How Will Trump Tariffs and Other Policies Impact Consumer Shopping Habits?

InMoment’s Strategic Insights team recently conducted a Market Pulse survey and social media analysis to explore consumer perspectives on whether their shopping habits are expected to change or remain consistent in response to President Donald Trump’s proposed policies, both before and after implementation.
Primark + InMoment customer story - image of a woman behind a shopping counter handing another woman a shopping bag

While countless articles, blogs, and posts discuss the predicted economic impact of “Trump Tariffs,” which refer to policies the new administration has proposed on imported goods, few focus on how consumers plan to adjust their shopping behavior. As a customer experience company, InMoment was curious about consumers’ perspectives on whether their shopping habits will change—or remain the same—in response to his proposed policies. So, a market pulse survey was conducted with a representative sample of the U.S. population to see what they thought. 

Current Impact (Before Trump Tariffs and Policies)

Although 46% of survey respondents said they weren’t going to change their shopping habits, posts on social media sites show that people are discussing buying or stocking up on products before policies are enacted. Conversations are around purchasing products they typically buy or are planning on buying. 

The following quotes were pulled from our analysis: 

  • “Getting some electronics before tariffs shoot up the prices”
  • “I’m planning on buying a hybrid car, as we expect green tax credits to be axed”
  • “I will start the year by cutting back on all of my spending, so to prepare what may happen with the new administration”
  • “Buying things in December before new tariffs are implemented”

Anticipated Shopping Behavior (After Trump Tariffs and Policies)

Around 60% of respondents said they are expecting to change their shopping behavior, with more expecting to shop less as opposed to shopping more. Respondents are most likely to shop less for electronics and around 50% of respondents are expecting to spend less on dining. People think tariffs will have the biggest impact on their shopping habits compared to other policies like changes in trade agreements and immigration policies. 

The following quotes were pulled from the survey and social media analysis:

  • “I will be shopping a lot less due to prices going up. And I will have to budget and plan beforehand”
  • “With all the proposed tariffs, prices will go up for groceries and other products.”
  • “I would just have to be more mindful while shopping and only shop for necessities”
  • “I think groceries will be higher so I will be buying less and more generic name items”

Impact of Trump Tariffs and Policies

Most respondents (56%) expect prices to increase for goods and services. Over 50% expect prices to increase for clothing/footwear, groceries, entertainment, home products, electronics, and gas.  

The following quotes were pulled from the survey and social media analysis:

  • “Rising prices for food and gas will keep most people at home”
  • “Things will be more expensive but my shopping habits will be the same.”
  • “Wait til the tariffs hit and immigration mandates affect the agricultural industries even tomatoes cost will be insane”

Differing Expectations

The biggest discrepancies are seen when looking at political views. Those who consider themselves more Liberal are more likely to expect to shop less on products, while those who are more Conservative expect to shop more. The biggest gaps were found for clothing/footwear and groceries – Liberals were 3X more likely to say they expect to shop less. There are even bigger gaps when asked about the impact of the policies on prices with Conservatives 8X more likely to say that prices for clothing/footwear will decrease and 7X more likely to say that grocery prices will decrease. 

Recommendations for Businesses

Policies are out of companies’ control, consumers are confused with conflicting messages, and it is unclear what changes will happen and when. Here are three key strategies to employ in order to maintain the integrity of your business in strenuous economic times. 

1. Prepare A Clear Communication Strategy

A clear communication strategy ensures that you know how to relay important information to all of your customers. In order to do so, you need to create specific templates for each communication platform so that deploying customer communication is as easy as adjusting the message for each platform. 

2. Train Employees on Core Values

When consumers are faced with choices about where they will take their business, they will often turn to the organization that makes them feel the most valued. It is crucial that frontline employees, contact center agents, managers, and executives are all up-to-speed on your organization’s values so that they can be reflected during customer interactions. 

