are they getting at? The only results I can see this survey gleaning is a scoreboard metric and some customer demographics that we might already have access to via other data sources. 

When you craft surveys, the first questions you should ask should be for you and your team. Do you have a set of northstar goals (GOALS not scores!) for your customer experience program already? Great! If not, start that conversation with your executive stakeholders and team. Only then can you truly design your program, surveys, and other initiatives with the end goal in mind. 

Once you have agreed upon a desired end goal, then you need to ask:

  • What are we hoping to learn?
  • Who are we hoping to learn from?
  • Do we already have access to this data?

If you want to gut-check your surveys, you can check out this CX survey assessment my colleagues developed to help you optimize your surveys!

ChatGPT Doesn’t Know Your Customers Like You Do

Context is everything. And when it comes to ChatGPT customer experience questions, they won’t have any of the contextual data that you do. If your CX program has been around for a while, you likely have a mountain of customer data around. And that existing data will shape what you already know, and what questions you still need to ask. 

(Additionally, you might be tempted to feed ChatGPT some of your customer data, but that can unearth a whole boatload of security complications. Do you really want every ChatGPT user having access to your customer data? Didn’t think so.) 

An effective customer listening strategy is personal and targeted. Speaking to the customer in their language is critical. Many brands have worked hard to develop a brand persona. Asking customers for feedback in a sterile, canned voice will not yield the best results or further endear your brand to your customers. I don’t believe your brand personalization  can be accomplished by a ChatGPT survey—at least not today.

ChatGPT Is a Starting Block, Not the Finish Line

Now you may be thinking, “Jim, you’ve made a good case for the risks of using ChatGPT for customer experience surveys. But there has to be some way I can use it.” I’m glad you asked and yes, there is! 

I know we have all heard the fear-mongering conversations about AI taking jobs. And if we’re being realistic, AI will eliminate some jobs, but it will also create new ones. Those who will be safe from that chopping block are those professionals who learn how to leverage AI to increase efficiency and  perfect skills that AI alone just can’t manage without human input.

In the customer experience space, this could be leveraging ChatGPT as a starting point, then leveraging the additional context you have about your customers and your brand’s identity to perfect its suggestions. 

For example, ChatGPT can give you phrasing ideas for your survey questions as long as you are very specific in your prompts. It can also help you to think of other ways to ask questions you’ve been posing to customers for a long time, giving your same old relationship and post-transaction surveys a refresh. 

It’s not about AI or humans. It’s about humans using AI to improve and become more imaginative and efficient.

I will end with this. I do not want to come off as a “debbie downer” or, even worse, as naive. AI is going to have an increased role in customer experience and in creating the listening posts that practitioners create to capture customer insight. But, I believe true value will be well beyond simply crafting a survey. 

The real power of ChatGPT and other AI tools will be to help understand the data that comes from a survey or the multiple direct and indirect data sources that make up the voice of the customer. And, just to validate this statement, I asked ChatGPT why the voice of the customer is important? In this case, ChatGPT was spot on:

I think we can all agree that ChatGPT is right on target with that answer.

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How Prepared Are Financial Firms Feeling for Consumer Duty?

Consumer Duty

In our recent virtual panel discussion, we explored how different financial firms are embracing the Consumer Duty Act and identified areas where most of their resources have been designated. The panelists engaged in insightful discussions, sharing their organisational challenges and best practices, while attendees were to engage in polls aimed at answering three key questions on preparedness, challenges, and changes related to Consumer Duty.

And because at InMoment, we value sharing knowledge as widely as possible, I’m going to share the results of that in-event poll with you here, along with a few thoughts about our learnings.

How Prepared Do You Feel for Consumer Duty?

We were pleased to see that the majority of firms who joined us felt very prepared, with 50% selecting this option, and no one stating that they weren’t prepared at all. 

The panelists shared valuable insights on embracing changes and putting customers at the center of their business. A key takeaway was the importance of ensuring that everyone in the organisation was informed and that they understood what Consumer Duty means for the whole business, but also their specific accountability in delivering against it. Increasing awareness and providing comprehensive training to employees are crucial steps toward ensuring adherence to the act’s expectations.

The discussion around preparation also highlighted the importance of assessing product alignment with target customers, the risks of non-compliance, and the benefits of adopting a customer-first approach. 

Furthermore, the concept of “substantive compliance” was emphasized as a means to exceed expectations and gain a competitive advantage. Ensuring the needs of vulnerable customers are met was also discussed as a crucial aspect of achieving desired outcomes.

What Have Been Your Biggest Challenges in Getting Ready for Consumer Duty?

When asked about the biggest challenges they have faced, there was an equal split between “creating change within the organisation to adapt to the FCA requirements” and “conflicting priorities.” Both challenges undoubtedly speak to the need to implement new processes as well as ways of thinking, especially when strategic plans or other requirements such as digital transformation were already planned as necessities.

Solving for these challenges requires an organisation to embrace the Consumer Duty Act as an opportunity for a strategic evolution, rather than a complete upheaval of existing business strategies. The key is in adapting your perspective to see these adjustments as a fine tuning rather than a complete abandonment of the preexisting travel plan.

