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Author: Kiersten Lopez

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Why Your Brand Needs to Desilo Customer Journeys Today

By: Eric Smuda, CX Distinguished Practitioner in XI Strategy and Enablement

As customer experiences grow more complex, so too have customer expectations. This has become especially true in recent years, as customers take an increasingly multichannel approach to interacting with brands, purchasing products, and relaying concerns. For this and other reasons, there’s never been a greater need for brands to meet this multichannel expectation and desilo journeys than right now. Let’s get into how and why organizations should accomplish this.

A Broader View

One of the most pressing reasons to desilo customer journeys is to achieve an omnichannel view of customers. Brands can do this by integrating call center transcripts, web data, and operational metrics from across multichannel journeys (with the help of a proper experience platform). Feeding this data, this context, back into the organization helps your brand create a meaningfully improved experience for your customers.

Additionally, though creating a better customer experience is the primary goal here,, brands will find that they can also accomplish key business objectives with this more holistic view of their customers. These include greater customer acquisition, better customer retention, heightened cross-selling to your existing customer base, and lowering cost to serve, all of which result in a stronger bottom line.

A Smarter Approach

Another reason brands should desilo customer journeys is because doing so makes your Voice of the Customer (VoC) and other feedback tools smarter. As experiences have grown more multichannel, customers have grown to expect brands to remember them, their preferences, and whether certain interactions have occurred already. Desiloing journeys allows brands to achieve all of this while also removing irrelevant questions and making feedback collection more conversational.

This idea only makes sense when you consider that each piece of a VoC program is a chance to learn something new or different about a customer. The more disparate pieces of info you can collect and assemble, the more complete the picture of your customers becomes. A multichannel approach to VoC can thus help brands round out that aforementioned omnichannel customer view that’s so important to experience improvement.

The Road to Success

While customers should be the primary beneficiary of journey desiloing, employees benefit from this approach as well. The biggest benefit that employees can reap from desiloed journeys and data is having a complete set of information on customers’ interactions and expectations. When employees have that knowledge and the ability to act on it, they can take pride in having delivered a better customer experience, which boosts their morale. It also helps them understand how their work fits into the customer journey and how it connects with that of other teams.

To sum up, desiloing journeys allows brands to get a 360-degree view of customers that’s essential for improving experiences, create a multichannel experience that treats customers more like people than support tickets, and gives employees a chance to work toward the same commonly understood customer experience goal. This results in both a fundamentally connective experience for customers and transformational success for the brands that can provide it.

Click here to learn more about desiloing customer journeys (and to see an example of that process in action) in my Point of View on this subject.

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What Customers Expect from a Modern Brand Experience

By: Eric Smuda, CX Distinguished Practitioner in XI Strategy and Enablement

The experience world has seen a certain term crop up more and more in recent years: omnichannel. This word has gradually become a regular part of customer experience (CX) practitioners’ vocabulary, and indicates a grander shift in CX thinking from focusing on transactions to creating a more seamless journey for customers. This article will briefly introduce what customers have come to expect of brands, and how those organizations can begin to think about meeting that expectation.

The Sum of All Parts

The main reason why many CX practitioners have shifted their customer experience thinking from individual transactions to entire relationships is because, well, that’s how customers see things. Individual transactions and interactions are important, yes, but customers think about a brand relationship in its entirety. This trend has only become more prominent in recent years, and it’s key to designing a meaningfully improved experience.

One of the most important reasons why customers think this way, especially when it comes to expecting a seamless experience, is because they now interact with brands in many different ways: via an app, over the phone, in-person, on a website, etc. With this increase in touchpoints has come a customer expectation that brands will recognize and remember them no matter how they choose to transact. This expectation is at the core of creating a truly omnichannel experience.

The Problem with Legacy Systems

It’s reasonable to ask why more brands haven’t immediately created omnichannel experiences if customers have come to not just desire them, but expect them. Unfortunately, many organizations have legacy systems in place that rigidly silo experience data. Call center data stays with call center teams, website data stays with digital teams, so on and so forth. This setup makes it much more difficult for brands to even know where to start desiloing customer journeys, let alone to successfully execute that goal.

