Stuart Richards – InMoment

Is Net Promoter Score Dead?

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

February 4, 2020July 18, 2022

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 These principles are hardly outdated in today’s experience landscape, especially since they espouse finding meaning beyond the metric.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!

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The Importance of Onboarding in the Automotive Industry: Part 2

By: Chris Travell

January 30, 2020September 17, 2020

To view the first part of this blog series, click here.

The Important First Day of the Employee Journey

In the last blog on the Employee Experience in the Automotive industry, we looked at the strategic importance and economic benefit of an effective onboarding process and focused on what should happen prior to the employee’s start date.

In this post, we’ll look at what happens when employees arrive on their first day. As before, we are focusing on the automotive industry, but the principles equally apply to other industries as well.

Creating a Welcome Kit

Once the day has arrived, you want to make it special and the best way to do that is to create an exceptional first impression. Have your receptionist be aware of the start date and ensure that the new employee is welcomed appropriately.

In fact, consider creating a “Welcome Kit” that contains numerous positive first impression opportunities such as branded assessories. Have a welcome letter from the Dealer Principal, or even from the OEM President, prepared and left at the new employee’s desk.

Often items like these are used daily and a new hire will feel an immediate attachment, so much so that they will often continue to use them for years all the while linking back to that first day.

Lastly, provide any desktop resources and in this case, the term desktop is in the literal sense. Any print materials such as dealership newsletters, upcoming community involvement notices, employee recognition programs -anything that conveys positive dealership activity will help to make a new employee feel good about their decision to join the team.

From an online standpoint, consider adding a dedicated Welcome page to your intranet or LMS. Creating a specific Welcome starting point will be engaging and will direct a new hire to specific curriculum best suited for their role.

Be sure to include a Welcome video or a step-by-step tutorial of where and when to access available training resources which, again, builds on that important first impression and helps to ease the potential training concerns people face with any new job.

As the day continues, ensure a dealership tour takes place and introduce the new hire to the various departments and team members. This is just as important for the existing team as for the new hire as positive introductions will help break the ice and hopefully lead to productive working relationships.

Engaging the New Employee Beyond the First Day

After the tour, review any administrative processes and outline not only the orientation for the remainder of the day, but also for the week ahead. For example, if this is a sales role, you may want to suggest the new hire learn as much as possible about one specific model per day.

Encourage them to drive the vehicle and speak with other salespeople. Have them talk to the service personnel to better understand the maintenance requirements of the vehicles they’ll be selling. Learning all the details of an entire product lineup can be daunting, so focus on small daily or weekly goals that are attainable.

To sustain this positive feeling past the first day, OEMs or even large dealer groups should consider conducting monthly webinar sessions for new hires. This would be a great way to meet others, online at least, who are in a similar situation and allows for the moderator to run through the onboarding process once again to promote upcoming events, answer outstanding questions, and receive important feedback.

This also could be a great opportunity for a short, anonymous employee survey to uncover any opportunities for improvement in the onboarding process.

Who Should Lead the Onboarding?

In terms of leading the onboarding, often this is left up to a Sales or Service Manager and while this is optimal, typically these managers are busy and other responsibilities may interfere with the full attention they can bring.

As an alternative, consider creating a role for an onboarding Champion, an individual whose responsibility it is to see that new employees are thoroughly walked through the onboarding process and are there to help answer additional questions in the upcoming days and weeks ahead.

This role would not take the place of a manager, as it would likely be a secondary role for a peer in the new hire’s respective department and as such, is designed to be another level of support.

When developing this role, consider making it a possible precursor to a management position as it will involve people skills, accountability, and guidance – all valuable traits in any future manager.

Onboarding is an Essential Part of the Employee Experience

To recap, onboarding is an essential part of the employee experience. Onboarding any new hire will be most effective when done in a consistent process. Include it in the hiring stage, allowing you to demonstrate your commitment to their success, the level of support available, and necessary accountability to complete the required curriculum.

Turnover is costly and leads to lower employee and customer satisfaction so ensure you take onboarding seriously and allocate the necessary resources to make a new hire feel comfortable, valued and a welcome part of your dealership family.

Onboarding is one of the most important processes a dealership can have, as it often predicates the likelihood of a new hire actually staying long term and starting a successful career. Not only will the implementation make a difference in the company, but it will also help individual employees to feel valued and achieve their career goals.

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A New Recipe for CX Success with Auntie Anne’s

Not many of us can resist the enticing and familiar waft of a fresh batch of Auntie Anne’s pretzels. But no matter how phenomenal a product is, there’s always room for a business to take its customer experience (CX) to the next level—and that’s why InMoment stepped into Auntie Anne’s kitchen to cook up a new CX strategy.

Keep reading to learn how the partnership between InMoment and Auntie Anne’s drove some pretty sweet results for the business.

Food for Thought: Smarter Data

Auntie Anne’s understands that the guest experience and the employee experience are closely connected. But as a quick-service restaurant chain connected through millions of pieces of data and feedback, it became nearly impossible to understand exactly how the two are connected. Although mystery shopping was the brand’s previous method of receiving feedback, that tactic alone no longer cut it. Auntie Anne’s needed a comprehensive approach, one that would fuel a CX that’s not only meaningful, but delivers results, as well.