There was also emphasis on fostering a culture of ongoing learning and improvement. By embracing a mindset of adaptability and remaining attuned to shifting customer expectations and regulatory landscapes, organisations will be best able to meet the challenges and seize the opportunities presented by the act.

What Are the Biggest Changes That You Have Made Towards Identifying Risk Amongst Your Customers?

Lastly, we asked attendees about the biggest changes they had made to identify at-risk customers. The poll and the subsequent discussion revealed the significant industry-wide adoption of integrating diverse data sources (other than traditional surveys) into Marketing Intelligence (MI), with the third poll showing that 81% had integrated different data sources into their reporting. This integration empowers organisations to leverage comprehensive data, driving focus and strategic changes that are aligned with evolving customer needs.

Leaders in this space have continued to make adjustments to their CX programmes to support Consumer Duty requirements such as reviewing touchpoints and customer journeys to bridge gaps, more effective dissemination of customer insights to stakeholders, and a greater focus on measuring consumer understanding in order to take proactive action to address improvement areas. This final action leads to not only improved communication out to customers but also improved internal communication around expectations and making material more inclusive to drive better understanding.

“Firms should harness the benefits of data and technology to improve their services and understand the outcomes they achieve for their customers.”

The FCA

To get access to detailed notes, poll data and more, you can click here for a full summary of the Consumer Duty Panel Discussion! 

It’s clear that the most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance-first approach. 

Having the right experience programme in place can help build customer centricity and use it to your advantage!

Find out how InMoment can help you embrace these changes to:

  1. Deliver positive outcomes for your customers
  2. Gain an improved consumer understanding
  3. Identify customers at risk to complain and churn
  4. Develop a culture of continuous experience improvement

Click the link if you would like to learn more about how InMoment can help you with Consumer Duty Compliance!

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

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The Power of Listening: Mastering Voice of the Customer Surveys

Voice of the Customer Surveys

These days, understanding your customers isn’t a “nice thing to do”; it’s an absolute necessity. To truly understand your customers, you need to spend some quality time listening to them and understanding the voice of the customer. That’s why mastering the art of the voice of the customer survey can be a game-changer for any business seeking to better understand its customers. The power of listening to your customers transcends beyond just collecting feedback; it serves as a strategic compass, guiding your decision-making, shaping your product development, and, most importantly, building strong, lasting customer relationships. 

Read on to learn more about voice of the customer surveys, why they’re so important, how to create them, and some sample questions that can get you started creating your VoC survey today. 

What Is a Voice of the Customer Survey?

At its core, a voice of the customer (VoC) surveys captures customers’ expectations, preferences, and aversions toward products, services, or your company in general. A VoC survey involves gathering both quantitative and qualitative feedback from customers about their various touchpoints with a company. Touchpoints could be anything from an interaction with your website, chatting with your customer service representatives, or actually using your products and services. By exploring customers’ experiences with these touchpoints, you’ll gain a holistic understanding of your customer’s journey and experience with your company. 

Why Are Voice of the Customer Surveys So Important?

A VoC is more than just another survey to worry about. The benefits of VoC surveys extend far beyond mere data collection. They provide invaluable insights that can shape product development, fine-tune marketing strategies, and enhance customer service. Hopefully with all of these pieces in place, you’ll experience improved customer satisfaction and loyalty. Thus, the power of VoC surveys lies not just in listening to what customers have to say but in using those insights to create a better, more personalized customer experience.

Let’s dive into three specific benefits from utilizing VoC surveys as the powerful they are: 

Understanding Customer Needs and Wants

At the heart of any successful business strategy lies a deep understanding of customer needs and wants. VoC surveys are literally the voice of your customers. They serve as a way to pull out real and salient insights into your customers’ needs and wants. These insights are the pulse of the market, reflecting real-time customer sentiment and demand. By tuning into the voice of the customer, you can identify what truly matters to your customers and adjust your strategies, products, and services appropriately. Your customers love it too.. VOC surveys provide customers with the opportunity to communicate their needs and wants directly to businesses.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

You created your business to solve a problem, and you want to make sure your products and services are actually doing that. The way to see if you’re reaching your customers the way you want is to evaluate your customer satisfaction. A VoC survey gives you the chance to do just that. Plus using these surveys can also help you boost your customer satisfaction on its own. Customers love the opportunity to be heard and understood, so when you’re actively working toward that, they’re going to notice and appreciate that. 

Improving the Business Overall

VoC surveys are not just about improving customer experience; they offer significant benefits for the overall health and growth of the business. These surveys help businesses pinpoint potential issues from the customer’s perspective, allowing them to proactively address these concerns before they escalate and cause significant damage. Whatever customers aren’t liking, with a VoC, you have a chance to stop that in its tracks. This proactive approach not only improves the customer experience but also strengthens the company’s reputation, enhances operational efficiency, and drives overall business success. 

Designing Your Voice of the Customer Survey

Voice of the customer surveys are powerful. How do you go about creating your own? Let’s dive into some of the basic steps for designing a highly effective VoC survey. 

Define Objectives

Before crafting your VoC survey, it’s crucial to define clear, specific objectives. What are you trying to do or understand? Are you looking for insights on a specific product or service you want to refine? Or are you looking to improve your customer satisfaction overall? Knowing what your objectives are will help you design a survey that gathers data to help with your goal. You can ensure the data you collect is actionable and relevant to your overall business goals. 