Another issue to consider here is how brands use CRM systems. Though many of these databases’ data isn’t all that divided, it’s common for too few people to have access to it. This reduces data democratization, which makes it harder for a brand to achieve the 360-degree customer view needed for desiloing journeys.

Where Brands Go from Here

It’s become clear that customers expect brands to recognize them at every touchpoint, and to use that recognition to enhance their experience. Customers also expect to be able to seamlessly jump from one channel to another in any given interaction. Many companies’ experience programs aren’t built to accommodate this trend, resulting in lost opportunities for both a better experience and a stronger bottom line.

How might brands circumvent these problems, desilo their customer journeys, and create a more seamless experience for all? Click here to learn more about how your organization can break these barriers down and achieve Experience Improvement (XI) in my Point of View on this subject.

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Three Paths to Understanding Why Customers Leave Your Brand

By: The InMoment Team

Retaining customers is one of the best ways to ensure that your brand is building a strong bottom line and an ever-improving experience, but keeping customer churn low is easier said than done. Customer churn is, unfortunately, an unavoidable fact of doing business, but that doesn’t mean that brands have to let it happen in vain. Today, we’re going to give you a quick rundown on understanding why customers leave your brand so that you can prevent future churn, retain loyal clientele, and continuously improve their experience.

Enabling Storytelling

One of the best ways to become aware of friction points within your experience is by letting customers point them out in their own words. We’re not just talking written survey answers, here; experience feedback programs that enable multimedia feedback are among the most powerful tools for learning about problematic or broken touchpoints in your customer journey.

Think about how much more human it is to see and hear customers express their concerns instead of just reading about them. Multimedia feedback empowers brands to understand customer concerns on a much more human level than surveys allow, which is also important for motivating employees. In short, empowering customers to express their concerns in their preferred format and sharing that frank feedback with the relevant teams is one of the best ways to motivate genuine improvement.

Seeking Disclosure

Receiving feedback from current customers is important, but what about past customers? What about the competition’s? The best customer experience platforms are sustained by the best market research, and brands that opt for the former can often receive the latter. Databases, customer panels, and other sources of market learnings are now available at the push of a button, and brands that want to understand their experience from all angles should seek this knowledge out as resources allow.

Once you have all of this feedback and intel from customers both inside and outside your brand, a handy next step is to feed all of that structured data directly into a real-time text analytics engine. This tool is incredibly helpful for brands because it can extract customer sentiment and reinforce organizations’ knowledge of customer churn’s root causes. 

Keeping Churn at Bay

Like we said earlier, brands can’t keep customer churn out of the equation, but they can do a great deal to prevent it with tools and methods like these. Reducing churn in this way is also great not just for churn reduction’s sake, but also for creating a more human experience, instilling greater loyalty in customers, and creating a stronger bottom line.

Want to read more on how you can improve customer retention? Our new eBook walks you through exactly how to build a holistic initiative and the math that will prove the value of your efforts! Check it out here.

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How Talking to Past and Present Customers Reduces Future Churn

By: Jennifer Passini, Ph.D., Senior Director of Solutions Strategy

Reducing churn and retaining a solid base of loyal customers is a constant challenge for brands, which is why setting out to reduce that churn must likewise be a constant company goal. I outlined a variety of churn reduction strategies in my recent point of view document on the subject, but there’s a two-pronged approach that merits an especially close look: talking to past and present customers to reduce future churn.

Talking to Past Customers

You can’t always save customers who have already left your brand for what they believe are greener pastures, but talking to these individuals can yield valuable intel that might save some of your current customer base from doing the same. This methodology is often referred to as win/loss research or Attrition Customer Experience (CX), and its findings are invaluable. Talking to past customers can help brands understand what parts of their experience might be driving customers away, as well as better tell which churn might be controllable or uncontrollable.

