Stuart Richards – InMoment

Segment Integration– Use Wootric NPS without touching code

Update 11.30.2015: MOBILE Now you can use Segment.com to enable Wootric’s Net Promoter Score platform in your mobile app without touching code or waiting for the next release cycle. Learn more about Segment’s mobile integration platform.

In-product tools can be extremely valuable to a business. Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Optimizely, Crazy Egg…I’m sure we all have a few we can’t live without. But if your technical resources are constrained, even the easiest tools to install end up somewhere in the development pipeline. As the non-technical side of the house, I know how hard it can be to wait to test out a new shiny tool.

We built InMoment to measure Net Promoter Score inside your product. Why? Because every online business deserves to hear from more customers in the most fresh and contextual way. While a developer would tell you Wootric is a fast code install, it’s still an install. And I’d certainly tell you that “marketing me” would need help.

We succeed when you succeed, so we’ll remove any barriers we can to help our customers–technical or non-technical–quickly get up, running, and listening to customers. Read More…

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Five Steps to Uncovering the Real Customer Experience Journey

When I was growing up, a 50-cent, bottomless cup of coffee was the norm. People would have laughed at the thought of a five-dollar cup of joe, and yet how many of us drive out of our way to find a Starbucks to start our day? In the case of Starbucks, it is not even about the quality of their coffee. You can go to the grocery store and purchase the same coffee there, yet people flock to Starbucks stores because they provide an experience and not just a cup of coffee.

Today, the coffee shop is an iconic gathering place. From the moment you walk in, the aroma of the coffee surrounds you. The environment in the store is calm, relaxing and inviting. The store invites you to stay and relax for long periods, and many people stay to study, work, check their e-mail, update their social media account, surf the web, or share some time with friends. The servers are not called servers; they are “baristas,” adding to the sense that you are doing more than just grabbing an ordinary cup of coffee. Each cup is prepared individually and the customer’s name is written on the cup to personalize the experience.

In other words, the product is not the focal point; rather, the focal point is the experience that the company delivers.

Successfully delivering a good customer experience requires a comprehensive orchestration of a great many things. One of the most essential to the backbone of your CX program is a thorough understanding of the customer and his or her experience with your brand, people, product and service — a process popularly known as customer journey mapping.

Starbucks knows its customers well. It has a well-mapped journey of what the experience will be like from the moment the customer walks into the store. By selling more than just a product, the company is able to charge 5-10 times what a competitor could and still attract more customers. Starbucks clearly understands that focusing on the customer experience is not just a corporate tagline for shareholders. It is a business strategy.

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the journey a customer has with your brand, products, services and people. It is important to note that journey mapping is not an appropriate replacement for quantitative efforts, but rather a good starting point or supplement to quantitative programs. It includes multiple touchpoints from the customer’s point of view, such as:

Key moments and evaluation points in the process
Positive and negative components of the experience
Attitudes and emotions that may come into play

Step One: Build the Company View of the Journey

Mapping the customer’s journey starts with identifying and building out the steps of the journey from the company’s point of view, from beginning to end. Start by identifying the key moments a customer has with the company. Getting agreement on the discrete steps a customer takes can be difficult, as each functional area and stakeholder will bring a unique perspective to the table. It is critical for the organization to work off a common vision of the journey, so measurements, improvements, and enhancements must be created using a shared framework.

Building out the steps

Once the steps of the journey are identified, build out the experience of each step, including the following elements:

Customer’s desired outcomes
Time or duration
Attitudes and thoughts
Emotional responses
Emotional needs
Customer pain points
Areas of weakness
Areas of strength
Importance of the step
Satisfaction with the step

Though some might argue that this process is overkill for organizational stakeholders to go through, the elements of this process enable a more educated approach to the secondary probing and qualitative research phase. Additionally, the process of including all stakeholders embeds customer journey mapping within the cultural framework of the organization. As stakeholders help build the journey, hear different perspectives from their peers, and eventually see the customer’s perspective of the journey, they are more likely to understand and accept the final product. Finally, it is very insight-provoking at the end of the process to highlight the differences in what the customer sees as critical moments and evaluation points in the journey compared to company stakeholders.

Customer-Centric Blueprint

A by-product of customer journey mapping is a customer-centric blueprint, which highlights customer experiences that lead to a decision or behavior that impacts financial outcomes for the organization. A customer-centric blueprinting process involves:

Determining what critical elements are impacting each step in the journey
Identifying all people and departments who are even remotely connected to this element
Identifying the policies, processes, procedures and tools that impact this element
Listing all internal metrics associated with this element of the step, which can serve as early indicators of a good or bad experience by the customer before they even take a survey

Step Two: Build the Customer View of the Journey

Once the internal stakeholders have created their view of the customer journey, it is time to have the end customer validate this framework. A series of qualitative research sessions are usually helpful for this purpose. In these sessions, customers walk through their version of what the journey looks like, using all the same criteria used by internal stakeholders.