Before InMoment, Auntie Anne’s was drowning in data that was siloed and sporadic, which didn’t allow for insights that spurred meaningful change. By linking up with InMoment’s XI Platform, they were able to compile and organize data and rank stores on key metrics, like friendliness and value. Not only did this provide personalized insights to individual stores, but also drummed up friendly competition between franchises. Through this, Auntie Anne’s was able to implement new, successful processes at underperforming stores.

Don’t Glaze Over the Small Details

According to Forrester, customers who have great experiences are 3.6x times more likely to spend more money with the brand. Research also shows that 3% of total CX-fueled revenue is generated by word of mouth from happy customers. These highly engaged stores also helped achieve higher OSAT, or overall satisfaction, year over year, which resulted in higher sales. In the three years after implementing InMoment, Auntie Anne’s experienced a 6 point increase in their OSAT score.

The implementation of an intelligent tool such as the XI Platform directly increased Auntie Anne’s bottom line, more than justifying the technology investment for skeptical, higher-up business executives.

Roll the Guest and the Employee Experience into One

With any company, the guest experience is only half the battle. Getting employees to champion a new CX strategy is key to a full experience transformation.

That’s where Auntie Anne’s made it personal by implementing a “Guest Care Wall of Fame” to showcase how employees are being praised for their customer experience efforts. The company also inducted franchises into its “20/70 Club,” celebrating stores that receive 20 survey responses per month and achieve an OSAT score of 70 or above.

These initiatives create HR benefits, too. According to industry research, it can cost up to $2,000 to onboard and train a new employee. When employees are more engaged, they perform better and stay longer, resulting in a cost reduction in employee turnover and training costs across all Auntie Anne’s franchises.

With a robust CX-program in place and the right intelligent tools, companies like Auntie Anne’s can save dough and dip into new levels of success, ones that produce more business value and profit across the board.

To read more about Auntie Anne’s sweet customer experience, check out this free webinar in which Chief of Operations Savannah Harper discussed how they leverage customer feedback across their entire organization!

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Prioritising Customer Experience in The New Year

By: Rob Glennon, Customer Experience Strategy Director

January 21, 2020August 26, 2021

That “new year, new you” mantra is difficult enough to achieve on a personal level, let alone an organisational one. As companies return from the holidays, many of them will begin assessing which milestones they want to pass in the new decade. This is especially true (and challenging) for CX practitioners as the business intelligence landscape will no doubt continue to rapidly change.

Figuring these organisation-wide New Years resolutions out is never a small task, but it’s not insurmountable, either. Practitioners who want to tackle the new decade with gusto and prioritise projects in 2020 can do so by following a few simple steps.

Step 1: Review and Evolve Your CX Charter

A CX charter is a set of statements about a company’s aspirations and its customer journey. If you’re looking to shake things up in 2020, checking this living document is a great first step for seeing where your organisation has been and where it could go from here.

Don’t have a CX charter? Crafting one is another great way to sort out CX prioritisation in the new year. A CX charter is there to clarify your own priorities, and is not intended for public use. As previously mentioned, the most effective CX charters contain a set of aspirational, implicit statements meant to guide a company’s experience vision, as well as a description of a brand’s high-level customer journey. Whether you’re looking to revamp a current charter or make a new one, this document is a great place for practitioners to start.

Step 2: Audit Your Customer Journey

The next step that practitioners should take when reviewing CX prioritisation in the new year is taking another glance at their customer journey. Customer journeys typically consist of both high- and low-level descriptions. The former consists of sales funnel-esque steps like “buy” while the latter includes more detailed steps, such as “I forgot to pay.”

While mapping customer journeys is useful for understanding how they interact with a brand, there’s another layer to this process: touchpoints. Auditing customer journeys allows practitioners to assess customer journey touchpoints, decide which ones are most important, and which ones might need a bit of polish; this all factors directly into creating CX initiatives.

Step 3: Creating Initiatives

Once practitioners have identified problems to solve and intelligence gaps to close, what’s the best way to get started? It’s never a bad idea to begin with an abstract, high-level problem statement. That may sound like the stuff of unproductive meetings, but practitioners can follow this statement up by breaking it down into smaller, more specific problems to solve.

This process, when executed in an agile way, enables practitioners and their teams to both establish an overarching vision of their organisation’s priorities and derive actual projects and initiatives from that vision. This parallel dynamic also enables CX practitioners to stay connected to their brand’s mission and justify CX’s importance to seeing that mission through.

Step 4: Fit Those Initiatives Into Your Roadmap

While on the subject of seeing a CX mission through (and justifying ROI in the boardroom), putting your initiatives on a roadmap is a great way to track projects, evaluate changes, and demonstrate to the C-Suite that CX prioritisation can yield tangible results and performance markers.

If all of these tools prove anything, it’s that a little structure can go a long way. Establishing a charter, identifying customer journeys, creating initiatives, and charting those projects on a roadmap can inexorably tie CX to a brand journey, and thus stand a far greater chance of being a boon to that journey. CX practitioners who rely on these prioritisation tools will have an easier time establishing CX’s worth and reaping transformative success for their organisations.

Want to learn more about these steps? Read the full PDF here or visit our Resource Center for more info on CX how-to’s, hot topics, and more!