Choose the Right Types of Questions

Once you have clear objectives, you need questions that achieve your overall goals. The choice of questions in your VoC survey can significantly impact the quality and type of feedback you receive. To gain a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ experiences, it’s advisable to use a mix of multiple choice questions, scales (like the Likert scale), and open-ended questions. Multiple choice questions and scales are excellent for collecting quantitative data, offering clear, easily analyzable feedback. On the other hand, open-ended questions allow customers to express their opinions and experiences in their own words, providing rich qualitative data that can offer deeper, nuanced insights. A mix of question types will give you deeper insights overall. 

Keep It Simple

While it’s important to gather as much valuable feedback as possible, your customers won’t complete a long survey. It’s much better to have fewer questions and more complete surveys than the other way around. Aim to keep it simple and keep your surveys no longer than 10 minutes. The simpler and more streamlined your survey, the more likely customers are to complete it and provide honest, thoughtful responses.

Start Broad, Then Get Specific

When structuring your VoC survey, a useful approach is to start with general questions before delving into more specific ones. Starting broad helps your customers “warm up” to providing you with feedback. Broad, initial questions can pertain to overall satisfaction, general experiences, or perceptions of your brand. Essentially, your early questions should be easy to answer without too much extensive thought. You can narrow as you go to get more detailed feedback. 

Questions to Ask in a Voice of the Customer Survey

Those strategies can help you get started. To really take your VoC survey to the next level, we have some starter questions to help you write your own voice of the customer surveys. The questions we provide are broken up into general categories that you may want to consider on your surveys. 

Value-Based VoC Questions

  • Did you find everything you were looking for today?
  • Is there anything you were looking for that we didn’t have?
  • On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate the value of your purchase?
  • What are the most important qualities you look for in a product or service? (This question is particularly poignant as a multiple choice question)
  • Did our customer service help you resolve any issue you came across?

Brand Loyalty VoC Questions

  • How likely are you to recommend our brand to a friend or colleague on a scale of 1–10? 
  • When thinking about our brand, product, or service, what is the first thing that comes to mind?
  • What might prevent you from doing business with us in the future?
  • How likely are you to switch to a different brand, product, or service?

Customer Satisfaction Questions

  • How would you describe your experience with us today?
  • How satisfied are you with the product or service you received?
  • Was your customer service agent able to handle any issue you had?
  • What could we have done to improve your experience?

Final Thoughts

Overall, VoC surveys are powerful tools to better understand your customers and how they really perceive your company. Utilizing these surveys, you can further refine your products and services, enhance your customer satisfaction, and better meet the needs of your customers. 

Learn more about how a voice of the customer survey can help you build a better brand with InMoment today!

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From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

Embracing Consumer Duty to Deliver Positive Outcomes for the UK Financial Services Sector

Consumer Duty- How You Can Prepare

The new FCA Consumer Duty is intended to improve customer outcomes and promote better customer experiences in the financial industry in the United Kingdom (UK) by setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection. By prioritising customer interests and designing products and services that meet their needs, firms can create more positive and beneficial experiences for customers.

What Is Consumer Duty?

Consumer Duty Principle, proposed by FCA, is a significant new legislation for the UK Financial Services sector. The legislation aims to set a consistent and increased standard of care to customers, and mandates organisations to put the needs of the customer first. 

What Are the Details of the New FCA Consumer Duty?

The FCA Consumer Duty has three golden rules that every UK financial organisation will need to adhere to:

  1. Act in Good Faith Towards Customers: Organisations are required to act in the best interests of their customers and prioritise their interests over their own. They must also ensure that their products and services meet the needs of their customers.
  1. Allow and Support Customers to Pursue their Financial Objectives: Organisations must design their products and services to meet the needs of their customers and ensure they are fit for purpose. They must also ensure that their pricing is transparent, fair, and not misleading.
  1. Avoid Causing Foreseeable Harm to Customers: Organisations must provide clear and accessible information to their customers about their products and services, including any risks associated with them. This includes communicating in plain language and avoiding jargon or technical terms that customers may not understand.

How Will the Act Benefit Consumers and Financial Organisations?

If you get it right, our experts at InMoment foresee the Consumer Duty Principle bringing many benefits to consumers and financial organisations alike, such as: 

  • Customer Trust and Loyalty: Putting the customer’s interests first can lead to increased customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business.
  • Efficiency and Effectiveness: By designing products and services that meet the needs of your customers, you are likely to see increased efficiency and effectiveness in your business operations. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability.
  • Brand Image and Reputation: By promoting responsible business practices and prioritising customer outcomes, you can enhance your company’s reputation as a socially responsible and ethical business.

Consumer Duty + Experience Improvement = Customer Centricity! 