3. Monitor Social Media Platforms

Social media monitoring is one of the most important things to do in order to stay on top of market trends and shifts in customer sentiment. Use social media monitoring as a tool to connect with your customers and position your organization at the front of market shifts. 

Stay on Top of Market Shifts with InMoment

To see how customer expectations play out, InMoment plans to conduct the same study after the new administration has been in office for some time. Be sure to check back often for updated findings. 

When new federal legislation affects the way your business operates, you must have a top-of-the-line CX program to retain customers during tough economic times. With InMoment’s platform, you can monitor customer feedback from multiple sources, all in one place. See how InMoment can help your business by scheduling a demo today!

Do You Need a Customer Experience Manager?

A customer experience manager determines, implements, refines, and reports on the customer experience program. This role is crucial to the success of customer experience in enterprise organizations.
Do you need a customer experience manager or CX Manager

Did you know that 80% of organizations have CX teams with 11 or more employees dedicated to the business’s CX program? 

As your company begins to scale customer experience operations, it is possible for silos that cause different departments to use separate technologies and focus on different metrics, which fragments your understanding of the customer experience

To avoid this problem, you need a customer experience manager to break down silos, unify your tech stack, and unite your directors, VPs, and business units with the ultimate goal of creating a friction-free, productive, and delightful customer experience—from onboarding to renewal and advocacy. 

What Is a Customer Experience Manager (CX Manager)?

A customer experience manager determines, implements, and refines the customer experience strategy to ensure that all customer interactions with a company are seamless, satisfying, and aligned with the organization’s values. 

Another important aspect of this role is that it determines the best way to collect, analyze, and act on the voice of customer data at key touchpoints across the customer journey. 

Benefits of Having A Customer Experience Manager

Employing a dedicated customer experience manager can profoundly enhance your organization by providing a singular leadership point for the entire customer experience program. This role ensures that all initiatives to improve customer satisfaction are strategically aligned and executed efficiently across various departments. 

A skilled customer experience manager not only fosters collaboration among teams but also takes charge of managing personnel and allocating resources wisely. By streamlining processes and integrating diverse strategies, this leader plays a pivotal role in driving both operational efficiency and sustainable growth, ultimately creating a more cohesive and impactful customer journey.

What Background Should a CX Manager Have?

It is common to see a wide range of candidates succeed in the role of CX manager—from Salesforce Administrators to Senior Sales Operations professionals to Customer Success or Customer Experience/Voice of the Customer leaders. Even marketing professionals have successfully led CX operations efforts.

It makes sense that effective CX professionals would come from different backgrounds since this role is about as cross-functional as it gets. We can tell you that certain qualities and skill sets, rather than specific career trajectories, predict success in this role. 

Key Skills and Traits of a Successful CX Manager

Customer experience managers will not all share the same background. Some customer experience managers will have marketing experience, others will have sales experience, etc. However, all successful customer experience managers share the same traits that make them successful leaders of customer experience initiatives. Some of these skills include: 

  • Diplomacy and negotiation skills
  • Tech literacy
  • Project management mastery
  • Understanding of procurement

Diplomacy and Negotiation Skills

A customer experience manager needs to have excellent interpersonal skills and be able to balance all the stakeholders’ needs and achieve goals with their available resources. They’ll need to convince a range of departments—not just the customer-facing ones—just how vital these efforts are to the company’s long-term success. 

A CX manager will lead team meetings, communicate strategies, and move projects forward while holding everyone to a timeline (including executives). On top of that, they must obtain a clear mandate and buy-in from their C-suite sponsors. This is especially important, as only 51% of customer experience decision-makers who state that improving the customer experience is a priority for their executives said that those executives act like CX is important most or all of the time

Tech Literacy

Your various technology platforms need to work together as a system. Otherwise, your information silos stay intact and your customer journey remains fragmented. 

On top of that, they’ll need to find the gaps in your current capabilities and identify solutions to fill them. Sometimes, this involves purchasing entirely new systems. Other times, it’s simply a matter of integrating what you’re currently working on. Usually, it’s a bit of both.