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The Importance of Onboarding in the Automotive Industry: Part 1

The Automotive Employee Journey

Let’s start with some good news. According to Tinypulse.com, 91% of employees are retained by an organization with an effective onboarding process and 69% of new hires are likely to stay for three years if there is a well-structured onboarding programme in place.

But here’s the bad news – 22% of staff turnover occurs within the first 45 days.

According to Fred Reichheld, the inventor of NPS:

“If you wonder what getting and keeping the right employees has to do with getting and keeping the right customers, the answer is everything. Companies need to care about the employee experience because that’s the only way they will be equipped to deliver a great customer experience.”

The reality of the statement seems to be hitting home. We do a lot of work in the area of employee engagement. We have received more requests for information and proposals in the last year for employee engagement projects than we have in recent memory.

The automotive industry suffers from higher-than-average turnover, especially in the key areas of frontline roles that deal directly with the customer. And without a positive employee experience, it is much more difficult to deliver a positive customer experience.

Manufacturers seem to be recognizing more acutely the need to have fully engaged, interested, and satisfied frontline employees which is particularly challenging, in an industry that globally still tends to operate on a franchise model.

In this two part blog series, we will be looking at the employee journey. The first will deal with the time leading up to the employee starting their first day of work; the second will focus on what happens once they actually get there. Even though our focus in this post is on onboarding for the automotive industry, the principles can be applied across industry.

Minimizing Turnover While Increasing Satisfaction

For the automotive industry there’s a very strong economic argument for decreasing employee turnover. According to Ted Kraybill, president of ESI Trends which conducts the annual National Automobile Dealers Association Dealership Workforce Study in the US, a 10-percentage-point increase in turnover will cost the average dealership $7,500 in gross profit per employee per year.

If the average dealership has 70 people, a 10-point increase in employee turnover for the average dealership costs more than $500,000 in gross profit annually. Multiplied by NADA’s count of roughly 16,500 dealerships, it’s an $8 billion-plus problem (Automotive News, 2017).

The first step to minimise a high employee turnover is to implement a strong onboarding process for your next hire. A good process will increase the employee satisfaction and retention, whereas a poor one will result in consistent and costly turnover.

Showing Commitment to the Development

By presenting the onboarding steps, brand history, curriculum and resources available, you demonstrate your commitment to an individual’s development, success, and comfort level when first starting a new role. This can be a tense time for anyone in a new position, and the more structure you can present before they are hired, the more likely you are to attract a better candidate.

Communicate Accountability

A second goal along with this support, is to communicate the accountability that goes along with it. By demonstrating that certain courses are to be completed, and a culture that is to be adhered to, you are setting expectations that will need to be met. Too often a new hire exhibits the wrong behavior simply for the fact that they were not told of the desired behaviour by the employer.

By doing this before the actual hire takes place, you ensure they understand what is expected with no surprises after they start.

Share Onboarding Plan Prior to the Employee’s First Day

Once you have made the hire official, often there can be some time gap until the actual start date. If this is the case, you may want to consider sending any applicable resources to the new hire to help prepare them for your brand and/or dealership.

Even having them explore the websites in depth with specific information needs will help them become more familiar with their new surroundings. Here they can learn more about the product and possibly the team they will be working with which can help them feel more at home.

It may also raise some initial questions that they can be prepared to ask on their first day.

Speaking of the first day, an effective onboarding process is transparent, meaning that you need to choreograph the day and prepare the new hire for what’s ahead. Sending an email or text in advance with the day’s agenda will help to confirm your commitment and help them start off on the right foot.

Positive Employee Experiences Turn Into Positive Customer Experiences

The bottom line is that in order to retain employees, effective onboarding processes need to be put into effect. Better preparing employees before their first day and during training will decrease turnover and ultimately help new hires to feel supported by their team, stay committed to development, and increase their communication with leadership.

With an exemplary onboarding process, automotive companies will see an increase in fully engaged, interested, and satisfied employees. And when employees have a positive experience with the company, they are more likely to pass on the positive experiences to their customers.

Click here to read the second part of this series.

Sources:

Automotive News (‘Employee turnover costs dealers billions’ Jan.23, 2017)

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Can You Hear Me Now? How to Listen for, Identify, and Fix Organizational Problems

By: Jim Katzman, Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement

January 7, 2020July 30, 2021

Sometimes, the problems holding your organization back are easy to spot. Much of the time, though, organizational issues are well-hidden, well-integrated, or simply entrenched into the operating rhythm, which makes fixing them a bit more complicated.

Though trying to isolate and fix deep-rooted problems is not an easy or simple task, organizations can meet this challenge with perseverance and the power of customer experience data tools. What follows is a quick overview of those tools and the best practices to bear in mind while using them.

Step #1: Canvas the Company

The first step organizations should take to identify problems is to round up all of their data. That’s right—customer survey feedback, employee feedback, company metadata, and even external market and social data—scoop it all up and gather it in one place for analysis.

Though it probably doesn’t need spelling out, organizations can’t find problems if they examine some data sources and not others. Issues that may seem like they’re stemming from one department may actually be rooted in another. For this reason, it pays to have all data gathered in one place. Additionally, gathering from ALL data sources keeps all involved groups honest to the process and eliminates any bias that could creep into the improvement process.

