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2023 Consumer Experience Trends

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2023 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2023

 
Schedule a Demo

2023 Consumer Experience Trends

Download the reports to learn what consumers want in 2023

Best Practices

Online Reputation Management
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Your 3 Step Checklist to Starting an Effective Online Reputation Management Program

By: The InMoment Team

Online reputation management is the process of actively monitoring and influencing the way your business is perceived by your customers and the general public. It involves collecting and analyzing feedback from multiple sources, such as reviews, social media, and customer surveys, and using that feedback to improve the customer experience and build a positive reputation.

Sounds like a lot, right? No need to be overwhelmed. We’ve compiled a step-by-step checklist to get you started. Let’s dive in and get started!

Online Reputation Management Step #1: Build A Strong Foundation

In order to build a successful online reputation management program, it’s important that you are collecting data from different outlets, setting up a review monitoring plan that involves tracking and analyzing online reviews across various review sites, and creating a review solicitation strategy that involves actively encouraging customers to leave reviews of your business on various review sites. Take these steps to get started:

  • Claim Local Listings – This involves creating profiles on various review sites and local directories, such as Yelp, Google My Business, and TripAdvisor. By claiming your local listings, you’ll be able to monitor and respond to reviews left by customers,
  • Set Up Review Management – Review management tools allow businesses to monitor and analyze their online reputation by tracking reviews, ratings, and customer feedback across multiple review sites.
  • Engage in Social Search – By monitoring social media conversations, you can quickly identify customer concerns, respond to customer inquiries, and engage with customers to build positive relationships.
  • Build a Team of Dedicated Team Members – Reputation management requires a dedicated team of professionals who can monitor customer reviews and respond to feedback in a timely and effective manner. This team should ideally consist of individuals with expertise in social media management, customer service, and public relations. It’s important to define clear roles for who responds to reviews
  • Set Up Alerts on All Review Sites – One of the essential elements of a review monitoring plan is setting up alerts for all review sites where your business is listed. This allows you to receive notifications when new reviews are posted, enabling you to respond quickly and address any issues raised by customers.
  • Build Approved Response Templates – Developing brand-approved review response templates ensures that all responses are consistent and align with your business’s overall messaging and tone.
  • Build Presence – By encouraging customers to leave reviews on various review sites, you can increase your presence on these platforms.

Online Reputation Management Step #2: Boost Your Customer Acquisition and Retention Strategy

To retain and grow your customer base, engage with your current customers by enhancing social proof, Attract and influence new buyers by building credibility with social proof and using review widgets to display reviews on your website, and win local search by increasing visibility through listing accuracy and improving review velocity.

  • Increase Search Velocity – Research has shown that a high star rating can significantly increase conversion rates. In fact, increasing your star rating from 3.7 to 4.4 can result in an 80% increase in conversions.  
  • Enhance Social Proof – One way to enhance social proof is by displaying positive reviews and testimonials prominently on your website and social media pages.
  • Respond to Reviews – Responding to both positive and negative reviews shows your customers that you value their feedback and are committed to providing excellent customer service.
  • Customize and Automate Responses – Automated responses should be used for quick responses to positive reviews, while negative reviews should be addressed with a personalized response. 

Online Reputation Management Step #3: Combine Review Data with VoC Feedback

To gain a holistic view of what your customers think, combine review data with voice of customer (VOC) feedback. Combining review data with VoC feedback can provide a more complete view of what customers think about the business. 

  • Feedback from Every Source – Collecting feedback from multiple sources can provide businesses with a comprehensive understanding of their customers’ opinions and experiences
  • Discover the “Why” – Understanding the “why” behind customer feedback can help businesses make more informed decisions about how to respond and take action. 
  • Get a Complete Market View – Gathering feedback from competitors and analyzing industry trends can help businesses gain a complete market view. This can provide valuable insights into areas where businesses can differentiate themselves and improve their reputation.
  • Compare Competitive Feedback – Analyzing competitive feedback can help businesses benchmark themselves against the competition and identify areas where they can improve.
  • Respond & React in Near Real-Time – Responding to customer feedback in a timely manner can help businesses improve their reputation and retain customers.

Your Online Reputation Management Program Going Forward

By following this checklist, you’ll set yourself up for success by creating an effective online reputation management program that is just as good as getting insights as you will be at acting on them. Ready to take the next step? Learn more about reputation management for your brand today!

Implementing a Closed-Loop System
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7 Steps for Implementing a Closed-Loop System

By: The InMoment Team

With so much riding on each interaction with your brand, you can’t afford to leave a negative customer experience unresolved. Research shows that it takes about 12 positive experiences to make up for one unresolved negative experience. In fact, a study by Lee Resources reveals that 91% of unhappy customers won’t return to your brand at all. That’s where a closed-loop system comes in!

What Is a Closed-Loop System?

 A closed-loop system is “the ability to identify and resolve individual customer issues and larger organizational patterns and trends based on those issues while communicating solutions back to customers and employees,” as defined by Bain & Company in“The Ultimate Question 2.0.” 

This system consists of an inner loop, the ability to identify and resolve individual customer issues while communicating solutions back to customers and employees, and the outer loop, the ability to identify and resolve larger organizational patterns and trends based on individual customer issues while communicating solutions back to customers and employees.

Why Is a Closed-Loop System Important?

And though closed-loop systems have been around for a while now, they are still just as vital to your customer experience (CX) program! Here are just a few reasons why: 

  • A closed-loop system gives you a competitive advantage. Many organizations don’t have a formal process for closing the customer feedback loop. If you have one, that places you above more than half of the competition in terms of making your customers feel seen and heard. 
  • A closed-loop system increases your customer loyalty. Did you know that 83% of customers feel more loyal to brands that respond and resolve their complaints? Getting feedback is one thing, but acting on that feedback is what will keep your customers coming back time and time again. 
  • A closed-loop system will decrease customer churn. By reducing your customer defection rate by just 5% using an effective closed-loop system, you can increase profits by 25-95%!

Are you convinced? Great! Now that you’re on board, we’ve outlined the 7 most important steps you need to take to get started with an effective closed-loop system. 

Getting Started with a Closed-Loop System

1. Get Executive Buy-In

Customer experience is an investment, and for your program to have a positive impact—and succeed—you need buy-in from your executive team. For best results, we’ve found that closed-loop pilot programs focused on a few locations usually are the easiest for executives to get behind. With fewer locations, it’s easier to prove the efficacy of the program without straining your brand’s resources too much.

2. Prioritize Initiatives

Implementing a closed-loop system is a marathon, not a sprint. No matter the size of your company, setting up your program will take time. As your program matures, look for the easy wins to gain credibility and prove success within your organization. Once you’ve found your stride, gradually move on to more complicated issues.

3. Harness Existing Business Knowledge

Identify employees with an understanding of your organization’s operations, and empower them to resolve customer issues as they occur. Your employees know your business and are in a unique position to help your customers and quickly close the loop on customer issues.

4. Commit to Faster Resolution

As technology advances and the customer experience evolves, consumers expect more and more from your brand. Expectations have risen to the point that 42% of consumers said that if they contact your brand for support, they expect a response within 60 minutes. Resolve customer issues in a timely fashion, and your customers will reward you with repeat business and brand advocacy throughout the years.

5. Increase Organizational Agility

Don’t get too comfortable with the way things have always been done in regard to your CX program. Treat every customer issue as you would if you were a small business, and resolve it as quickly—and personably—as possible. Customers want to feel special, and the quicker you’re able to adapt to individual customer issues, the more you’ll be able to reduce customer churn and ensure organizational success.

6. Make Individual Contact

Your customers don’t care about the size of your business; they care about how your brand treats them on a personal level. Study your brand’s customer journey, gather feedback, and identify ways to increase the amount of personal contact during the process of resolving a customer issue. A simple note or phone call can have a profound impact on the success of your program.

