Kiersten Lopez – InMoment

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

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

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

Your Guide to the Three Latest InMoment Announcements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Your Guide to the Three Latest InMoment Announcements

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 5 minutes

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

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

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

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

3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution

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

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

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

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

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

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

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s what the benefits look like:

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

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

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

In this Post

3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution

Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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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.

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

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 Write the Best Customer Onboarding Surveys & Improve the Experience

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

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

What Is Designing with the End in Mind?

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

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

How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?

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

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

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

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

Meaningful Experience Improvement

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

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

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

In this Post

What Is Designing with the End in Mind?How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?Meaningful Experience Improvement

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Written by Simon Fraser

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Customer Aggression in the Workplace Has Forever Changed Employee Experience

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

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

The Roots of Heightened Customer Aggression

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

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

How Customers and Employees View This Problem

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

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

Image #1: Customer responses to the question,“What would you think if you witnessed a customer acting aggressively toward an employee at a place of business?”

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

Image #2: Responses if the employee was aggressive in return

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

Employee Commitment

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

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

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

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

In this Post

The Roots of Heightened Customer Aggression How Customers and Employees View This Problem Employee Commitment

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 4 minutes

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

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

This article was originally posted on CustomerThink.com

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

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

4 Signposts on the Employee Experience Maturity Path Map

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

#1: Employee Satisfaction

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

#2: Employee Engagement

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

#3: Employee Commitment

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

#4: Employee Advocacy

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

How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

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

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

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

The Importance of Creating a Culture of Commitment

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

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

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

In this Post

4 Signposts on the Employee Experience Maturity Path Map How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?The Importance of Creating a Culture of Commitment

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Written by Michael Lowenstein

Reading time 5 minutes

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

A game-changing guide for your team on how to build & implement a competitive, fully-stacked integrated CX program.

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

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

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

Using the Right Listening Technique

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

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

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

Building Human Connections

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

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

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

Buyer Interviews Process

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

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

The Insights

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

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

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

Time to Get Started!

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

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

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

In this Post

Using the Right Listening Technique Building Human Connections Buyer Interviews Process The Insights Time to Get Started!

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Unlock Expert Guidance on Today’s CX Challenges & Opportunities

Updated August 9, 2024

Written by Josh Marans

Reading time 3 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How to Eliminate Friction in Your Customer Journey

What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?

When most folks think of friction, they probably think of middle school science class. But if you’re a customer experience professional, “friction” is probably a term you’ve heard whenever your teammates talk about reducing customer churn. Within that context, friction refers to points in the brand experience that can have a long-term impact on customers’ relationship with a business. Friction may even cause some customers to quit a brand altogether.

Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?

Did you know that the average business today loses between 10-30% of its customers annually?

Additionally, research by Carlson Marketing shows that U.S. companies lose 50% of their customers every five years. Multiply the amount of churning customers by the lifetime value (LTV) of the average customer at your organization and losing customers at this rate means losing millions of dollars!

Because of this, it’s essential that brands have an experience program in place that can detect friction, help experience professionals understand the problem(s) creating that friction, and correct them. The result is both a meaningfully improved experience and saved customer relationships. So, without further ado, let’s go over how your organization can ensure it’s eliminating friction across your customer journey.

How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

#1: Understand The Moments That Matter

Like we said earlier, an important part of reducing friction is knowing about and understanding the moments that matter to customers. Brands can achieve this understanding by mapping out a few of their most important customer journeys. Learning about key touchpoints is one of the best ways to become aware of problems as they arise.

One of the most impactful methods to identify these moments and then reduce friction across your customer journey is InMoment’s Touchpoint Impact Mapping. Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a innovative way of understanding the moments that matter to customers. It is unique because it is based entirely on comment data drawn from customer feedback, ensuring a more accurate view of the customer’s memory of their experience. This creates an emotional picture of the journey that highlights what is most important to customers and also allows our clients to prioritize those moments that matter most to their customers.

Watch this video to hear how banking giant, Virgin Money, leveraged Touchpoint Impact Mapping to identify a key friction point and then improve its customer onboarding experience!