InMoment’s CX integrations seamlessly integrate with over 100 enterprise systems to ensure you have a holistic and unified view of the customer experience data to make better business decisions. 

Data sources from different integrations being combined to provide a better customer experience.

Project Management Mastery

Your customer experience manager will need excellent project management skills, including planning timelines and budgets end-to-end and getting personnel to stick to them. They also need to know how to purchase from vendors without using an RFP.

A Strong Understanding of Procurement

Executives have grown wary of new B2B software that promises to solve all their problems, and middle management is rarely overjoyed at the prospect of retraining staff on new platforms. That said, sometimes the current systems don’t cut it, and it’s up to the CX manager to understand the tradeoffs when evaluating new technology and delivering an integrated system that gets the job done.

How to Hire a High-Impact CX Manager

If you want a customer experience manager that will truly revolutionize the customer experience at your organization and be able to tie those improvements to business success, you are going to need to make sure you conduct a hiring process that will yield the highest-performing professionals. Here are some steps to follow that will help you hire a high-impact customer experience manager: 

1. Define the Role: 

One of the most important parts of the hiring process is to make sure that it gets started the right way. When you are looking for a CX manager, clarify what you are looking for and what they will be in charge of. 

Are you hiring a CX manager to start your customer experience from scratch? Are they taking over a pre-existing business unit? What kind of results do you expect from a successful customer experience manager? These questions ensure that applicants are educated on the role from the beginning and eliminate misunderstandings later in the hiring process. 

2. Look for Someone Who Understands the Customer

Whoever you choose as your customer experience manager should have a strong understanding of the modern consumer and the experiences they are looking to have. The ideal candidate understands that only a fraction of customer feedback comes from surveys and that an effective customer experience program will source customer feedback from multiple sources in order to tap into the 85% of customer feedback that is unstructured. 

3. Can Tie CX to Business Performance

One of the biggest challenges for customer experience professionals is to tie customer experience business improvements with business performance improvements. In the current business environment, this is a crucial skill. Regardless of their background, your chosen candidate should have experience with this to ensure that you can measure the ROI of your CX program

4. Assess Cultural Fit

Your customer experience manager will be responsible for communicating across your organization, whether it be executives or associates. Since the CX manager will touch many departments, it is important to take the time to ensure that they are also a cultural fit for your company. This will make the adoption and execution of customer experience initiatives a lot smoother. 

5. Understand the Importance of the Agent/Customer Interaction

One of the most important parts of the customer journey is the experience that the customer has with a contact center or customer support team. 78% of customers prefer to contact customer support through online chat or voice calls. Furthermore, 76% of customers get frustrated when they do not receive a personalized experience. 

It is important to hire a customer experience manager that understands the weight the contact center holds in regard to the entire customer experience and empowers the organization to invest in solutions that will meet customer expectations. 

Tools and Technology for CX Managers

For your customer experience manager to be successful, they need to be equipped with tools that give them the best insights into the state of the customer experience at your organization. These include, but are not limited to, CRM systems, analytics platforms, collaboration tools, and customer feedback platforms. 

The most important of these tools is a customer experience platform. A customer experience platform helps you connect data from multiple sources to get a holistic view of how customers view their interactions with your organization. 

InMoment’s customer experience solution is the premier choice for successful customer experience managers as it combines up to six different solutions, such as conversation intelligence, customer experience surveys, digital listening, reputation management, and more! 

How to Measure the Success of a Customer Experience Manager

There are multiple ways to measure the success of your customer experience manager to understand the impact they are having at your organization. The three main categories of metrics you can use are: 

  • Customer Experience Metrics
  • Operational Metrics 
  • Business Impact

Customer Experience Metrics

To measure the success of your customer experience manager, you will need to benchmark their performance against the customer experience metrics that were agreed upon early on in the hiring process. These can include:

  • Net Promoter Score (NPS)
  • Customer Satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES) 

These metrics can reflect the changes in how the customers perceive their experience. For example, an increase in customer satisfaction in the six to twelve months of a customer experience manager’s time with your organization means the changes and initiatives they have implemented have resulted in a more positive customer experience.  