Customer experience (CX) platforms can help financial services organisations comply with the FCA Consumer Duty more effectively by helping them better understand their customers’ needs, improve their products and services, and ensure that they are acting in their customers’ best interests. With an integrated CX approach of leveraging the right data, technology, and CX expertise you can take the right action to comply with Consumer Duty in the following ways:

  • Data Management: Managing customer data more efficiently helps to better understand your customers’ needs and preferences, which is essential to designing products and services that meet those needs.
  • AI-powered Analytics: Analysing customer behaviour and preferences helps you identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to products and services in order to better serve customers.
  • Communication Management: Managing communications with customers more efficiently ensures that they receive clear and accessible information about your products and services and  any concerns or questions can be addressed immediately.
  • Compliance Management: Tracking compliance activities ensures that all customer interactions are recorded and monitored and reported correctly and efficiently. 

Five Ways Financial Organisations Can Prepare for Consumer Duty

To comply with Consumer Duty, better technology, data management, and improving customer experiences will be crucial to the success of every financial organisation in the UK. At the onset and in the future, it will be necessary to make experiences, compliance, and reporting processes more efficient. Here’s a few ways InMoment ca help you to prepare and ensure your organisation is set up for success.  

#1: Proactively Detect Consumer Intent to Complain

Ensure you respond to complaints. Simplify the process by applying a tool that automatically identifies and alerts you to those customers who intend to complain or even switch providers. Using InMoments AI-powered technology, those customers who intend to complain, but have not yet done so, can be flagged, with a formal case raised to resolve their issue, avoiding a formal complaint and potential fine.

#2: Comprehensive Review and Audit of Survey and Listening Posts

Start a comprehensive review and audit of all of your existing survey and listening posts, ensuring you are asking the right questions and capturing the most appropriate metrics in regards to consumer duty. We can provide actionable recommendations to ensure your listening posts are set up to deliver the right outcomes, and that your surveys are WCAG 2.0 compliant.

#3: Evaluate and Solve Compliance Issues at Scale 

Delivering consistent and compliant customer communications can feel like a daunting task. We can help you evaluate all structured, semi structured, and unstructured communication to advise if each piece of communication is compliant with the consumer duty before they go live, providing recommendations for areas of improvement. 

#4: Create Seamless Experiences for Your Most Vulnerable Customers 

It is critical that your most vulnerable customers continue to have a seamless experience with your brand. Our technology can automatically alert you to any aspects of your customer journey that are not providing an inclusive experience. Through our unique Consumer Duty Taxonomy consisting of DEI, Compliance, and the Financial Services Industry Pack, we can identify those customers who are NOT getting the right outcomes, and provide recommendations on how to improve their experience.

#5: Combine a Compliance Focus With a Customer-Centric Culture

The most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance- first approach. Celebrate and socialise positive customer experiences, champion positive customer outcomes across the entire organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about how InMoment can help, please reach out to voc@inmoment.com or click here to read our full consumer duty solution brief!

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5 Reasons To Get Tickets to the 2023 XI Forum Sydney or Singapore!

It’s that time of year again! XI Forum Sydney and Singapore are back and this year, they’re jam-packed with hands-on demonstrations, workshops, and interactive opportunities to help you extract tangible value from our speakers, as well as gain applicable knowledge for your experience program. 

Here are five reasons why you should save your spot today:

Reason #1: Implement ‘Integrated CX’ for Your Brand

What is integrated CX? Not only is this the theme of our upcoming XI Forums, but it’s also InMoment’s approach to help businesses take action on their customer experience initiatives to ultimately deliver measurable business outcomes. 

Integrated CX connects critical aspects of a successful customer experience, including:

  • Integrated Signals: Bringing together the voice of customers and not-yet customers across the full customer journey from surveys, chats, reviews, calls, etc.
  • Integrated Insights: Delivering both leading innovative technology and strategic expertise to deliver ROI
  • Integrated Action: The ultimate goal is to eliminate any and all silos that exist in many companies, facilitating a coordinated, data-driven approach to prioritising which action will get your business the best results

Discover what integrated signals, integrated insights, and integrated actions can do for your experience program.

Reason #2: Learn From Award-Winning Speakers

The 2023 speaker line up has been announced and the content is more practical than ever. Joining us on stage, we have:

  • InMoment’s Chief Product Officer, Sandeep Garg taking delegates through how integrated CX applies to your experience program
  • Craveable Brand’s Chief Customer Officer, Jess Gill will share Oporto, Red Rooster, and Chicken Treat’s journey to shift their culture toward customer centricity and the wins they’ve had as a result. 
  • Downer New Zealand’s National Customer Experience and Marketing Manager, Scott Wilson and HR Business Partner, Jake Barker. Together, they will share how these two business units work together to make experiences better for both customers AND employees.  
  • Aesop’s Voice of the Customer Global Program Manager, Jason Katsambiris will take delegates through what it takes to run a global VoC program across different languages, cultures, and markets— designing a program that ingests and makes sense of linguistically dispersed customer signals to enable customer engagement at scale.
  • Fonterra’s VoC Program Manager, Roshena de Leon. Through embedding an integrated experience program, Roshena will share with delegates her experience driving CX collaboration across teams, using simple frameworks to drive sustainable change.
  • Commonwealth Super Corporation’s Customer Experience and Insights Manager, Katie Bogg, will host a workshop designed to give you hands-on experience on getting your program noticed from frontline employees, buy-in from C-suite executives, gaining momentum for customer-led initiatives, and anchoring your program around an elevator pitch for experience improvement success. 
  • legalsuper’s Data, Insights, and CX Manager, Eslam Affifi—after winning last year’s CX Award for using data to unlock customer insights, Eslam will help you understand the “why” behind your program, and the challenges that legalsuper overcame to build out its experience improvement program.
  • InMoment’s Director of Experience Improvement, Josh Marans will teach delegates how InMoment launched our own internal award-winning experience improvement program, and the mistakes you can avoid when launching yours.