Win/loss research also affords brands an opportunity to scout out the competition. Past customers usually aren’t shy about sharing which company they switched to and why they think that competitor suits their needs better. While that criticism might sting a bit, it’s a great way to learn about why customers and prospects choose other companies over you. Thus, talking to customers who’ve already gone out the door is rarely a waste of time.

Talking to Current Customers

Once you’ve discussed your brand experience with past customers, it’s important to incorporate those learnings into saving current, at-risk customers from leaving your organization. Arming yourself with context from past customers can go a long way toward reshaping your approach with current customers, listening to their concerns, and understanding why they may feel one way or another about their own journeys with your brand.

Having a powerful Experience Improvement (XI) platform is a priority to take here too. Tools like sentiment analysis can provide brands powerful intelligence that they can compare with feedback from past customers. Combining all of this information can help brands know not just which touchpoints need improvement, but also how best to meaningfully change those areas to retain current business.

Working Upstream

Combining feedback from past and present customers is one of the best ways that brands can prevent future churn. Organizations can rely on this intelligence to be more proactive about saving at-risk customers, identifying and solving broken touchpoints and other experience issues before they result in a loss. Though this process is work intensive and may not save all of your at-risk relationships, the brands that dedicate themselves to soliciting this feedback from all their customers will come away with less churn, and thus more success, than their peers.

Interested in learning more about reducing customer churn? Click here to read my full-length point of view on the subject and to learn additional strategies for reducing churn at your organization.

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The Greatest CX Opportunities for Financial Services in 2021

One of our favorite things about the 2020 Wealth Poll is that it didn’t just dissect the investor mindset. It took that understanding one step further by identifying the best opportunities for wealth management firms, banks, and other financial services businesses to improve their experience in 2021.

So without further ado, let’s dive into our findings!

About the 2020 Wealth Poll

The InMoment Wealth Poll is a multi-wave poll of affluent investors done every few years for the past fifteen years. From June 30, 2020 to July 2, 2020, we surveyed 1,212 investors with over $100,000 of privately held assets to understand how the unsettled market has affected them, how they feel about their client experience, and where opportunities may lie for investment firms to improve and expand business.

Here is a quick breakdown of the investors we surveyed:

  • 790 Mass Affluent Investors ($100,000 to less than $1,000,000 in investable
  • 400 High Net Worth Investors ($1,000,000 to less than $10,000,000 in investable assets)
  • 22 Ultra-High Net Worth Investors ($10,000,000 or more in investable assets)

Experience Improvement Opportunities in 2021

Perhaps one of the most important functions an experience program can serve is helping an organization to identify what they do well in the eyes of the customer—and where there’s room to improve. Only when brands pinpoint those areas can they remove friction and improve experiences (and even move on to increase customer retention, save costs, and more).

That’s the idea that inspired one of the most telling questions in the InMoment Wealth Poll, “Thinking About Your Primary Investment Firm, How Satisfied Are You with Each of the Following.” The answers we received for this question are sure to inform financial services organization’s experience strategies for the upcoming year. Let’s take a look!

It is important to note which firm types have advantages in specific areas. Mutual fund firms, for instance, are currently outperforming others when it comes to “Investment Performance” according to their clients. Additionally, full-service brokerage and insurance firms are showing particular strength when it comes to delivering for their clients, specifically when it comes to the relationships clients have with their financial advisors. Discount firms are also showing strength when it comes to their online services.

When it comes to the big picture, however, it is clear that elements like “Financial Stability” and “Reputation” are mere table stakes for investors. “Fees” are areas of dissatisfaction across the board—which is not surprising—but discount brokerages seem to have a particular advantage here in that investors seem more satisfied with their fees. 

Looking for More?

If these findings peaked your interest, our full length report, “How the Investor Mindset Has Evolved in the Last Decade (and Where It’s Headed)” is full of them! You can download it and see all of the insights our 2020 Wealth Poll here for free. Enjoy your read!