7. Empower Your Employees

As mentioned earlier, your employees understand the way your organization operates better than anyone else. This knowledge puts them in a unique position to understand customer issues and know the right solution for resolving the problem. Have faith in your employees and give them the autonomy they need to address customer issues on a case-by-case basis and resolve them as efficiently and personably as possible.

closing the loop on customer issues with a closed loop system

The Value of Closing the Loop

Closed-loop systems are one of the most effective ways to not only reduce customer churn, but prove the financial impact of your brand’s customer experience program. One client of ours implemented a closed-loop system that helped them identify nearly $23 million in potential revenue.

Other studies have found that closed-loop programs help retain customers, which can increase company value (up to 30%) and increase profits (up to 125%).

You can learn more from InMoment expert Jim Katzman about the value of closing the loop in his article here.

3 Myths Around Closed Loop Systems

When developing an effective closed loop system, it is just as important to think about what to do as well as what NOT to do. We’ve put together a list of 3 myths revolving around closed loop systems—and what you can do to avoid them. 

Myth #1: Closed-Loop Systems Are Not Profitable

An effective closed loop system will not only help you break even, it will help save you money! While many people think that closed-loop systems handle singular cases, they actually help you identify business trends and get ahead of them! By anticipating, not merely reacting, to your customer’s needs, you’ll be improving experiences before they even happen. 

Myth #2: Closed-Loop Systems Are Only Relevant for Certain Industries

There is a stigma surrounding closed-loop systems—that they only belong in certain industries, such as retail or food service. While those industries definitely benefit from closed-loop systems, they are not the only ones with something to gain! Every business, regardless of the industry they operate in, can benefit from a system that gives you the ability to identify the next best action for a customer, and address the root cause of issues to ensure continuous improvement. 

Checkout this case study to see how one of our Financial Services clients utilized a closed-loop system to improve their NPS score as well as other business-specific metrics! 

Myth #3: Closed-Loop Systems Are Too Complex

A system that allows you to quickly respond to customer complaints, analyze data to identify customer trends, and share knowledge within your organization to create a holistic view of the customer experience? It sounds like it would be a headache to implement. Well, that couldn’t be further from the truth—if you have the right partner!

Get the Closed-Loop System Starter Kit with InMoment’s Closed-Loop Action Package

Not sure where to start? No worries, we are here to help. We have developed a Closed-Loop Action Package that contains everything you need to get started with a system that will improve your business tomorrow, today!

Our Closed-Loop Action Package consists of four products: Case Management, Alerts & Notifications, Moments, and Reporting. Let’s break down what those are and what they mean for your business. 

  • Case Management:  Manage, track, prioritize, and resolve customer experience cases. Supports the ability to track communications with customers about their experience and helps to surface the root cause of customer issues from the employee perspective. Case Management is available on all managed survey programs purchased with XI Platform and allows for flexible filtering, for example: case status (closure or expiration), case owner, or case timer
  • Alerts & Notifications:Provides the ability to notify designated users based on specified criteria which may include scores and/or verbatim content tags.  Includes up to 5 notification workflows per survey program from employee recognition, phrase/score recognition, and customer rescue alerts. Alerts can be sent via email, text or other custom systems.
  • Moments: Case Management integrates with the Moments mobile application to enable creation of cases and close the feedback loop on the go. With Moments, users can create and amend favorite collections, share feedback, create a case, mark moments invalid, or complete and close the loop so they get the insights they need to take immediate action.
  • Reporting: Offers insights into closed loop data. Users can visualize and monitor cases at a high-level. Program owners can immediately see stats such as average days to close a case, hours to first action, and number of escalated cases. 
  • Voice of Employee: Supports the ability to track communications with customers about their experience and helps to surface the root cause of customer issues from the employee perspective. Incorporate the voice of the employee tasked with case resolution with a built-in questionnaire to uncover actionable intelligence from your employees; including customer and employee sentiment, and the root cause of the customer issue.

Ready to start closing the loop? Schedule a whiteboarding session with our experts today!

employee loyalty
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The Importance of Employee Loyalty in the Workplace

By: The InMoment Team

We all know that employee loyalty is important, but oftentimes we forget how employee loyalty is connected with customer loyalty and how loyal employees contribute to the success of the entire business.

“Profit and growth are stimulated primarily by customer loyalty. Loyalty is a direct result of customer satisfaction. Satisfaction is largely influenced by the value of services provided to customers. Value is created by satisfied, loyal, and productive employees. Employee satisfaction, in turn, results primarily from high-quality support services and policies that enable employees to deliver results to customers.” (Putting the Service-Profit Chain to Work, Harvard Business Review, 1994)

What Is Employee Loyalty and Why Is It Important at Work?

Employee loyalty refers to the dedication, commitment, and allegiance exhibited by employees towards their organization, resulting in long-term engagement, productivity, and a willingness to go above and beyond in their work

Employee loyalty is crucial in the workplace as it fosters a sense of stability, trust, and mutual benefit between employees and the organization. Loyal employees are more engaged, productive, and committed to achieving organizational goals. They contribute to a positive work culture, enhance team collaboration, and are less likely to seek opportunities elsewhere, reducing turnover costs. Moreover, loyal employees become brand advocates, attracting top talent and positively influencing the organization’s reputation and success.

Leadership and Loyalty

There is a strong relationship between employee satisfaction and employee loyalty and between employee loyalty and customer loyalty and, ultimately, profitability. So what is the secret to fostering employee loyalty and preventing employee turnover? Effective leadership.

In fact, according to a survey conducted by Korn Ferry, 33% of employees plan to look for a new job due to being bored and needing a new challenge.

Leaders who genuinely care about their people—who are “plugged in” to their organizations and listen to their employees for suggestions on how to improve—will develop corporate cultures that naturally support the concept of the Service-Profit Chain. By no surprise, employees who trust and respect the leadership of an organization often feel more empowered and motivated to do their best, which reduces employee turnover and its costs.

Those costs, particularly when layoffs are involved, can include low morale among stressed employees, and widespread distrust of the company by employees, according to the American Psychological Association’s 2014 Work and Well-Being Survey.

Metlife had similar findings in its 2011 Annual U.S. Employee Benefit Trends Study, which reported that employee loyalty was  at a 3-year low. However, the study’s 2017 findings, titled “Work Redefined: A New Age” focused  on what companies can do to inspire loyalty: “With so much change, employees are looking for more stability, protection, and a safeguard against disruption. If they can find it in their employer, they’ll show their appreciation through loyalty.”

Much of the report examines what kind of benefits inspire employee loyalty in the workplace, but even great benefits can’t make up for a poor work environment, so it’s more important than ever for leaders to embrace and implement changes that encourage loyal employees who uphold your brand’s values.

Factors That Influence Employee Loyalty

  • Organizational culture and values
  • Leadership and management practices
  • Career development and growth opportunities
  • Recognition and rewards programs
  • Work-life balance initiatives
  • Employee well-being and support

6 Tips for Fostering Employee Loyalty

These tips, which are drawn largely from the experience of customer service reps (CSRs), are widely applicable since in the end we all ultimately serve the customer.

1. Give Employees the Tools They Need

Develop tools that allow employees to quickly look up the answers to common problems, share best practices and solutions with each other, and contribute to the company’s knowledge base. Train employees in soft skills as well, like de-escalating a situation, and feeling and expressing empathy.

2. Give Employees the Time They Need

Think about voice of the customer (VoC) for a moment, and how often feedback comes from a post-interaction customer satisfaction survey, whether it’s an automated phone call or email.

Now think about how much customer service is outsourced to call centers, which work effectively in keeping calls short. One call center explained the need for time limits this way:  “Companies account for customer service as a cost center, not a profit center, and companies need to keep costs down.” Talented, hard-working employees with great people skills might be forgiven for hearing this as, “You cost us, and the only value you have is your ability to keep costs down.”