Reason #3: Network With Your Peers

Network with 100+ senior CX practitioners from the region’s leading brands. That’s right—there will be plenty of opportunities to meet new people and create new connections throughout the day and learn from their unique experiences. 

Reason #4: The Conference Is More Practical Than Ever

XI Forum Sydney and Singapore have a reputation for being the most practical conference in the APAC region. The conference is designed to give you a behind-the-scenes look at some of Australia’s best performing experience programs, and take learnings from the experts to apply to your program from day one. You will discover CX resources, client stories, frameworks, and methodologies that will be revealed to delegates for the first time. 

Reason #5: We’re Coming to a City Near You! 

This year we’ve added another location to the XI Forum APAC tour—we’ll be visiting Sydney and Singapore! 

What are you waiting for? We would love to have you join us at one of these locations:

XI Forum Sydney: 15th March 2023

XI Forum Singapore: 24th March 2023


Any questions we didn’t answer here? Reach out to infoapac@inmoment.com

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Moments That Matter in the Customer Experience: How Driver Analysis Helps Identify Which to Focus on & Why

In our recent blog, we discussed how you can improve your customer experience (CX) strategy in five simple steps. Customer experience often relates to the long-term relationship between customers and the companies they do business with. It reflects the summary of experiences at different points along the customer journey—such as considering doing business with a brand, making a purchase and becoming a customer, receiving additional services, having issues resolved, etc—and includes multiple channels: phone, in-person, email, and so on. These various interactions along the customer lifecycle—and, more specifically, those that have the most impact on the business—are what we like to call “Moments That Matter”  (MTM) in customer experience.

But are there some moments that matter more than others in the overall customer experience? And if so, how do we assess their importance?

Five Questions to Address

  1. What Are “Moments That Matter?”
  2. How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
  3. How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
  4. How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” assessed?
  5. Why Does the Technology You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?

Question #1: What Are “Moments That Matter?”

In the past couple of decades, it has become more clear that consumers are after more than just the “product” they purchase. Their choice to support a brand is more than just rational decision-making; it’s about emotions, too. Today’s organizations realize this; so, they try to continuously improve the way in which they deliver those experiences. 

For example, many organizations measure call center experiences as a part of their CX program, which is a smart move. Service and support is a key element that defines customer experience, and it frequently generates memorable moments. But is the call center interaction all that matters for the customer?

“Moments That Matter” are the specific interactions—like a particularly superior or terrible call center experience—that trigger customers’ feelings and leave lasting impressions. These are the specific experiences that stand out more than others and impact the customers’ long-term opinions about the organization overall. Additionally, they can likely lead to a make-or-break decision about their future relationship with the organization. 

Question #2: How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?

A key step to identifying the “Moments That Matter” is understanding the customers’ journey throughout their relationship with the organization, from consideration and researching the product or service they need all the way through using said product or service. 

Mapping this journey starts with the organization’s knowledge of its key customer touchpoints. Next, customers provide feedback and further input to pinpoints those touchpoints most important to them. They also provide context about their best and worst experiences, wins, and pain points. This mapping helps brands focus on the key “Moments That Matter,” because, in reality, not every touchpoint and every experience is as impactful as others in creating healthy and long-lasting relationships.

Question #3: How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?

After understanding what “Moments That Matter” are, the next step is to measure the brand’s performance at each of those moments. This is typically done using a survey format that first asks customers to evaluate their overall experience with the company. Then, it should ask which MTMs they have experienced and evaluate those they are familiar with.  It may also be effective to rate some MTMs on a battery of actional deep-dive attributes.

Question #4: How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” Assessed?

There are two general ways to assess the importance of each MTM: 

  • Ask how important each MTM is (so-called “stated importance”), or 
  • Mathematically derive importance from each MTM’s ratings and the overall experience with the company (“derived importance”). 

Derived importance has an advantage in that it does not require additional questions and simply uses respondents’ evaluation of each MTM they experienced. In general, the rating for each MTM is aligned with the overall experience rating, and the MTM that best follows the overall experience rating is therefore the most important. This type of analysis is called “driver analysis.” At InMoment, we use a technique called True Driver Analysis, which surpasses other approaches in quality of results. 

Question #5: Why Does the Approach You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?

Different statistical approaches can be used to conduct a driver analysis and assess the importance of each MTM: correlation analysis, regression analysis, structural equation modeling, and partial least squares, to name a few. The results of these approaches, however, may be biased in the presence of a strong relationship among the MTMs themselves (called “multicollinearity”). 

For this reason, InMoment uses True Driver Analysis, which is a technique designed specifically to avoid this type of bias and to assess the “true” relative impact of each MTM on an overall outcome metric. As an output of True Driver Analysis, organizations can identify the key Moments That Matter, focus their efforts, and be able to improve customer experience, loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.