How Virgin Money Eliminates Friction in It’s Customer Journey

What’s more, once you’ve identified those high-impact moments, you can use this strategy to immediately begin solving those problems and expediently reduce journey friction. Understanding touchpoints and their drawbacks enables organizations to come up with solutions, implement them, and listen to see how they’re working. Experience practitioners can then point to those changes, and their improvements, when proving their program’s worth.

#2: Talk to Employees

Research has even shown that a highly engaged workforce increases profitability by 21%! So, getting your customers’ take on an experience is clearly important, but many brands, in their rush to do so, overlook chatting with their employees about customer journeys as well. Employees, especially frontline ones, can provide extremely powerful and eye-opening intel about your brand’s experience. How can brands access and leverage that?

The best way for brands to get their employees’ perspective is by letting them constantly submit feedback and ideas in real-time. Rather than relying on, say, an annual survey, organizations should instead utilize experience platforms that give employees a constant voice. This also further allows brands to learn about, and act upon, problems as they emerge in real-time instead of too far down the road for the customer’s liking.

Want to learn more about how employees can help you decrease friction in the customer journey and grow customer loyalty and value? Check out this infographic!

#3: Keeping Tabs on Your Customer Journey

That notion of being constantly aware of journey friction as it happens is at the heart of keeping it suppressed as much as possible. Surveys are important, but this dynamic is another reason why they’re insufficient for reducing journey friction by themselves—a constantly possible problem demands a constantly active solution. Organizations simply cannot achieve that level of awareness otherwise.

Another element of getting a full picture of your experience is leveraging data sources outside of surveys. And that’s going to become crucial in the next few years. Why? Because only 19% of U.S. Gen Z customers are likely to complete a traditional survey.

Instead of relying solely on direct surveys, brands can do this by combining survey listening with other sources of data, like your employees’ perspectives, and putting it against a backdrop of financial and operational information. This approach creates a 360-degree view of your customers and experience, an understanding that your organization can leverage to reduce friction, boost retention, and create a meaningfully improved experience.

Want to learn more about improving customer retention? We just published an entire eBook on the subject—click here to check it out!

In this Post

What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

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Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 4 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

How Targeted Surveys Help Improve Your Customer Experience (CX)

One tool is practically synonymous with the customer experience (CX) industry: surveys. Since the inception of the industry, targeted customer experience surveys have been seen as a foundational listening and research tool that leverages strategic questions to collect data from a specific group of customers.

Sending out a targeted survey is the first step to improving customer experiences, employee experiences, and even the bottom line. Once a targeted survey has collected the desired data, a top-notch Experience Improvement platform mines that data using advanced analytics to uncover actionable insights. And once an action plan is made and carried out, businesses can improve their practices and processes in a way that helps them to acquire new customers and employees, retain existing ones, identify cross-sell and upsell opportunities, and eliminate extra costs.

All that starts with a targeted survey. But what are the best practices for creating a targeted survey? How do you get started? Well, that’s what we will break down today!

Picking Your Audience

The first step to a successful targeted survey? Selecting a target audience! Ask your team, “Who are we trying to appeal to? How do we want to improve their experience?” The audience in question should be one that is crucial to your strategy, so be sure to examine sales data, demographics, and other analytics to inform your decision.

For instance, let’s say that you are a fast casual restaurant looking to launch a new menu item in a specific region. Your target audience would then be customers from that region who are regulars at your restaurant. That would be helpful to gauging interest in your new sandwich combo!

You can also leverage other, more general surveys that ask broader questions in order to identify more specific populations to survey. Additionally, it’s possible that your company already has the data you need! Check other relevant data or research that may have already been done on your desired subject. If the insights you need are already in your possession, this can help you avoid the dreaded survey fatigue in your customers (and employees).

Four Principles for Building a Good Survey

At InMoment, we often get questions like, “What is the best way to design a survey?”, “What questions should I include?”, and “What rating scales should I use?”. The quick answer to those questions is that it depends on both the type and the topic of the survey.

