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Author: Stuart Richards

5 Customer Experience Trends to Consider in 2019
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5 Customer Experience Trends to Consider in 2019

By: Andrew Park, VP, Customer Experience Strategy

Brands are being inundated with talk about consumers’ increasing expectations when it comes to customer experience (CX). And as businesses deliver more creative and engaging experiences, forming impactful customer relationships becomes more difficult.

The 2019 CX Trends Report conducted by InMoment suggests that despite evolving conversations around CX, companies are struggling to balance their own needs and changing customer preferences. While 50% of brands say they’re “definitely” doing better at delivering excellent customer experience, just 11% of customers agree.

So how can brands keep up with the change? Though companies lag behind in providing exceptional CX, there are simple ways to catch up and forge stronger customer connections. InMoment’s study paints a picture of brands chasing down elusive CX success, but also exposes a realm of uncharted terrain. Here are five key CX trends spotted in the data:

1. Lurking v. Listening

Companies spend billions of dollars each year analyzing all types of digital interaction data — from social posts to online reviews. Brands can extract useful information from this research, but they may be missing out on the most valuable feedback. Research shows that 70% of consumers believe direct conversations are the best way for companies to capture consumer sentiment, contrasting with only 40% of brands.

This discrepancy reveals an opportunity for businesses to engage more directly with customers — and through digital CX technology, this is possible to do at scale. Moving forward, companies should prioritize direct communication having tech-powered, intelligent and personal conversations directly with customers.

2. Dismissing the Human Factor

AI and other shiny new technologies are stealing brands’ attention (and dollars). However, this singular focus may be to the detriment of customer relationships: 42% of consumers said “better service from staff” is the most important thing brands can do to improve experiences, whereas brands underestimated this factor. Reliable, committed relationships with staff make an impact, influencing customers’ purchasing decisions and increasing satisfaction more than any other factor.

Companies often address CX and employee experience (EX) separately, but these findings reveal they are closely connected. Improved EX (including using tech to bolster employees’ efficacy and enjoyment) creates a more productive and contented staff. This, in turn, impacts CX, leading to happier customers and, ultimately, higher revenue.

3. Pathetic Personalization

Personalization promises powerful opportunities for brands — but those using it strictly to sell products are destined for disappointment. InMoment found that only 21% of consumers thought personalization efforts made them feel “cared for,” and less than half of brands (42%) agree that their efforts are improving relationships.

Brands fail to realize that many customers know what information companies have about them, and expect them to use it to deliver value — as they define it. Companies should capitalize on this desire by creating a personalized CX that delivers meaningful value beyond just the close of the sale.

4. Neglecting Non-Buyers

The question of why people leave without buying constantly occupies the mind of marketers. Now, they have an answer — and it may prompt substantial shifts in their CX approaches. InMoment’s research uncovered that 72% of digital non-buyers are only online to browse, research or comparison shop. For in-store shoppers, 44% of customers who leave without making a purchase do so for the same reason, and an equal 44% don’t buy because the item(s) they came for isn’t in stock.

For brands with physical locations, fixing supply chain issues offers a chance to close more sales. For companies that sell both online and in-person, there’s another compelling opportunity: Find ways to offer value as early in the relationship as possible, and then build from there. Amazon made a brilliant move by rolling out Favorites lists, giving even non-buyers the opportunity to invest in the brand early, and to recruit friends and family. Instead of looking at non-buyers as mysteries to be solved with just the right email or remarketing campaign, view and treat them as valuable customers from the very first touch.

5. Definition of Loyalty Diverges

All brands aim for high customer loyalty, hoping to cultivate a reliable base of repeat shoppers. But research shows they may be misjudging exactly how consumers demonstrate loyalty. Companies tend to view only positive reviews as signs of loyalty, but a large segment of customers say this trait also includes honest, constructive feedback. Brands may feel inclined to write off customers who provide negative reviews, but it’s important to remember that they are people who cared enough to share their thoughts in the first place.

People who provide both positive and straightforward, constructive feedback may actually be a brand’s most invested and loyal customer base. Over 70% of consumers surveyed say they feel a responsibility for creating a better customer experience. Brands can use these committed customers as a guiding light for improving operations — seeking out and celebrating well-intentioned critiques rather than dismissing them.

While new technology is revolutionizing brands’ customer experience capabilities, InMoment’s findings show that successful CX still relies on some of the basic tenets of human relationships. Companies looking to stay ahead of evolving expectations should focus on improving interactions with customers (both potential and existing) and responding to loyal customers’ feedback. Going back to the basics helps brands develop stronger relationships and create customer experiences that make a lasting impact.

Over the last 12 years, Andrew Park has developed into a recognized thought leader who counsels brands on connecting CX and business success. He now resides as Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy at InMoment, a leader in customer experience management. Beyond helping clients drive both business outcomes and customer satisfaction, Park has spent more than a decade designing, deploying and consulting on customer experience programs for global Fortune 1000 companies. He is CCXP certified, the author of several white papers, an experienced speaker, and regularly contributes to public conversations about customer experience in forums like the Huffington Post, Inc and Forbes.

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Customer Experience Enablement: What it is and How it Can Help Your Business Bottom Line

Since you’re here on the Wootric blog, you probably already know that providing a high-quality experience to your customers is vital to your business.