This is hardly a way to build loyalty, and the pressure to keep calls short contributes to the call center industry having the highest turnover of industries worldwide. (In a 2016 post Talkdesk, a provider of call center solutions, reported the yearly turnover as 30-45%, double or triple that of all U.S. industries in 2013.)

3. Change How You Account for Customer Service

A better way to think about customer service and build employee loyalty is to think about how many customers your employees talk with and interact with each day. That gives them valuable perspective on customer wants, needs, frustrations, and satisfaction. Think about ways to record and gather that perspective, and how you can use the data to improve your services, products, offerings, and, especially, profits.

4. Measure the Right Things

Remember that not all projects take the same amount of time. Strict time limits or quotas may discourage talented employees from taking on difficult tasks. Quality Assurance and Training Connection (QATC) reported that one company saw a significant increase in retention by designating more resources and adjusting performance expectations a little for a particularly stressful call type. Think about the knowledge and experience the company held onto by keeping those employees. (Not to mention the cost savings.) QATC’s article ends with a table breaking out the line items behind the oft-quoted cost of about $6,500 to replace a non-supervisory employee.

5. Solicit Employee Feedback

How does an employee show loyalty? Through open communication. ATB Financial, which has appeared repeatedly on Achievers’ 50 Most Engaged Workplaces list (and most recently as one of The Elite 8), encourages its employees to logon to the recruiting site Glassdoor and leave anonymous reviews of the company. The chief people officer’s response to fears that employees might leave nasty reviews? “Then we’d better get a hell of a lot better,” Lorne Rubis told the Financial Post. “I’d much rather know and have the courage, strength, and conviction to allow for the data to be free-flowing than to worry about what kind of governance we put on that.”

6. Study What Other Companies Are Doing To Build Employee Loyalty

Achievers compile an annual list of 50 Most Engaged Workplaces by looking at eight categories: Leadership, Communication, Culture, Rewards and Recognition, Accountability and Performance, Vision and Values, and Corporate Social Responsibility. A good place to discover what other companies are doing is the citations for The Elite 8, the top companies in each category.

InMoment was honored to appear as one of the 50 in 2011 as Mindshare Technologies, and we’re tremendously proud to have employees who are engaged, passionate about their work, creative, and committed to providing the highest quality of internal and external service. At the heart of our company is a phenomenal leadership team that has created a culture where people work hard, care about each other, are innovative, and fun to be around.

By constantly improving from our employee feedback, we were recently awarded the Top 50 Most Engaged Workplaces in the United States.

Ready to improve employee loyalty and satisfaction in your company? See how InMoment can help you increase employee loyalty in the workplace and boost business success.

EX and CX
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Realistic and Personal: How Avnet Strengthens the Bond Between EX and CX in a Post-Pandemic Workforce 

By: The InMoment Team

These days, social media seems polarized with posts from friends or colleagues either about starting new positions or sharing that they’ve been a part of recent layoffs. This hectic environment is on the top of both employees’ and employers’ minds, making employee experience (EX) initiatives vital to retaining talent and keeping morale up.

Peggy Carrieres, Avnet’s VP of Global Sales, Enablement, and Supplier Development, shared with InMoment how Avnet is taking a realistic but personal approach to strengthening its employee experience to sustain its customer experience (CX).

Where Employees Will Work—And Why It’s Complicated

Most employees are grappling with what work-life balance means in the new normal, and while some CEOs say they don’t care where employees work (at home, on the beach, etc.), others are pushing hard to get everyone back in the office. 

Carrieres shared that the answer of whether employees should return to the office full-time is much more complex than anyone is giving it credit for. She says the last two years of pandemic living are not truly in the past.  While employees and clients adjust to this new normal and experience stress and change, reconnecting to each other may result in a dynamic that is difficult to navigate. This new challenge makes an effective EX program much more important in a company.

A good EX program needs to be realistic by looking at employees holistically. Because when they come to work, they come as their whole selves, and a burnt-out employee can be a detractor to the overall employee experience, which may, in turn, affect customer experience. 

Creating a Culture of Community

In these unprecedented times, allowing employees to voice their stress and worry is a big part of a productive employee experience. Carrieres says a good EX program has to allow employees a safe space so they know they’re not alone in their struggles. 

Carrieres shared an experience of a time she became aware of a specific piece of employee feedback. She then gave the employee’s concerns an anonymous platform in a staff meeting, where she found that nearly every employee in attendance shared a similar worry. This act of acknowledgment uncovered a conversation that led to ideas and changes that may have been overlooked otherwise. This experience proved that how employers leverage employee feedback for learning and growth is crucial to reducing churn and growing a healthy employee base that is sustainable. 

What’s Next for EX Programs

Employee choice and control within their professional experience is invaluable, and taking a holistic view of the organization and its employees will allow companies the opportunity to meet their people where they are, help them feel valued, and, ultimately, reduce churn. 

Providing optimal customer experiences hinges on employees feeling valued, happy, and confident. That’s why it’s so important to include the voice of employees in your experience programs!

Learn more about how your employees can impact your customer experience in this eBook!

B2B Customer Experience
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Q&A: B2B Customer Experience Conversation with Avnet’s Peggy Carrieres About Supply Chain Challenges, Capturing the Voice of Customer, and More!

By: The InMoment Team

One of the best ways to overcome obstacles is to fall back on your community and brainstorm solutions together. That’s why InMoment hosts regular Experience Exchanges to help customer experience (CX) professionals do just that. 

InMoment XI Strategist Jim Katzman had the opportunity to sit down with Peggy Carrieres, Global Vice President of Sales Enablement and Supplier Development for Avnet and electronics components-industry expert. 

In the conversation, she offered insight into how B2B brands can create transparency, combat supply chain challenges, redefine “customer loyalty,” and drive trust for customers who face an increasingly complex supply chain in one of the most volatile market cycles in recent history.

Our Conversation with Peggy Carrieres of Avnet

Jim: Great to see you again, Peggy! I’d like to start the conversation about the connection between the supply chain challenges many B2B companies are facing and how these challenges affect loyalty. What role does Experience Improvement play here, and how? 

Peggy: I have been in this industry for over 25 years, and back then, it was all about process-focused engineering and technology—and that’s great. Still, we’ve seen the pervasiveness of electronics, and everything we use—from work to play—is packed with technology to make our lives easier. 

For example, a simple light bulb used to house a filament and now has many semiconductors in it. It’s a huge industry and growing like crazy, but over time, it has gotten incredibly complex.

Our product goes to 40 countries to get to market, and we sit in the middle of the value chain between suppliers and customers. 

We’re a value-added distributor with almost 2K engineers globally who work on designing a journey to help our customers get their products to market in a complex supply chain. But at the end of the day, what we’ve found from our trend data since we started our CX program back in 2014 is that relationships still matter. That is probably the most significant lesson in our voice of the customer journey: relationships can drive so many other factors in your business, and if you miss the boat, you are going to miss your customer. 

Jim: We all know about supply chain challenges, but in the semiconductor industry specifically, can you talk about how or what role agility plays?

Peggy: It’s important to know that this industry, by nature, is cyclical; it ebbs and flows about every four years and is driven by technology.  What we’re seeing today is different and more complex and has permanent changes to initially temporary solutions. Early 2020 COVID-19 hit but didn’t drive the situation yet, but as it became more and more complex, its influence grew. 

Avnet is a broad-line distributor, operating in over 140 countries globally in every region. We are able to move our customer’s demands from one country to another quickly.  So when you put that through a CX lens, I would say in this industry, what we’ve learned is that it’s imperative to understand global and cultural norms and how people get work done on a day-to-day basis in different cultures.

