Best Practices

Developing and maintaining a customer experience (CX) program is challenging, which is why many brands turn to a partner to help see this massive endeavor through. If, like many business leaders, you’re wondering how best to go about this process, what follows is an effective methodology for finding the right CX partner for your business:

1. Assess Your Current Program
2. Establish Why a Change is Needed
3. Incorporate The Needs of Other Stakeholders
4. Outline Program Goals
5. Develop Short, Middle, and Long-Term Plans

Step #1: Assess Your Current Program

Before searching for a CX partner, it’s important for brands to assess where their program is at. Specifically, organizations should establish which feedback channels they rely on, which stakeholders are involved, and whether their current program is effectively helping them attain meaningful transformation or meet business goals.

Companies that establish the scope, strengths, and weaknesses of their CX program before they begin searching for a vendor can better identify which CX partner can best suit their individual needs. Having this knowledge handy can also hasten any implementation processes once brands select a vendor.

Step #2: Establish Why a Change is Needed

Once brands have had a chance to sit down and evaluate their current CX efforts, they also need to answer a very important question: why bring in a vendor? What program or business need would recruiting a CX partner help meet?

Just as taking stock of a CX program can better prepare companies to seek out a vendor, so too can answering this question. Companies should always try to distill their CX and business shortcomings down as specifically as possible to both help find the right vendor and to be prepared to hit the ground running on improvements.

Step #3: Incorporate The Needs of Other Stakeholders

Considering company stakeholders’ needs is another important part of nailing down an ideal CX vendor. Just as they should consider why a change might be needed on the CX front, businesses also need to carefully consider which stakeholders would stand to gain from a CX partner’s assistance and how.

For example, do frontline teams need help with effectively managing customer feedback? Would Human Resources benefit from a change in how they engage with and solicit feedback from employees? These and other questions are why it’s important to consider what various stakeholders need from a CX program and how finding the right vendor could help their respective efforts.

Step #4: Outline Program Goals

This step can only take place after companies have identified how their current CX efforts are faring, why a change might be needed in those efforts, and which stakeholders need to be involved and how they’d benefit. 

To be clear, outlining program goals means establishing specific, meaningful transformations that brands wish to see, not something generic like “general CX improvement.” Much like establishing why a change is needed, outlining specific goals can help a company find the right CX partner for them significantly faster.

Step #5: Establish Short, Middle, and Long-Term Plans

Companies can take outlining program goals a step further by examining what they’d like to see a CX program achieve in the short, middle, and long term. Brands should get as specific as possible with the high water marks they’d like to achieve through customer experience, including customer acquisition, customer retention, upselling to existing customers, and by how much they’d like to lower cost to serve. These are just a few elements companies can incorporate into these plans.

Brands that take the time to put all five of these pieces into place will be excellently positioned to find the right CX vendor for their respective business goals. No matter those goals, though, it’s important to seek out a partner that offers a balance of data-powered solutions and inveterate expertise. Together, brands and their vendors can then establish needed changes, bring benefits to stakeholders, meet business goals, and achieve short, middle, and long-term success.

Though every organization needs a customer experience (CX) solution tailored to its own industry, challenges, and strengths, there are several fundamental traits that all successful CX programs share. 

In our latest webinar, “Now is the Time to Assess and Reinvent Your CX Program” with Forrester Senior Analyst Faith Adams, Eric Smuda described five elements that together define world-class CX initiatives and can enable organizations to achieve transformational success:

• CX-Centric Data
• Economic Framework
• Aligned/Empowered Employees
• Data Accessibility
• Organized for Success

Key #1: CX-Centric Data

If an organization hopes to reap success and meaningful learnings from its CX program, it needs to ensure that every bit of data gathered through that program is relevant to the experience it seeks to provide.

Companies can help ensure CX centricity in their data in a number of ways. First, it always helps to design feedback channels in such a way that customers can share what they think is most important about an experience, not just what a brand considers most prudent. For example, open-ended survey questions and media upload opportunities are just a few ways to help make this happen.

Brands can also make their data more CX-centric by desiloing it. Departments should never work in a bubble when it comes to soliciting feedback—rather, they need to ensure that their feedback methods aren’t running over each other and are working in concert toward a holistic understanding of the customer experience. These methods are key to ensuring more CX-centric data.