Principle #1: Design with the End in Mind

This principle is also referred to as the “Backward Research Process.” When you design with the end in mind, you must first think about the decisions you want to make and actions you want to take based on the information you collect.

Are you focused on increasing customer retention by identifying customers who had a poor experience? Do you want to “grade” your outlets or employees on their ability to serve customers? Do you want to assess which specific customer-handling processes are and are not working? The content of your survey should be guided by your answers to these questions. And since you’ve already identified your target audience, you’re ahead of the game!

Principle #2: Generate Hypotheses When Designing Your Survey

While designing the survey, it is often helpful to generate some hypotheses about how you think the results might turn out. This exercise can help you define what information you need to either collect or append to your survey data.

Principle #3: Ask the Right Questions

Don’t ask all the questions. Ask the right questions. Depending on your desired outcome, you might use a variation of these question types:

Multiple Choice Questions
Text Entry Questions
Quotas and Qualifications

Principle #4: Don’t Forget About The Survey Invitation

One of the most neglected parts of the survey design process is the survey invitation. Often, it is designed as an after-thought. You need to design your email invitation to maximize the likelihood that customers will receive it, notice it, open it, and click the survey link.

A well-designed, branded targeted survey experience is key!

Learn from the Data

You’ve zeroed in on your audience, chosen strategic questions, and sent out an optimized invitation—now the data is rolling in! This is the most exciting part of the process, because that feedback you’re receiving will be the basis of your next major improvements to the customer experience!

Your Experience Improvement (XI) tools (such as our Active Listening Studio) will be able to ingest that data, and not only reveal insights, but will pinpoint the moments that matter (or the interactions, channels, and touchpoints that most impact your business). Prioritizing those moments helps you to take swift action to improve not only experiences, but also your bottom line.

After you’ve taken these actions toward Experience Improvement, you can also send follow up surveys to identify the effectiveness of your improvements and fuel continuous efforts toward experience excellence.

How InMoment’s Active Listening Studio Can Help

InMoment’s Active Listening Studio is a one of a kind listening suite that gives you the control to gather feedback at every touchpoint, allowing customers to tell you what matters most to them without bombarding them with survey after survey. Active Listening Studio includes:

DIY Survey Creation
Our AI-powered Engagement Engine™
The Rapid Resolution Engine™
Our Eligibility Engine™
Social Monitoring
Multimedia Feedback

Leveraging these tools allows you to create a more effective targeted survey, optimize your listening strategy, and ultimately prove that you’ve improved experiences and your business. One of our global retail clients was even able to increase survey response rates by 37% and response length by 38%!

Want to learn more about how InMoment can help you conduct a better targeted survey—and improve your customer experiences, employee experiences, and beyond? Contact our team today and we’d be happy to explore the right options for your business!

In this Post

Picking Your Audience Four Principles for Building a Good Survey Learn from the Data How InMoment’s Active Listening Studio Can Help

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 4 minutes

2025 Consumer Trends Report

Do Companies Recognize the High CX Value of Employee Advocates?

This article was originally posted on CustomerThink.com

Do companies recognize the high customer experience (CX) value of employee advocates? Shouldn’t they want to cultivate the kind of behavior advocacy represents?

That’s my belief. And, because of dramatic, behavior-shaping trends in the world of talent and skills availability, significant and lasting disruptions in the way people work, and the greater independence of today’s employees, I’m convinced they should both recognize and cultivate it.

The EX/CX Connection

Employees are the key, critical common denominator in optimizing the customer experience. Very often, either directly or indirectly, they are at the intersection of customer/vendor experience. Making the experience for customers positive and attractive at each point where the company interacts with them requires an in-depth understanding of both customer needs and how what the company currently does achieves that goal, particularly through the employees. That means that companies must seek to understand, and leverage, the impact employees have on customer behavior. Further, and equally important, they must focus on optimizing the employee experience.

Supporters of employee satisfaction and engagement programs, research and training techniques, with their focus on retention, productivity, and fit or alignment with business objectives, have made some broad, bold, and often unchallenged, assertions with respect to how these states impact customer behavior. Chief among these is that, beyond skills, everyday performance, and even commitment to act in the best interest of their employers, employees have natural tendencies and abilities to deliver customer value, fueled by emotion and subconscious intuition.