A lot of the hiccups that happen in B2B are due to miscommunication. We’ve learned that being agile through our supply chain means distributors like Avnet become the control tower, creating transparency across the full product lifecycle.  If you think about it, a customer may have 300 suppliers to purchase from to get their product to market. Their demand signal can be diluted, but because we have established relationships with suppliers, we can get the early warning and adjust to be flexible in our supply chain with our clients.  I don’t think this is a temporary standard; it’s going to completely change how we get business done on a daily basis. 

Jim: Would you say Avnet is like a hub for those 300 suppliers? 

Peggy: Absolutely, 100% I do—a global hub! We have customers who’ve engaged with us that haven’t traditionally engaged with “the channel” and who prefer or even try to go direct to the supplier, but the process is so complex it’s just very difficult. They can’t physically manage every supplier and every step of bringing their products to market, so they come to us. 

Jim: Since Avnet is a global company, you have many different cultures to navigate. How do you listen for, understand, and drive action to counter the communication problems you may encounter due to those differences? 

Peggy: That has been one of the most significant values of our voice of customer program. When we started it, we wanted to build a coalition in every country, but every country did its own thing and tracked its own trends over time.

It’s essential to give the feedback to someone who has context and insight into that culture. For example, we have one response that came through in Hebrew, and our translation team couldn’t translate it. So, I took it to someone who is Israeli, who works on our team here in Phoenix, and who knew the context. She relayed that the feedback was such an endearing phrase that no translation can convey its special meaning. 

This experience taught me that we need global understanding and empathy across the organization. However, we also need context in regions and countries that offer nuance because it’s hard to hear those things sometimes. 

We do that in a consultative manner, and by doing that, over time, our teams have been conditioned to get that feedback and use it to drive revenue and benefit, our teams have made that connection, and it has been highly successful. 

Jim: How does customer experience play a role in how Avnet deals with global supply-chain challenges?

Peggy: The market will change—we are seeing signs of it now. Who the customer is can also change over time. We’re the largest revenue-generated AZ-based company, with 45% in Asia, 30% in Europe, and 25% in the US, so we’re well-balanced. But from the perspective of customer experience and relationships, we needed more. 

We did a cross-correlation with NPS and what has the most uplift in “loyalty,” which is a term I hate because it can change quickly depending on how you react and respond. However, the pillars and drivers for us are ease of doing business, the quality of products and services, and, at the end of the day, how we engage with customers matters. 

For instance, how we respond to a customer’s challenge will be remembered when a customer’s partnership is on the line. I am their advocate to our supplier base; being present at the table to show them I care is mission-critical. These relationships are what drive the B2B space. 

Jim: Yes, I learned that when the executive escalation call comes in, you first hit mute and listen for pockets where you can fix something, even if it’s not everything. I think the key is honing your skill of listening to encompass the whole pain point and resisting the urge to jump in immediately at the first sign of distress.

Peggy: Right, and we’ve seen a complete shift in the focus of this industry. Raw materials, labor, and logistics all cost more now, and so we’ve had to change an industry’s discussion.  It used to be from the total cost down to total price, but now it’s the total cost of ownership, which is the assurance of supply and mitigating risk for our client. 

The conversation has shifted, and if we didn’t have a finger on the pulse of the market and work collectively with our customers, we would’ve missed the boat. If you just show a price increase without offering a conversation, you’ve hurt your relationship as well, and you don’t just come back from that. 

Jim: One thing I hear from our clients is that it’s hard to capture the B2B voice. I’d love to hear how you think and process capturing that flavor in your design approach and how Avnet built its relationship survey with the employee experience in mind. 

Peggy: The value of feedback is trends over time, so one thing we do (as we know who our demographics are) is we have the customers self-identify their role in the organization. We’ve got buyers, engineers, executives, and supply chain materials, and because they see the relationship differently at each level, it’s important to know the perspective behind the individual feedback.

I own our design tools and capabilities, and I focused specifically on the feedback from customer engineers. One thing that has been valuable is we ask them in a simple survey if they’d like to opt-in for a focus group, and we’ve had a pretty good response there. This volunteer participation allows us to quickly pose further and more profound questions to that group about what we’re developing at Avnet.  So, I think it’s important to ask customers to self-identify because every company is different in B2B. A supply chain person in one company may be completely different from a supply chain person in another.

Another thing we are seeing is what we call “customer lifecycle convergence,” where the supply chain and design chain are becoming more integrated than ever before, so you have to be in touch with both of those voices if you want to be successful. 

Jim: So, do you have different relationship questions for the different audiences you’ve identified?

Peggy: We actually just did a voice of the engineering survey, and what we found was that 93% said they spent the majority of their time looking for parts and needed someone to help them.  With this, we were able to develop a new design process based on the current state of the market and trained the field application engineers to use that process.  

In return, our revenue, that’s tied to what we call demand creation, has really increased over the last two years. So having that outside-in perspective and then changing the approach and the selling motion had a huge benefit for us.

That’s a Wrap!

This B2B Experience Exchange was packed with valuable insights about the supply chain challenges. Additionally, awesome employee experience insights also packed a powerful punch in this conversation, and we’ll be including those as part two! Look out for our next quarterly experience exchange, and in the meantime, check out this Guide to building a customer-centric B2B  experience.

Consumer Duty- How You Can Prepare
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Embracing Consumer Duty to Deliver Positive Outcomes for the UK Financial Services Sector

By: The InMoment Team

The new FCA Consumer Duty is intended to improve customer outcomes and promote better customer experiences in the financial industry in the United Kingdom (UK) by setting higher and clearer standards of consumer protection. By prioritising customer interests and designing products and services that meet their needs, firms can create more positive and beneficial experiences for customers.

What Is Consumer Duty?

Consumer Duty Principle, proposed by FCA, is a significant new legislation for the UK Financial Services sector. The legislation aims to set a consistent and increased standard of care to customers, and mandates organisations to put the needs of the customer first. 

What Are the Details of the New FCA Consumer Duty?

The FCA Consumer Duty has three golden rules that every UK financial organisation will need to adhere to:

  1. Act in Good Faith Towards Customers: Organisations are required to act in the best interests of their customers and prioritise their interests over their own. They must also ensure that their products and services meet the needs of their customers.
  1. Allow and Support Customers to Pursue their Financial Objectives: Organisations must design their products and services to meet the needs of their customers and ensure they are fit for purpose. They must also ensure that their pricing is transparent, fair, and not misleading.
  1. Avoid Causing Foreseeable Harm to Customers: Organisations must provide clear and accessible information to their customers about their products and services, including any risks associated with them. This includes communicating in plain language and avoiding jargon or technical terms that customers may not understand.

How Will the Act Benefit Consumers and Financial Organisations?

If you get it right, our experts at InMoment foresee the Consumer Duty Principle bringing many benefits to consumers and financial organisations alike, such as: 

  • Customer Trust and Loyalty: Putting the customer’s interests first can lead to increased customer satisfaction, positive word-of-mouth, and repeat business.
  • Efficiency and Effectiveness: By designing products and services that meet the needs of your customers, you are likely to see increased efficiency and effectiveness in your business operations. This can lead to cost savings and improved profitability.
  • Brand Image and Reputation: By promoting responsible business practices and prioritising customer outcomes, you can enhance your company’s reputation as a socially responsible and ethical business.

Consumer Duty + Experience Improvement = Customer Centricity! 

Customer experience (CX) platforms can help financial services organisations comply with the FCA Consumer Duty more effectively by helping them better understand their customers’ needs, improve their products and services, and ensure that they are acting in their customers’ best interests. With an integrated CX approach of leveraging the right data, technology, and CX expertise you can take the right action to comply with Consumer Duty in the following ways:

  • Data Management: Managing customer data more efficiently helps to better understand your customers’ needs and preferences, which is essential to designing products and services that meet those needs.
  • AI-powered Analytics: Analysing customer behaviour and preferences helps you identify areas for improvement and make adjustments to products and services in order to better serve customers.
  • Communication Management: Managing communications with customers more efficiently ensures that they receive clear and accessible information about your products and services and  any concerns or questions can be addressed immediately.
  • Compliance Management: Tracking compliance activities ensures that all customer interactions are recorded and monitored and reported correctly and efficiently. 