You’ve heard people talk about CX becoming the key differentiator for brands in the coming years.

Stats on how customers values CX

(Source)

You’ve watched brands in a variety of industries revamp their customer-facing operations to improve the consumer’s experience.

You may have even begun investing in improving your brand’s customer experience in a variety of different ways.

But, when it comes down to it, you still aren’t exactly sure if your efforts are paying off for the customer—or for your business.

Don’t worry, you’re not alone: According to a 2018 report from CustomerThink, only 30% of brands report experiencing enhanced differentiation or any other tangible benefit from their CX-related initiatives. Moreover, Oracle reports that only 43% of CX executives are highly confident in their organization’s preparedness and ability to provide an enhanced CX as time goes on.

While there are a number of reasons this is (which we’ll get to), the overarching takeaway is that improving the overall customer experience requires much more from an organization than most realize. In order for a company to make sustainable improvements to its CX—improvements that lead to tangible benefits for the business—a fundamental shift within the organization must occur.

This is where customer experience enablement comes in.

What is Customer Experience Enablement?

Customer experience enablement is an holistic approach to improving CX by making foundational changes to both customer-facing and internal processes within a company. It is worth noting that approach is sometimes known as customer experience management (CXM or CEM). So many acronyms!

Breaking that down a bit more, customer experience enablement (CXE) is all about:

  1. Providing a branded experience that aligns with both the customer’s expectations and the experience the company intended the customer to have
  2. Enabling teams and individual employees within an organization to provide this experience to the customer effectively and efficiently—so that the customer’s experience is equally as efficient throughout their buyer’s journey

As we mentioned above, it’s the second part of our breakdown that organizations often overlook. Unfortunately, this leads said companies into a situation in which they have a pretty good idea of what needs to be done to improve their CX—but are unable to actually put these initiatives into action in ways that benefit both the customer and the business.

That being said, let’s now dig into the key components of customer experience enablement—and why becoming more aligned with these components is essential to the growth of your business.

3 Key Components of Customer Experience Enablement

In the previous section, we broke down customer experience enablement into the customer-facing and internal sides of the same coin.

As you’ll see as you read through the rest of this article, the key components of CXE can touch on either side of this coin—and can sometimes touch on both at the same time, as well.

(If this is a bit confusing, don’t worry: It will start to make sense right away. We promise.)

Without further ado, let’s dig into the three key components of customer experience enablement.

1. Organizational Alignment

In order for an organization to become truly able to enhance the experience they provide their customers, everyone within the organization needs to be on board with the initiative.

Instill Ownership of CX Throughout Your Organization

In some cases, this is pretty obvious. Of course your marketing, sales, and support staff will be involved in CX-related initiatives; they do engage directly with the customer, after all.

In other cases, though, it can be a bit difficult to get certain team members on board. That is, it’s not exactly uncommon for teams that don’t interact with the customer (e.g., accounting, logistics, etc.) to overlook the role they play in the customer experience.

The thing is:

Your team needs to be willing to put in the effort required to improve your CX before they are able to do so. Or, more accurately, if your various teams aren’t willing to work toward improving your brand’s CX, it won’t matter if they’re able to or not: it’s just not going to happen.

Unfortunately, data collected by Adobe shows that a “lack of clear ownership of the customer…holds companies back from a true customer focus,” with nearly half of responding organizations denoting this as a problem.

Furthermore, Kapost’s 2016 B2B Benchmark report found that only 12% of B2B marketers believe that they’re “very effective at delivering a consistent customer experience.”

Only 12% of B2B marketers say they are delivering consistent CX

(Source)

The silver lining of all this is that, if you can instill ownership of the customer throughout your organization, you’ll be a step ahead of half of your competitors.

Communicate the Benefits of CX Ownership

Another area in which generating buy-in is vital to your CX-related initiatives is in proving the value of doing so to your company’s various stakeholders.

At this point, it’s important to frame the benefits of CXE in ways that matter to a specific team or individual. For example, marketing managers will likely care more about engagement metrics, while executives will be focused on revenues and profit margins of the potential initiative. For teams responsible for internal processes, this value likely comes in an ability to be more efficient in their duties, overall.

(Keep this all in mind, as we’ll talk a bit more about it toward the end of this post.)

Enabling Your Teams and Facilitating Ownership

Once you’ve generated buy-in throughout your organization, the next step is enabling all of your teams to actually play a more active role in creating a top-notch experience for your customers.

As CXE specialist Melissa Madian explains in an interview with Vision Critical, CXE is about enabling “revenue-generating and customer-facing teams with the processes, tools and training they need to help close business faster and deliver a superior customer experience.”

While “playing a more active role” can mean different things to different team members (and different organizations), the key to being able to do so is active, intentional, cross-team communication throughout a given organization.

For one thing, this means building avenues of communication between all teams—and breaking down any barriers to communication that may exist within your organization. In a literal sense, this may mean making it easier for your various teams to interact with each other (whether physically or via technology). More symbolically, this means breaking down silos and cutting through any red tape that may hinder communication between certain teams.

Secondly, you’ll need to actively facilitate and systematize internal communication processes (as opposed to just hoping it occurs organically simply because you’ve “enabled it”).