Key#2: Economic Framework

The best CX programs both help brands identify opportunities for meaningful improvement and serve as cornerstones of a companies’ economic aspirations. Thus, it pays for organizations to be mindful not only of how to provide a better experience, but also how that improved experience can help brands climb to the top of their vertical and provide new opportunities for growth.

Organizations can help their CX programs stay rooted in an economic framework by anchoring it in four economic pillars. First, companies need to ask how CX programs can help them acquire new customers. They also need to consider how those same programs can improve customer retention, identify opportunities to cross-sell/upsell within existing pools of customers, and, finally, lower cost to serve. This paradigm can help keep customer experience within an economic framework and, ultimately, improve an organization’s standing in its marketplace and with customers.

Key #3: Aligned/Empowered Employees

Employees are an integral part of any successful CX effort. Thus, brands that want to be customer experience leaders need to empower their employees to take part in that endeavor. 

How exactly can companies accomplish this? For starters, it pays to recognize the employees who are part of the feedback process. This means incentivizing and rewarding customer-facing employees who go above and beyond to listen to customer concerns and reassure those individuals that their feedback is being heard.

Additionally, once companies implement meaningful improvement(s) based on customer feedback, they need to circle back to the employees who helped collect that info to let them know what took place as a result of their dedication. This can help employees find greater meaning in their work and become more impassioned about their brand. After all, employee passion is a key component of any world-class CX program.

Key #4: Data Accessibility

The more accessible a company’s CX data is, the easier it becomes for CX practitioners and stakeholders to understand where their company’s experience effort is and where it needs to go to achieve meaningful improvement.

Again, it’s also important for companies to desilo their data. When departments and stakeholders collect CX data by themselves, they risk creating skewed views of their company’s CX efforts and may even trample over each other’s attempts to gather meaningful information. The companies with the best CX programs recognize the importance of having departments and practitioners work together toward a single understanding of the experience they provide. They can then make that understanding available for all stakeholders.

Key #5: Organized for Success

When companies strive to ensure CX centricity in their data, work to keep that data rooted in a framework of economic success, empower employees to take part in and drive that success, and make CX information united and accessible to all relevant stakeholders, they’ll be ready to build a world-class CX program and, thus, be organized to attain transformational success.

Though none of these tasks is a small endeavor, companies that work toward achieving them will not only see an improved CX program, but also get the most out of that effort. Doing so can help any company reach the top of its vertical and continuously achieve meaningful improvement for itself and its customers.

Grocery stores and supermarkets are accustomed to being a central part of their customers’ lives, but in the age of COVID-19, many brands are finding that they are the only destination for customers—outside of their homes, that is.

These stores are among the few specified “essential” businesses that remain open so home-bound customers can keep their fridges and pantries stocked. This is an important lifeline for customers, but it also presents a set of challenges—and opportunities—for grocery store and supermarket brands.

Here’s a comprehensive list of key elements brands should master in order to provide excellent, essential customer experiences:

Rethink Employee Roles

The pandemic is forcing so many of us to rethink our processes and see if they still work in this unprecedented scenario. As grocery stores and supermarkets reflect, it will become apparent that they will need some employees to perform different tasks. For instance, where one employee may usually help to pack bags at the cash wrap, they may now need to disinfect carts as shoppers are finished using them. Additionally, businesses should dedicate more staff to fulfilling online orders, as pickup and delivery options will be more heavily relied upon.

Go Out of Your Way

Customer stress levels are up for obvious reasons. Any little thing you can do to make their lives easier or more convenient will therefore go a long way in the world of COVID-19. You could open up more pick-up time slots, assign extra cleaning duties, or even go the extra mile of dedicating specific shopping hours to the most vulnerable communities. Making customers feel cared for now will create a sense of trust and loyalty that will far outlast this pandemic.

Let Customers Know Their Health is Your Priority

When customers step out their door to go anywhere, they have a lot on their minds: Do I need a mask? What about gloves? How can I be sure I stay six feet away from strangers? Is this store disinfecting regularly? 

The most important thing grocery store and supermarket brands can do is show customers that you understand their concerns and are doing everything in your power to keep them safe and healthy. Doing something as simple as posting an employee to wipe down carts and pass them off to shoppers as they enter the store will be effective. Even asking cashiers to wipe down credit card machines after each and every customer will have the desired effect. Why? Instead of telling your customers you are taking extra precautions, you are performing those precautions right before their very eyes!

COVID-19 may be creating incredible amounts of uncertainty, but if it is doing one positive thing, it is proving that we are able and willing to do what it takes to keep each other safe. 