During or prior to the interview, customers may also be asked to:

Create a collage, drawings or photos that illustrate how they feel about the experience they have when dealing with the brand, category, product, service or people. (See an illustration below of one perspective on air travel.) The use of imagery adds a richer perspective to the experience, which can elicit deeper insights than verbal cues alone.
Share metaphors that describe what their emotional needs are at each step. These can come from a standard list, or they can share their own. This part of the process creates a clear delivery goal for the company at each step of the journey.

Step Three: Review the Current State

The next phase of the journey-mapping process often takes the form of a workshop, during which the customer journey is reviewed, while keeping the following objectives in mind:

Create a common understanding of the customer journey
Identify areas within the experience with the greatest opportunity to improve/address
Identify elements that should be included in the VoC program
Review the design criteria for improvements and development of new experiences
Prioritize the steps in the journey that should be addressed

This step is critical for embedding the journey into the organization. It involves immersing participants in the qualitative research in a way that helps them step into the shoes of their customer. In order to do this, the room where this final workshop is conducted is turned into a customer gallery, which may contain detailed summaries of each step in the journey, customer quotes from the qualitative research, any photos or imagery created or solicited during the research, and any relevant previous research that contributes to the organization’s understanding of the customer journey.

Once this information is absorbed, it is time to prioritize the areas the company considers more important to focus on for improvement. Among the improvement opportunities is the chance to evaluate the current VoC measures against what customers identified as their key moments of the experience. This process can either validate the current measures or identify gaps that need to be filled with VoC tools.

Step Four: Create Customer Experience Design Criteria

You now have detailed journey maps, photos, interview transcripts, previous research, customer quotes, etc. How do you make sense of this and avoid everyone running in a different direction to improve the customer experience?

Creating common customer experience design criteria helps prevent organizations from becoming overwhelmed. Customer experience design criteria are the three or four top criteria that serve as the essence of what customers need in any experience they have with your organization. These criteria are derived from analyzing the attitudes, thoughts, emotions, and needs of customers at each step in the journey, and then identifying a few common themes that represent the essence of what the customer needs. For example, the design criteria for a business technology supplier may look like the following:

Proactively identify solutions that add success to the business owner
Be impressively responsive
Remove the technology burden from the business owner
Make every interaction professional

Each of these represents what the business owners conveyed throughout the journey. By creating common design criteria, everyone in the organization can now use these as criteria that should be met in any customer-impacting service, tool or interaction. Additionally, marketing and customer-facing communications should also reinforce the same criteria so that there is better alignment with every customer touchpoint.

Step Five: Ideate a Future State

The final phase in the customer journey mapping process is to leverage the new insights and design a better customer experience. One of the greatest challenges in any customer experience program is achieving true organizational commitment and buy-in. It is not that companies are against having a customer focus; quite the contrary. The challenge is getting the attention of stakeholders who are stretched so thin that it is difficult to get their attention. But the benefits of engaging stakeholders in customer journey mapping gives them a vested interest in the process and increases their common knowledge of the customer experience well beyond where it was.

The final step is to leverage this insight and engagement into the design of a better customer experience. This is done through ideation. Unlike brainstorming, ideation is structured so that it can take participants beyond their current framework of thinking and view solutions through different lenses using the customer experience design criteria previously identified. While ideation is intended to unleash creative thinking, the design criteria help ensure the thinking is focused on what the customer needs the new solutions to address.

While there are entire books written on ideation alone, here are a few of approaches with very brief descriptions:

TOP MIND IDEAS: People throw out top of mind ideas (these tend to be very incremental/not very innovative, but allow people to get the pent up demand ideas out of them).

PICK YOUR PROBLEM: Split up into groups — each group picks two to three high priority problems/opportunities identified in the journey mapping. Each group then develops as many ideas as they can around their selected items.

RELATED WORLDS: After breaking into smaller groups, each group picks an industry outside of the one where they operate. Each group then identifies the characteristics of the selected industry, focusing on how that industry generally solves its key problems (e.g., cell phone companies require contracts for additional service, they offer the phone for free or at a steep discount based on a two year contract, etc.). The intent is then to leverage the list of characteristics to ideate around how companies in the related industry would apply their thinking to solve the problems at hand in your business.

Get Fired/Get Hired High Risk — High Reward Ideas/Far Out Ideas.

GET FIRED: Moderator encourages participants to generate ideas that are so outrageous that in a normal meeting you would “get fired” for bringing them up.

GET HIRED: Moderator asks the group for ideas that scale the outrageous ideas back to something for which you would “get hired.” The intent is to give participants the license to bring up ideas that normally they may be too cautious or prudent to do.