Step #2: Identify Far-Reaching Problems

Once organizations have their data ready to go, they can begin scouring it for problems. The most efficient way to go about this process is to leverage an employee feedback tool to look for the biggest and most common problems, i.e. issues that are affecting multiple departments and processes.

Leveraging these listening tools has many benefits. First, organizations can identify issues that are affecting the most departments—and thus, the most customers. Secondly, the process of gathering and capturing multi-source data becomes repeatable. And thirdly, these tools can be used to help search for and isolate the small issues that comprise big problems.

Step #3: Implement Fixes

The reason why organizations should break big problems up into small ones is because it makes issues easier to address. Finding fixes for 10 small problems is still easier than trying to convene a one-size-fits-all solution that transcends departments and processes. Rendering problems down to more bite-size chunks also uncovers the root causes of problems—and makes those causes simpler to manage in both the short- and long-term.

Organizations that take the time to identify large-scale problems, cut them down to size, and take action to implement issue-by-issue fixes have a far greater chance of attaining meaningful, transformative success than those that don’t. Driving incremental improvement is also great from a culture perspective because it displays a focus on continuous improvement.

Looking for more guidance on how you can effect real change in 2020? Read “How CX Intelligence Can Drive Meaningful Product Innovation” today!

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A Clear 2020 Vision: Best CX Practices for the New Year

If one thing is certain, it’s that digital expectations are perpetually changing—that’s true for customers, employees, and businesses. And yet, organizations are always playing catch up; the more phenomenal experiences they deliver, the greater expectations grow.

In fact, when we surveyed consumers and brands to better comprehend the overlapping and conflicting opinions on how the customer experience is delivered, we discovered that fifty percent of brands said they are “definitely” doing better, but only 11% of consumers said the same. That’s a pretty big discrepancy—one that we certainly don’t want repeated in the new year. The good news? There are steps you can take to level the playing field. Here are some of the best practices to incorporate into your CX strategy in 2020.

#1: Cultivate data holistically

How: Extend feedback channels.

The bustling eCommerce industry has undoubtedly changed the wants and needs of the modern consumer. Feedback across nearly all retail industries shows one common thread: People want to connect with the brands they love, in more than a transactional way. So when it comes to data, think outside the box by taking advantage of multiple platforms.

For example, take a look at our initiative with Foot Locker. During our partnership, the brand used InMoment’s Video Feedback and Image Upload capabilities so customers could tell their own stories in their own way. With our technology, Foot Locker could more easily hear, understand, and solve any customer complaints or feedback, effectively strengthening the brand-to-consumer relationship. Our point? By looking at feedback from various channels, you’re able to see the big picture more clearly—and even lock in customer loyalty for the new year and beyond.

#2: Get better information

How: Optimize survey methods.

Your brand may provide several modes of feedback, but that doesn’t always mean it’s all useful, or effective. For instance, if an online survey interferes with the overall design of your website, why would anyone give it the time of day? When it comes to design, a clean, simple, functional, and optimized page is always best.

But don’t just rely on that alone. Include modern data analysis tools in your CX strategy that reach customers where they are and when they’re ready to give feedback. And most importantly, to gain useful insights on overall guest satisfaction, only ask them questions that are relevant to their experience.

#3: Experience a 360-degree view of feedback

How: Marry CX and EX.

It’s no secret that the customer and employee experiences are closely intertwined. But what does that actually mean in terms of metrics, and how can you use this information to get ahead? While customer feedback data is essential, it’s also limited. But by implementing an EX program to complement your existing CX program, like our client Massage Envy, you can use employee feedback and turnover metrics to better determine key drivers of customer satisfaction. This sophistication allows you to assess your company’s entire experience (customer, employee, and beyond) and deliver true intelligence for actionable business change.

#4: Personalize with purpose

How: Tailor the experience.

Over the years, many companies have missed the mark on what exactly customers value and why. It’s important to not only use personalization for profit, but also leverage feedback to better understand the entire customer experience.

For example, customers are not satisfied with marketing emails that are simply personalized by name or browse history. They would rather you understand their preferences (such as device or channel) and buying habits. By tailoring your experience to the customer, your brand can more easily achieve that desired intersection where customers are happier and more loyal, and your business is more profitable.

#5: Drive big-picture change

How: Focus on the right CX metrics.

Instead of hyper-focusing on small details, aim for the big picture. Think about the endgame and leverage customer experience metrics with meaning, rather than over-analyzing every data point that piles up over the year. By putting your company’s growth at the center of your efforts, you’ll drive the desired outcomes that will make the biggest financial impact in the long run.

Aligning your organization on a metric framework is a crucial step in achieving your CX improvement goals. And what better time than the beginning of the year? With a strong customer experience strategy in place, you can move through 2020 with a clear, winning vision that delivers profound results.

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Relationship Goals: Using Surveys to Capture Complete Brand Experiences

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

December 17, 2019August 27, 2021

If I asked you to picture a survey, you’d probably think of that email you receive after buying something online or having worked your way through a call center phone tree. These transactional surveys, as they’re called, are ubiquitous in today’s customer experience landscape and are effective for learning how customers feel about short-term brand experiences.