Grocery store and supermarket brands have the opportunity to lead the charge; if they take up the mantle, they are sure to capture the long-term loyalty of customers for years to come! 

Looking for ways to show your shoppers how much you care about their health and safety? Check out this article that walks through the specific steps you can take to create a stress-free shopping experience!

In today’s digital world, keeping up is no longer the goal; it’s getting ahead. With customers engaging with brands in a myriad of ways and channels, the ability to transform feedback into actionable insights has never been more crucial. 

Organizations must take a pragmatic, modern approach to customer listening—one that looks at feedback holistically to better understand the entire customer experience (CX). When you pair the right, useful data with modern solutions and platforms you can transform your customers’ feedback into business intelligence that drives meaningful change. 

Traditional vs. Modern Listening

A holistic approach to customer feedback doesn’t mean that tried-and-true methods need to be replaced, just modified. An entirely modernized customer listening strategy includes all different types of feedback to better understand the complete customer journey, including: 

• Traditional listening: Solicited customer feedback typically gathered through long-form customer feedback surveys that focus on a single point in time, experience or channel. 

• Modern listening: Customer feedback collected through multimedia channels and sources that are often optimized and personalized but can also be aggregated like social, employee, operational, financial, and CRM data. 

Traditional methods of feedback, despite their limitations, aren’t without merit.  At the same time, what a truly modern approach to customer listening does is aggregate all feedback—modern and traditional—into a centralized location to better understand business impact. 

Understanding the Full Customer Journey 

Survey questions provide answers, but that kind of solicited data can be limiting. Expand your listening program to include various touchpoints and channels. For example, SMS, email survey invitations, and QR codes meet customers where they are—on their phones. Social listening targets younger generations, and that data can open the door for unfiltered, meaningful stories and reviews that survey questions alone can’t capture.

Traditional listening methods still have a part to play. Methods of obtaining information like call centers or market surveys produce a wealth of data. However, when combined with an intelligent customer feedback management tool, this information can be personalized, compiled, and integrated into actionable data insights—a significant upgrade from basic answers to survey questions. 

Bigger Insights, Bigger Wins

With modern customer listening, it’s important to note when a sale becomes more than a sale and can be transformed into a blueprint for achieving larger business objectives. Tools that digitally intercept targeted points of the buying journey can provide real-time insights into customer purchase habits and behaviors. This unique knowledge gained helps facilitate more intelligent predictive analytics so that your business can more easily adapt to losses and duplicate and intensify wins.  

The truth is that not all brands have the talent and bandwidth to expand their customer listening programs in house. Leveraging robust data intelligence tools is crucial in optimizing, harnessing, and capitalizing on meaningful conversations. Collecting the information is one step, but combined with a modern CX program, you can add context to data, maximizing your business insights and performance. 

To take a deeper dive into the evolution of customer listening, you can read our eBook, “How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback”. 

In a world where e-commerce is constantly evolving, more and more traditional quality assessment strategies are becoming obsolete. Even though mystery shopping was once the standard approach to assessing service, new technology proves itself to be more effective and more reliable.

Your organization needs an all-encompassing customer experience (CX) strategy that grants you peripheral views of customer service shortcomings, as well as insights into the most critical lines of your business. InMoment’s latest white paper, “Why a Customer Experience Program is More Powerful Than Mystery Shopping,” details what intelligent technology can do that mystery shopping simply cannot. 

The Benefits of Adopting a Holistic CX Program 

Improving the customer experience doesn’t just affect the customer. Your organization can leverage the insights gained from newly implemented technology to make meaningful, transformative business decisions. Here are a few improvements that a holistic approach to feedback can drive for your business: 

#1: You can more closely assess your CX program, and make strategy adjustments as needed.  

Reviews from mystery shopping companies and other traditional modes of quality assessment tend to accumulate over time. Without having direct and instant access to CX results and reviews, odds are your business will make the same mistakes over and over again, negatively impacting customer experiences. 

But with instant real-time access to results, your organization can quickly and efficiently assess information, making necessary strategy adjustments. InMoment’s XI Platform is comprised of three clouds: the CX Cloud, the Employee Experience (EX) Cloud, and the Market Experience (MX) Cloud. The platform garners different types of data formats, including real-time survey responses, analytics, reporting and alerts that deliver immediate results. With this modern technology in place, these clouds can be used individually, or combined to deliver insights from the most critical lines of your business

#2 Your CX and performance data is carefully and optimally organized. 

