Author: Stuart Richards

With over 15 years of experience in the customer experience (CX) space, I have seen multiple companies employ training efforts to get their employees involved in new CX programs and initiatives. I have witnessed this process from the perspective of an Account Manager, Implementations Manager, a member of the Product Team, a Business Operations Manager, and now as the Director of Learning Services.

Throughout my experience, I’ve seen successes, but I’ve also seen teams fail to execute a training approach that actually engages employees. The theme across these failures is that their approach is time consuming, over complicated, and essentially inactionable. The truth is that while everyone knows training is important, it is easy for it to get lost in the list of day-to-day tasks—especially if the approach isn’t accessible. 

In order to set yourself—and your business—up for success, you need to avoid over-complicating things when it comes to rolling out employee training for your new program, but that’s easier said than done. To get you started, I’ve outlined 5 easy steps to help you craft an effective CX training approach for your business.

Step #1: Designate a Training Leader

As I started above, everyone knows that training is important. However, this understanding isn’t where most companies fall short; the failure is most often in the execution.

That is why it is so important to start your efforts by naming a project manager or leader to be directly responsible for your training efforts. This person can be the program champion, someone from your internal training team, or a representative from HR. 

Regardless of who this person is, it is their job to make sure that every employee participates in the training program. This means that they need to have the tools to track employee participation effectively—and to share results. 

How you track doesn’t need to be fancy, it could be as simple as an Excel or Google Sheet housed in a common area within the company, or it could be as complex as your work’s HR portal. By monitoring who has completed what, you’ll be able to keep the ball rolling for continuous success (and you’ll be all set up to execute step two).  

Step #2: Hold People Accountable

After finding your CX training owner, you need to create a way to hold employees accountable for completing their training. At the end of the day, we are all human and most of us need a carrot or a stick to be inspired to finish a task. 

Many businesses will create a goal or key performance indicator (KPI) directly related to training—this can be something as simple as a quarterly compliance record or something a little more involved. For example, one of our clients found a way to gamify their employee training by creating a board game for team members to play together. This way, the CX training was a fun team building exercise that also got employees actively engaged in the program.

No matter what your accountability method is, it will help employees know they are responsible for completing a set amount of CX training by a certain date. Deadlines are important drivers that everyone can understand, so use them!

Step #3: Make Training Easy to Complete

Now that you’ve designated your training leader and found a way to hold your team accountable, it’s time to make training easy to complete. When faced with a large task, people will be more likely to complete it if:

1. They know what needs to be done: Make a simple list of all required training and make this list accessible.  
2. They know when it has to be done: Send regular reminders via email or program notifications into your HR platform   
3. It is easy to find and complete: Locate training links in a place people often visit during their work day (like Slack, and internal sharing site, or learning management system.)

Remember: the easier you can make training to consume, the more likely your team will be to complete it. 

Step #4: Provide Opportunities for High Performers to Help

Now that you’ve set your learning program up for success, invite others in to join the party. As you curate your program, there will be folks who naturally rise up and quickly become subject matter experts. 

Successful training programs will make an effort to hold up those CX training rockstars as an ideal that the rest of the organization can aspire to. For example, if one region is doing exceptionally well, share their success with others to inspire them to step up to the plate as well. 

Encouraging your people to celebrate high performers and come up with their own creative ways to get their coworkers involved curates a team mentality and helps to foster a customer-centric culture.

Step #5: Celebrate!

Lastly, celebrate those wins! When people have successfully completed the assigned work, reward them. When you reward them, do it publically. Everyone likes to be recognized—plus, there is nothing like a little bit of healthy competition to motivate people. 

Post results in a place all can see—this can look like sending out a congratulatory email to the team that calls out those who have finished CX training, or putting a “congratulations” in via your internal rewards program. Again, it doesn’t have to be fancy—just remember to do it! 

If you follow these easy steps, you’ll be on your way to implementing a successful CX training program. Leadership, accountability, accessibility, team work, and rewards will pave the way to the desired result: a CX program that is both highly successful and fully utilized from top to bottom. 

If you’re looking for more content that will help you drive employee engagement, check out this piece on employee incentives. You’ll learn what’s wrong with traditional approaches and how you can create a system that actually works in “Considering Employee Incentives for CX Success? 5 Ideas for Better Engagement.” 

The Net Promoter Score® (NPS) and the wider ecosystem to which it belongs, the Net Promoter System®, have long been organizations’ preferred means of evaluating everything from employee and customer satisfaction to internal processes. The reasons for NPS’s popularity are many, but its most attractive features are its speed, ease of use, and its ability to distill the state of almost any experience, department or function into a single number.