Operational Metrics

Operational metrics are metrics that reflect the processes within your organization. To measure the performance of your customer experience manager using these metrics, you can compare CX efforts against: 

  • Resolution time
  • Average time in queue  
  • Conversion rate

These metrics reflect the smoothness of operations in your organization or in a specific business unit. For example, the average time in queue and resolution time are often used as call center metrics. A higher resolution time and a lower average time waiting to talk to an agent means that customers have better experiences.  

Business Impact

Perhaps most importantly, you will want to measure how your customer experience manager demonstrates the ROI of CX initiatives through their tangible business impact. This can be done using metrics such as: 

  • Average order size
  • Customer churn rate
  • Cost per conversion (CPC) 

These metrics help measure the ROI of CX initiatives. Using the right tools, you can gauge the financial impact that a successful customer experience program is having on your business. 

Fill out the calculator below to see the ROI you could get from utilizing InMoment’s customer experience platform: 

Calculate your business’s ROI using InMoment’s VoC tools.

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Total ICX ROI

Submit two or more calculators to show an overview of what your integrated CX program could return.

Empower Your Customer Experience Manager with InMoment

A successful CX Manager doesn’t just improve customer experience—they drive meaningful, measurable business growth by putting customers at the heart of every decision. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment’s platform can set your customer experience manager up for success! 

References 

McKinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 12/17/2024. 

Forrester. The State Of Customer Experience Teams, 2023. (https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-customer-experience-teams-2023/RES180035). Accessed 12/17/2024. 

Winter 2024 CX Trends: Navigating AI, Society, and Experience Design

Learn how generative AI, customer expectations, and customer journeys as a whole are changing and how your business can be prepared for the future.

Winter 2024 is heating up the CX landscape! Generative AI is making waves, societal shifts are redefining expectations, and customer experience design is evolving beyond transactions into transformative journeys. CX leaders face a thrilling challenge: staying ahead in a rapidly changing world. Let’s dive into the hottest trends and their implications for experience improvement.

AI: Hype, Hallucinations, and Human Oversight

Generative AI stole the spotlight in 2024, offering revolutionary possibilities—from personalized marketing to automated support. Yet, the reality is more nuanced. AI is an amplifier, generating outputs based on input quality. Remember the infamous case of AI suggesting glue on pizza? It underscores the need for vigilance and human oversight.

Think of AI as an intern needing guidance—it doesn’t replace human judgment but enhances it. Successful AI integration combines AI with Human Intelligence (HI) to ensure ethical, relevant, and brand-aligned interactions.

Real-world example: Taco Bell’s voice AI drive-thru improves efficiency but keeps employees involved for complex tasks, blending AI’s speed with human empathy.

Key takeaway: Thoughtful AI integration, with human oversight, augments customer connections rather than replacing them.

Society: Divided, Yet Connected

Customers navigate a paradox: craving connection in an overstimulated, fragmented world. Societal trends are shaping new opportunities and challenges for CX leaders:

  • Wellness Culture: Self-care is booming, from non-alcoholic beverages to gut health products. But wellness culture can fuel health anxiety. CX leaders must offer authentic support without exploiting fears.
  • Social Divides: From dating apps highlighting income disparity to far-right riots affecting footfall, social inequalities are more visible. Brands must foster inclusion through thoughtful CX strategies.
  • Youth Trends: Gen Z’s rising influence demands authenticity, sustainability, and inclusivity. It’s not just their buying power but their values that matter. Aligning experiences with these principles fosters loyalty.

Key takeaway: Brands that support well-being, inclusion, and individuality will forge stronger connections and resilience in their CX strategies.