Idea Tournament Session

The last step in the ideation process is to take the mountain of concepts and evaluate them in order to whittle them down to something more manageable. A structured process of voting is used based on top-of-mind reactions and tied to the design criteria. Different targets can be set, but generally allow people to vote for 10% of the ideas. Once this is complete, a process of evaluating the ideas on criteria such as customer need, revenue potential, feasibility, ability to create a sustainable competitive advantage and time to implement (or other gauges that are relevant to the organization) is completed. The output is a “portfolio” of ideas that includes some ideas with “breakthrough” potential (high risk — high return), and others that are more incremental in nature (low risk — low return).

Conclusion

The end result of conducting a thorough customer journey mapping process is a more comprehensive understanding of the experience your customer has with your organization, insights in the areas that need to be addressed, ideas on how to improve the experience, and a common understanding of the experience your customers have with your organization. Walking out of this process, you will also have the following outputs to continue to guide the organization’s journey to improve the customer experience:

Journey Map: Company view of the customer journey
Journey Map: Customer view of the journey (both a detailed version and a more aggregate version that can be shared more broadly across the organization)
A customer-centric blueprint
A common set of customer experience design criteria
A portfolio of new ideas to improve the customer experience (both short term tactical ideas and longer term break-through ideas)
Transcripts of interviews
Visuals created by customers
A list of measures to consider adding to new or existing VoC efforts

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Customer Journey Map redefined: Customer Journey Management

Let me make a suggestion right out of the gate. While many customer experience practitioners have readily adopted customer journey mapping as a best practice, too many of us look at it as a “once-and-done” activity. We mistakenly see the effort to understand and document the customer journey as almost a checklist step in a project plan with little if any utility value other than the production of a graphical “map” to hang on the office wall and to inform our design process only at the onset of new initiative.

Instead, may I offer the suggestion that we need to consider the customer journey as an evolving, living thing that will change over time as customers find new preferences and manners of interaction and experiences with us. As such, I’d like to offer up the idea that we look at the journey with fairly frequent revisits and, in doing so, work to manage the evolution of the journey. This will keep us from seeing the effort to understand it as a static step we often consider only at the beginning of a new customer experience improvement process.

We accept the notion that our customers are not sitting still and limiting their interactions with us to the same ways and for the same reasons they always have. They do not have a permanent “business as usual” approach to literally everything. Why then could it be sufficient to seek to understand the customer journey as only a single point-in-time exercise? Instead, why can’t we consider revisiting the process a few times a year as our markets and customers mature and evolve?

The purpose of follow-up journey assessments is to re-focus on gaps created by market conditions and changes in customer preference. These updates will bring value as we prioritize our own transformational efforts, focus on areas where we can implement customer-centric innovation and process improvements, and develop and launch new solution offerings. They will enable us to align our new developments with the refreshed journey map and moments of truth along it.

We can (in a progressive mindset) consider customers and their journeys with us as assets, no different from cash in the bank or infrastructure. Then why not do a new journey assessment and artifact map even quarterly, just as we produce financial statements several times a year? It’s just another way to look at this unique asset class; our customer relationships.

Even if you’re thinking to yourselves that your customers’ journeys with your company don’t change that much, that often, I’d still bet that your priorities change.

Some touchpoints along the customer journey may be necessary to make the customer experience more functional or efficient, while not being drivers of customer delight in and of themselves. But in time, these touchpoints, sometimes referred to as “experience hygiene,” may become more important to customers and grow into moments of truth. Similarly, factors that are loyalty drivers at one point in time can lose their importance for customers as the world changes.

It all changes based on the natural heartbeat of our businesses, our customers, and the markets we serve. Losing sight of new priorities or moving targets for optimization may create, at best, avoidable inefficiencies and, at worst, significant market setbacks. If we don’t stay up to date, we allow our competition to seize customer relationships, market share, and profits that should have been ours.

I’d like to strongly urge you to consider the best practice of frequently refreshing to your customer journey mapping work. Perhaps we could also consider, as the title of this post suggests, renaming our process – from customer journey mapping to something with a sense of repetition and continual improvement, like customer journey management. Doing so sends the right message about the process being “alive,” and suggests the need for the continual reprioritizing and frequent critical visits that will benefit our programs.

Let’s refocus on our takeaways: changing our old process of thinking about the map as an artifact to considering the fact that the journey has a heartbeat and is alive with change. The more clearly we understand this, the better the experiences we will create for our customers. Those customers will reward us long into the future with their wallets and their loyalty.

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Customer Experience Disconnects: 5 Steps to Creating the Right Customer Experience

Customer Experience is maturing. I rarely hear the phrase “customer service” anymore, and most business leaders know what acronyms like CX and VoC mean—without even Googling them.

However, maturing is a verb that indicates a process; it doesn’t mean we’ve completely grown up. In fact, we’re probably somewhere in our teenage years, which, just like that stage of human development, can be awkward and painful.