Five Ways Financial Organisations Can Prepare for Consumer Duty

To comply with Consumer Duty, better technology, data management, and improving customer experiences will be crucial to the success of every financial organisation in the UK. At the onset and in the future, it will be necessary to make experiences, compliance, and reporting processes more efficient. Here’s a few ways InMoment ca help you to prepare and ensure your organisation is set up for success.  

#1: Proactively Detect Consumer Intent to Complain

Ensure you respond to complaints. Simplify the process by applying a tool that automatically identifies and alerts you to those customers who intend to complain or even switch providers. Using InMoments AI-powered technology, those customers who intend to complain, but have not yet done so, can be flagged, with a formal case raised to resolve their issue, avoiding a formal complaint and potential fine.

#2: Comprehensive Review and Audit of Survey and Listening Posts

Start a comprehensive review and audit of all of your existing survey and listening posts, ensuring you are asking the right questions and capturing the most appropriate metrics in regards to consumer duty. We can provide actionable recommendations to ensure your listening posts are set up to deliver the right outcomes, and that your surveys are WCAG 2.0 compliant.

#3: Evaluate and Solve Compliance Issues at Scale 

Delivering consistent and compliant customer communications can feel like a daunting task. We can help you evaluate all structured, semi structured, and unstructured communication to advise if each piece of communication is compliant with the consumer duty before they go live, providing recommendations for areas of improvement. 

#4: Create Seamless Experiences for Your Most Vulnerable Customers 

It is critical that your most vulnerable customers continue to have a seamless experience with your brand. Our technology can automatically alert you to any aspects of your customer journey that are not providing an inclusive experience. Through our unique Consumer Duty Taxonomy consisting of DEI, Compliance, and the Financial Services Industry Pack, we can identify those customers who are NOT getting the right outcomes, and provide recommendations on how to improve their experience.

#5: Combine a Compliance Focus With a Customer-Centric Culture

The most successful brands will be those that focus on enhancing their customer-centric culture, putting the customer at the heart of all decision making, rather than focusing only on a compliance- first approach. Celebrate and socialise positive customer experiences, champion positive customer outcomes across the entire organisation.

If you’d like to learn more about how InMoment can help, please reach out to voc@inmoment.com or click here to read our full consumer duty solution brief!

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Moments That Matter in the Customer Experience: How Driver Analysis Helps Identify Which to Focus on & Why

By: The InMoment Team

In our recent blog, we discussed how you can improve your customer experience (CX) strategy in five simple steps. Customer experience often relates to the long-term relationship between customers and the companies they do business with. It reflects the summary of experiences at different points along the customer journey—such as considering doing business with a brand, making a purchase and becoming a customer, receiving additional services, having issues resolved, etc—and includes multiple channels: phone, in-person, email, and so on. These various interactions along the customer lifecycle—and, more specifically, those that have the most impact on the business—are what we like to call “Moments That Matter”  (MTM) in customer experience.

But are there some moments that matter more than others in the overall customer experience? And if so, how do we assess their importance?

Five Questions to Address

  1. What Are “Moments That Matter?”
  2. How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?
  3. How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?
  4. How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” assessed?
  5. Why Does the Technology You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?

Question #1: What Are “Moments That Matter?”

In the past couple of decades, it has become more clear that consumers are after more than just the “product” they purchase. Their choice to support a brand is more than just rational decision-making; it’s about emotions, too. Today’s organizations realize this; so, they try to continuously improve the way in which they deliver those experiences. 

For example, many organizations measure call center experiences as a part of their CX program, which is a smart move. Service and support is a key element that defines customer experience, and it frequently generates memorable moments. But is the call center interaction all that matters for the customer?

“Moments That Matter” are the specific interactions—like a particularly superior or terrible call center experience—that trigger customers’ feelings and leave lasting impressions. These are the specific experiences that stand out more than others and impact the customers’ long-term opinions about the organization overall. Additionally, they can likely lead to a make-or-break decision about their future relationship with the organization. 

Question #2: How Are “Moments That Matter” Determined?

A key step to identifying the “Moments That Matter” is understanding the customers’ journey throughout their relationship with the organization, from consideration and researching the product or service they need all the way through using said product or service. 

Mapping this journey starts with the organization’s knowledge of its key customer touchpoints. Next, customers provide feedback and further input to pinpoints those touchpoints most important to them. They also provide context about their best and worst experiences, wins, and pain points. This mapping helps brands focus on the key “Moments That Matter,” because, in reality, not every touchpoint and every experience is as impactful as others in creating healthy and long-lasting relationships.

Question #3: How Are “Moments That Matter” Measured?

After understanding what “Moments That Matter” are, the next step is to measure the brand’s performance at each of those moments. This is typically done using a survey format that first asks customers to evaluate their overall experience with the company. Then, it should ask which MTMs they have experienced and evaluate those they are familiar with.  It may also be effective to rate some MTMs on a battery of actional deep-dive attributes.

Question #4: How Is the Importance of Each “Moment That Matters” Assessed?

There are two general ways to assess the importance of each MTM: 

  • Ask how important each MTM is (so-called “stated importance”), or 
  • Mathematically derive importance from each MTM’s ratings and the overall experience with the company (“derived importance”). 

Derived importance has an advantage in that it does not require additional questions and simply uses respondents’ evaluation of each MTM they experienced. In general, the rating for each MTM is aligned with the overall experience rating, and the MTM that best follows the overall experience rating is therefore the most important. This type of analysis is called “driver analysis.” At InMoment, we use a technique called True Driver Analysis, which surpasses other approaches in quality of results. 

Question #5: Why Does the Approach You Use to Understand These Moments Matter?

Different statistical approaches can be used to conduct a driver analysis and assess the importance of each MTM: correlation analysis, regression analysis, structural equation modeling, and partial least squares, to name a few. The results of these approaches, however, may be biased in the presence of a strong relationship among the MTMs themselves (called “multicollinearity”). 

For this reason, InMoment uses True Driver Analysis, which is a technique designed specifically to avoid this type of bias and to assess the “true” relative impact of each MTM on an overall outcome metric. As an output of True Driver Analysis, organizations can identify the key Moments That Matter, focus their efforts, and be able to improve customer experience, loyalty, and ultimately, the bottom line.

A Visual of InMoment Driver Analysis

With continuous experience improvement being a key enabler of happier customers and long-lasting customer relationships, it is most critical to identify and focus on the Moments That Matter in every experience delivered. 

To read more about a proven strategy for continuously improving experiences across your brand in five steps—as well as the brands who have found success with it—check out this article for free today!

4 Strategies for Staff Motivation
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3 Staff Motivation Challenges & How to Combat Them

By: The InMoment Team

Anytime you enter a retail store or dine at a restaurant, we bet you have some very definite expectations, one of which is to have a pleasant interaction with the staff. And as the world’s most successful brands know, in order to meet that expectation they need to provide both staff training and staff motivation to make that happen.

Employees, regardless of the products or services they provide, are the ones setting the tone for their company and brand. They are the ones on the front lines interacting with customers each and every day. And when employees are fully engaged and satisfied with their job, it shows. They become passionate advocates who positively affect the customer experience. The reverse is also true: When employees are not satisfied, they become liabilities to your brand.

The question is, then, “What is the critical element to helping employees engage in their work?” It’s called motivation, and you can’t have engagement without it.

Areas of Staff Motivation to Keep in Mind

Staff motivation can be a huge challenge for even the best location managers. With so much to manage during every operating hour, a manager’s ability to inspire and motivate employees is limited—but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Managers can greatly improve staff motivation by keeping these three areas in mind:

1. Focus: Ensure that employees are focusing on the right things to drive a positive customer experience.
2. Communication: Make sure communication is grounded in the customer experience.
3. Visibility: Keep the customer experience front and center in employee’s minds.