Not all businesses are the same, so their CX strategies shouldn’t be either. You need a platform that is flexible enough to support all different types of executives within every area of your organization. With a scalable architecture, data can be obtained, stored, organized and distributed to the right people, at the right time, so that everyone gets the relevant insights they need in their roles—from executives to marketing, and HR. 

Additionally, intelligent automation tools can provide external and internal improvements for both customers and employees. For example, InMoment’s XI Platform allows companies to incorporate tried-and-true feedback (like surveys) in a way that doesn’t complicate processes for customers. The insights and results are received in real-time, allowing companies to respond to feedback and implement changes much faster.

#3 You’ll increase your organization’s revenue and performance. 

Among all the other benefits, an intelligent CX strategy also increases the overall performance and reputation of your organization—and results in a better bottom line. Here are just a few notable numbers achieved through a holistic customer experience strategy: 

• $23 million in potential revenue one InMoment client gained after implementing a closed-loop system. These kinds of customer improvements can help your company identify and retain at-risk customers, in addition to acquiring new ones.  
• 3.6x more money customers who have great experiences with a brand are more likely to spend with that brand. With the right CX strategy in place, the payoff will come quickly. 
• 3% increase in CX-fueled revenue. According to Forrester reports, happy customers account for about a 3% bump in revenue potential in most industries. 

Leveling up your customer experience strategy has both quantitative and qualitative benefits for the entire organization. In a highly competitive market, staying ahead is key to staying on top. To learn more about how our XI Platform can take your CX program to the next level, download our white paper, “Why a Customer Experience Program is More Powerful Than Mystery Shopping” here.

In the evolving e-commerce market, consumers have just as much power as brands, if not more. As a result, the demand for intelligent, user-friendly customer experience (CX) has only increased, with no signs of it slowing down.

 In a highly competitive market, traditional methods will no longer cut it. In order to create a meaningful experience that benefits everyone—brands, customers, employees, and the market—you need all-encompassing business intelligence tools that fill the gaps with insights that will drive impactful results. 

InMoment puts the intelligence in intelligent automation. The XI Platform is comprised of three clouds, the CX Cloud, the Employee Experience (EX) Cloud, and the Market Experience (MX) Cloud. Built on a modernized technology stack, these clouds can be used individually or combined to deliver insights from the most critical lines of your business. 

4 Key Drivers in Experience Intelligence Automation

#1: Synthesize

Customer feedback is essential, yes, but there’s more to it than that. Data doesn’t come from just one source or even one format; experience data lives in every part of your business. Our approach widens your lens to a 360-degree view by mining and storing data from a variety of sources—your organization, its products, your market, and your competitors—to identify the most critical intersections of what creates meaningful experiences. With InMoment, science is infused in every part of the XI Platform, which enables the extraction of more data in more formats for even more intelligent business insights.  

#2: Analyze 

Collecting and leveraging data through silos makes it difficult to piece all of the experiences together and even harder to create an effective CX strategy. But with the extraction of data in its original form combined with the unique fusion of sources, our platform easily compiles findings from the customer, employee, and market to take your analytics to the next level. By viewing metrics through the right lens, you can maximize the quality and relevance of the insights that your company receives to transform CX metrics into meaningful analysis, which in turn, gives your company the tools to execute an actionable, data-driven customer experience strategy. 

#3: Prioritize 

Every company strives for meaningful contribution but without the fundamental knowledge of your customers, employees, competition, and the market, you can never truly make informed decisions. InMoment’s XI Platform allows you to customize and tailor the intelligence that users receive, ensuring everyone gets the relevant insights needed. This experience intelligence allows everyone to better understand feedback and prioritize the issues that require immediate action and solve those problems. Our solution is highly scalable to meet your company where you are now and get you where you want to go.

#4: Monetize 

With InMoment’s XI Platform and a fully integrated CX strategy, your business can finally see the big picture. Better customer experience transparency allows your company to turn findings into action that produces more business value and profit. These purposefully designed, extraordinary experiences aid in fostering long-term, measurable growth. 

Want to learn more about how our XI Platform can take your CX program to the next level? Download InMoment’s eBook “Designing Extraordinary Experiences: Combining the Power of Customer, Employee, and Market Experience Intelligence” today.

There’s a reputation problem facing the future of the telecom industry. 