This may mean restructuring processes to include more of your team members as needed—with the focus remaining on the customer experience at all times. Again, even if a certain internal process doesn’t seem to impact CX all that much, your marketing, sales, and support teams might discover otherwise when an internal decision ends up causing chaos for your customers.

Going along with this, another way to facilitate and enhance internal communications is via knowledge management, specifically by making use of knowledge sharing and knowledge transferring systems. Doing so will allow various teams to stay apprised of the goings-on throughout your organization, and can also easily communicate vital information from their department to other teams as necessary.

To reiterate, the goal of this initial step toward customer experience enablement is to get your team members on board with your initiative—and to begin putting structures in place that allow all of your team members to pursue this initiative both individually and as a company.

Bluntly speaking, without this piece of the puzzle in place, it’s nearly impossible to accomplish what we’ll be discussing next.

2. Focus on Customer Intelligence and Other Valuable Data

The second key component of customer experience enablement revolves around the collection, assessment, and analysis of audience-related data.

To be sure, most modern organizations already know that big data plays a huge role in their CX-related initiatives and efforts. According to data collected by MarketingProfs, 40% of marketers say data is “critical to improved decision making,” while 36% say data “drives the ability to provide personalized experiences.”

importance of big data to executing customer centric programs

(Source)

The problem, though, is that most organizations don’t feel fully equipped to actually put the data they collect to good use. Case in point, 61% of CMOs admit to shortcomings when it comes to using big data to make improvements to CX.

While Adobe’s data shows companies are adept at data hygiene-related processes (i.e., ensuring data is accurate and reliable), this is only a part of the equation. It’s in understanding the contextual meaning behind the data that causes issues for most companies. And, when it comes to data relating to the customer experience, context is key.

Collecting Customer Data that Matters

With the above in mind, your first order of business is to focus on uncovering the data that provides the most valuable and accurate insight into your customers’ expectations. This is where Voice of the Customer is huge: it’s all about digging into the specifics of what your customers want from your brand—and minimizing the potential for your customer-facing data to be taken completely out of context in the future.

It’s important to note, here, that customer experience—and, by extension, CXE—refers to all engagements that occur between your organization and your customers, whether pre-, post-, or during a given purchase.

By looking at a specific data point, metric, or piece of customer feedback with the customer’s journey in mind, you’ll add an extra layer of context to the data you collect and analyze. In turn, you’ll be able to tailor their experience with your company even further—making them more likely to stay loyal to your brand for some time to come.

(Again, we’ll get to that momentarily.)

Collecting Internal Data that Matters

Another data-related part of CXE is prioritizing customer-facing info that provides the most value to your company.

Essentially, this means focusing on data that refers to your most valuable and loyal customers, as well as your highest potential prospects. This will enable your team to start making CX-related improvements to get your high-value customers even more engaged with your brand. Needless to say, this will lead to nothing but good things for your business moving forward.

Speaking of making improvements to your customer experience…

3. Improvements to CX that Matter—and Last

Before we get too far into this last section, let’s quickly go over the aspects of CXE we’ve discussed thus far:

Now, to be clear, all of these initiatives are done for one main reason:

To be able to make impactful and lasting improvements to your brand’s processes—in turn enhancing your brand’s overall customer experience.

As we said earlier, these improvements can manifest in any number of ways, such as:

  • Streamlining transactional processes, making it easier for customers to receive the product or service they require quicker and with less downtime
  • Improving onboarding processes, allowing customers to “hit the ground running” with your product or service—and maximizing the value they get out of it, as well
  • Making iterative changes to your product or service based on customer feedback, ensuring your customers continue to receive more and more value from your brand over time

Notice that each hypothetical improvement listed above is tied to a specific target outcome focusing directly on the customer’s experience. At the risk of being redundant, that’s literally the point of customer experience enablement: to enable your team to provide a better experience to your customers.

CXE is also about making sustainable and long-lasting improvements to your processes, ensuring that you’ll be able to provide an enhanced experience to your customers not just once or twice, but from here on out.

This is why it’s essential for CXE to start at the foundational and systemic level of your organization: Skipping this crucial step could cause your team to revert back to the “old way” of doing things—rendering any gains you may have experienced in the meantime moot.

But, with a deep-seeded, evidence-backed understanding of all that goes into enhancing CX, your organization will understand the importance of adopting and integrating new CX-related processes into their daily operations.

While any temporary or superficial improvements made will likely not lead to any long-lasting benefits for your organization, those more systemic and strategic improvements can only lead to great things for your business.

First of all, the more enjoyable and valuable your CX in the eyes of your customer, the higher your customer satisfaction rate will climb. Of course, with this increase in customer satisfaction, you’ll also likely experience a boost in retention, advocacy, and acquisition, as well.

Additionally, as your organization becomes more acclimated with your CXE-related initiatives, your teams will become more proficient and efficient in completing their individual duties. More efficiency means less wasted resources—which, in turn, means more resources on-hand to reinvest into improving your CX even further.

Finally, we’d be remiss if we ignored the fact that effective customer experience enablement leads to massive profits for companies of all sizes.

The more value your customers receive from your brand, and the easier it is for your company to provide this value to them, the more money your company will make as time goes on.

It’s that simple.