Over the last year, I’ve seen an increasing number of news stories, blogs, and social posts recounting customer experience initiatives gone awry—from awkwardly executed campaigns to the imposition of “friendlier” lingo. Customers are rolling their eyes, posting comments of incredulity, and poking fun in live broadcasts.

Does the Shoe Fit Your Brand Experience?

While I won’t name names, this is happening to customer experience newbies and more seasoned brands alike. Why are these good intentions being questioned, begrudged, and even mocked?

Simple: Because in our rush to deliver great customer experiences, companies are designing experiences that simply don’t fit their brands. Normally, disconnects between expectation and execution present themselves in the form of a “bad” experience. But inappropriate experiences can come across as contrived, insincere, or just plain silly—and they can hurt a brand as much as those unpleasant ones.

When it comes to customer experience, it’s important that you don’t just try to be “the best,” but that you create and execute experiences that align with your customers’ best expectations. Following are a few important steps every company and CX professional should take to get, and stay, on the right path:

1. Know Who You Are

A brand isn’t just an image, a “look and feel,” or a catchy name. Your brand should capture the essence of who you are and the unique value you offer customers. Most importantly, your brand is a continual negotiation, a dance between your company and your customers. Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, said, “A brand is no longer what we tell the consumer it is; it is what consumers tell each other it is.” This doesn’t mean you can abdicate the responsibility of doing the hard work of distilling that unique value and communicating it out. But it does mean that you must know, without a doubt, whether your brand promise resonates with customers.

2. Know What Your Customers Expect

Customers expect different things from different brands. For some, it’s “fast and accurate.” For others, “friendly and helpful” is more appropriate. And for some, “luxury and exclusivity” are baseline expectations. Deviating from these core promises gets brands into trouble. For example, “friendly and helpful” can actually get in the way of “fast and accurate.” Stay focused on delivering what your customers value most.

3. Be Authentic

There is no single formula for CX success because each organization and its relationship with customers are different. Simply imposing another successful customer experience blueprint on your own organization won’t work. There’s nothing wrong with learning from the best, but, if you neglect the important step of adapting rules to the specific needs of your brand and your customers, you’re likely to stumble.

4. Be Deliberate

Great customer experience doesn’t just happen. Identify the “moments of truth” along your customers’ journey that are most critical to their experience, so you can draw them closer at each interaction. And pay special attention to the language you use. Even subtle-sounding misfires, like using the word “guest” instead of “customer” can indicate you don’t understand what customers value from their relationship with your brand. This is not simply a matter of being politically correct. Words matter, so choose wisely.

5. Listen

Listening to customers cannot be something that happens once a year, once a quarter, or even once a month. Set up listening posts at every important touchpoint, provide open forums for customers to share when and how they prefer, and be proactive by listening on social media and other online forums. It’s just as important that you have the right technology in place to make sense of the mountains of customer data—and the organizational commitment to act quickly.

In a blog post late last year, Gartner declared customer experience “the new competitive battleground.” As you embark upon the fight for market share, be wise in the strategies and tactics you deploy. While you should learn from the past, the only sure way to win and keep the hearts, minds and dollars of your customers is to take time to create an authentic environment: one made up of individual experiences that are true to the relationship you want with your customers. And then, push yourself elegantly beyond that goal.

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Involved & Enthralled: 5 Ways to Improve Your Engagement Strategy

Gathering feedback is only part of the customer experience (CX) equation. Before your brand can even begin to collect feedback, it needs to engage both its customers and employees. That task is easier said than done, though.

Based on a recent InMoment-commissioned report by CGA Peach, we’ve highlighted five methods for increasing engagement at every level of your organisation. Read, reflect, and evaluate how your brand’s engagement strategy stacks up.

5 Ways to Engage Your Customers & Employees

1. Improve Board-Level Buy-In

Overall, 60% of leaders believe having active and visible board-level involvement will help deliver the frontline outcomes that should flow from their customer programmes.

“Businesses that are customer-centric have the message clearly reinforced from the board down. They intertwine everything they do with this perspective. It is not something you do, but who you are.”

—Gary Topiol, International Managing Director, InMoment

2. Increase Interdepartmental Communication

If customers are king, more transparency may be needed to ensure all departments focus on the “main thing.” Better understanding of the customer can improve the efficiency of all departments of a business—not just operations.

3. Recognise and Reward Employees

Given the interrelationship and interdependence between customer and frontline staff, companies that can bridge this gap and bring together the two sources of feedback could build themselves a clear operational advantage.

4. Introduce Real-Time Feedback to Frontline Managers & Team

Operators have a vast array of tools at their fingertips now, and that means they potentially have a mass of data to handle too. Nine in ten respondents of CGA Peach’s survey said they have seen an increase in the volume of data coming into their business over the last two years, with 30% seeing a significant rise.