A Visual of InMoment Driver Analysis

With continuous experience improvement being a key enabler of happier customers and long-lasting customer relationships, it is most critical to identify and focus on the Moments That Matter in every experience delivered. 

To read more about a proven strategy for continuously improving experiences across your brand in five steps—as well as the brands who have found success with it—check out this article for free today!

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Cleaning a Toilet vs. Calling Customer Support: 3 Factors Impacting the Customer Experience

Calling Customer Support vs Cleaning a Toilet

Shep Hyken, a well-known customer service consultant, recently shared that 42% of people would rather clean a toilet than call customer support. This statistic actually didn’t surprise me given how often support experiences leave much to be desired. 

This got me thinking: Why is that the case when none of us would claim to enjoy cleaning a toilet!? And I decided that the reluctance to call customer support came down to three factors: 

  • Control 
  • Time to task completion 
  • And likelihood things are done right the first time

Let’s take a closer look at each of these factors—and how organizations can address them in their customer support initiatives!

3 Factors Impacting the Customer Support Experience

Factor #1: Control

Since I am the one cleaning the toilet, I have control over when and how the job is done and how well it is done. That is not often the case in the support experience. 

Yes, more companies and brands are trying to shift the customer service experience to a self-serve one, where the person needing support can find their own answers via the company’s internet site, user forums, or at worst a chat session. But let’s be honest, these moves are not being done to put the customer in control of the experience; they are being done to save the company money by shifting the experience to lower cost channels and reducing the labor costs in the call center. 

Unfortunately, because these self-serve support initiatives are motivated by a cost-savings lens and not a customer experience one, they are often not executed very well. People can’t find the answer they need online, or the answer doesn’t make sense or completely solve their problem. And chatbots are often effective at solving very simple queries, but not complex ones.

The other reality is that consumers want to interact with a live person. According to CDP.com, 64% of consumers say access to live people would significantly improve customer experience. So while shifting the support burden to the consumer or low-cost (non-human) channels may save the company money, it is not engendering customer loyalty when that is not how the consumer wants to interact with your company.

Factor #2: Time to Completion

As mentioned, no one enjoys cleaning a toilet, but if we are honest, it takes no more than a couple minutes, less than 10 for even the dirtiest of them. But how many customer-support experiences take only a few minutes? 

It often takes you at least a few minutes to get through the automated phone tree, only to be told your hold time is much longer than a few minutes! While some brands are now using automated callbacks  that adds some convenience in that you don’t have to actually wait on hold (ironically being told how important your call is over and over and over again), how likely is it that you get a call back when it is convenient for you? It’s more likely that you have moved on to other tasks only to be interrupted by that call.

Factor #3: Getting Things Done Right the First Time

Finally, we arrive at the last factor: first-call resolution (as call center leaders call it). I want you to think back to your last few call center interactions: What percentage of the time is your issue really resolved on the first call, with no transfers and no additional hold time? 

Too often the first agent you speak with is either brand new and not trained properly, or the company’s knowledge base does not provide them quick access to the answer to your issue, or they are not empowered to resolve your issue without “supervisor approval” or a transfer to a manager.

There are several problems with how most companies measure first call resolution:

  1. It is not measuring total effort to resolution. Most likely, you have already searched the website or FAQs or user forums and possibly tried the chatbot before getting to a live agent. So it is measuring the call, but not measuring customer time and effort.
  2. If it is measured based on agent data entry, it is not measuring consumer confidence that the issue was resolved and it is making that judgment likely well before the customer has experienced the solution and feels confident it is resolved.
  3. If it is measured based on survey responses, it is not representative of the total customer base, but only those customers who completed the follow-up survey, a small percentage of the customers who contacted customer support.

My colleagues at InMoment often hear me say “every call to the call center is a broken customer experience somewhere upstream.” Given that, your call center is your safety net and last chance to “save” the customer and ensure a continued relationship and extended lifetime value. 

Yet, too many companies see their call center as only a cost and something that can be managed or minimized by reducing headcount and shifting to lower cost channels. This is a financially driven, inside-out view of customer support and not an outside-in, customer-centric approach. 

If companies truly want to reduce the cost associated with customer support, learn from these calls and fix the upstream issues that are creating the need for the calls in the first place. 

Fewer issues, fewer calls, happier customers, better financial outcomes.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how InMoment’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

How to Build Customer Trust and Loyalty

Two people and a dog inside of a business showing customer loyalty.

Many companies underestimate the value of customer trust and loyalty when it comes to driving higher revenue growth. It might sound counterintuitive, but convincing existing customers to return is more important than gaining new ones. This is because the cost of finding new customers is far higher than the cost of selling to existing customers. In fact, returning customers spend 67% more than first-time buyers.

It’s clear that executives need to put customer loyalty at the center of their company’s values, but how do you actually go about doing building customer trust and loyalty? Let’s jump right in!

3 Ways to Build Customer Trust and Customer Loyalty

  1. Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust
  2. Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand
  3. Quality, Quality, Quality

Action #1: Create Personalized Experiences to Build Trust

Throughout the customer journey, your brand should meet customers where they are. The more personal you make the customer experience, the more trust you’ll cultivate. 