Experience Design: From Transactions to Transformations

Today’s best experiences go beyond reducing friction—they transform interactions. The goal: anticipate needs, foster emotional connections, and make every touchpoint memorable. Here’s how:

  • Sustainable Interactions: Conscious design minimizes environmental impact and builds trust.
  • Tactile Resurgence: Physical buttons are back! Companies like Apple reintroduce tactile keys, prioritizing comfort over aesthetics.
  • Preventative Experiences: Proactive strategies (like reducing return rates) prevent friction. Smart recommendations can turn these efforts positive.
  • Innovative In-Store Interactions: Gamified shopping and self-service returns transform mundane tasks into engaging experiences.
  • Preserve Human Connection: Digital efficiency (like mobile orders) streamlines tasks but can erode joy. Balance technology with personal interaction.
  • Data-Driven Design: Too much data overwhelms without context. Filter relevant insights to focus on what truly matters.

Key takeaway: Transformative experience design anticipates needs, aligns with values, and enhances human connections. In order to achieve this, you need to know how to leverage all your data.

The Psychology of Change: Helping Humans Adapt

Change is hard—especially with new technologies. The “mere exposure effect” shows that familiarity breeds comfort. Transparency and training are crucial. Frame AI as an enabler, not a replacer, to build trust and ease transitions.

Emotions Drive Decisions: Emotional experiences leave a lasting impact—sometimes positive, sometimes not. To create moments of delight and minimize friction, you need a fresh approach that combines creativity with customer behavior analysis. Take Houston Airport, for example: they famously cut complaints not by speeding up baggage delivery, but by making passengers walk longer, reducing the perception of wait time. It’s all about rethinking the journey to reshape the experience.

Psychology in Practice:

  • Behavioral Insights Matter: Simplify choices to prevent overwhelming customers.
  • Reframing Works: Change perspectives to change outcomes.
  • Action Bias Alert: Sometimes, doing less is the smartest move. Take penalty shots in football for example. Data shows that goalkeepers who stay centered instead of diving dramatically actually save more. It’s a reminder that strategic patience often beats impulsive action.

Looking Ahead: Balancing Innovation and Human Connection

As we move into 2025, the key to CX excellence lies in balance. AI offers incredible potential, but human connection defines exceptional experiences.

Key Action Points:

  • Integrate AI with HI: Enhance efficiency while maintaining brand integrity.
  • Champion Authenticity: Navigate societal divides with honest, empathetic CX strategies.
  • Engage Younger Audiences: Align with Gen Z’s values to resonate across generations.

CX leaders have a unique opportunity to meet evolving expectations, from integrating AI for seamless personalization to rethinking wellness campaigns for genuine care.

Want to learn more? Check out our 2025 Consumer Trends Report for deeper insights and practical guidance on navigating the future of customer experience.

How Customer Experience Outsourcing Could Benefit Your Business

Customer experience outsourcing involves delegating certain aspects of customer experience management to third-party providers to scale CX operations.
Businessman shaking hands with partner.

Customer experience is at the heart of modern business success. Companies constantly seek ways to improve satisfaction, foster loyalty, and drive revenue, but delivering an exceptional customer experience is no small task. From managing customer touchpoints to implementing advanced tools and strategies, achieving the desired results requires significant expertise and resources.

For many businesses, the solution lies in customer experience outsourcing. By partnering with specialized providers, companies can tap into expertise, streamline operations, and provide 24/7 customer support—without overburdening their internal teams.

As a matter of fact, customer experience outsourcing can boost efficiency by up to 25% and give your organization more time to focus on core business functions. 

What is Customer Experience Outsourcing?

Customer experience outsourcing involves delegating certain aspects of customer experience management to third-party providers. These providers manage interactions across various channels, including customer support, social media, live chat, email, and technical support.