5. Understand Drivers of Engagement

From an emotional perspective, nearly nine in ten executives think “feeling valued” is a key driver for customers—far more so than feeling excited, confident, or validated. Three in five leaders (62%) also rate “feeling listened to” as a key driver, which may be an underestimation in this age of social media.

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Consumers to Brands: We Want to Be a Part of Your Success

On top of our Voice of Customer (VoC) technology, InMoment supports a consumer insights panel and a team of data scientists who conduct regular research on a range of customer experience topics.

We recently completed a study asking 644 North American consumers to rank six emerging elements of customer experience in order of importance. We also asked 131 customer experience professionals the same questions. In their responses, not only did we see where alignment and disconnects exist between brands and their buyers, we also found several surprising insights into what tips the scales on customer engagement and loyalty.

The Elements We Explored

Mobile first: Ensuring 24/7 mobile support for customers

More reliable online reviews

Personalized experience: Brands using customer information to personalize messages and promotions

Shorter surveys, more listening: Fewer set questions, more options for customers to share experiences in their own words

Feeling trumps function: Relationships and customer experience will reign over function, price, and selection

Transparency: Keeping customers informed on how their feedback is being used.

Biggest Disconnects

Consumers ranked “Reliable Online Reviews” #2 in importance, while brands relegated this element to last place at #6. But not all brands were on board. While one in four did rank it last, one in five executives actually placed this in the #1 position.

At first glance, we thought the split would have come between businesses that serve consumers and business-to-business companies. Upon further examination of the data, however, we found that this was not the case. This means that even in industries where online reviews have a big impact on choice and loyalty, some brands don’t consider them an important part of their customers’ experiences.

Our Take: Regardless of the business you’re in, consider and care for your online audiences. They are more connected, more vocal, and generally more engaged with your brand and their peers than other customer segments.

On the Same Page

Consumers and brands ranked “Shorter Surveys, More Listening,” #1 and #2 respectively. What we found particularly interesting is that consumers did not express a lack of interest in giving feedback. What they don’t like are long-form surveys that focus on what the company wants to know versus what they want to share. We saw phrases like: “fast and easy to complete, with relevant questions that relate,” and “ability to leave as short or as long a review as I want.”

Our Take: It’s worth the time it takes to design more considered, customer-centric questions. Keep the scoring to a minimum, and take advantage of online forums and open-ended comments to give customers their own sharing spaces.

The Value of Value

The most powerful findings came, not surprisingly, by looking at the rankings alongside the consumers’ verbatim comments. The short story: customers want to feel valued by the brands they support. One in three consumers explicitly included words and phrases like “feeling valued,” “acknowledged,” “heard,” “appreciated,” and “respected” in describing how they want to be treated.

While this might seem obvious, the comments helped us see an even more nuanced and powerful story. Consumers don’t just want to be on the receiving end of value. They also want to give value in return. In comments mentioning the word “value,” nearly half of the respondents (48.4%) used it to express their desire to provide value back to the company. And when asked why they give feedback, four in five consumers selected “I enjoy offering my feedback and making a difference.”

And consumers told us exactly how companies can do this:

Tell them why: “I’d like to know that the information in the survey is useful. Maybe if there was an upfront comment statement like ‘We are interested in your opinion because…’

Show you are listening: “It would be nice to not only be acknowledged, but to receive some feedback regarding the suggestion or comment.”

Take action: “It would be nice if companies let us know what changes they’ve made in response to customer comments.”

» View our infographic: Make Them Feel Valued. Make Them Feel Heard.

Super-Empowered and Well-Intentioned

In a time when consumers have nearly infinite options and a global communication platform at their fingertips—and customer experience has become the place to compete—it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. And while customers do wield unprecedented power, they don’t seem to want to use it for evil. Instead, they are asking to become partners in brands’ success. The question is, Will companies take them seriously? Will they value customers’ advice as strategic business intelligence? Will they treat customers as individuals and not just transactions?

Our Take: The stars are aligned. Customers are clamoring to give exactly what companies need. If brands listen well and listen often, their customers will provide real-time guidance on how to deliver the best experiences and improve nearly every part of the business. Talk about a win-win.

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3 Tips for Building a VoC Business Case

The customer experience is a team effort, so it takes an enterprise-wide investment to improve it. You’ll need the support of your peers, partners, and uppers. (You already have ours.) Successfully pitching and pushing any business initiative to your mates—even something so enlightened as the customer experience—requires a strong business case.

That shouldn’t scare you, though, because the evidence is now out there to be had. One resource to lean on is Outside In: The Power of Putting Customers at the Center of Your Business, authored by Harley Manning and Kerry Bodine. Aside from sharing multiple examples of successful use cases, the authors offer great advice on creating a case for yourself.