For instance, in the pre-purchase stage, in-store employees should have substantial knowledge about products and understand what customers need. Employees should be trained to create positive interactions from the beginning all the way up to the final moment of purchase. Asking small questions like if a customer found everything they needed—and stepping in if they didn’t—can make a huge impact. Little actions like that help add a nice personal touch to a customer’s experience—and lead to a stronger level of trust!

Action #2: Go the Extra Mile to Listen and Understand 

Trust often leads to loyalty, but your brand has to make the first move. To cement a longstanding relationship of trust, your business needs to show loyalty to customers first. 

An effective approach here would be to engage with and respond to customers, because engaged customers are more likely to promote your company than unengaged customers. Actively responding to customer questions, comments, and complaints can grow loyalty by putting a human voice to a brand. 

One best practice for engaging with customers in this way is to design an open communication and feedback channel. Of course, we recommend utilizing not just a help center as a method to reach out, but any adequate resource, from employees on the front line to digital surveys. Additionally, you should look to other indirect forms of feedback to understand your customers such as review site data and social media mentions.

Action #3:  Quality, Quality, Quality

At the end of the day, even if their customer experience was amazing, if the product doesn’t meet a customer’s expectations, all that work you did to build trust and loyalty is in vain. Customers expect value for what they pay for and no amount of sales gimmicks can hide the truth of your product, so it’s key to know customers’ expectations and develop your product/service to meet or exceed that. After all, loyal customers are coming back for a quality purchase; the positive customer experience is an additional element encouraging that return. 

Your customer experience platform is essential to identifying friction points and remedying them to improve customer trust and customer loyalty. We discussed in the section above how it’s important to keep tabs on what your customers are saying about their experience. Once you’ve collected all this feedback data across every channel, you can leverage your customer experience (CX) platform to analyze all that customer feedback and identify the areas in your business that need some attention. Check out this video below to learn how global banking giant, Virgin Money, worked with InMoment to understand the most impactful moments in the customer journey.

Now that you’ve learned how to build customer trust and loyalty, read our eBook to learn about how that trust and loyalty can drive cross-sell and upsell opportunities!

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how InMoment’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

CX Design: What It Is, How It Works, and How It Creates Experience Improvement

What is CX design?

If you’ve ever heard the terms “CX” or “customer experience” before, you probably know that they and similar phrases refer to organizations’ attempts to scour every interaction for feedback and insights. You might also know that customer experience is generally considered to be a more specific subset of user experience (UX). But how do those organizations design CX programs? What goes into deciding which interactions to scrutinize, the goals formed around that work, and so much more? If you’re curious about CX design and how organizations wield it, you’ve come to the right place!

Today’s discussion breaks down the wider universe of CX design, but we’re also going to talk about the best ways for organizations to leverage this discipline. Many brands consider merely “managing” experiences to be the finish line of CX design, but there’s a lot more that organizations can accomplish, including genuine Experience Improvement (XI). Let’s get into it!

What Is CX Design?

The idea of CX design was relatively simple for many years. Basically, when an organization’s leadership decided to engage in customer experience design, they would deploy surveys (sometimes physically) for customers to fill out and hand back. We’ve all seen the little surveys that sometimes pop up after buying a sandwich, getting a car serviced, visiting a retailer, and the like. For a long time, this was considered cutting-edge CX technology and a valuable means of soliciting feedback. Other methods, like mystery shopping, were often used as well.

However, as technology has grown more sophisticated, so too has our understanding of not just how to manage customer experience, but how to improve it. Our understanding of what customers truly seek in experiences has broadened as well, and so the job of a CX designer (and the role of CX strategy in general) became more about understanding customers’ minds, not just getting their feedback. It became about optimizing journey touchpoints to delight customers and nurture relationships!

Unfortunately, even though technology and new learnings have made CX design so much more powerful than in years past, many organizations seem content to use it to gather numbers and react to problems only as they arise. This principle is reflected in how these companies’ programs are designed; CX teams don’t deploy to fix a problem until it’s been submitted by a customer, and discussions on program progress are centered around how today’s metrics compare to yesterday’s.

The issue with this sort of CX design is that while it can give you a superficial temperature reading of how customers like your brand… that’s about all you’re getting from it. Organizations that take this tack with their CX design miss opportunities to, yes, fix glaring flaws, but also meaningfully improve experiences and get to know their customers on a more human level. That is where the true power of CX design comes into play, and the brands that wield it are, more often than not, at the top of their vertical because of it.

What Does the CX Design Process Look Like?

If CX design can really help organizations achieve such dramatic transformations and high goals, what’s the first step toward actually doing that? 

As we mentioned earlier, many brands start their CX design process by looking at a handful of channels their customers might use to communicate (contact centers, social media, etc.) and deciding to pay more attention to those channels. However, while going about CX design this way might net you a few insights here and there, it’s actually much more effective to design with the end in mind.

In other words, before you even turn any of your listening posts on, take some time to consider which goals you actually want to achieve with your CX program. The sky’s the limit, too! Don’t be afraid to stake out some truly ambitious goals in your design. Experience programs can be used to achieve some pretty amazing things.