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Why Customers Churn—And How Your Brand Can Respond

By: Jennifer Passini, Ph.D., Senior Director of Solutions Strategy

Of all the inevitable frustrations that come with doing business, perhaps none are so consistent as customer churn. Though countless organizations have made churn reduction a continuous goal, seeing customers leave in spite of your best efforts can be quite a headache in multiple arenas—building loyalty, evaluating effectiveness, and of course, creating a stronger bottom line.

Today’s conversation will be a quick rundown of some of the biggest reasons customers leave and what your organization can do about it. We’ll cover the churn you can control, the churn you cannot, and how to boost your own churn reduction efforts.

The Churn You Can’t Control

Let’s get this out of the way first thing—some churn is beyond any organization’s control. No matter how proactive your customer experience (CX) team is, some amount of churn is inevitable and to be expected. It’s unfortunate, but it’s also a fact of doing business.

Why might some customers invariably leave your brand? Sometimes, they really just don’t need whatever product or service you’re offering anymore. In other instances they might fall on hard times and no longer be able to buy what you’re selling. If your brand serves one or a few given areas, they might move beyond that radius and thus cut themselves off that way. All of these things are beyond your brand’s control.

However, none of this means that brands should throw their hands up in frustration. It certainly doesn’t mean your organization shouldn’t focus on churn reduction.. While some fraction of churn may be unavoidable, quite a bit of it can be controlled and can be managed by organizations. This brings us to our next point: the churn you can manage.

The Churn You Can Control

Brands can and should use customer experience programs to manage the churn they can influence, as well as evaluate what they could’ve done better. For the most part, controllable churn occurs when your product isn’t a great fit for a customer’s needs, poor communication occurs, or a myriad of other possible causes. However, your brand can respond to and control these issues.

Your customers can use feedback tools to bring problems like poor service experiences directly to brands’ attention. Organizations can then digest the feedback and formulate an action plan to combat that problem. Other churn catalysts like superior competition, product and services disconnects, or deficient employee training can be brought to light this way, as well.

Taking Action

Learning about preventable churn through a customer experience program is powerful stuff, but brands can’t stop at knowing about churn catalysts if they want to retain customers. Rather, brands need to design their programs around the audiences from whom they hope to glean intel about churn causes, listen carefully to those individuals, understand the common sentiments amid all the feedback, and then transform the business accordingly.

With this method, brands can realize a lower rate of churn for themselves and continuously apply customer feedback toward that goal. This process can help brands get churn out of the way of their goals: a better experience for all and a stronger bottom line.

Interested in learning more about reducing customer churn? Click here to read my full-length point of view on the subject and to learn additional strategies for reducing churn at your organization.

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How to Ensure Your Brand Promise and Customer Experience Are Always Aligned

By: The InMoment Team

One of the toughest challenges that many brands face is making sure that what they promise lines up with what their customers are experiencing. This alignment is huge for attracting new customers, keeping your current ones, cross-selling to your customer base, and lowering cost to serve. Brands want to succeed for themselves and their customers, so keeping these elements aligned is crucial. However, it’s not always easy.

If you’re looking to make sure your brand promise syncs with your customer experience, never fear! We’ve got a few quick steps you can run through to double-check that everything’s in order:

  1. What is Your Brand Promising?
  2. What is Your Brand Delivering?
  3. What Do Customers Think?

Step #1: What is Your Brand Promising?

This step isn’t as simple as booting up an ad or reading your brand’s website. Those things are important, yes, but be sure to get your marketing and customer experience folks together as you consider this question. Having these two perspectives in the same room is vital to assessing what your brand is promising. Marketing teams offer up ideal goals. Customer experience teams assess how well things are going on the ground.

It’s always good for these two teams to be aligned anyway, but take the time to hash out what exactly your brand is promising. Don’t be afraid to go beyond slogans; take a close look at your organization’s product promise and how it’s being transmitted to customers.