Credit to Peter O’Neill, Bradford J. Holmes, Paul Hagen, and Michael Shrum for curating and summarizing these three tips from its pages.¹

1. Start with Cost Avoidance

Installing listening systems to collect customer feedback will almost always enable your company to reduce support costs. A positive fallout effect is collecting good research about the customer experience.

2. Assign a Value to Customer Loyalty

Forrester’s research clearly shows a correlation between customer experience and loyalty.² Loyalty is an increasingly important factor in B2B as business customers become service consumers and switching costs ceases to be a barrier. All annuity businesses thrive or die on loyalty.

3. Model the Effect of Customer Experience Benefits

While initial customer experience investments will focus on identifying and repairing problems, three other types of revenue benefits have been tied to improving customer experience:

incremental purchases from current customers
retained revenue as a result of lower churn
new sales driven by customer advocacy

1. The Case for B2B Customer Experience Programs Is Revenue Generation and Renewal, Forrester Research, Inc., January 25, 2013

2. Forrester’s Customer Experience Index identifies customer experience leaders and laggards. This information was used to look at how customer experience correlates to loyalty. Across all industries, there’s a high correlation between customer experience and customers’ willingness to buy another product and their likelihood to recommend a company. See the March 26, 2010, “Customer Experience Leaders Garner More Loyalty” report.

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Are You Interrogating Your Customers?

We’re well-intentioned. Really, we are. We Customer Experience professionals are passionate about customers and want to do everything within our power to improve their experiences. But in our rush to connect with our customers, we may actually be driving them away.

Understanding the customer experience your organization is delivering requires a lot of asking. We have a massive array of tools to delve into the state of our customer experience—from third-party perspectives like market research and mystery shop programs to transactional data that tells us how our customers behave.

The Ballooning Survey

One of the most powerful sources of customer intelligence is their direct feedback. And so we monitor social media, conduct exit interviews, and we survey. We love our surveys! So many lovely numbers that we can crunch, slice, dice, quantify, and measure. And as more groups within our companies discover the treasure trove of information within customer feedback, they want in on the fun. So the surveys get longer, and longer.

Our poor customers have become the victims of our exuberance. Slogging through question after question after question after question, most of which they couldn’t care less about. We have crossed the line—from earnest asker to unapologetic interrogator.

Feedback, a Positive Experience?

How do we balance our need to understand with our need to keep the feedback experience a positive one? Following are a few tips that will help you get even better data, while not just “doing no harm,” but actually improving your customers’ experience:

On Their Own Terms

The phrase “Customer Experience Management” is headed the way of the laserdisc. As a customer myself, I have absolutely no interest in having my experience “managed.” Today’s customers want more authentic relationships with brands, and they want to share their stories—but on their own terms.

Social Listening automates the process of finding and gathering feedback on brand- and location-level social sites, and in online review forums. You can view social feedback on its own or alongside other types of customer stories for a more holistic view. Links to social comments allow you to respond directly to customers.

Comment boxes are another incredibly valuable tool. Inside those four walls, customers tend to share details that give you specifics on exactly why they feel the way they do about their experience, and how you can either fix a problem or reinforce what’s working. In verbatim comments, customers also prioritize what’s most important to them, giving you the insights you need to focus on the areas with the most impact.

Actively Listen

While comment boxes are great, sometimes customers need a little nudge to get going—and keep talking. Active listening tools can transform a comment into a conversation, where you’re subtly letting your customers know that you’re listening. A familiar strength meter lets them know that you’d like to hear a little bit more. Follow-up questions based on their personal stories keep the Q&A focused and relevant to what they want to tell you.

Let Them Know

Customers want to know three things when they take the time to give feedback:

That you heard them
That you are going to act on what they said
That the insights they shared will make a difference.

While few brands take these final steps, they are critical in building a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your customers. Today’s customers aren’t simply more demanding, they want to know that the time they spend makes a difference. Letting them know that you’ve heard them, and allowing them to peek behind the curtain at how you’re using their feedback to make positive changes, shows that you value them as human beings and as partners in an ongoing relationship.

End the Interrogation

It’s not okay to assault your customers during the feedback experience—even when you really, really, really want to know. It’s not nice, and it’s not necessary. With the right philosophy and tools, you can harness the important moment in your relationships with your customers to bring them closer—and get great data to crunch as well.

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Wootric + Intercom: Closing the Net Promoter Score Loop

Watch the Video:

Here at Wootric we’re big fans of Intercom. We are a customer feedback platform and we use Intercom ourselves to have meaningful conversations with our customers. Not surprisingly, our customers also tend to share the same passion for reaching their own customers where they are most likely to respond.

We also believe that asking customers for feedback without proper follow-up is a cardinal sin in customer experience management. When survey feedback, such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), is coming in from your customers every day, it becomes something that you need to manage proactively. We’ve taken steps to address that by making follow-up an integrated part of the Wootric dashboard. But we also know that many of our customers manage their user conversations outside of Wootric. Rather than re-invent the wheel, why not combine forces?