Josh BrownAbout the Author: Josh Brown is a Customer Success Engineer and part of the marketing team at Helpjuice. Helpjuice provides easy-to-use knowledge base software that guarantees less support emails and more happy customers.

Learn how Wootric can help you measure and improve customer experience. Book a consultative demo today.

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The Future of Feedback Is Here—It’s Time to Move Beyond Surveys

By: Andrew Joiner, CEO

I recently caught a terrific article in the Wall Street Journal skewering the over-reliance on Net Promoter Scores. As I read it, I couldn’t help but take it one step further.

NPS was created at a time when we didn’t have the technology to understand customer data in its native form. We now have that technology and can move beyond calculating metrics to deriving deep meaning from the natural conversations customers are having through open-ended comments, social media channels, contact centers, video, voice and even images.

In essence, NPS attempts to reduce the human experience to a number. And at a larger scale, structured surveys dumb down feedback regarding the real and complex human experience.

The future of feedback is in allowing customers and employees to communicate whenever, wherever, and however they want, preserving that data in its native form, and then applying advanced analytics to uncover the intelligence that will drive true change in the business.

This philosophy was a big reason Madison Dearborn Partners chose to become new investment partners with InMoment. John Lewis, current executive partner at MDP and now executive chairman of InMoment, shared this validating perspective with us:

It used to be that owning third-party market data gave companies a competitive edge. Today, most organizations are awash in data, and the real opportunity is integrating large and disparate types of data using advanced analytics techniques like artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems very differently.

This is especially relevant in the fast-growing area of customer experience, where understanding customers and what you can do to drive increased loyalty is everything. Most vendors try to do this with traditional surveys. In light of the multidimensional relationship brands now have with their customers, that simply isn’t enough.

I couldn’t agree more. The CX market has long been under served by both metric-heavy and market-research-led approaches.

In launching the XI Platform, we are making our vision of moving from basic insights to true intelligence, real — bringing valuable first-party data together with social and operational data, and then applying advanced analytics all in a single environment.

Yes, there will continue to be business leaders—and even experience management platforms—who rely on metrics like NPS and structured, do-it-yourself surveys that dumb down the data, but the industry is changing. And it will not be toward more surveys, but beyond surveys.

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Because CX Surveys Just Aren’t Enough: Why We’re Investing in InMoment

By: John Lewis, Executive Chairman

Coming to Madison Dearborn Partners from Nielsen — one of the largest data companies in the world — I knew the future of data was really in analytics. It used to be that owning third-party market data gave companies a competitive edge. Today, most organizations are awash in data, and the real opportunity is integrating large and disparate types of data using advanced analytics techniques like artificial intelligence and machine learning to solve problems very differently.  

This is especially relevant in the fast-growing area of customer experience, where understanding customers and what you can do to drive increased loyalty is everything. Most vendors try to do this with traditional surveys. In light of the multidimensional relationship brands now have with their customers, that isn’t enough.  

InMoment stands out among other vendors because of their approach to both the data and analytics side of customer understanding. In launching the XI Platform, the company made its vision of moving from basic insights to true intelligence, real — bringing valuable first-party data together with social and operational data, and then applying advanced analytics all in a single environment.  

The game of customer experience will ultimately change.  And it will not be toward more surveys, but beyond surveys.

We believe InMoment has the right team, the right vision, and is at the right time in its development to become a positive, disruptive force and fundamentally change the way companies understand their customers.

As a strategic partner, Madison Dearborn Partners is here to help accelerate InMoment’s path to scale, helping the company move even faster and take even bigger leaps toward this objective.

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Why CX Leaders Need to Rethink Using Incentives for Employees

By: Andrew Park, VP, Customer Experience Strategy

From meeting sales quotas to achieving high levels of customer satisfaction, incentivizing employees is commonplace for organizations aiming to increase performance within their workforce.

Customer experience leaders are no different. According to Forrester, 85% of companies tie CX to compensation. But the same report also details why linking customer experience performance to financial rewards (and other incentives) actually results in less-than-favorable employee behaviors that can negatively impact employers.  

The Downside of Tying CX to Incentives for Employees

Tying compensation and incentives to customer experience might provide a short-term bump in employee performance, but it may do more harm than good in the long run. InMoment’s “Considering Employee Incentives for CX Success? Five Ideas for Better Engagement That Won’t Backfire” resource highlights the pitfalls associated with CX incentives for employees, including:

  • Bad Employee Behaviors – Most companies that offer incentives use a pay-for-performance or “variable” pay structure, directly tying incentives to individual employee performance. But according to Forrester, this model encourages more troublesome employee behavior, like submitting fraudulent customer reviews and questioning the authenticity of CX data.
  • Bad Customer Experiences – When employees feel the weight of incentives – especially relating to their pay – you run the risk of shifting their focus from top-quality customer service to worrying only about achieving rewards. As a result, employees might start pestering customers to submit positive reviews or high survey scores, leaving customers feeling under pressure and uncomfortable.

3 Things Brands Can Do Instead of Offering Incentives

Delivering exceptional customer experiences shouldn’t be contingent on whether there are incentives on the table. And CX leaders should regularly encourage employees to deliver their best work, without solely offering rewards.