Step #2: What is Your Brand Delivering?

This step is another reason it’s so important to get your CX team on the line for this brand alignment chat. Making a brand promise is one thing, but a CX team will quickly tell you how well that’s playing out in customer interactions. This gives both CX and marketing teams a chance to see where things aren’t quite lining up between brand promise and customer experiences (and gets a good conversation going about solutions).

Step #3: What Do Customers Think?

Your CX team’s perspective is important, but when it comes to evaluating experiences, nothing beats seeing things through your customer’s eyes. What are customers saying about how and why they interact with your brand? How do they feel about the experience you deliver? Is your experience consistent at every touchpoint?

Questions like these go a long way toward spotting the gap between brand alignment and customer experience. More importantly, they give brands a chance to see where things could be better and to shape those touchpoints up. With this process handy, brands can work to align what they promise with what they deliver, creating a better experience for their customers and stronger bottom lines for themselves.

Click here to learn more about the crucial link between CX and marketing, and how uniting those perspectives can transform your entire brand!

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Three 2021 Customer Experience Trends You Need to Know

By: Kiri Burgess, Senior CX Consultant

Looking back on last year, there’s one word that personifies the customer experience industry’s response to 2020’s unprecedented events: adaptation. Very few periods in history have tested and challenged our industry to level up, listen harder, and adapt our efforts to meet customer and employee feedback. With the new year already here, we’ve assembled a list of the three top customer experience (CX) program trends you can look forward to in 2021:

CX Trend #1: The Value of Continuous Listening 

We saw it throughout the year—when circumstances shift, our programs need to adapt as well. New channels, ways of purchasing, servicing, and working emerged overnight as people were suddenly required to stay home, go contactless, and take extra steps to ensure personal safety in a matter of days, or in some cases, overnight.

Ideally, new products, services, and ways of working are tested prior to going live, but this wasn’t always possible in 2020. Therefore, a test and learn mentality proved to be a valuable business asset. Many brands had to and learned to take a “launch first, listen second” approach using an adaptive, always-on listening solution to understand how customers and employees were responding to new initiatives, and then take action to adapt and improve those initiatives. To evolve at speed, brands will need to consider continuing or adopting this approach as external factors such as the Coronavirus require them to change and evolve quickly for success.

Further Reading: How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback

CX Trend #2: Focusing on the (New) Moments that Matter

Respecting our customer’s effort and time continues to be paramount, especially when considering the  busy lives and conflicting priorities customers must balance. Factor in any extra anxiety around COVID-19 and our appreciation for people’s time and energy must be even greater. 

Heading into 2021, it is more important than ever to design and structure a CX program around the key moments that matter to your customers. With all of the changes in 2020, those key moments may have altered slightly or changed all together, especially with the new purchasing and servicing paths that have emerged and new channels that have appeared. Customer journey mapping will help you with this in two ways: 

  1. To identify and prioritise the high-impact and high-emotion moments for your most valued customers
  2. To help employees recognise, react to, and own those moments that matter. From there, you can make meaningful and impactful adjustments to the business. 

Customer journey mapping will more than ever help brands ensure they are respecting their customer’s effort and time by focusing on and enhancing the moments that really matter to them.

Further Reading: Five Steps for Uncovering the Real Customer Journey 

CX Trend #3: Understanding and Communicating the ROI Impact of CX

Many CX programs start out with the belief that “CX is the right thing to do” and are able to gain sponsorship from a senior executive within the organisation based on that logic. However, 2020 brought about greater scrutiny on resources and budgets. So, as we go into 2021, it will be more important than ever for CX teams to understand and prove the return on investment of CX programs. 

Understanding how your CX program supports key financial and business outcomes for your organisation is paramount. To connect the dots, combine your CX and business/financial data, analyze the relationships between the two, working collaboratively with your finance team. Ensure the links are understood across the organization so it is obvious to internal stakeholders that your CX program is contributing to the overall success of the business. Many CX programs initially have the goal ‘to improve the customer experience,’ but undertaking the necessary analysis to prove the financial benefits will ensure ongoing investment for your program and CX initiatives.