Customer experience outsourcing does not just refer to outsourcing different channels, it also refers to outsourcing the management of your entire customer experience program to a trusted provider who can provide you with software, services, and reporting. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Outsourcing

Outsourcing customer experience can offer transformative benefits for businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the key advantages:

  • Cost Savings: Outsourcing eliminates the need for in-house hiring, training, and infrastructure, reducing operational costs. Many outsourcing providers also operate in regions with lower labor costs, further driving savings.
  • Access to Expertise and Technology: Customer experience outsourcing partners bring specialized knowledge, cutting-edge tools, and best practices that might not be available in-house. They stay updated on industry trends, ensuring your customers get top-tier support.
  • Scalability and Flexibility: Whether it’s seasonal demand or rapid business growth, outsourcing allows you to scale your operations quickly and efficiently. Providers can adjust team sizes and resources to meet your needs.
  • 24/7 Availability: Many CX outsourcing providers operate around the clock, ensuring your customers can receive support anytime, anywhere.
  • Focus on Core Operations: By outsourcing customer experience tasks, your internal team can dedicate more time to strategic business goals and innovation.

Challenges of Outsourcing Customer Experience

While customer experience outsourcing offers significant advantages, it’s not without challenges. Organizations interested in customer experience outsourcing need to be aware of potential pitfalls and address them proactively. Here are some of the main challenges of customer experience management outsourcing:

  • Loss of Brand Voice: Outsourcing can sometimes lead to inconsistencies in how your brand communicates with customers, which might impact customer trust.
  • Communication Barriers: Language and cultural differences can pose challenges, especially when working with offshore providers.
  • Quality Control: Maintaining high standards in customer interactions can be difficult without robust monitoring and feedback systems.
  • Data Security and Privacy: Sharing customer data with third parties can increase the risk of breaches or non-compliance with regulations like GDPR or CCPA.

To mitigate these challenges, your business should invest time in selecting the right customer experience outsourcing partner, ensuring alignment with their values, and establishing clear performance metrics.

How to Choose the Right Customer Experience Outsourcing Partner

Selecting the right customer experience outsourcing partner is an important step in your customer experience strategy. Here are some key factors to consider:

  • Industry experience
  • Technology and tools
  • Cultural Fit
  • Scalability

Industry Experience

When choosing a CX partner, you want a partner who understands your industry and has a proven track record of delivering excellent results in your sector. You can narrow down vendors by reading customer experience improvement stories that highlight improvements in business performance as a direct result of CX improvement.

InMoment’s team of CX experts has over 50 years of advisory and research experience across multiple industries. The InMoment team excels at program management, so you spend less time managing experiences and more time improving them.

Technology and Tools

It is important to choose a partner that uses advanced technology and tools that can also be customized to your specific needs. You can examine which vendors have the best CX technology by reading reviews and third-party evaluations. 

InMoment’s platform has been named a leader in Gartner, IDC, and Forrester evaluative reports and is the highest rated by users, according to Gartner Peer Insights. In a recent Survey by G2, InMoment performed better than Qualtrics in every category.

Cultural Fit

When selecting a customer experience management outsourcing partner, it is important to ensure that they understand your brand’s core values and maintain the same voice you embody in your current customer interactions. 

This step ensures that the experiences delivered to your customers remain consistent and reflect the essence of your brand. By collaborating with a partner who understands and upholds your principles, you can create a seamless and cohesive experience that reinforces trust and loyalty among your clientele.

Scalability

Choose a provider capable of scaling resources to meet your business’s evolving customer experience needs.

When selecting a customer experience outsourcing partner, it is important to choose one that has the capability to scale resources effectively to accommodate the changing demands of your business’s customer experience program. 

InMoment’s platform is easily scalable and customizable to match the evolving needs of your business. Regardless of your business currently falls on the customer experience maturity model, InMoment can meet you where you are and help you scale accordingly. 

Choosing the Right Customer Experience Outsourcing Approach

When it comes to customer experience outsourcing, businesses have a range of options to choose from. Some organizations may prefer fully entrusting their CX operations to an external partner and leveraging a full-service solution’s expertise and comprehensive support. 