What those things are depends on what your business needs. For example, if your customers are churning a lot more than you’d like, you can build your CX design around better customer retention. Or, perhaps you’d like to use your experience program to improve workplace culture or get a better sense of what’s going on in the marketplace around your organization.

Whatever your Experience Improvement goal is, just having that as a guiding ethos will make a world of difference for your CX design. However, while your goal should be aspirational, it also needs to be quantifiable—to revisit the churn example, make sure that you tie a specific percentage or number to your goal. That will further define the finish line you want your CX program to help you cross, and it will also make your initiative’s value more tangible and therefore more visible!

Why Is CX Design Important?

Once organizations establish the goal(s) they want to achieve with their CX design and attach some sort of target number to it, it’s time to take the next step and consider which CX tools to use. This is another reason why setting a goal before doing anything else is so helpful, because it helps you determine not just which tools and channels to focus on, but also which groups of customers.

For example, if you see a chance to improve new customer acquisition, it doesn’t make sense to deploy tools geared for that goal toward all of your customer segments. Rather, you can free yourself and your CX design to focus all your efforts towards new customers. And if you have the bandwidth for additional CX goals, you can deploy your remaining tools where they most make sense. This more deliberate and thoughtful approach to design goes a long way toward achieving those goals!

This approach will also help you find and listen to the channels most relevant to your CX goals. To revisit the customer acquisition example, a CX team that sets that goal might research the areas where new customers most talk about your brand, then set up surveys and other listening tools there to capture that customer intelligence at its most organic. The team will have honed in on the channel most relevant to its goals and successfully filtered out noise from customer segments that are less relevant to those goals.

You don’t have to be a CX expert to know that brands and organizations love data. In fact, some companies love data so much that they gather it just for the sake of having it! Having data is certainly important, of course, but much like the CX metrics we talked about earlier, just having it won’t create Experience Improvement for your customers. The only way to do that is to actually take that data and mine it for valuable insights.

Data hygiene is yet another area that conventional CX design struggles with. A lot of programs are designed to gather lots of data very efficiently, but that creates a whole new challenge for the people running that program—namely, how much time does it take to sift through a mountain of data? What insights should CX teams look for and which ones should they disregard? And how can those teams make progress finding insights when their program is gathering data from every corner at every moment?

This is yet another reason why a deliberate, more targeted approach to CX design is the way to go. If you build your CX programs around very specific goals, the data you gather will be much more specific as well. Your data mountain will be smaller and more manageable, and your CX team won’t have to go near as far to find the insights most helpful to their goals.

One final note about data is that it doesn’t have to come from the CX team alone. Pulling other employees and groups into your CX design process can help you get a complete, 360-degree picture of your customer, further cementing both your goals and your future success. Including others also lets them know that, no matter how far away their job may be from the front lines, their work still matters and is relevant to creating a great experience for customers.

Realizing Experience Improvement Through CX Design

This is the hardest part of customer experience design, but it’s also what the process that we’ve been talking about is designed to simplify for you, your CX team, and your entire brand. You’ve used this CX design process to learn what you need to change to create Experience Improvement for your customers; now it’s time to reach out to the right teams and work together to actually make those alignments.

Once you do, continue to track and quantify those changes. Quantifiable goals are like receipts for a CX program; they give you something to prove its worth when you go back to the board for additional funding (as a quick aside, if you hear any positive customer stories that come about as a result of your changes, save those too! Execs love them). Some changes take a while to blossom, but they’ll be worth the wait once they come through.

Ultimately, what is the point of great CX design? A stronger bottom line for your brand? Yes. Eliminating problems with your journey touchpoints? Absolutely! But there’s an even more ambitious goal that comes about as a result of great CX design, and that’s true Experience Improvement. In this context, Experience Improvement doesn’t just refer to individual interactions better and fixing journey touchpoints (though those are certainly important). It means aligning brand and CX design to achieve seamless experiences. It means understanding who your customers are on a deeply fundamental, human level.

Once organizations achieve that close-up understanding of their customers and thus a close bond with them, there’s almost nothing that can break that relationship. Customers who feel understood as human beings, not just clients, won’t ditch you for a competitor. They’ll evangelize your brand to anyone who will listen. And it’ll all be thanks to your stellar CX design and the Experience Improvement opportunities it created!

We hope that this conversation has given you more insights into what CX design is and how fundamentally it can transform your experiences and brand ecosystem. If you want to learn more about how Experience Improvement can help your organization, feel free to download this e-book!

We’re always up for chatting about all things experience, and our mission is to help you own the moments that matter.

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

Watch this demo video to see how InMoment’s award-winning AI tech does the heavy lifting on analysis so you can spend more time lifting CX results.

Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

From proving ROI and navigating budget constraints to adopting AI and creating seamless omnichannel experiences, these challenges are shaping the future of customer experience. In this report, discover actionable insights and recommendations from our CX experts to help you overcome these obstacles and drive growth.

2025 Consumer Trends Report

The One Report You Don't Want to MIss: The way customers interact with brands is evolving faster than ever. Our free 2025 Consumer Trends Report highlights the key shifts transforming customer experience (CX) and what your business needs to stay competitive.

Don’t Ban Equality: InMoment Takes a Stand for Our Employees

InMoment Signs "Don't Ban Equality" Pledge

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.

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