Research shows that telecommunications companies consistently receive lower customer experience (CX) scores than any other industry. That’s partly because people tend to have much higher customer experience standards for telecoms than they might have for other businesses. But it’s also because many telecoms simply aren’t listening to their customers. And as the streaming war heats up and spurs major changes in the telecom industry, businesses can no longer afford to ignore their customers. 

Here are a few tips brands can use to improve the customer experience and ultimately customer retention in the telecom industry: 

Anticipate Common Problems Before They Occur

It doesn’t have to be a guessing game when it comes to understanding customer needs and problems. Common issues often plague telecom users, especially as they reach certain milestones along the customer journey. 

For example, our research shows that customers are less likely to recommend internet, mobile, or television services around the one-year mark with a provider. Respondents report common frustrations around staff ability, efficiency, and helpfulness, as well as issues with bill clarity and ease of payment. 

Given that this problem is by no means rare, telecom providers should be proactive and engage existing customers before they reach this milestone. Check in with customers about their points of concern and educate them to avoid any confusion that may create bigger problems down the line. 

Approach Efforts to Automate Wisely

Automation in the telecom industry has changed the game for many companies through the use of AI-enabled chatbots. AI can ease the burden on swamped customer service reps and provide more convenient options for customers to engage with businesses. But no matter how helpful this technology can be, it can never fully replace human interaction.

Poor customer service is a top contributing factor to user dissatisfaction. As a result, telecom companies must review all problems that occur and make sure their chatbots are not used at the wrong times and making issues worse. Every customer resolution strategy should blend automation options with the possibility of intervention by a human customer service rep. This should be a seamless process; that way, if problems are escalated from bots then service reps have all the data and information needed to avoid wasting customer time. 

Engage Customers on Their Own Terms 

It’s hard to understand all of the unique problems your customers face if they can’t easily provide insightful feedback. And given that customer needs and preferences vary, one size does not fit all when it comes to the options for soliciting this feedback. Customers should be able to choose from a diverse range of channels to solve their problems in the ways that are easiest and most productive for them. 

Give customers opportunities to engage via interactive methods—through voice, video, image, and more—beyond just the standard survey. This provides more meaningful and insightful data with details that matter so you can easily improve your CX. Regardless of how your customers choose to engage, make sure their transition from survey to video chat or phone call with a rep is seamless and consistent. 

There are no guarantees in the future of telecom. But your survival in an increasingly competitive space depends on your ability to step in the shoes of your customers and understand their needs and issues. If you can harness the voice of the customer to improve your customer experience, you’re already ahead. 

For more information, download our “CX in the Telecom Industry“ eBook today. 

To leverage a third-party delivery company, or to go it alone? That’s the question facing many franchise and independent restaurants. Today’s diners love meal delivery services; the average person has two food delivery apps on their phone and uses them three times a month. More than half (54%) of users start their meal search with a specific restaurant in mind, then look for it in an app. So if your restaurant isn’t available on food delivery apps, guests may move on to your competition. 

But those wary of jumping on board with a restaurant delivery brand like Grubhub and DoorDash worry about putting their guests’ experience—from the state of the food at arrival to the speed at which it arrives—in someone else’s hands. (There’s also the startling fact that one-fourth of delivery drivers admit to sneaking a bite of a guest’s food.)

Restaurants that do decide third-party delivery services are worth the risk need a way to measure the full effect that these offerings are having on their brand. That means engaging tools within your guest experience management platform to give your brand the opportunity to connect with diners as if you were delivering their meals yourself.

In our latest report, “How to Measure the Effect of Third-party Delivery on Your Brand,” we delve into a few ways your restaurant can leverage guest experience solutions to make sure your diners are getting the quality delivery experience they expect. 

Leverage Email Surveys

While guests may be able to gain instant access to your brand’s online surveys via their food receipts, there’s no guarantee with third-party delivery services that those receipts will even reach guests’ hands. 

To combat this potential gap, restaurants can shift their tactics away from receipt feedback requests to follow-up emails. This leverages a key benefit of food delivery services—access to your guests’ personal data, including email addresses—and allows you to personalize emails based on when and what a guest orders. 

When setting up your email surveys, don’t forget to factor in relevance. Since guests who received delivery orders weren’t served in your restaurant (this time), you won’t want to ask questions about your servers or cleanliness. Instead, focus on the flavor, temperature and quality of the food. Asking the right questions shows guests you’re paying attention and are truly invested in their overall experience.