NPS’s benefits have earned it plenty of acclaim since its 2003 debut, but the metric has faced skepticism in recent years from some CX experts. Some of these practitioners have gone so far as to proclaim that NPS is “dead” and that organizations should leave it behind. What follows is a quick, honest look at these claims and at NPS’s place in today’s experience landscape.

It’s All About the Numbers(?)

One reason some CX practitioners shy away from the Net Promoter Score is because it’s just a number. How, these experts contend, can a simple number tell organizations what changes to make or what initiatives to undertake in order to achieve transformational success, let alone improve their score?

It’s true that the Net Promoter Score is “just” a number, but companies that focus solely on the metric aren’t tapping its full potential to begin with. Instead, organizations need to look to the deeper movement behind that number: the Net Promoter System. The Net Promoter System promotes customer centricity, continuous improvement, and learning from customer feedback. These principles are hardly outdated in today’s experience landscape, especially since they espouse finding meaning beyond the metric.

The Perils of Scoreboard-Watching

Relying more on the Net Promoter System’s values than the Net Promoter Score may sound well and good, but it also raises a natural question: if the System promotes the principles that the modern experience landscape thrives on, what’s the point of using the score at all?

First, let’s take a step back to discuss the relationship between the Net Promoter Score and companies’ expectations of it. Far too many organizations expect change to come about as a result of merely observing their score. Frankly, this expectation is a cultural problem, not the fault of NPS. Change is no less difficult to attain within an organization than in any other arena of life or business, and as with those other arenas, the only thing organizations can do to affect change is to work hard. Once organizations labor to apply the Net Promoter System’s principles, the metric will take care of itself and finally become an accurate indicator of a company’s standing.

Additionally, while endeavoring to understand the relationship between NPS and a brand’s financial incomes, some organizations may find that another metric, such as OSAT or Likelihood to Repurchase, suits them better. That’s great, but the principles behind the Net Promoter System still apply and can be leveraged even in those other contexts.

NPS Lives

Organizations that shift their focus from the metric to the meaning that the Net Promoter System provides can execute NPS with modern, data-ingesting experience intelligence tools. After all, the Net Promoter System helped bring about the wider customer experience world to begin with (it’s no coincidence that CX began proliferating shortly after NPS’s introduction).

Organizations can use the Net Promoter System and data-ingesting platforms toward the same end: capturing the voice of the customer at its most relevant moments, analyzing sentiments, and delivering those insights to stakeholders that can turn them into action. Because of this, NPS is far from dead—the values and internal business practices it promulgates are relevant to any organization that seeks meaningful, transformational success.

Want to read more about the state of NPS in 2020? Read the full article for free today!

Optimizing the customer experience for success is a necessity in today’s competitive business environment. And, for any initiative, customer data is the perfect place to start adjusting your strategy. With careful planning, analysis, and execution, you can transform CX intelligence into effective product innovation.

Our webinar, “From Information to Innovation: Using Customer Data to Drive Product Innovation,” helps you identify ways to leverage your CX program to sustain product enhancements that delight customers and drive loyalty. What follows are three notable, in-depth takeaways from that webinar that your organization can leverage to optimize its customer experience strategy.

Start with customer data.

It’s no secret there’s an abundance of data, but it’s rare for that data to produce any drastic change by itself. Often, the hardest part of listening to customers is figuring out which information to utilize and how. Start by taking a hard look at the data you have available, whether it’s surveys, comments, or employee feedback. Then, with either a skilled CX professional or a data-ingesting experience intelligence platform (or, ideally, both), you can begin to piece together information to find common themes.

Scrutinizing the information you already have allows your business to identify problem areas and to improve. Be sure to prioritize the most prevalent issues your company is facing that also have the biggest impact on customer experience. With solid listening tools in place, you can leverage existing insights to drive a better experience for customers across all facets of your organization.  Sometimes, the customer voice at one touch point may even provide insight for a completely different improvement opportunity!

Leverage intelligence tools to fuel strategy.

To go from knowing about a problem to fixing it, you need a plan. Fueling your business with CX intelligence resources and professionals gives product teams specific goals to work toward and issues to resolve. For example, the goal of fixing your product’s layout is much more tangible than broadly improving customer satisfaction (though a properly packaged CX business intelligence tool can enable both).  “Artful” listening allows teams to transcend the superficial to find both deep insights and the root causes of problems.

Your organization’s issues are unique and complex, and should be treated as such. With the right tools, authority, and people, problems can be squashed quicker and more efficiently. Specificity, context, and attention to detail are all unique to CX intelligence—and by leveraging these elements, you can improve your product.

Act quickly, but consistently. 

Achievable success is always the goal, but sustainable growth can be particularly elusive. The key? Proactivity. Data-ingesting experience platforms allow organizations to identify problem areas and develop specific improvement initiatives, but it’s what your teams do after that that really counts.  Bring cross-functional teams together to digest data, tie it to operational processes, and help product teams prioritize long-term change.