And so here we are, making the connection for Intercom users between measurement and proactive followup.

Wootric + Intercom = Customer Love

Here is how you can use Wootric in Intercom to make the most of Net Promoter Score feedback:

Note: This process is essentially the same for our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) and Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys.

1) Wootric samples your user base to collect NPS score / feedback

2) Individual scores and responses get posted to your Intercom dashboard, and are also recorded as an event in the user record.

View a user’s recent NPS data (i.e. score, comment, date)

Filter users by NPS data, such as score and comment

3) Then the fun begins. Some ideas:

Trigger Intercom messages to a user based on the score they provided. Perhaps you’d like to ping your detractors (scores of 0-6) that chose not to leave you a detailed comment, asking for additional feedback. Or maybe thank your promoters (scores of 9 or 10) and invite them to your referral program. You set the rules to drive meaningful interactions!

Leverage NPS segments for future Intercom communication campaigns. This could be something like releasing and communicating new features to your promoters first. Or perhaps targeting specific passives with additional on-boarding to important features they might have missed.

Detractor auto message triggered off an NPS score

Ready to Get Started?

Here are two ways to implement:

If you are an Intercom customer, simply click on this button to create a Wootric account (or sign in) and instantly connect it to your Intercom account.
Use Zapier. With a free Zapier account, you can pass Wootric data to Intercom, or other applications, without touching code.

If you are doing other creative things with Wootric and Intercom we’d love to hear about it!

The Bottom Line:

Measuring your NPS is just the beginning of your journey. Follow up in the ways that work best for your business, whether it’s through us, through Intercom, or another tool. We are here to support you in connecting the dots.

Start measuring Net Promoter Score, CSAT or Customer Effort Score for free with InMoment

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Understanding Empathy and Your Brand

While many companies operate under the model of “If we build it, they will come,” the most successful companies know it’s essential to understand and actively engage with a targeted customer base.

At InMoment, we believe that no one owns the customer, but instead that everyone owns the experience. Both the customers and the company equally share in the brand experience, and both carry equal importance in decision making.

To develop strong customer relationships, brands must fully understand how and why their customers choose to interact with their company. In other words, they must learn to empathize.

Understanding Empathy

To begin, let’s explore what empathy actually is. Empathy is frequently confused with sympathy, when in reality, they can have greatly different outcomes when applied.

Both sympathy and empathy involve relating to and having concern for the feelings of other individuals. Sounds good, right? In most circumstances, either sympathy or empathy are appropriate responses. However, when developing a relationship with customers and clients, empathy always wins.

Sympathy is feeling compassion for another person. Sympathizing requires little emotional investment or intellectual effort and can often be misconstrued as pity. Empathy, in contrast, is the act of projecting one’s self into another person’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstance to gain greater understanding—walking a mile in their shoes.

The Benefits of Empathy

So what does empathy have to do with your customer relationships? People want to build loyalty and relationships with brands. By knowing your ideal customer and understanding how to attract them—in other words, empathizing with their experience—you open the door to developing a great relationship.

With this relationship comes success. When you understand your target customer, you can fine-tune your brand experience to better meet their specific needs and wants. In turn, companies experience the following benefits:

Understanding what drives loyalty towards their brand
Learning how to turn negative feedback into an opportunity
Increasing customer referrals and brand advocacy
Maximizing the efficacy of InMoment’s customer feedback products

Actively listening and engaging with your customers’ perspectives—whether through one-on-one interviews, in-person observations, or through InMoment’s customer experience software—provides the highest ROI on your market research.

Creating an Empathy Map

What does this look like in practice? How do you actually get to know your customer? Copyblogger recently produced a comprehensive guide to understanding your customers’ worldview. Inspired by the user experience world, Copyblogger outlined the process of creating empathy maps for your ideal customers. These maps address four key areas in which customers interact with brands: thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Copyblogger suggests gathering several key players to map out your brand experience, including stakeholders, customer support leads, vendors, product developers, and marketers. In this exercise, you’ll sit down together to discuss both experience and specific questions (What do our customers say or feel when they use your product? What are customers hearing from other people who use the product?), along with more personal, worldview questions (How do our customers think about their hopes and fears? How do our customers interact with family and loved ones?).

Some of these questions may seem fairly abstract in comparison to typical market research practices. This is what makes the approach such a success. By striving to understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of your brand experience, you better understand your customer as a person, not just a source of revenue.

Dr. Frank Luntz describes the necessity of this abstraction in his book Words that Work. “The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart.” This “imaginative leap” will lead you to uncover the answers to questions that can truly revolutionize your business.

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

What drives my customer to spend their money at my business?
What pain points does my customer experience in their average day?
Can I resolve any of these pain points?
What pain points do customers experience with my brand?
In what unique way can I improve my customers’ lives?