But what about long-term brand experiences, though? What kind of survey do organizations use if they want to know how customers feel about every facet of their brand experience from top to bottom? This is where the relationship survey comes into play.

The Impression That I Get

While transactional surveys are designed to evaluate purchases, website feedback processes, and other specific interactions, relationship surveys ask customers to reflect on their entire experience with a brand—not just their most recent.

Effective relationship surveys ask customers how well a brand is delivering against its principles, as well as for their impressions of recent changes or news. These surveys may also ask for customers’ impressions of a brand’s messaging on key topics, such as the environment.

Take the Good With the Bad

Relationship surveys ask customers about their entire brand experience, so there’s a chance that those individuals will throw some improvement suggestions in with the praise. I’ve never seen a brand score a perfect 10 with its customers all the time, so some disapproval is to be expected with this type of survey. No matter the score, though, getting a survey back means that a brand can begin improving how customers perceive it over time.

It’s important to remember, though, that relationship surveys connect directly to customers’ thoughts and opinions about an entire brand experience. This means that these surveys are an ideal means of identifying problem areas and room for improvement that transactional surveys may not identify. From what I’ve seen over the years, the more of this feedback an organization can gather, the better positioned it will be to achieve meaningful change and close intelligence gaps.

Being Tactical

What specifically might companies keep an eye out for as they solicit this kind of feedback? Well, for a start, many relationship surveys ask customers to compare their current impression of a brand with the one they may have had previously. In addition, these surveys are an excellent means of asking customers for their opinions on an organization’s values, ethics, and the direction it’s taking.

Survey Synthesis

Relationship surveys are comprehensive, high-speed tools that can deliver a high volume of feedback in a short span of time. Brands that use them can understand what their audience thinks about a variety of different interactions, and create a cumulative sense of how their relationships with customers are changing over time.

As previously commented, there are other types of surveys that are better for, say, gauging how customers feel about specific transactions and other short-term brand experiences. Organizations that employ multiple types of surveys can gain all of this context and be better positioned for success because of that.

No matter how many kinds of surveys an organization may use, though, they’re all only as relevant as the action that companies take with them. Proactivity and a willingness to act on feedback are the keys to a successful survey strategy. This is no less true for relationship surveys than for any other kind of questionnaire.

If you would like to learn more about relationship surveys—and how you can pair them with transactional surveys—check out “Uniting Transactional and Relationship Surveys to Capture the Entire Experience” today!

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9 Novel Natural Language Processing Applications in Business

Building an effective NLP application starts with defining a concrete use-case within a specific domain. No two companies are completely alike, and the same goes for business solutions. But this doesn’t mean that learnings from one project cannot be applied to another. With this in mind, we’ve collected case studies across nine different industries to illustrate the potential uses for natural language processing and text analytics.

Biotechnology

When someone calls into the Medical Information Department (MID) at Biogen, they’re routed to operators who search through FAQ’s, brochures, and product resources to answer questions. If the answer cannot be provided within a minute, the call escalates to an expensive medical director. Biogen wanted to reduce the involvement of these directors. So, they turned to InMoment for a solution to empower, not replace, their human operators.

First, we configured our core NLP to identify relevant information within Biogen’s resources. Then, we combined this solution with an open-source search engine and custom user interface. The resulting system understands complex relationships within Biogen’s data. Now, MID operators can now type in keywords or questions to get answers in seconds. Early testing by Biogen already shows faster responses and fewer calls sent to medical directors.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“We’ve worked with InMoment for years on programs surrounding Voice of the Patient, Voice of the Key Opinion Leader (KoL), and social media monitoring… They’ve always been a key partner.” — Keith Ho Director of Customer Focus and Medical Digital, Biogen[/perfectpullquote]

Sports & Entertainment

Brandtix delivers actionable brand performance insight for the world’s top athletes and teams by gathering data from social media and news platforms. They turned to InMoment for a powerful NLP platform that could analyze and decode the jargon-filled language of professional sports. Together, Semantria API and Brandtix’s proprietary algorithms now process fan vernacular across 19 languages. As part of this, Semantria analyzes and structures the sentiment of fan conversations as positive or negative, based on context. These capabilities allow franchise owners, player agents, and PR teams to separate meaningful mentions from general chatter and address PR problems before they get out of hand.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“Choosing InMoment over its competitors was easy — thanks to the mix of service, price, ease of use, and language packs. Further, InMoment counts extraction and sentiment analysis as one action. The other solutions we looked at bill extraction and sentiment separately, charging double the volume and double the price.” — Shahar Fogel Vice President of Product, Brandtix[/perfectpullquote]

Social Media Monitoring

evolve24 is a data analytics firm that combines myriad data sources to help companies develop strategic direction. To process information and provide market intelligence in real-time, evolve24 can only employ best-in-class toolsets with the lowest possible latency and downtime. Salience, a core AI-based NLP engine, provides low-latency text analytics that processes five or more tweets every second, expediting evolve24’s time-to-value for their customers. Salience’s power and customizability give evolve24 the ability to keep up with increasing volumes while helping them maintain high standards of consistency and measurement across a range of text data sources.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“The text analytics engine is a key tool for us in conjunction with our proprietary emotion metric; this next evolution of functionality promises an even more comprehensive look into the conversations our customers’ customers are having.” — Noah Krusell VP of Product Development, evolve24[/perfectpullquote]

Customer Experience Management

VOZIQ offers a suite of Predictive Customer Retention and Customer Experience Management solutions for call centers. Traditional churn prediction models rely on transaction histories and demographics data but fail to incorporate consumer-generated input with real customer sentiment. VOZIQ turned to InMoment to fill this gap.