4 Strategies to Drive Staff Motivation for Location Managers

Location managers can master these key areas by implementing some simple and effective strategies in order to drive staff motivation in order to deliver a continued exceptional customer experience:

Strategy #1: Be Generous With Praise

It’s one of the easiest things you can give, not to mention it has a phenomenal cost-to-impact ratio. Praise every improvement you see in your team members, both in one-on-one situations and in front of their peers.

Strategy #2: Make Your Ideas Theirs

Don’t tell your staff what to do. Instead, consult with them in a way that helps them arrive at correct conclusions on their own. For example, ask, “What do you think about trying this?”

Strategy #3: Don’t Criticize or Correct

No one enjoys hearing that they did something wrong. Try an indirect approach to get people to improve, learn from their mistakes, and fix them. Ask, “What will you do differently if that situation arises again? Why?”

Strategy #4: Recognize and Reward

Give a shout out to top performing employees. Run contests or internal games with a simple incentive and keep track of results in an area that everyone can see. You can also leverage InMoment’s Moments, a motivational tool that helps everyone from frontline staff to executives to gain insight into real-time customer feedback, understand the role they play in the customer experience, and take action to improve experiences.

When you display Moment’s in the workplace, you can showcase location-specific feedback, allowing employees to see the state of the experience at their location. That means that when employees are called out by customers for the awesome work they do, they will see it, and so will their team members! This level of recognition gives staff members a direct view into their big-picture impact on the customers and the business, which creates additional motivation to perform in their role.

How Moments Helps Encourage Motivation from Frontline Staff to Executives

Moments empowers users to socialize and share customer and employee feedback, gain insights, and quickly take action to drive experience improvement while fostering a customer-first business approach. Here are just a few of the benefits:

InMoment's Moments helps to increase staff motivation and engagement

Increased Visibility: Deliver high transparency to anyone from frontline staff to location managers, all the way up to executives on incoming customer and employee feedback through a curated data feed of comments published through filtered saved views tailored to users.

Instant Insights: Access experience feedback analytics that provide clarity into customer sentiment, themes and trends, NPS score, and more.

Organizational Engagement: Quickly distribute and socialize customer feedback and get the organization engaged with your customer experience program with an intuitive mobile application.

Improvement from Individual Verbatims: Armed with the right data, users can quickly share feedback with others, create a case for comments that need following up on, add a comment to a collection of similar feedback, and promote experience improvement by rewarding employees for positive feedback.

Case Management: Easily create a case for an experience(s) requiring followup through an integrated case platform. Users can track experiences and respond to feedback through the Moments mobile application and respond to feedback, and mark a case complete or invalid. Plus, users can view actions taken on any given experience for a historical record.

Digital Signage: Showcase filtered experience feedback views on a monitor or television to create a more customer-centric culture within an office environment (we even have Moment’s on display in every common space at InMoment HQ!)

If you take care of your staff and implement the above strategies, you’ll be well on your way to providing a great work environment. In turn, your locations and overall brand will continue to deliver an exceptional customer experience and benefit from return visits, active brand advocacy and loyalty, and, ultimately, an increase in revenue. And isn’t that what every business is looking for?

Financial Services Grow Share of Wallet
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How Financial Services Brands Can Grow Share of Wallet with Their CX Program

By: The InMoment Team

Financial services brands are facing more complex challenges than ever before, especially when it comes to customer experience (CX) and growing share of wallet. Additionally, the added stress of today’s economy and the fall out of a global pandemic makes finance an even more sensitive topic for customers than usual, making the experiences brands even more pivotal. 

Luckily, there is good news for brands even in these troubled times—if they play their cards right, they can use their experience programs to not only create great experiences for customers, but also grow their business simultaneously.

There are four key business goals finserv brands can accomplish with their CX programs (we talk about them in our latest eBook here), but today we are going to focus on just one: growing share of wallet. 

The Importance Share of Wallet (and How Your CX Program Can Help)

Growing your share of wallet can be achieved by growing your customer base (acquiring new customers or expanding the financial institution’s geographic or product/service footprint) or by capturing a greater share of current customers’ financial wallet with additional products and services. 

Growing wallet share means more than just maintaining the customers you already have—it means understanding if they are also utilizing services from your competitors, which services, and why those customers are going elsewhere. With this knowledge, you can make changes that help you go from being one of a few brands a customer utilizes to the only brand your customers trust. 

Being your customer’s one and only has some major implications for your bottom line. In fact, according to Harvard Business Review, if your brand is one of only two a customer uses for a given purpose, the difference between being their first choice and being their second choice can mean that “half of each dollar you could be collecting from the customer is going to your competitor instead.” 

With the right CX program, however, you can narrow that gap. Here are two specific examples of how experience tools can be leveraged to grow wallet share:

CX Benefit #1: Acquire More Customers

Customer acquisition is one of what we at InMoment like to call the four economic pillars of customer experience return on investment (ROI). Why? Because it’s absolutely key to making sure that your CX efforts (along with marketing campaigns, promotions, and more) are paying off.

Understanding the effects your actions as a brand have on different customer segments is crucial, as it allows you to further target your initiatives. You can then acquire more of that type of customer, then quantify the value of those new customers for your bottom line.

For example, an InMoment client sought to capitalize on acquisitions by optimizing its surveys to find new types of customers. By targeting respondents between the ages of 18 and 35 with specific questions, the company was able understand this demographic and what drove it so that this intelligence could be included in the brand’s expansion initiatives.

The practitioners who ran this initiative were then able to prove its worth by tracking the new customer acquisition, increases in unique customers, and market share growth that it generated.

CX Benefit #2: Understand How You Measure Up

Equally important to acquiring more customers is understanding what your competitors are doing that convinces those individuals to choose a brand other than yours. Understanding competitive differentiation in terms of brand, experiences, and product and servicing offerings can inform the organization on target audiences, competitive customers who are most vulnerable, and how to position the organization’s product and servicing offering in the most attractive way. 

With competitive perceptions, a financial institution may find a specific opportunity to attract competitive customers who may not be happy with the digital offering available with a current provider. An institution may also spot a chance to attract customers’ attention with a specific product offering targeting their defined needs.

For Financial Services, Intelligence Is Key

There are plenty of other benefits a CX program can bring to a financial services brand, but they all have one thing in common: intelligence.

With an experience initiative that is able to collect data from anywhere and everywhere, apply powerful technology, and give you access to experts who can guide you on your journey, you gain the kind of intelligence that helps you make informed decisions about your experience. And when you make informed decisions, you can truly delight your customers and transform your business. Sounds like a win-win, doesn’t it?

Want to learn about the other three business goals financial services brands can accomplish with their CX program? Read the full eBook here for free!

Survey Design
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Survey Design 101

By: The InMoment Team

When gathering accurate and useful data, how the data is collected is just as important as the results it yields. Reliable insights are discovered when the questions are fair, unbiased, and relevant to the participants. This is why the design of the survey can ultimately determine the survey’s success.

What Is Survey Design?

Survey design is the detailed process of creating surveys that optimize the potential results that can be collected from a well-made questionnaire. Decent design takes into account the kind of questions, the quality of questions, the flow and organization of the survey, and the possible biases or conflicts of both questions and participants.

Though creating a questionnaire may seem simple at first, it can be a complicated and tedious process. Questions can be asked in different ways, both in form and language. How much context or detail is provided can sway a participant’s opinion. What questions are presented first will likely influence the questions posed later in the survey, which can impact results. 

5 Steps for a Seamless Survey Design

Consider the following survey design best practices that have been narrowed down to 5 essential steps. Depending on the topic or purpose of the survey, some steps should be taken into account more carefully than others.