Though on the surface this sounds plausible, and even rather convincing, a thorough examination of how employee satisfaction and engagement link to customer behavior will yield only a tenuous, assumptive and anecdotal connection. In other words, there is much vocal punditry, and even whole books, on this subject, but little substantive proof of connection or cause.

Powerful and advanced research can generate insights which enable B2B and B2C companies to identify current levels of employee commitment, and it provides actionable direction on how to help them become more contributory and active brand advocates. Employee advocacy, as an advanced EX core concept and research protocol, was designed to build and sustain stronger and more commitment-based and rewarding employee experiences and also improved customer experiences, driving the loyalty and advocacy behavior of both stakeholder groups, and in turn increasing sales and profits.

It is often stated (especially by corporate CEOs) that the greatest asset of a company is its employees. Emotionally-based research has uncovered specifically how an organization can link, drive and leverage employee attitudes and behavior to expand customer-brand bonding and bottom-line performance. This is advanced EX, some might even say it is revolutionary! Employee advocacy research can be combined with existing customer and employee loyalty solutions to provide companies with comprehensive and actionable insights on the state of their employees’ attitudes and action propensities, and how those may be affecting customer behavior.

Employee advocacy identifies new categories and key drivers of employee subconscious emotional and rational commitment, while it also links with the emotional and rational aspects of customer commitment. At the positive and negative poles, these employee-focused commitment categories include:

Defining Employee Advocates (And Employee Saboteurs)

– Advocates, the employees who are most committed to their employer. Advocates represent employees who are strongly committed to the company’s brand promise, the organization itself, and its customers. They also behave and communicate in a consistently positive manner toward the company, both inside and outside.

– Saboteurs, the employees who are the least committed to their employer. Saboteurs are active and frequently vocal detractors about the organization itself, its culture and policies, and its products and services. These individuals are negative advocates, communicating their low opinions and unfavorable perspectives both to peers inside the company and to customers, and others, outside the company.

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

Employee Advocates are Essential to Customer Experience—and Overall—Success

Where customer experience is concerned, it is essential to remember that organizations and brands looking to succeed in today’s competitive climate have successfully embedded CX into their cultures, from the C-level executive to the frontline employee. They prosper by using insights generated from a variety of channels and touchpoints, including employees, integrated with customer data from multiple sources, mined by sophisticated text analytics technologies, and then channeled to steer and guide every corner of their businesses.

The more successful the brand and organization, the more evident that the approaches taken are both bottom-up and top-down. This helps ensure a more strategic and real-world view of stakeholder behavior. Truly effective organizations have wisely invested key resources in the stakeholder experience. and at every level of the enterprise. Their leaders, likewise, focus on both individual and collective accomplishment.

This kind of achievement and fulfillment requires that experiences be optimized for all stakeholders. It’s a simple, basic premise, but it works – now and for the future. Ideally, there should be a direct linkage back and forth between the leader, the employee, and the customer. This is where employee advocacy, like the edelweiss flower, can bloom and grow.

In this Post

The EX/CX Connection Defining Employee Advocates (And Employee Saboteurs)Employee Advocates are Essential to Customer Experience—and Overall—Success

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by Michael Lowenstein

Reading time 4 minutes

The Secret to Improving Your CX Survey Response Rates

It is a fact that CX survey response rates have been declining. Additionally, we are being surveyed more and more every day about every mundane thing in our lives. Even the federal government is in on it—an executive order in 1993 directed federal agencies to gather public feedback on how well they delivered services and to strive to offer a comparable level of customer experience with private companies. Orders similar to that one have continued into the present day.

But, with surveys being the lifeblood of nearly all customer experience (CX) programs, what is a CX practitioner to do to improve their CX survey response rates? Much has been written about the tactical things a survey owner can do: list hygiene, fatigue or quarantine rules, visual appeal of the invitation, subject line, formatting, time estimates in the invitation, etc. And while these elements can have some impact, they are temporary band-aids for the over-surveying problem.