Through Semantria, VOZIQ categorizes the text comments and identifies customer sentiment from survey scores and keywords in each call log. Since partnering with InMoment, VOZIQ has retained thousands of customers for their clients, resulting in millions of dollars in additional revenue each year.

Industrial & Aviation Design

Gensler’s Los Angeles Aviation and Transportation Studio partnered with InMoment, leveraging sentiment analysis on customer feedback to make better-informed decisions about the planning and design of airports. The result is a data-driven voice of customer program that can help win contracts and build airports that better serve stakeholders and travelers alike.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“As a global industry leader in airport architecture, we utilize the power of Semantria’s rapid and precise data analysis to create better-informed designs for the airports of tomorrow.” — Andy Huang, AIA LEED Associate Designer, Gensler Aviation and Transportation Studio[/perfectpullquote]

Hospitality & Hotel Management

Revinate helps over 30,000 hospitality providers measure online presence, analyze consumer feedback, and reinvent the guest experience. With over 2,700 categories, 100 restaurant topics, 200 hotel topics, and nine languages, Revinate gives their customers the ability to measure consumer sentiment in critical categories, such as rooms, staff, service, and food. Semantria’s customizability lets Revinate’s users create lists of custom topics, follow trending topics as they evolve, and compare sentiment scores across multiple organization-specific metrics.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“The support from the team at InMoment was outstanding; they made a very complex project seem simple. With their partnership, we met our goals on time, delivered the best possible product, and were set up to ensure continued success.” — Matt Zarem, Senior Director of Product, Revinate[/perfectpullquote]

Technology & Electronics

A large tech company’s Customer Market Research (CMR) team helps managers across the company make better decisions regarding product and market strategy. Before, the CMR team used to listen to the Voice of the Customer by designing, distributing, and analyzing a wide range of surveys. As the group began working to integrate social media data, they turned to InMoment.

Their team needed to effectively filter social content in order to extract relevant data, reduce survey spend, easily configure flexible one-off analyses, and validate long-term trends. Traditional social listening tools didn’t offer the customizability and scalability that the CMR team needed, so they contacted InMoment to discuss a “semi-custom” solution.

First, the CMR team extracts a subset of social comments from a InMoment-built data warehouse, based on the products and brands they want to know more about. Then they use Spotlight to analyze this data and understand what people are saying, how they feel, and why they feel that way. Next, they validate the results and relate the net sentiment score to quantitative Likert™ Scale survey data. This approach allows them to compare and contrast what people say in structured surveys, versus what they say in the unstructured environment of social media.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“InMoment is the only vendor we’ve seen that can offer the flexibility that is required to support our complex product line.” — Csaba Dancshazy Senior Market Research Manager [/perfectpullquote]

Fitness Lifestyle & Events

Tough Mudder Inc. has grown to become a leading active lifestyle brand and endurance event company with more than 2.5 million global participants. The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an essential measurement for the company. However, the volume and the qualitative format of their post-event surveys make it challenging to garner insight.

Using Semantria for Excel, the Tough Mudder team reduced manual survey coding time by 90%. Working with InMoment staff, they designed custom queries to solve an industry-specific sentiment analysis problem. In total, Tough Mudder uses InMoment to process 2,000 surveys for each of the company’s 78 events per season, some 156,000 surveys total.

[perfectpullquote align=”full” bordertop=”false” cite=”” link=”” color=”” class=”” size=””]“By teaming with InMoment, Tough Mudder is able to report Net Promoter Scores and review participant feedback within a week of every event. The company’s ability to make strategic adjustments based on customer insights is invaluable to providing the ultimate event experience.” — Sydney Friedkin Consumer Insights Analyst, Tough Mudder Inc.[/perfectpullquote]

Regulatory Compliance & Financial Services

The Australian government mandates that financial Statements of Advice (SoAs) include disclosures covering conflicts of interest, own product recommendations, and more. Financial services providers doing business in Australia use SoA templates and frequent spot-checks. This helps make sure that financial advisors aren’t modifying or deleting critical disclosures.

An average-sized firm produces hundreds of pages of SoAs each week. Manual review is costly, unreliable, and exposes the firm to high non-compliance risk. One such firm, unable to find an existing contract analysis tool that could solve this exact problem, turned to InMoment for help. First, we trained our semi-structured data parser with machine learning to understand the underlying structure of the Statement of Advice document. Then, we built a custom natural language processing configuration to extract and analyze entities and other text elements. Then, we structured and exported the resulting data into a simple spreadsheet.

Now, in mere minutes the firm’s auditors can see whether proper disclosures were made across hundreds of documents. They can even identify where an advisor’s recommendations may go against their client’s stated goals and risk attitude. This substantially lowers the firm’s non-compliance risk even while reducing their disclosure compliance costs.