Here’s how you can support employees while enabling them to provide memorable experiences that keep customers coming back for more:

  • Share Positive Customer Feedback with Employees. Customer feedback typically circulates at a high level, with most employees completely unaware of how customers rate their experiences. When your company receives positive customer comments, share it across the organization. Highlighting great feedback helps to keep employees motivated and excited about their work.
  • Identify More Opportunities to Coach Employees. Customer feedback presents an excellent opportunity to improve employee performance. Instead of reprimanding employees if they receive less-than-favorable feedback, use the comments as an opportunity to coach future performance. This turns an initially negative scenario into a positive career-growth moment.
  • Focus on Impactful Metrics Employees Understand. Tracking metrics is the cornerstone of successful customer experience programs. Use data and information that’s meaningful to employees, and that they have a chance at impacting. It’s beneficial for your organization as a whole if employees have a better grasp on how their performance attributes to overall company success.

Bottom line: Incentives for CX don’t work. They can encourage bad behaviors and competitiveness in organizations, which may negatively impact your business. Instead of using monetary rewards, CX leaders should focus on supporting employees through coaching, metric sharing and more so they can continue to provide top-tier customer experiences.

To learn more about incentives and CX, check out “Considering Employee Incentives for CX Success? Five Ideas for Better Engagement That Won’t Backfire” today!

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CX Professionals Talk About 3 Strategies to Drive Action

At a recent MaritzCX event, we held an interactive power hour  facilitated peer-to-peer discussion about creating a strategic action plan to generate the expectations and actionability of insights. The room was all a buzz with CX professionals, who were sharing ideas and discussing the methods that work best when it comes to driving action throughout their organizations.

We all know that gathering insight from customers doesn’t help “you” or “them” if you don’t use that information to make an impactful change. In the CX profession, we like to measure and look at metrics—but influencing people, teams and organizations to act differently is one of the most important and difficult things we need to do.

This interactive discussion pinpointed 3 strategic ways to drive action throughout your organization:

1. Drive Ownership at All Levels of Your Business

  • Empower the lines of business with data, so that action can be taken by the owners who can make changes for customers.
  • Engage the business lines in your CX work from day one. If there is a certain customer pain that a business line would like to learn about, bring them into the process from the beginning to develop a research learning plan, so that they have accountability with you. When the insight is brought to the forefront, action can be taken immediately, because the business lines have been involved from the beginning.
  • Provide a Playbook or repository of best practices with peer review to share with your front line employees. If you know what works well for the customer, share it and give your teams the ability to rate the information on an interactive platform. This enables peers to know when something is working well, or when it needs to be revised.

2. Don’t Forget the Importance of Data Integration

  • Use both Voice of Customer (VoC) and operational data metrics. Do not report them separately. Your data should be reported as one, as this will help you and your organization develop a better understanding of customers.
  • Leverage, test, and learn. When insights come in, they are telling us something. Use that information, get into market, measure the gaps and make sure to drive the right business outcomes (from what customers are asking for). Listen, test and learn is the key to success.
  • It is important to try and solve the right business problems. You now have all your data integrated into a comprehensive story of what your customers are saying, as well as what the business outcome is. At this point, you can rally around what problem you want to solve and then use the right metrics to carry that forward.
  • Use the data. You need to make the data immediately available and transparent to all employees throughout your organization.

3. Collaboration that Goes Beyond Your Team’s Cubicle Walls

  • A hub and spoke cross-functional model can be an effective way to help with accountability and actionability throughout your organization.
    • The hub is the CX team
    • The spokes are all other organizations/teams that own and drive CX/EX action within their part of the organization. They are the ones that are truly accountable for driving change.
  • Develop a thorough communication strategy. A communication plan that conveys the required actions and the business value of the change should leverage the customer feedback, put it into effect, and inform the organization about it, and the changes that have taken place.

I’d like to thank Amy Jo Fisher, American Family Insurance for facilitating the event discussion.

 

 

Selecting CX Metrics
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How to Select Customer Experience Metrics That Put Your Program on the Path to Success

Customer Experience (CX) intelligence is a necessity for brands competing for customer attention and loyalty. After all, how can you make sure your efforts to exceed customer expectations are successful if you can’t listen to or understand them?

This is why CX professionals rely on in-depth data to gain a more detailed, real-time look at their customers and their needs. They know that once you understand customers’ behaviors and preferences, you can craft business strategies that truly create positive, memorable experiences.

Three Ways to Find the Right Customer Experience Metrics for Your Business

The volume of CX data and metrics made available to brands is seemingly limitless. From NPS to OSAT and Customer Effort Score, effectively measuring customer experience boils down to focusing on the metrics that matter most to your business.

Not sure where to start? InMoment’s latest eBook, “Three Rules for Choosing the Right Metrics to Track Your Customer Experience Success” guides you through selecting metrics that fit into your overall customer experience program:

#1: Focus on the metrics that will drive the most change in your business.

Successful customer experience programs are built around understanding how you want your business to grow. Instead of narrowing in on a single focal point (like improving one CX score), look at the bigger business picture. Where do you envision your brand in five years? What revenue goals would you like to achieve? Think more about the endgame and choose the CX metrics that will help you get there.

#2: Consider points of view from across your organization.