The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is…

I’ll let you in on a secret: if you truly want to improve and sustain your response rates, look to your CX program (specifically your closed loop processes). There are two critical things any company can do to improve its response rates, and they tie back to the inner and outer loop concepts described in the Net Promoter System^SM.

You’ve probably heard that it’s vital for organizations to close these loops, as doing so can help you achieve everything from Experience Improvement (XI) to enhanced customer retention and sustained business growth. That’s true! But effectively closing these loops also provides an incentive and opens a door for continuous feedback from your customers or members.

The Inner Loop

The inner loop refers to the systems, processes, and teams that organizations use to respond to customers one-on-one to address negative feedback. Having an effective inner closed loop process is of obvious importance to any company that wants to keep its doors open, let alone create a differentiated and meaningful experience for customers. Fail to close the inner loop, and you open the “leaky bucket.”

However, if you can build a system that allows you to receive customer feedback, analyze it for actionable insights, and respond both meaningfully and expediently, you’ll have a much easier time retaining customers and extending their lifetime value. You will learn more about their individual preferences and may even potentially cross-sell or upsell them to additional products and services.

There is also plenty of research that demonstrates that customers whose complaints have been successfully resolved tend to leave higher review scores than customers who never had a complaint in the first place! Finally, by responding to customers when they have complaints, you demonstrate that you have listened and acted on their feedback, giving them a strong incentive to provide feedback again in the future.

The Outer Loop

The scope of the outer loop is considerably wider than that of the inner loop and requires more organizational resources, cross-silo cooperation, and team coordination. Rather than focus on individual customer interactions and complaint resolution, the outer loop is about the actions your organization takes on the collective feedback you’re receiving to drive Experience Improvement and communicate those improvements back to a much broader segment of customers (if not your entire customer base). The one-on-one interactions that comprise the inner loop are certainly important, but the outer loop is all about incorporating those into a cumulative group effort to drive sustained Experience Improvement.

This improves your CX survey response rates by demonstrating to all customers that your organization truly does care about feedback and attempts to take action to improve the overall customer experience. This provides a feedback incentive even for customers who may not have shared it in the past, as they see the direct benefit.

Widening Focus

Click here to read my full-length Point of View on how focusing on your CX program will actually help you achieve better outcomes. In the meantime, take advantage of anything you might have learned here to meaningfully improve your inner and outer loop processes. I promise you you’ll see a difference.

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The Secret to Improving CX Survey Response Rates Is...The Inner Loop The Outer Loop Widening Focus

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Written by Eric Smuda

Reading time 3 minutes

5 Things Brands Need to Know About the Gen Z Customer Experience (and Employee Experience)

If we were to sum up what brands need to know about Gen Z customer experience preferences (and employee experience preferences) in a few words, it would go something like this: they’re different. Revolutionary even. This may seem like an oversimplification, but when you think about it, Gen Z grew up in a world that is more connected than ever, has more access than ever, and accomplishes everything faster than ever. It makes sense, then, that their standards for customer and employee experiences would be higher than ever, too.

Because Gen Z makes up 26% of the global population, their preferences should already be playing a significant role in your business strategy—and their influence will only grow! That’s why we put a magnifying glass over these emerging consumers and employees in our recent 2022 Experience Trends report, to give you the intelligence you need to create a positive impact with Gen Z, whether you’re trying to convince them to become loyal customers or recruit them to be engaged employees.

Here’s what you need to know according to our data:

What Is Most Important for the Gen Z Customer Experience & Employee Experience?

Tip #1: Seamless and Efficient Experiences Are a Must

We’ve spent a lot of time on the InMoment blog discussing the importance of a seamless experience. It doesn’t matter what channel or touchpoint, your customers and employees should have a sense of consistency every time they interact with your brand. And for Gen Z, seamless experiences are table stakes when it comes to maintaining their loyalty. Gen Z shops both online and in store, so it’s imperative that they are able to experience the same level of convenience, personalization, and general experience excellence across the board.