Further watching: How to Demonstrate the Value of Experience Improvement to C-Suite and Beyond

Wrapping Up

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year like no other. As we head into 2021 with new resilience, at InMoment we are looking forward to the upcoming industry trends that will come along with it. Adaptation is what defined 2020, but more importantly, it will be what takes us forward.

‌Here’s to a healthy and happy 2021 for you and yours.

If you’re interested in learning more, here are some of our top content pieces of the year for you to read.

Download here:

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5 Steps To Realizing Your Experience Program’s Goals

By: Jim Katzman, Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement

The road to true Experience Improvement (XI) is rarely a straightforward one. There are many ways to take the journey, as countless companies have discovered over the last 10-15 years, but only experience improvement produces the type of customer connections and employee passion that turns companies from followers to true leaders within their verticals.

I talked about realizing experience program goals and success in a recent POV, but I think it’s time to talk briefly about how companies get there. What are steps brands take to get to realizing their goals, and how can they ensure that realization truly means transformational success? Our framework is designed to help companies get there, and it consists of five steps:

  1. Design
  2. Listen
  3. Understand
  4. Transform
  5. Realize

Step #1: Design

I’ve seen a lot of brands kick their experience programs off by turning listening posts on and then forming goals around whatever feedback they can find. It’s much more effective, though, to come at this step in the opposite direction: brands should first design their goals, then turn listening posts on. Defining what you want to do with your experience program before you begin it is much more effective (and a lot less messy) than the inverse.

So, what business challenges do you want your experience program to help solve for? Are you looking to boost customer retention, or lower the cost to serve? Maybe you want to cross-sell or upsell to your existing customer base. Whatever your goal, lay it out at the beginning of your program process and describe it in terms of specific numbers. Goals like “retain more customers” are too vague; design your initiative with percentages and financial goals, and ascertaining how successful it’s been will largely take care of itself.

Step #2: Listen

Another big component of designing your program is deciding which audiences to listen to. This is a more targeted approach than attempting to intercept feedback from all sides and can garner you intel pertinent to your specific goals. Once you’ve completed the legwork of deciding who you want to listen to, that’s when you should turn your listening posts on and start gathering feedback. All told, being selective about who you listen to will make realizing program goals easier.

Step #3: Understand

After you’ve gathered a sufficient amount of feedback, it’s time to roll up your sleeves and delve into what your customers, non-customers, or other audience groups are saying. There are several ways to go about this process—utilizing an experience improvement platform that can analyze sentiments and thus commonalities within your feedback is one of the most effective. Finding the common threads within your feedback will make you aware of what customers (or other groups) are saying, what they like, and most importantly, what needs fixing.

Step #4: Transform

Transforming your business means applying what you’ve learned from gathered feedback. It means identifying processes and potential problem areas, then working with the relevant stakeholders to come up with solutions. Brands should always desilo their experience data as a matter of course, but working directly with relevant departments is crucial to actually seeing change occur where it needs to. This is not an easy process by any means, but this collaboration is the best way to guarantee that meaningful transformation occurs.

Step #5: Realize

After this, the final step of our framework, realize, can take place as experience teams and practitioners see changes take place and goals hopefully get reached. What more is there to the process, though?

Click here to read my full POV on the subject, where I explain how brands like yours can best realize their experience goals and make a difference for themselves, their customers, and their employees.

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From Costs to Culture: Realizing Experience Program Gains

By: Jim Katzman, Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement

Realizing your experience program goals is a pivotal moment for your organization. Getting to this stage requires lots of careful design work, listening intently to customers, understanding their feedback, and using that new learning to meaningfully transform the business. Brands can also evaluate how well they hit their experience program goals as they achieve this step.

How can companies most effectively evaluate how well they’ve realized program goals, though? And what might that goal realization ultimately look like as it reshapes or redefines processes? Let’s walk through what to look out for as your brand turns its goals into reality.