Contrast Guests’ Experiences

One of the many advantages of a leading guest experience management platform is that it can measure multiple touchpoints. While your goal may be to gather feedback on guests’ food delivery experience, you can also compare and benchmark that data against their dine-in visits. You can even go so far as to break down those third-party experiences by brand (DoorDash, Uber Eats, Grubhub, etc.) to see which is best representing your restaurant—and which one could be doing damage.

Your most important benchmarking data, however, will come from crunching some numbers. Work with your guest experience team to find an average spend for each guest in a variety of groups (dining-in versus delivery, one third-party brand versus another, etc.). When you multiply that number by the amount of negative experiences in each group, you’ll gain a window into your potential losses if those guests leave your brand—and the numbers show exactly where you need to improve. 

Find Out What’s Really Important to Your Guests

At its core, the ultimate goal behind guest feedback is to maintain a quality experience, improve your service based on wants and needs, then maintain guest loyalty. We already know that more than two-thirds of guests report that “staff interaction” highly influences their ongoing brand decision making. But what about guests who receive your food via third-party delivery services? We can’t assume they’re influenced by the same factors.

That’s where follow-up email surveys can prove a gold mine. Nearly one-third of diners say they buy more food when ordering delivery versus dining in. Why is that? What extras are they ordering? Additionally, you can gain feedback about the delivery experience beyond food. More than one-third (36%) of guests say they would pay more for eco-friendly packaging—do yours feel the same? Do they prioritize friendly drivers and speedy delivery? Your survey can reveal answers to all these questions.

Restaurants that use third-party delivery know they’ve already opened up a variety of new revenue streams. But there’s plenty they don’t know about food delivery experiences. Guest experience management platforms deliver the tools to clear up these mysteries, and help restaurants maintain great diner experiences, no matter where they’re eating. 

To learn more about how you can use your guest experience management platform to guarantee great experiences with third-party delivery, check out our latest eBook, “How to Measure the Effect of Third-party Delivery on Your Brand.”

For brands looking to gain a competitive edge in a customer-centric, digital-first era, quality customer experience (CX) separates the companies that excel from those that fall behind. 

Despite valiant efforts from brands to make customer experience strategies a core part of their business, 70% of CX initiatives risk losing funding—and failing altogether—by not providing enough business value. And while roughly 80% of brands want to compete based on customer experience, only 7% of CX strategies result in competitive differentiation.

However, these numbers aren’t cause for panic. The good news is there are simple measures you can take to ensure your CX strategy is not only effective, but fosters relationships with buyers to increase customer satisfaction—and most importantly, retention. 

3 Steps You Can Take to Improve the Lifespan of Your CX Strategy 

Good CX strategies involve more than occasional customer surveys and scoring systems. They need to be actionable, iterative plans that evolve with customer habits and expectations. 

Simon Fraser, VP of XI Strategy, discussed CX challenges facing brands in the webinar “Delights, Customers, Action”, where they uncover what you can do to overcome CX strategy-related challenges, and develop a plan for success:

Step 1: Take time to ask questions before you roll out a strategy.

It’s difficult to thoughtfully execute CX initiatives when you don’t take the time to ask yourself, “What do we want to accomplish?” Before implementing a full CX strategy, work with your team to compile answers to a few key questions. What is your desired outcome? What obstacles can you anticipate? Who needs to be involved? Once these questions have been asked you can get to work on answering each one, and ensure your strategy addresses any preemptive concerns. 

Step 2: Don’t be afraid to test and reimagine your strategies.

Brands often get caught up in early CX success and become complacent, instead of focusing on how they can continue to improve. It’s important to remember that successful CX strategies should involve ongoing testing, validation and iteration. Factors like buyer expectations constantly shift—and you’ll want your strategy to adjust accordingly. 

Step 3: Make customer sentiment a part of your CX strategy.

Great customer experiences involve fully listening to customer stories. And when you go beyond quantitative customer experience metrics, you unlock customer intelligence that allows you to understand and identify the actions to take based on what creates those meaningful, memorable experiences. Take this information and integrate it into your CX approach. That way, you can not only continuously improve, but you can also iterate your strategies based an actionable, first-hand data. 

Customer experience shouldn’t trip up organizations. It should be an opportunity to understand your core buyers, drive ROI and gain an edge on competitors. And by taking a careful, comprehensive approach to developing your CX strategy, the chance of sustained success only improves. 

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

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

The Downside of Tying CX to Incentives for Employees

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

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

3 Things Brands Can Do Instead of Offering Incentives

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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