It’s tempting to track customer experience metrics based solely on executive input, but it’s important to remember that your organization is made up of more than the C-suite. While your CFO might be interested in metrics related to ROI, your employees might want data that helps them sell more effectively.

Brands should also consider their customers’ point of view. Today’s customers expect brands to fully understand their needs. The CX metrics you track should work to support your company’s ability to more clearly grasp – and meet – customer expectations.

#3: Learn from historical data, but don’t rely on it.

Historical customer experience intelligence can provide excellent insights into business performance. However, you don’t want to hold your brand to a specific benchmark or metric you used in the past. Historical metrics are often revisited without context, making them irrelevant for the current state of your company. As your business continues to evolve, so should the framework for how you measure and track success.

It can be overwhelming to define your CX metric framework. But if you remember to put your company and its goals at the center of your efforts, you’re more likely to rely on the data that will have a positive, game-changing impact on your business.

To learn about choosing metrics with meaning, download InMoment’s eBook, “Three Rules for Choosing the Right Metrics to Track Your Customer Experience Success” today!

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4 Guest Experience Trends in the Restaurant Business: Engaged Employees, Third-Party Delivery and More!

By: Nate Morley, Customer Success Manager

Each day, restaurants all over America serve tens of millions of guests. When they deliver great experiences, guests reward them with more frequent visits, larger orders, and positive word-of-mouth that drives revenue and growth.

However, while there are so many of these opportunities for restaurants, Technomic recently noted  traffic ranges from flat to down year-over-year, restaurant growth is outpacing population growth, and on top of that, fewer consumers are spending money away from home—down 7% from 2000.

While these statistics may seem grim, focusing on guest experience can help to revitalize the numbers. It is more important than ever for brands to deliver a great experience to ensure that they keep (and hopefully grow) their share of the market and keep guests coming back visit after visit—even though they have countless dining options.

Recently, I attended the 2019 Restaurant Leadership Conference, where I had the opportunity to listen to industry leaders talk about what helps their brands to go beyond run-of-the-mill interactions to create extraordinary guest experience success. As the conference went on, I noticed four trending topics in their presentations:

Trend #1: The Influence of Frontline Employees

The first trend that stood out was how important frontline employees continue to be in the guest experience.

Despite all the advancements in technology—including developments in artificial intelligence—people are still central to an elevated guest experience and delivering on a restaurant’s brand promise.

Here’s the truth that all brands need to recognize and act on: successful brands invest in their employees.

A leader of a large Mississippi-based franchise group noted: “we have two businesses: people and pizza.”

This leader said his brand’s employees are empowered with standard operating procedures that are designed specifically to deliver an excellent guest experience.

Tech Tip: InMoment’s front-line coaching application allows brands to integrate their standard operating procedures and best practices into the platform, which applies predictive analytic models to create “focus areas” based on each restaurant location. The brand’s unique SOPs automatically populate the Action Plan section, encouraging restaurant managers to train and emphasize the brand’s best practices with the employees who are on the front lines of the guest experience.

Trend #2: The Importance of Engaged Employees

Another trending topic was the importance of having engaged front line employees.   

The vice president of operations for a large franchisee with 330 restaurants across 10 states said: “We’re in a different climate of employee. They often ask, ‘What else are you going to do for me?’”

Another franchise leader chimed in: “The happier our employees are, the better they’re going to do at their job.”

This franchise said they don’t just provide restaurant-related training to keep employees happy, they also provide training on how to live a better life.

Tech Tip: In addition to capturing guest feedback, InMoment offers brands the chance to gather feedback from their employees about their own experience. The results are delivered through dashboards and reports alongside guest experience insights, providing a side-by-side view of the impact employees experience is having on the guest experience.

Trend #3: The Growth of Third Party Delivery

The third trend I noticed was the continued growth of third party delivery.

One main stage speaker joked they were required to mention delivery services at least once in every presentation.

Third party delivery is an $8 billion a year industry—which would make it among the top restaurant chains in the world.

With such growth, it’s imperative restaurateurs capture feedback from their guests in these delivery situations so they can continue to enhance the off-premise experience for their brand.

Another main stage speaker singled out Texas Roadhouse—a guest experience leader— has taken another approach, opting out of the third party delivery movement to ensure they are able to deliver on their brand promise of great food.

CEO Kent Taylor, famously stated: “We encourage all our competitors to do as much delivery as they can, so they can deliver lukewarm food to the people who order it. We’ll stick to our guns on this.”

Tech Tip: InMoment offers restaurants the ability to listen to their guests across all touchpoints, including online, in-store, and even delivery.  

Trend #4: Personalizing for Success

The last theme that stood out to me was that of personalizing the guest experience.

One speaker defined personalization as simply: “Taking care of the guest.”

With so many ways to engage guests these days—whether through email, text, loyalty programs, mobile apps and so on—brands need to be able to give their guests only what they want to see, because as another speaker said, “the consumer has gotten really good at tuning things out.”

That being said, guests still want to engage with restaurants and know they are being listened to by the brands they love. It’s all about tailoring the right message through the right channel to the right person.

Tech Tip: InMoment allows restaurants to listen to their guests through a range of multimedia feedback channels, including surveys, social reviews, contact us forms, mobile app integrations, image and video feedback, and website intercepts.