The Four Economic Pillars

There’s a highly effective paradigm for evaluating how well your program did and is doing for your brand, which we call the four economic pillars. These four elements are a relatively simple way to spell out your program’s performance and can serve as a powerful story to tell whether they were goals you were aiming for or not.

The first pillar here is customer acquisition; how many new customers has your company picked up since your experience program began, and how big a role did it play in netting new business? Like I said before, experience programs require a lot of design work before they’re activated, and part of this process is setting forth tangible, quantifiable financial goals to hit. Creating these goals and bearing them in mind is a great way to both prove ROI and establish your program’s role in acquisition.

The second pillar is customer retention. Did your program help keep customer churn low and build stronger relationships with your existing customer base? Why or why not? The third pillar, cross-selling/upselling existing customers, is similarly important for evaluating your experience initiative’s effect on your customer base. Finally, check your goals to see if your program hit the fourth economic pillar: lowering cost to serve. Evaluating your program’s success through the lens of these four pillars is a great way to both gauge its success and make the case for additional funding.

Costs and Culture

Taking a monetary magnifying glass to an experience program is everyone’s first expectation, and with good reason. A good experience initiative should result in a better experience, of course, but it’s a given that these programs are also created with the goal of helping brands control cost and boost profit, hence frameworks like the four economic pillars.

However, there’s a more abstract, yet arguably more important, element to consider when realizing experience program gains, and that’s the effect these initiatives have on company culture. Consider whether your program has positively impacted the workplace—are employees taking more pride in their work? Has your company achieved a united, holistic vision of the experience it provides?

These and other questions are important because these types of transformational changes are what create true Experience Improvement (XI). They allow organizations to create fundamentally connective relationships with customers, which stokes loyalty and turns those individuals into brand advocates. Meanwhile, employees become more passionate about their jobs, which further boosts a brand’s market profile. In other words, realizing experience goals means attaining the sort of meaningful cultural change that can take a company straight to the top.

Click here to read my POV on realizing experience goals and effectively tying your initiative to company success!

Senior man trail hiking in the forest at sunset
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5 Guides For Your Experience Improvement Journey in 2021

By: The InMoment Team

What is your experience program looking to do in 2021? Is it a disparate list of tasks or a strategic play guided by a clear goal? If you feel like it’s more of the former for your team, we may have the guiding light you need: Experience Improvement (XI).

For so long, experience initiatives have focused on managing and measuring customer and employee experiences. But the truth is, that approach does nothing to actually move the needle for the business as whole. That’s why InMoment started setting a new goal for experience programs, one that focuses on not just understanding where things are and where they have been, but what brands need to do to move onward and upward.

Sound like something you’d like to employ for your business? We’ve put together a list of our top XI content from our experts to start you on the right foot. Keep reading for the scoop!

Top 5 Pieces for Your XI Journey

  1. Measuring Alone Doesn’t Make You Taller: Why Business Leaders Must Focus on Experience Improvement
  2. Achieving Continuous Improvement: A Framework for Success
  3. How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback
  4. Understanding to Improve: Getting the Most Out of Customer & Employee Data with World-Class Text Analytics
  5. The Four Pillars of Customer Experience ROI

Measuring Alone Doesn’t Make You Taller: Why Business Leaders Must Focus on Experience Improvement

As we mentioned above, focusing on measuring experience alone will not actually do anything to improve experiences (or your bottom line at that). That’s why business leaders looking to have a positive impact through experience need to shift their focus to an Experience Improvement initiative.

This point of view article explains the difference in-depth to help you change your mindset. Check it out here!

Achieving Continuous Improvement: A Framework for Success

Once you have the mindset down, how do you steer your program (and organization) toward Experience Improvement? Enter the Continuous Improvement Framework.