Additionally, be sure to measure success so that a model of “listen-understand-improve-monetize” can be repeated. Oftentimes, when working with smart tools, smart people are underutilized. It’s important that your organization treats intelligence as an enabler for customer experience, not a replacement for it.

When companies prioritize CX innovation, they have a much easier time turning hard-won insights into meaningful innovation. After that first win, CX practitioners can establish enough credibility to drive even more success for their organization. Use your wins to both justify the importance of CX to executives and to see the business grow firsthand.

To hear more about how you can utilize your customer feedback to transform your product, watch the full webinar for free today!

We live in a fast-paced and sometimes disconnected, impersonal world. Many prefer texting to calling or face-to-face communication.  We shop online for convenience—and because some of us just don’t feel like interacting with a sales associate. Waiting in line at a store or having to call into a service center can be painful. When the retail experience can sometimes be a hassle, why would we bother buying at brick and mortar when we can from the comfort of our homes?

Retailers are struggling to find their fit in this new world: How do they overhaul the retail experience, bring it into the 21st century, and re-engage with this new type of customer in a personalized and inclusive way?

Customer feedback across many different industries shows one common thread: People want to connect with the brands they love in more than just a transactional way. CX intelligence can help revamp the entire experience, from in-store to online—even in the way brands listen to customers.

Our focus at InMoment is to help retailers embrace the future of feedback and create inclusive and personalized experiences for every type of customer. At Forrester CXSF, we partnered with Foot Locker to share how the global retailer is innovating the customer experience at three main touchpoints to bring about a retail transformation.                

How Consolidated Data Helps Foot Locker Gain Holistic Insights

Consolidating its siloed data into one platform with InMoment, Foot Locker was able to carefully identify a diverse array of customer types, from the sneakerhead who wants the latest and greatest in footwear to up their street cred, to the senior citizen who just wants a comfy pair of kicks. In between are the in and out power shoppers, non-sneakerheads, and many others.

 By specifying different categories of customers, Foot Locker has been able to design personalized and inclusive experiences in-store, online, and during the feedback process. 

Foot Locker’s Power Stores and pop-up retail spots are celebrating the local culture of the neighborhoods they serve. Different from the traditional brick and mortar store, Power Stores are a hub for local sneaker culture, art, music, and sports—featuring wall designs from local artists, and custom shoe designs celebrating their hometown. 

With its pop-up stores, Foot Locker is literally meeting customers where they are, setting up shop for instance in parks where kids are playing ball. By partnering with big brands like Nike, sports stars, and other celebrities, Foot Locker is building a stronger brand connection for its customers, building relationships that will continue to attract them to brick and mortar stores. 

These innovative in-store designs are the result of Foot Locker truly understanding who its customers are, thanks to data consolidation. 

When it comes to feedback, Foot Locker partnered with InMoment to create a more personalized and engaging survey experience. Using InMoment’s Video Feedback and Image Upload capabilities, customers can tell their own stories in their own way.  For example, Video Feedback helped customers alert Foot Locker about online orders that arrived in damaged or crumpled shoeboxes. With Video Feedback, Foot Locker can see, hear, and better understand the customer’s emotion by their tone of voice and body language, and it’s a fast and easy way for customers of all ages to interact with the retailer without having to go to the store or call customer service. 

With Image Upload, one customer shared with Foot Locker how excited she was that her son with cerebral palsy was able to find brand-name shoes that fit over his leg braces. In response, Foot Locker reached out to him directly and sent him a gift card to get another pair. The boy’s mother then sang Foot Locker’s praises on Facebook, reminding everyone to “fill out those surveys…someone is listening!”

If the Shoe Fits, Wear It

InMoment CEO Andrew Joiner believes retailers will only succeed in the future if they follow Foot Locker’s example by looking at the big picture: Who customers are and where they’re connecting with the brand. 

“Don’t just collect feedback from a single point – you will get data in multiple channels, but if you look at it holistically and across every point you’re talking to customers through, you get amazing results,” said Joiner. 

By cultivating holistic data with InMoment, Foot Locker is embracing this changing retail world. It’s promising customers through action that interacting with its team in person, online or through feedback is going to be an excellent experience—something many retailers are failing to do in this new retail atmosphere. 

Creating these personalized and inclusive experiences has kept Foot Locker at No. 4 on Forbes’ Most Engaged Companies List, and has increased its OSAT score by six points since 2018. 

But scores aren’t important. What’s vital is that customers feel that brands are stepping into their shoes and connecting with them on a more personal level. That’s what locks in customer loyalty. That’s why Foot Locker is changing the game. And InMoment is honored to be a part of it.