Tip #2: Gen Z Is Unlikely to Complete a Traditional CX or EX Survey

Get ready for a mic drop moment: Gen Z is simply less likely to fill out a traditional survey. In the course of our research we found that:

In the US:
- Only 19% of your emerging customers (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
- Only 22% of your emerging employees (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
In Canada:
- Only 28% of your emerging customers (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey
- Only 41% of your emerging employees (Gen Z) are likely to complete a traditional survey

So what feedback collection methods should you be using if you want to gauge the Gen Z customer experience? We suggest Microsurveys, social media and review sites, and live chat to gain the intelligence you need to compete for Gen Z’s loyalty.

Thinking of adapting your approach to customer experience surveys, and customer feedback in general? Our experts have derived a four step process to help you leverage all of your data, and only send surveys when they’ll be most effective. Check it out for free here!

Tip #3: Social Media Influencers Have Significant Reach

Gen Z’s first exposure to your brand is likely via social media, and more specifically, through social media influencers. We asked Gen Z consumers about whether they used an influencer code to make a purchase in 2021, and if they are likely to use influencer discount codes in the upcoming year. Here’s what they told us:

One of three emerging Gen Z customers had used a social influencer code in 2021
One of three emerging Gen Z customers were planning to use a code in 2022

From these numbers, it’s clear social media influencers will continue to, well, influence the emerging consumer. If you haven’t considered leveraging influences to acquire new customers, then it’s time to start!

Tip #4: Strong Brand Values Are Make-or-Break

Gen Z has high standards when it comes to the brands they support, and even higher standards for the brands they work for. When looking into a possible employer, our research found that Gen Z is looking for three primary values. Here they are as explained by Gen Z:

Culture: “[I] am likely to choose a [company] that allows me to express myself […] and [get] creative with mentorship and support.”
Diversity: “I’m looking for [a company] that bring in diverse [experiences and] talents that can challenge one another.”
Connectivity: “I believe that success [means] bringing everyone together […] we all [want] to be part of the equation [not just our executives].”

To successfully recruit this value-driven generation, brands should take care to emphasize these core values in job descriptions, internal messaging, and beyond.

Tip #5: Gen Z Has Little Tolerance for Bad Behavior

We’ve all seen the news stories: customers in store or aboard flights displaying outlandishly bad behavior when confronted with mask policies or low stock of desired items, and taking their anger out on employees. We were curious about what Gen Z thought of these displays and whether it affected their perception of the brand involved.

We asked, “What would you think if you witnessed a customer acting aggressively toward an employee at a place of business?” Gen Z responded with overwhelming compassion for the employee in the situation, and even mentioned that “I would interject […] No one should be treated that way.”

What Are You Doing to Prepare for the Next Generation of Consumers & Employees?

As Gen Z becomes an even more prominent customer and employee segment, their CX and and EX preferences will become even more important to your business. So what are you doing today to emphasize and enable Gen Z customer experience expectations? How are you connecting with them? How are you collecting feedback from them to understand how they perceive your brand?

You need to have a strategy in place, and our experts are here to help. Learn how our XI Platform can support your efforts to create optimize Gen Z customer experiences by reaching out to us here or in the chatbot at the lower right hand corner of your screen.
You can also read more from our 2022 Experience Trends Report here!

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What Is Most Important for the Gen Z Customer Experience & Employee Experience?What Are You Doing to Prepare for the Next Generation of Consumers & Employees?

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Updated August 9, 2024

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 5 minutes

Digital Customer Experience: The Value of “Slamming” Your Assumptions

In the world of experience (especially when we’re talking about digital customer experience), we’re constantly making predictions or hypotheses about what the customer is expecting from their experience. And whether we’re making a change to the website, opening a new store, or debuting a new product, that prediction will either be right or wrong.

When we’re wrong, or surprised, it can be easy to feel like we have failed. But in reality, these moments are really opportunities to slam our assumptions, dive into our feedback data, and improve experiences.

This is exactly what we discussed at a recent event with InMoment client Julie (JB) Booth, Head of UX/CX at Columbia Sportswear. In that presentation, JB walked us through how she and her team put their beliefs about in-person and digital customer experience expectations into perspective, use CX tools to dive in and test assumptions, and finally create a culture with an opportunity mindset.