InMoment’s technology is the perfect complement to these empathy exercises. We develop all of our products to capture the voices, feelings, and stories of your customers and understand them in our platform.

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The Text Analytics “Duck Test”

If it looks like text analytics, behaves like text analytics, and is called text analytics, it’s probably text analytics, right? Not necessarily.

A text analytics solution may identify keywords and phrases, but that does not ensure any level of comprehension or insight. Text analytics should help tell the customer story and empower your brand to make operational adjustments in an instant.

All technology is not created equal. Take a long hard look at your current text analytics solution and decide for yourself if it’s the real deal.

Industry-Tuned Models

A generic text analytics solution can be a powerful addition to your Voice of the Customer (VoC) program. A text analytics solution fine-tuned to the nuances of your industry, on the other hand, is invaluable. Many text analytics programs use the same classification model—regardless of industry. As a result, accuracy suffers and customer insights are potentially overlooked. Take our custom-built Monitor™ analytics for example, where we’re able to categorize incoming customer comments in real time, providing your brand with relevant and actionable insights the minute the data comes in.

Real-Time Analysis

Customer “moments of truth” are formed instantaneously. Your text analytics solution should be able to keep up with critical functions, which operate in real time, and allow for instant notifications on key issues, questionnaire branching changes, and management reporting. As management sees spikes or changes in customer issues, they can drill down with the touch of a button and view the individual comments fueling a customer experience trend.

Speech-to-Text

Speech-to-text technology allows customers to leave voice comments and have their words transcribed and analyzed in real time. This capability enables management to listen to the emotion conveyed by the customer and opens up additional—and less time-consuming—channels for customers to share their experiences.

Insight Accuracy

The average recall score—the percentage of relevant words or phrases retrieved by a text analytics model—of your standard solution is around 50%. That’s essentially the same odds as flipping a coin. Your chosen text analytics solution should have a recall score that clocks in around 90%. Those are good odds.

Comprehension over Computation

Many text analytics solutions employ a statistical model, which counts words. What they tend to be missing is the use of a linguistic model using a natural language processing (NLP) engine. InMoment’s NLP is powered by IBM’s Watson technology and enables our computers to read customer comments and uncover the customer story. Both solutions have their merits, but a linguistic model excels at uncovering experiential customer data.

The Customer Experience Intelligence Cloud™

Wondering what the Customer Experience Intelligence Cloud™ is? It’s the platform in which we gather loads of experiential customer information. Some of the most valuable data we collect comes in the form of unstructured customer comments. Because your brand should be able to mine insights from any feedback channel, we’ve embedded our text analytics inside of all our products and services.

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3 Tips to be Customer-Centric for Growth: Reflections on GrowthBeat

I heard about Venture Beat’s GrowthBeat conference a little last minute and made the decision to attend. As a marketer and a founder of a platform often leveraged by marketers, I was interested to hear the latest on growth (who isn’t?) and connect up with other marketing minds in the tech community.

GrowthBeat brought together some excellent speakers and panels — great case studies of how companies that have been willing to push the boundaries, iterate quickly, and leverage new tools are learning and finding success. But a few themes resonated for me at the higher-level–themes that spoke to the future of marketing, the future of organizations, and the role of the voice of the customer to drive growth.

Build an Integrated CX Program

2024 Gartner CX Magic Quadrant for VoC

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

What Is a Customer Journey Map?

Step One: Build the Company View of the Journey

Building out the steps

Customer-Centric Blueprint

Step Two: Build the Customer View of the Journey

Step Three: Review the Current State

Step Four: Create Customer Experience Design Criteria

Step Five: Ideate a Future State

Conclusion

Does the Shoe Fit Your Brand Experience?

1. Know Who You Are

2. Know What Your Customers Expect

3. Be Authentic

4. Be Deliberate

5. Listen

5 Ways to Engage Your Customers & Employees

1. Improve Board-Level Buy-In

2. Increase Interdepartmental Communication

3. Recognise and Reward Employees

4. Introduce Real-Time Feedback to Frontline Managers & Team

5. Understand Drivers of Engagement

Biggest Disconnects

On the Same Page

The Value of Value

Super-Empowered and Well-Intentioned

1. Start with Cost Avoidance

2. Assign a Value to Customer Loyalty

3. Model the Effect of Customer Experience Benefits

The Ballooning Survey

Feedback, a Positive Experience?

On Their Own Terms

Actively Listen

Let Them Know

End the Interrogation

Watch the Video:

Wootric + Intercom = Customer Love

Understanding Empathy

The Benefits of Empathy

Creating an Empathy Map

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

Industry-Tuned Models

Real-Time Analysis

Speech-to-Text

Insight Accuracy

Comprehension over Computation

The Customer Experience Intelligence Cloud™

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