This success framework consists of five steps that we use to guide clients toward their goals: design, listen, understand, transform, and realize. The best part? This framework doesn’t just set you up for one time success, it is meant to be used cyclically, so that as the world and your business evolve, your experience is constantly improving. For more on the framework, read the full piece by Eric Smuda here.

How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback

Listening to customers and employees is a foundational function of any experience program. Brands have been doing it for decades, but decades old methods and approaches aren’t the way to go in our technology-driven age.

That’s why it’s so vital to understand what a truly modern listening program looks like today—and to get a clear idea of how to create one. That’s why we created this eBook; you can access it for free here.

(Quick tip: Check out page five!)

Understanding to Improve: Getting the Most Out of Customer & Employee Data with World-Class Text Analytics

Once you’ve listened to customers and employees, you need the right tools to understand all that feedback. That’s why powerful text analytics are so important. Without them, you’re left with a mountain of data and no way to identify action items (much less, which items will have the most impact on the experience).

If you’re looking for a primer on analytics and which solutions offer the most for your program, this eBook is your go to! Find it here.

The Four Pillars of Customer Experience ROI

Ah, the age-old experience problem: proving return on investment. Business know that improving experiences is helpful, but it seems like they have struggled to show the link between experience initiatives and business success for decades.

At InMoment, we believe that every experience effort you pour resources into should be linked to tangible value in four specific areas we call the economic pillars of experience. This infographic will tell you more!

Hungry for more on Experience Improvement? We’ve got some big plans for how-to content in 2021! We can’t wait to share.

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Fight Change with Change: How Brands Can Overcome COVID

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

We’ve explored how COVID-19 has changed customer experience (CX) and behaviour in prior conversations, and how those changes are likely to leave the CX landscape altered for the foreseeable future. While the announcement and gradual deployment of a COVID vaccine is certainly cause for hope, it’s important to remember that the pandemic will be with the majority of us a while longer.

This is not the most welcome of news, especially for brands in hard-hit verticals like non-grocery retail and food service, but those organisations still have recourse for keeping their heads above water and thriving in the post-COVID world. Here’s how brands can stay ahead—how they can fight change with change.

Choose Your Transaction

Customers have enjoyed being able to choose how to transact with brands, but the rise of COVID-19 has put most of them on high alert in this regard. Customers are now especially wary of any threats to their health or personal safety, and take these factors into account when considering everything from in-person interactions with employees to touching a self-service kiosk.

As I mentioned in a previous discussion, contactless payments have skyrocketed during COVID-19 and will certainly remain the norm even after this pandemic concludes. There’s a more abstract shift underlying this trend, though, and it’s that customers are expecting brands to deliver greater transaction choice whatever its form. Foot Locker, for example, has continued to offer contactless payments, but has also begun offering Klarna as an online option. Customers have also come to expect these changes at a quicker pace thanks to COVID, and will continue to do so.

Tech’s Time to Shine

As difficult as this pandemic has been for many organisations, it also presents an opportunity to create new, oftentimes unorthodox solutions to the virus and other business challenges. Innovation has gotten many a brand through adverse times before, which is why companies must think outside the technological box as much as their resources will allow.

My favorite example of COVID-era innovation right now is Tesco, which has sought to address the rise in contactless payments by piloting its own drone programme. With this initiative, the grocer is using a fleet of drones to deliver groceries to customers in Ireland, satisfying those individuals’ desire for contactless payments and personal safety all at once. Tesco may very well continue the programme even after the pandemic subsides—after all, the innovations minted during crises rarely just go away after the fact.

A New World

That last idea is something that brands should bear in mind going forward. Not to sound indelicate, but crises come and go. Innovation, however, is forever. Organisations should remember that the tools they’re developing to combat COVID-19 now will likely serve as the foundation of a post-pandemic world. Fighting change with change is not just a stopgap measure; it provides a map for what brands can expect from their customers (and what customers will expect of them) going forward.

Click here to learn more about my take on this subject, the obstacles brands face in the age of COVID, and how they might find success for themselves and their customers as we transition to 2021.

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