Step #1: Identify the Survey Purpose

First and foremost, identify the purpose of the survey so that you can include the most relevant content in your survey design. It’s helpful to have an overarching purpose, and it’s even better to have multiple objectives that outline the details of your main goal. If you aren’t sure what your objectives should be, start asking some brainstorming questions to solidify your goals and establish a plan:

  • What is the demographic you are targeting?
  • What do you hope to discover by distributing this survey?
  • What kind of questions does this type of topic demand?
  • Do there need to be personalized questions at any point?
  • How will the answers be compiled and transformed into useful data?
  • What is your business or organization prepared to do based on the responses?
  • Who in your organization needs to be involved with the creation of the survey?

Knowing the objectives also helps you structure the survey correctly. It’s best to include the right sections within the survey outside of the actual questions. Some standards sections to include (which are often separated into different blocks for online surveys) are:

  • Introduction: The introduction needs to convey the purpose of the survey, provide instructions, set expectations for how long the survey will take, encourage honest answers, and reassure participants that their responses are secure.
  • Screeners: This section should ask questions that ensure that participants fall within the survey requirements for your objectives. This can include some appropriate demographic information, someone’s position in the company, or any other relevant information.
  • Content Questions: This is the main portion of the survey that features the most focused and topic-relevant questions.
  • Demographics: If you didn’t include demographic information in the screener section, add one after the main questions.
  • Redirect: After the questions and having participants submit their final answers, redirect them to a thank you page of some sort.

Understanding the ins and outs of the main purpose will not make the design of the survey better, but also keeps every question intentional and focused. Plus, if you completely understand the objectives and have a solid plan, you’ll be able to act on the results easier.

Step #2: Come Up with Questions

The most extensive part of the survey is often creating the actual questions. If you’ve planned according to your objectives, it’s easier to determine how many questions are needed and how long the questionnaire will be. Depending on the feedback you’re looking for, certain types of questions will be more beneficial than others. The most common options in surveys include the following forms.

  • Open/Close-Ended Questions: Open-ended questions allow for free responses that can completely vary but give more detailed answers, which will result in more qualitative. Close-ended questions only have so many variables and combinations, which will lead to more quantitative answers.
  • Multiple Choice: One of the most common types of questions, this format offers limited responses but also keeps things simple for participants and straightforward data.
  • Scale Questions: Scales are a great way to get multi-dimensional data while offering a measurable and simple set of options. Compared to multiple-choice, this offers much more range for more accuracy since they measure both which direction someone leans as well as the intensity of that leaning.
  • Slide bars: Similar to scale questions, bars help participants indicate to what degree they feel, think, or prefer one thing over the other on a more granular level. They also provide an interactive element to the survey.
  • Ratings: Rating questions are a great way to offer a range, but specifically for satisfaction about an activity, a product, an experience, a company, etc. Make sure these questions aren’t leading if you want authentic answers.
  • Multi-Select: One way to get more detailed data out of multiple-choice questions is to allow participants to select more than one of the multiple options (depending on the nature of the question, of course.) If you’re attempting to measure what kind of activities participants would like to see in the office, you can allow them to check multiple activities rather than just one.
  • Personal/Demographic Questions: These questions answer more specific questions to the individual and should be left until the end of the survey (see step 4).

Step #3: Refine Survey Questions by Eliminating Bias Factors

Biased answers are a top concern when it comes to surveys. The best results reflect the true feelings of participants without influencing answers one way or another. Remember: people take the path of least resistance, so simple, clear, and thoughtful questions work best. These are common pitfalls to watch for if you’re trying to figure out how to create a balanced survey.

Question Wording

The language used to create questions can yield different results, like the words “assistance to the poor” getting more support than “welfare”. Also, longer questions tend to be more confusing and more easily misinterpreted. Simple wording with clear, short questions helps the customer to answer more accurately.

Answer Order 

Sometimes the order of the answers provided affects results. If a survey is over the phone or in person, people struggle to remember multiple answers and sometimes choose either the first or last answer that they hear because that’s what they remember easiest.

Medium of the Survey 

Make sure that the form of the survey makes sense for the target audience and topic that you’re surveying. Things change between telephone, online, email, and in-person surveys.

Sensitive Subjects 

People don’t always want to share information about sensitive subjects and answer dishonestly about it. Consider your phrasing and reassure participants that responses are secure and confidential.

Social Pressure

Similarly, sensitive subjects that are either politicized or contentious sometimes lead people to not answer truthfully if they worry about social repercussions. Don’t use prestige bias where you associate a topic or answer with one group, i.e., describing a point by associating it with a trusted authority and then asking someone to agree or disagree with it.

Close-Minded or Non-Exhaustive Questions

The available answers need to allow respondents to answer as truthfully as possible. When the list of answers in a survey does not accurately reflect or fit all the potential answers of a consumer, the data can be skewed. For example, if you ask, “Do you ALWAYS exercise in the morning?” If someone almost always exercises in the morning, but not every day, they will put “no” which disrupts your data.

Open or Close-Ended Questions 

Does the survey want qualitative or quantitative data? Also note, too many open-ended questions can lead to burnout for the customer, so be mindful of how many questions you include in that format.

Length of Survey 

Speaking of burnout, length is one of the leading factors for survey completion and accuracy. The longer a survey is, the less accurate the results will be and the more likely the customer will not finish it.

Leading Questions 

Leading someone to answer in one or another doesn’t survey people’s sincere opinions. For example, asking a customer “How enjoyable was your visit with us today?” instead of “Rate your visit with us today” suggests to the customer that they at least enjoyed their visit a little bit and discourages honest answers. The first question is biased and leading.

Number of Questions per Page 

If there are too many questions on a page, the customer may mix up the questions and answer the wrong ones, or simply get overwhelmed and stop taking the survey. Take advantage of white space, and if you’re doing a survey online or with a program, don’t make the participants scroll for too long.

Branding 

Deciding whether or not the survey design should reflect the company’s brand or if it should be a blind survey. This usually depends on the purpose of the survey. If, for example, a company is looking for competition information, removing its brand would be wise.

Step #4: Have an Intentional Question Sequence

The order of the questions matter. Many people opt for a “funnel” sequence where the questions are more general, then specific, and then general again. 

  1. Broad at the Start: These questions will usually warm up the participants to the survey topics and help them familiarize themselves with the formatting and flow of the survey.
  2. Details for the Majority: The middle portion makes up most of the detailed questions that require more focus or deliberation.
  3. Personal Questions at the End: Any necessary or useful personal questions should be saved for the end, which eases participants out of the deep-concentration section and offers more closure.

There are other approaches and sequences to consider, but the funnel approach is fairly universal for most topics. Keep the questions concise and order them logically—people may get easily frustrated if the subjects bounce back and forth too much. By not jumping around excessively, you also prevent accidentally providing too much context for future questions, which can influence the responses given.

Along those same lines, listing more specific questions first can influence a question, too. If you first ask if someone enjoys their position at work and then follow it with a broader question about their overall work satisfaction, the first question will likely influence how the second one is answered.

It’s also important to remember that personal questions work best at the end. Studies show that too many personal questions in the beginning can make some respondents feel anxious about their demographics; they usually feel most worried about their own demographics affecting results. These questions are usually easier to answer and offer more of a cool down, encourage unbiased responses, and create a sense of resolution for participants.

Step #5: Test Out the Survey Design Before Distributing It

Finally, if you really want to perfect your survey research design, test, test, test. Even if you believe that the first iteration of the survey is a masterpiece, it’s essential to test the survey with a focus group or via pretesting. This helps ultimate biased questions, catches misinformation, and prevents wasting time and resources on an ineffective questionnaire. Testing should consider:

  • How long the survey takes
  • Confusing questions
  • Repetitive questions
  • Leading questions or wording issues
  • Missing questions or spelling errors
  • Miscellaneous problems that arise

Survey Design Is Easy with InMoment

Reliable data is the key to sincere, realistic, and effective improvement within a company. Businesses with this kind of feedback can make informed decisions that directly impact the people, clients, and consumers of your organization.