Deploying NLP in Your Business

All of the NLP applications above show how text analytics/NLP can help companies increase revenue and reduce costs. But can a natural language processing application solve your business problems?

Start by answering these questions:

What’s your need?
What’s your desired outcome?
Do you have enough data?
Do you have the right data?
Does the technology exist?
Can you build it?
Is there an established vendor you can work with?
How will you measure your outcome?

Your answers will help you figure out the best way towards solving your own business problems in a cost-effective way. Often this comes down to a question of Build vs Buy. In many (most) cases, it will make more sense to partner with a reliable NLP vendor – so long as you do your homework.

The truth is that many companies flaunt shiny AI systems that promise to solve all the world’s problems. But while moon-shot projects certainly are admirable, the nature of those projects often doom them to failure from the outset. And in the end, business users are not angel investors. They need real applications that deliver results today, not years in the future.

We can’t stress this enough: Everything comes down to how applicable an NLP solution is to your business. Whether you’re in hospitality, entertainment, financial services or any other text data heavy industry, natural language and text analytics can be utilized to unlock value. If you see potential for NLP within your organization, then the next step is to reach out to a vendor. If you speak with InMoment, we’ll start by sitting down with you to understand precisely what you’re trying to achieve, the context you’re working in, and why other providers don’t meet your needs.

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3 Steps for Turning Customer Feedback Into Product Innovation

By: Jim Katzman, Principal, CX Strategy & Enablement

December 10, 2019August 3, 2021

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!

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From Knowing to Doing: 6 Action Steps for Experience Transformation

Don’t just experience the experience transformation: own it. And if real transformation is what you’re after, you’ll need to turn metrics into meaningful and strategic CX actions. Our latest eBook, “How to Go Beyond CX Insights and Take Action: 6 Action Steps for Experience Transformation” guides you on everything from feedback to insights, insights to intelligence, intelligence to action, and action to transformation.

Here are six crucial action steps outlined in the eBook that detail how you can own the customer experience transformation.

#1: Get the right reports

Work smarter, not harder.

Gathering data is an essential step for nearly all businesses, but it’s not enough to transform your organization. Not all data is good data—and to ensure your company is moving forward, you need the right reporting tools to complement your customer experience strategy. You don’t have to be a data expert, but with the right templates and reports, you can turn metrics into insights that produce meaningful change.

#2: Include third-party information

Feedback is everywhere. Use it.

Technology never stops evolving and as a result, customer feedback takes various shapes. With social media commanding the attention of nearly all generations, your approach to data collection must be extensive. It’s imperative to implement tools that break down social data and deliver integrated insights to you in a variety of dashboards, reports, and apps. This enables you to take action to address unhappy customers, and get ahead of your competition.

#3. Proactively monitor the impact of campaigns on your CX

Understand the big picture, faster.

Businesses—no matter how big or small—constantly introduce new initiatives, leadership, campaigns, or policies. With all this noise, it can be difficult to ideate, complete, and understand the impact of projects. How can you address this challenge head on? Work to continuously monitor specific issues, and their impact on key metrics. By tracking, A/B testing and improving campaigns, you can better understand the big picture to more quickly determine what’s working, and what isn’t.

#4. Resolve issues quickly

Control the entire customer lifecycle.

Negative customer feedback can be valuable. One of the most important actions your CX program can take is to respond to negative feedback quickly and efficiently. But with a massive amount of data to sift through, addressing all negative feedback on your own might not be feasible. Linking up with intelligent tools, like InMoment’s case management system, gives you more control over your case list. That means your company can address things in order of importance to quickly solve everyday issues.

#5. Train your employees efficiently

Use data to empower your staff.

Give your employees the tools to succeed. With the right intelligence program, you can leverage customer feedback to train your employees. Robust coaching applications equip local managers with simple, procedural steps to solve service and satisfaction concerns in a quick and efficient fashion. With advanced data science in your corner, your company can take the employee experience to the next level—an action with rewards that will trickle down to the rest of your company.

#6. Prove the effectiveness of your actions

Justify the importance of your CX program.

How many times has your organization implemented projects that fall off the map? Often, it’s not the fault of those responsible for the project, but rather the lack of ability to determine and analyze the conclusions. Data-ingesting experience tools, like our XI Platform, can turn CX initiative data into intelligent and easy-to-understand insights for long-term, meaningful change. This intelligence helps gain the trust of higher-ups, which in turn leads to more business initiative freedom down the road.

When companies combine data insights with action, everyone wins. The right intelligence platform works in unison with capable employees for a fully formed CX strategy that produces a transformative impact for customers, employees, and the business itself.

You’ve collected the data, now what? Download our eBook, “How to Go Beyond CX Insights and Take Action: 6 Action Steps for Experience Transformation” to learn more today.

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How to Use Guest Feedback to Drive Organizational Success

Guest experiences don’t exist in siloes. From marketing to HR and operations, your entire organization plays a role in delivering memorable customer experiences (CX) and interactions that lead to increased customer loyalty.

InMoment’s Nate Morley was joined by Savannah Harper, director of operations services at Auntie Anne’s, and Nhuy Weidinger, brand marketing manager for McAlister’s Deli, to host a webinar in partnership with FastCasual.com, “Success Starts with Your Guests: Using Guest Feedback Throughout Your Entire Organization.” From leveraging the power of data to improving employee and customer interactions, this webinar discusses how each department across your organization can leverage customer feedback to make better business decisions and improve the overall experience.