Others may opt for greater autonomy and select a self-service solution that gives them control over their CX strategy while relying on a vendor for technology and minimal support.

Understanding the distinction between these two approaches—full-service and self-service—is essential for businesses looking to make informed decisions about customer experience outsourcing and their overall CX management strategy.

What Is a Full-Service Customer Experience Solution?

A full-service CX solution refers to a CX partnership in which the company providing the platform manages all aspects of the technology (programming, analysis, change management, etc.).

This relationship between the organization and the CX vendor is services-driven, and a brand that purchases this type of solution can expect to have a dedicated team of experienced CX and technology experts to check in with regularly and help the brand with every aspect of its CX program. 

A full-service CX vendor will help your team define strategy, implement the technology, train team members, craft surveys, import other customer data, design reporting dashboards, and beyond.  

What Is a Self-Service Customer Experience Solution?

A self-service CX vendor refers to a situation in which a person or persons within the purchasing organization are responsible for all aspects of the ongoing technology usage.

A brand purchasing a self-service CX solution can expect to have full control and autonomy in their CX initiatives. There is often a dedicated implementation team, but post implementation, there is more likely to be a helpline or contact the brand can reach out to in case of an error or if they’re in need of help.

Of course, there is a gray area between the two categories. A CX vendor that emphasizes true partnership will emphasize that customer experience is not one size fits all and will therefore offer a blend of self-service and support-driven options to fit your needs. For example, a vendor may offer DIY survey tools alongside strategic insight sessions. 

How to Determine Which Is Right for You

A full-service program can be a great choice if you’re short on resources or want to utilize customer experience management outsourcing. With a full-service program, you can fill in any gaps in resources or skill sets with the considerable expertise your full-service CX vendor has on staff. Your dedicated team will know your business, goals, and program.

A full-service CX solution will also help you to drive more long-term strategy for your program. Check-ins will help you to stay accountable to goals, and your vendor will be able to advise you on any challenges, as well as connect you with other CX professionals in your industry. 

On the other hand, a self-service program may be a better option if you have the expertise and resources to accomplish your CX goals in-house. With a self-service program, you can make changes to surveys or other initiatives in the middle of the night if you want to. 

Additionally, self-service programs can be more cost-effective in the long run, since you won’t be paying for the vendor’s management services.

Best Practices for Successful Customer Experience Outsourcing

Customer experience outsourcing is a large investment. The partner you choose to entrust your CX program with will have a direct impact on business performance. In order to ensure you choose the right partner and make the most out of your investment, follow these best practices: 

  • Set clear goals and KPIs
  • Maintain regular communication 
  • Invest in training
  • Monitor performance
  • Foster collaboration

Set Clear Goals and KPIs

Establishing clear objectives and customer experience metrics is essential for a successful outsourcing partnership. Clearly communicate what success looks like for your CX initiatives, whether it’s improving customer satisfaction scores, reducing response times, or increasing retention rates. These benchmarks will guide your partner’s efforts and ensure alignment with your business goals.

Maintain Regular Communication

Frequent and open communication is the foundation of a strong customer experience outsourcing relationship. Schedule regular check-ins and performance reviews to stay aligned with your partner. These touchpoints allow you to address any challenges, share updates, and ensure that your CX strategy remains on track.

Invest in Training

Equip your customer experience outsourcing partner’s team with the knowledge they need to represent your brand effectively. Comprehensive training on your products, services, and brand values ensures consistency in customer interactions and helps the team align with your business ethos. A well-trained team can significantly enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Monitor Performance

Effectively utilizing a customer experience dashboard will help you track the performance of your CX program and of your customer experience outsourcing provider. 

With InMoment as your CX partner, you can create customer experience dashboards and reports that can be shared throughout the organization to help stakeholders understand the current state of customer experience, evaluate the business impact of certain initiatives, and plan for the future.

Custom built CX dashboards and reports in InMoment's XI Platform.