I had a great time and learned so much about improving the guest experience during my three days at the 2019 Restaurant Leadership Conference. I can’t wait for next year!

Want to learn more about what’s next for Food Service brands and their guest experience? Check out this new eBook, “Three Steps for Future-Proofing the Guest Experience in Food Service: From Operational, Experiential, to a Truly Loyal Guest Relationship!”

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3 Best Practices to Engage Your Frontline Employees

By: Alex Wray

Identifying the Problems Your Customers Encounter, Is Only Half the Battle

Knowing how to resolve them, however, is what really matters. Many companies, while committed to improving the customer experience, are not where they want to be with their Voice of the Customer (VoC) initiative. In particular, the frontline managers and employees who directly shape customer experience lack the information and resources they need to take effective action and fully engage with their CX programs.

MaritzCX has conducted extensive research and interviewed employees at a variety of levels and companies who are responsible for translating survey results into action. Our research revealed several common issues for frontline employees:

  • Feeling left out of the design;
  • Not fully understanding the story; and
  • Not knowing what to do even when they do understand

When CX programs fall short in critical areas like these, the front line employees disengage—and that’s a problem. After all, these programs don’t just exist to feed corporate dashboards; they also support and drive actions to improve the customer experience.

So, what’s to be done? It starts with acknowledging the front line as stakeholders in the process.

1. Give Front line Employees Their Own Voice

Front line employees can develop customer loyalty, attract new customers, build your company’s reputation, and drive your company’s profit. It’s important, then, to make the front line an equal partner in the design process and tailor the reporting engines to their needs. Here are some recommendations:

  • Involve Them in Program Design: Include front line managers as active members of the design team to learn their perspectives firsthand—after all, these are the people creating and delivering much of what the customers experience.
  • Give Them What They Crave—the “Real” Voice of the Customer: Verbatim customer comments provide a rich source of information and value to the front line. Sophisticated text analysis tools allow survey designers to shift the balance from 100% close-ended questionnaires to those that actively seek open-ended feedback.
  • Offer Them Questionnaire Real Estate and Flexibility: Mass customization techniques are making it possible for organizations to tailor their customer experience surveys for individual operating units or groups. Smart organizations will also include a “flex” section in their surveys to accommodate topical or time-sensitive issues of interest.
  • Give Them Easy-to-Use Feedback Mechanisms: Consider developing a system that encourages the front line to provide regular feedback on the survey process, e.g. one that is built directly into the reporting system for added convenience.

2. Use the Right Tool for the Right Job

Collecting the right information is only the beginning; you must also make the information easy to access, use, and understand. Today’s customer experience reporting portals can be difficult to use, non-intuitively organized, and full of distracting elements that obscure the message for the end user.

Employees with different responsibilities require fundamentally different information. A retail manager for a bank, for example, does not use the same information as someone in headquarters. Focusing on the front line and their specific needs helps the organization design a more effective reporting system and user interface. Most industries with a retail operation have at least three user roles with different needs:

  • Headquarters/Corporate Users
  • Regional or Area Managers
  • Frontline (Unit) Managers

It is important to design your reporting system with the end users in mind and equip employees with tools that cater to their individual needs.

3. Remember, It’s All About Action

It’s easy to get caught up in the details of sampling and questionnaire design and forget what equally matters: inspiring and motivating people to do something with the information. To do this, you need to deploy a consistent VoC process that aligns the right people and processes to enact meaningful change.

The ideal reporting system will include a “cafeteria plan” of pre-configured tools that support actions at the unit level:

  • Performance Metrics Tools help managers identify and prioritize the areas they need to focus on to improve the customer experience. These tools can be aligned with organizational goals or used to analyze the relationship between customer experience and business outcomes such as loyalty. In either implementation, it encourages unit managers to understand the potential outcomes of their efforts.
  • Employee Coaching Tools, when built directly into customer experience management (CEM) systems, allow front line managers to collaborate with their employees and address areas of concern or opportunity. Alternatively, when linked to the organization’s learning management system (LMS), they can redirect employees who are struggling in a certain area to applicable training courses.
  • Service Recovery Tools, such as unit-level case management systems, allow front line managers to identify at-risk customers and reach out to resolve the problem. Additionally, managers can assign specific tasks to employees, close out concerns, and monitor case aging and incidence rates.
  • Diagnostic Processing Improvement Tools, when implemented at the unit level, allow front line managers to use a gated action planning process to resolve their specific problem areas. A well-designed reporting system should include a section to develop and track unit-level action plans.

Conclusion: Ringing the Cash Register

The investment return on VoC programs has never been in the measurement—it’s what companies do with the information that has the potential to ring the cash register. Getting the right information into the hands of unit managers and other front line employees is critical to improving the customer experience. The best systems:

  • Offer tools that support effective service recovery, employee coaching, and action planning;
  • Link to learning systems; and
  • Contain monitoring tools that drive action-ability and collaboration across all levels of the organization.

Anything less and you risk disengaging your employees and selling your VoC initiative short.

Guest Experience of Millennials
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How to Use Guest Experience to Create Loyal Guest Relationships in Food Service

By: Bill Gammell, Director, Customer Success

If you’re in the food service industry, then you’re no stranger to the guest experience. In fact, the customer experience (CX) and food service industries have evolved together overtime.