How Guest Feedback Impacts Department Roles

Operations: It’s no secret that good customer experiences start with employees. Your operations department is a great place to uncover how you can deliver value from the inside out.

According to Savannah Harper of Auntie Anne’s, this can be done by leveraging your guest experience platform to deliver in-depth data and metrics. This real-time, priceless data shows store owners and employees why they should care about guest experiences, drawing a correlation between good service, guest recovery, and a better bottom line.

Human Resources: A reported 79% of employees who quit their jobs claimed that a lack of appreciation was a major reason for leaving. And employees that don’t feel appreciated likely aren’t going the extra mile to improve customer experiences. But when your HR team highlights employee successes—as detailed in guest feedback—employees not only feel valued, they also know they’re doing well.

HR teams can also leverage employee success for training purposes, using real-world situations to prevent negative or bad customer experiences in the future.

Finance: Think finance is removed from guest experiences? Think again. While employees on the floor are the ones responsible for interacting with customers, those interactions directly impact things like revenue. By investing in your guest experiences, your business will see positive outcomes like:

Recovering at-risk revenue: Guests have lifetime value, especially those that continually seek out your brand for products or services. Identifying and recovering at-risk customers helps you rescue that revenue as well.
Increasing sales opportunities: According to Forrester, customers who have great buying experiences are 3.6 times more likely to spend more with the brand who provided it. Good customer experiences can equal more revenue opportunities.
Acquiring new customers: Word of mouth from happy customers makes up roughly 3% of CX-fueled revenue potential. Not only do great experiences lead to repeat purchases from existing customers, but it also increases the chance they’ll share your brand with their peers.

Development: For departments responsible for business development, guest feedback can lead to clearer understanding on brand perception, which in turn allows you to better optimize store locations. Granular guest data helps you know where your customers are coming from, where there’s opportunity to open new stores, and when it might be time to close ones that aren’t performing well.

Marketing: Marketing teams are constantly testing the waters with customers. And finding products customers love, or uncovering those they don’t, requires gathering guest data and feedback. According to Nhuy Weidinger, brand marketing manager for McAlister’s Deli, when the company changes the menu or introduces limited-time, seasonal menu items, they make sure to gather guest feedback to determine if those items should be rolled out again the following year.

For example, when McAlister’s Deli removed gravy and croissants from the menu, customers spoke up to let the company know they missed those items. And when McAlister’s marketing department made the decision to reintroduce those menu offerings, guests felt like their feedback was heard—and their cravings were satisfied.

Whether you’re responsible for your company’s books or determining the best locale to open a brick-and-mortar location, a strong CX strategy must touch every facet of your business. By aligning departments across your organization on how to listen, leverage, and act on guest feedback, you’re working to create better customer experiences, in turn driving more business success.

For more insights, check out Fast Casual’s webinar, “Success Starts with Your Guests: Using Guest Feedback Throughout Your Entire Organization,” today.

Build an Integrated CX Program

2024 Gartner CX Magic Quadrant for VoC

2024 Online Reputation Benchmark Report

It’s All About the Numbers(?)

The Perils of Scoreboard-Watching

NPS Lives

The Important First Day of the Employee Journey

Creating a Welcome Kit

Engaging the New Employee Beyond the First Day

Who Should Lead the Onboarding?

Onboarding is an Essential Part of the Employee Experience

Food for Thought: Smarter Data

Don’t Glaze Over the Small Details

Roll the Guest and the Employee Experience into One

Step 1: Review and Evolve Your CX Charter

Step 2: Audit Your Customer Journey

Step 3: Creating Initiatives

Step 4: Fit Those Initiatives Into Your Roadmap

The Automotive Employee Journey

Minimizing Turnover While Increasing Satisfaction

Showing Commitment to the Development

Communicate Accountability

Share Onboarding Plan Prior to the Employee’s First Day

Positive Employee Experiences Turn Into Positive Customer Experiences

Sources:

Automotive News (‘Employee turnover costs dealers billions’ Jan.23, 2017)

Step #1: Canvas the Company

Step #2: Identify Far-Reaching Problems

Step #3: Implement Fixes

#1: Cultivate data holistically

#2: Get better information

#3: Experience a 360-degree view of feedback

#4: Personalize with purpose

#5: Drive big-picture change

The Impression That I Get

Take the Good With the Bad

Being Tactical

Survey Synthesis

Biotechnology

Sports & Entertainment

Social Media Monitoring

Customer Experience Management

Industrial & Aviation Design

Hospitality & Hotel Management

Technology & Electronics

Fitness Lifestyle & Events

Regulatory Compliance & Financial Services

Deploying NLP in Your Business

Start with customer data.

Leverage intelligence tools to fuel strategy.

Act quickly, but consistently.

#1: Get the right reports

#2: Include third-party information

#3. Proactively monitor the impact of campaigns on your CX

#4. Resolve issues quickly

#5. Train your employees efficiently

#6. Prove the effectiveness of your actions

How Guest Feedback Impacts Department Roles

Change Region

North America

Europe

Asia Pacific