Now that you are prepared with persuasive survey design skills, you can optimize both the quality, design, and effectiveness of your survey with InMoment. Our XI intelligent platform allows you to easily put together an intuitive, clear, and sharp-looking survey. Discover just how simple it is to use InMoment for all your survey design needs.

Quick Service Restaurants Differentiate with Guest Experience
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How Quick Service Restaurant Brands Can Drive Profitable Guest Experience Programs

By: The InMoment Team

Many restaurants, including quick service restaurants (QSRs), are highly impacted by online reviews. As of last year, close to 214 million reviews have been posted to Yelp, and 45% of consumers say they’re likely to read a business’ reviews there before visiting. Meanwhile, nearly two-thirds (64%) of people now Google a business before visiting—and a whopping 94% say a negative review has caused them to avoid a business altogether.

Negative reviews (and word of mouth) can clearly cause quick service restaurants to lose some guests before they even walk in the door. So how can they stop those reviews before they’re even posted? With a proactive guest experience program that allows them to gather valuable guest feedback and then take the necessary action they need to attract new diners, satisfy regulars, and turn any potentially negative experiences into positive ones.

With this goal in mind, InMoment gathered the three most important steps quick service restaurants can take to achieve better guest experiences in our new eBook, “How Food Services Brands Can Evolve Guest Experience Programs.” Here’s a short preview of what you’ll find inside.

3 Steps to a Future-Proof, Revenue-Driving Guest Experience Program for Quick Service Restaurants

Step #1: Create Operational Consistency

Operations are a critical part of your organization. It is also where many food service providers begin their overall quest to improve the guest experience and help answer questions like:

  • How do I create a consistent experience between locations?
  • How do I encourage and enforce positive behaviors in staff?
  • How do I understand the overall experience guests are having with my brand?

Taking an operational approach is exactly what it implies: it helps food service providers understand where to make operational improvements that result in consistent experiences: clean bathrooms, tasty food, friendly service, and more.

When implementing an operational approach, look for solutions that help provide actionable guidance for employees and program managers with solutions like Integrated Standard Operating Procedures (SOPS) and Customized Action Planning.

Step #2: Optimize Individual Experiences

Once you have mastered the art of operational guest experience, it’s time to take the next step and tackle a more experiential approach. Operational approaches focus on creating a consistent experience for all your guests.

An experiential approach focuses on creating and optimizing a positive experience for each individual guest and answering questions such as:

  • How do I understand the experience every individual guest has with my brand?
  • How do I communicate with guests about their experience in a way that works for them?
  • How do I turn negative guest experiences into positive ones?
  • How do I incorporate employee feedback to improve the guest experience?

To truly optimize experiences, make sure you’re using a solution that allows you to listen to customers and respond to their individual experiences. To do this, you need to have a guest experience solution that allows you to listen to customer feedback on any and every possible channel, including:

  • Review sites
  • Social media
  • In-App feedback
  • Third-party delivery reviews
  • Direct survey feedback
  • Microsurvey feedback
  • Employee feedback
  • Call center data
  • Video feedback
  • Loyalty program data
  • And more!

You can learn more about customer listening best practices in our eBook here!

Step #3: Innovate for Lasting Relationships

With the amount of competition in today’s food service market, creating loyalty with your guests is more important than ever—and the final step in completing your journey from an operational, to experiential, a truly innovative and relationship-based guest experience program.

Ensuring brand loyalty requires creating a high-quality, consistent experience at every touchpoint to answers questions like:

  • How can I engage the guest in a friendly, authentic way?
  • How can I give the guest the ability to customize their experience to their specific needs?
  • How can I demonstrate awareness of the guests’ situation and acknowledge their needs?
  • How can I create an experience for the guest that is perceived as a personalized experience?
  • How can I remember the guests’ preferences and anticipate their changing needs?
  • How can I incorporate guests’ feedback into my business?

When building an innovative, relationship-based guest experience program, look to integrate with loyalty and brand apps, meet guests on their terms, and understand the broader market landscape with tools like multi-touchpoint support and competitive benchmarking.

Guest Experience Is the Differentiator for Quick Service Restaurants

To sum it all up: Restaurants that consistently create high-quality, consistent experiences will separate themselves from their competitors. Want to learn about how the approach we laid out above has helped InMoment clients to gain a reputation for excellent experiences and drive loyalty? Check out our eBook here to read about cutting-edge guest experience solutions and real stories from our world-class customers.

Financial Services Customer Experience Use Cases
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At a Glance: 3 Employee & Customer Experience Program Use Cases for Financial Services Brands

By: The InMoment Team

Financial services brands know that customers take their money seriously, so many of them leverage employee and customer experience programs to understand what their customers need, then create experiences that build trusting, positive customer/brand relationships. However, these relationships aren’t the only things experience programs can support for brands.

In fact, many financial services companies use their customer experience programs as a primary tool to influence key business outcomes. Looking for a few real life examples of how brands have done this? We’ve compiled a quick list of inspiring stories from our finserv clients. Check them out below: 

Three Financial Services Customer Experience Program Use Cases

Use Case #1: Empowering Employees

A global senior wealth management firm was able to utilize its CX programs to gather information from up to 150,000 clients annually. The data was tied to client asset information, allowing all portal users to view the opportunities and risks by customer segment. Timely and integrated reports allowed different employee groups to utilize this information, proving that experience initiatives truly empower all employees regardless of where they fall in an organizational hierarchy. 

To get even more specific:

  • Financial advisors were able to identify and save at-risk client relationships, pinpoint opportunities for growth and potential new business, and leverage both the survey process and their own results to market themselves to prospective clients.
  • Field management was able to prioritize its coaching based on financial advisor survey results, manage key client relationships (in excess of $2 million dollars) at their branch, and foster peer coaching by pairing advisors with different strengths and weaknesses.
  • Senior management was able to quantify the impact of customer satisfaction on revenue and profit, as well as identify key opportunities at the firm level to improve the client experience and grow relationships

Use Case #2: Preventing Churn

A global financial services firm used its CX solutions to identify customer segments that were most at risk. This effort helped the brand prioritize retention and inspired it to invest in strategies to reduce churn.

By focusing on the customer experience, the company achieved immediate intelligence that it was then able to deliver to the team members who could make a difference, accelerating current and future operations service enhancements. The brand was able to identify the key variables that most impacted loyalty for various customer segments, paving the way for initiatives to enhance the end customer’s service experience.

Use Case #3: Combining CX and EX

One retail financial services firm struggled to retain its members. With customer demand hot on the rise, this fast-growth firm found it difficult to listen and respond to those individuals, but with retention at stake, it got moving on its experience initiatives.

The firm launched more transaction-based listening programs to gather real-time customer feedback and serve as the collective core of its updated CX program. In addition, the brand launched employee feedback programs and a customer relationship survey that would both help it view overall customer health and cross-reference customer and employee perspectives.

This new program launched using greater mobile engagement, text analytics, and case management to close the loop. Within 18 months, the firm expanded the number of products/services per customer household by 16 percent, resulting in a 4 percent increase in loan share of wallet. The brand also increased its customer base by 31 percent and identified specific areas for improvement and expansion based on customer feedback. Wow!

There’s More Where That Came From!

Each of these use cases is incredibly inspiring, but the good news doesn’t stop there. In our latest eBook, we lay out four specific business goals that financial services brands can achieve with their experience programs. You can check it out for free on our Resources page, where you can also find a collection of customer stories that describe how industry leaders make a difference with their experience programs!

Click here to read “The Top 4 CX Business Goals for Financial Services Brands!”

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