What do I mean by this? Well, the food service industry was one of the first to embrace the idea of customer experience. Some experts even believe that restaurants’ need to gather guest feedback to improve their operations pushed the customer experience (CX) industry to where it is today.

Now, CX solutions are more advanced than ever; the leading vendors can offer their clients actionable intelligence that actually impacts their bottom line. As customer experience has evolved, so has the food service industry. Brands today are facing even more complex challenges like:

  • How do I attract the new wave of Millennials and Gen Z’ers to choose my restaurant over others?
  • What new items should I incorporate into my menu?
  • How do I protect my brand when using a third-party delivery service like UberEats or DoorDash?
  • How do I improve efficiency to manage rising labor costs?

To rise to the challenge, food service brands need to evolve their approach to guest experience from operational, to experiential, to relational. Here’s the difference between these three approaches:

The Operational Approach

The operational approach to guest experience is pretty straightforward. It means that your guest experience program is largely focused on answering questions about staffing, stock, and cleanliness. This is how food service brands have historically utilized guest experience.

The Experiential Approach

The experiential approach takes it a step further by focusing on consistent experiences for guests and then understanding why guests have the experience they do. This approach answers questions about how to turn negative experiences into positive ones and incorporating employee feedback to improve the guest experience.

The Relational Approach

The relational approach is the holy grail for guest experience: it focuses all program efforts on creating loyal guest relationships. Creating this level of loyalty requires creating high quality, consistent experiences not just in-location, but at every touchpoint guests have with your brand (online, customer experience, in app, etc.)

By evolving your approach to guest experience, you can utilize your program to create what every brand dreams of: loyal guest relationships. And because loyal customers will spend more, more frequently, your guest experience program can positively impact your bottom line more than ever before!

To read more about the specific CX solutions you can master to move from operational, to experiential, to loyal guest relationships, read the full “Three Steps to Future Proofing the Guest Experience in Food Service” eBook here!

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What InMoment’s Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud Means for Marketers

By: Meghan Mitton, VP, Solutions Marketing

Today InMoment announced its integration with the Adobe Experience Cloud, but what does it mean for marketers? The short answer is that integration presents an entirely new way to look at the customer experience (CX) and gain more intelligence than ever before.

Marketers have traditionally relied on acquisition, audience, behavioral, and conversion metrics to create customer segments and inform their efforts. While this tried-and-true method works to a point, the data provided from these sources is limited in what it can tell you.

The fact is that traditional marketing data can provide you with the “how,” “what,” and “where” customers are buying, but it can’t provide you with perhaps the most crucial piece of understanding: why your customers are—or aren’t—buying.

Our Chief Marketing Officer, Kristi Knight, elaborated on this point when she said, “What [traditional marketing] datasets don’t tell you is why your customers are acting the way they are—the golden thread for marketers—and you can only understand customer motivation through feedback from the customers themselves.”

The InMoment integration with Adobe Experience Cloud provides the missing piece of the puzzle; it helps marketers understand the stories behind the numbers and move from metrics-based marketing to meaningful marketing.

By allowing them to tap into the data derived from customer feedback in tandem with their traditional marketing metrics, this integration through the InMoment Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform enables marketers to create more targeted and personalized segments and online experiences.  

Want to know more about how do we do it? Check out the market release to get the specifics on this first-of-its-kind integration!

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The Future of Customer Experience: Why You Should Widen Your Perspective to Experience Intelligence

By: Meghan Mitton, VP, Solutions Marketing

The world of customer experience (CX) is constantly changing. CX professionals are always on the lookout for the latest and the greatest way to approach their customers, gain insights from their customer data, and leverage those insights in a way that will help improve experiences as well as the bottom line.

So what do CX professionals need to change in order to be ready for the future of feedback?

It’s simple: companies need to broaden their view from a CX-only focus, and embrace the “experience ecosystem.”  

CX has never existed in a vacuum. There’s an entire experience ecosystem that impacts and contains signals about customers’ relationships with brands: employees, products, and services—as well as the competition.

Contextual information from digital behaviors, operational data, audit data, and marketing technologies and analytics also play a role.  Combine this with the fact that experiences today are spoken, shared, lived, recorded, clicked and even socialized, and understanding your customers’ experiences gets pretty complex.

Given the speed at which customer experience is evolving, you might be surprised to hear that most vendors are approaching this brave new world with traditional survey processing technologies.

Why does it matter? Our CTO David Joiner explains it like this:  “Applying an older relational data technology approach to today’s complex experience data problem is like trying to stream live media through an 8-track tape.”

InMoment’s new Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform has a modern technology stack with data science at the core, allowing us to store, retrieve, and put the right analytics lenses to literally any type of data that will add meaningful intelligence to your understanding.

The XI Clouds:  The XI Platform also seamlessly unites three critical perspectives from the experience ecosystem in the Customer Experience (CX), Employee Experience (EX), and Market Experience (MX) clouds.  Because they’re connected at the foundation, users can share between and beyond each cloud, promoting a more comprehensive view of the business, collaboration, and much smarter action. More on the new XI Clouds in our next blog.  

Want to learn more about the XI Platform? Check out the press release!

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