In today’s post, however, we’ll walk through the steps of an exercise JB calls an “assumption slam,” so you can take this process back to your team and use it to test any assumptions of your own. Let’s get started!

How to “Slam” In-Person & Digital Customer Experience Assumptions

You know the old saying, “If you assume, you’re making an ‘a**’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’.” And it’s true! If you are assuming you know exactly what the customer expects out of their experience, you are not truly serving them. Instead, you need to operate on the theory of falsification: to have a great hypothesis, you need to be willing to prove yourself wrong. And that’s where an “assumption slam” comes in handy.

Step #1: Gather Your Team & Select a Topic

The first step in an “assumption slam” is to select a specific topic. If you were to select a broad topic such as “the digital customer experience,” it would be hard to create a thorough list. That’s why JB suggests a more specific theme, like how a specific customer segment navigates your website.

Step #2: Give Your Team Permission to Assume

Next, you need to give yourself permission to assume. Oftentimes, it can feel embarrassing to believe something based on instinct, without having looked into whether that belief is qualified by any data. That’s why it’s so important to let the team know there is no pressure to back up any claims they speak. This kind of behavior is most effective when modeled by team leaders; if the leader is willing to be vulnerable and talk about their assumptions, it gives the rest of the team permission to do the same.

Step #3: List Out Assumptions

Grab a white board and start listing out any and all assumptions! Don’t feel the need to be neat and organized yet—that will come later. Right now, you are primarily trying to get all the assumptions about the in-person or digital customer experience out in the open. You might even find that multiple team members have been operating under the same assumptions.

Step #4: Map Out Assumptions by Risk & Testability

Now it’s time to get organized. Draw two intersecting axes, labeling one “risk” and the other “testability.” Once you’ve done that, as a team, map each assumption along the axes. This allows you to gauge priorities. Those assumptions labeled as “high risk, high testability” will be the first you want to dive into.

Step #5: Dive into Assumptions with Impact

You’ve identified the “high risk, high testability” assumptions your team has about your focus subject, but what do you do now? Well, you get testing! Start with the assumption with the most risk and highest testability and develop a plan for how your team can test that assumption. Then you can work your way down your list until you no longer have assumptions—until you have concrete facts about the way your customers behave and what they expect from their in-person and digital customer experience.

Testing Your Assumptions—and Acting on the Results

Want to learn more about how you can take the results of your assumption slam and then take action to improve your experiences? You can watch the full webinar with helpful tips and tricks here!

In this Post

How to “Slam” In-Person & Digital Customer Experience Assumptions Testing Your Assumptions—and Acting on the Results

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Updated January 21, 2025

Written by The InMoment Team

Reading time 3 minutes

Your Guide to the Three Latest InMoment Announcements

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

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

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

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3 Benefits of Leveraging a Customized Social Listening Solution

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

Benefit #2: Structure Massive Amounts of Natural Language Feedback

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

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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What Is Designing with the End in Mind?

How Can Brands Design with the End in Mind?

Meaningful Experience Improvement

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The Roots of Heightened Customer Aggression

How Customers and Employees View This Problem

Employee Commitment

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10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

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4 Signposts on the Employee Experience Maturity Path Map

#1: Employee Satisfaction

#2: Employee Engagement

#3: Employee Commitment

#4: Employee Advocacy

How Does EX Improvement Impact Customer Behavior?

The Importance of Creating a Culture of Commitment

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10 Steps to Easily Build An Integrated Customer Experience Program

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Using the Right Listening Technique

Building Human Connections

Buyer Interviews Process

The Insights

Time to Get Started!

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Watch the Video – Get More Out of Your CX Program

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2025 Consumer Trends Report

2025 Consumer Trends Report

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What Is Friction in the Customer Journey?

Why Is It Important to Reduce Friction in the Customer Journey?

How Can You Eliminate Friction in the Customer Journey?

#1: Understand The Moments That Matter

#2: Talk to Employees

#3: Keeping Tabs on Your Customer Journey