Foster Collaboration

In order to develop the most successful partnership with your customer experience outsourcing provider, view them as an extension of your internal team. Foster a collaborative relationship by encouraging open communication, brainstorming solutions together, and sharing feedback. A strong partnership built on mutual trust and teamwork will lead to better customer and business results.

Take InMoment’s Quiz and Get Started

Ultimately, the decision on the extent of your customer experience outsourcing efforts depends on a variety of factors, including the size of your organization, your budget, and your technical expertise. 

Take the InMoment quiz below to get started and find out whether a self-service or full-service customer experience outsourcing solution is best for you!

References 

MyOutDesk. 35 Outsourcing Statistics For 2024 | MyOutDesk. (https://www.myoutdesk.com/blog/outsourcing-statistics/). Accessed 12/6/2024. 

Customer Experience Maturity Model: A Framework for Improving Experiences

Companies focusing on customer experience (CX) improvements report better overall business metrics. While building a mature CX program is no easy task, a customer experience maturity model can help businesses understand where they are and what they need to do.
business meeting and presentation in a modern office

Customer experience (CX) is emerging as a significant competitive advantage for businesses. Customer-centric companies realize an 80% increase in revenue and report 60% higher profit than those that don’t focus on customer experience

However, building a solid CX program requires more than isolated efforts and reactive fixes. Businesses must focus on a strategic approach that helps them move the needle on their current CX programs. This is where a customer experience maturity model comes into play.

What is a Customer Experience Maturity Model?

A CX Maturity Model is a five-stage framework that evaluates the readiness and effectiveness of your CX program. It provides a data-driven approach to identifying areas for improvement across the customer journey. As a result, the model removes the guesswork from your customer experience strategy, replacing it with a roadmap to CX excellence.

Stages of Customer Experience Maturity

  1. Investigate
  2. Initiate
  3. Mobilize
  4. Scale
  5. Embed

CX maturity starts from a static phase of identifying the first steps and concludes with integrating strong CX practices. The framework encourages continuous evolution to adapt to shifts in customer expectations.

Before we explore the five stages, it’s essential to understand the role of a CX team throughout this process. A team can leverage the following six competencies, or customer experience management skills, to complete each stage:

  1. Lead: Key skills include strategy and governance to build, align, and sustain successful CX programs. For example, outlining a CX program and building a team to execute the vision.
  2. Realize: Key skills include tracking key CX metrics to ensure the program is realizing value and achieving business goals. For example, tracking NPS to determine the success of recent loyalty efforts.
  3. Activate: Key skills include communication and expertise building to ensure teams have the skills, support, and incentive to achieve CX goals. For example, training employees to adopt a customer-centric approach and rewarding their work to motivate them.
  4. Enlighten: Key skills include CX data collection, analysis, and visualization to ensure actionable insights across the organization. For example, using surveys to collect feedback and sentiment analysis to understand emotional tone.
  5. Respond: Key skills include effective response and strategic decision-making to deliver CX improvements based on insights. For example, following up with disgruntled customers and updating a product feature to fit client needs.
  6. Disrupt: Key skills include customer experience design and integration to provide exceptional services. For example, using InMoment’s XI platform to create a customer journey map showing how to optimize each phase.

Leveraging these competencies is crucial for moving through each of the following stages of CX maturity:

Investigate

In this initial phase, a business has yet to understand the value of a dynamic CX program. It views CX as a supplementary activity rather than a competitive differentiator.

As a result, teams primarily rely on in-house data like contact lists to reach out to customers via email. It’s a static approach that doesn’t consider targeted outreach or customer feedback analysis.

Organizations can progress from this stage by first achieving leadership buy-in. Visualize the value of CX efforts and share them with executives. Educate yourself so that you can address any questions or concerns. Highlight the positive impact of a customer-centric approach on the company’s bottom line.

Initiate

The leadership starts approving key activities as it realizes the value of customer experience management. An initial CX strategy takes shape during this stage. The organization establishes a team to explore and implement Voice of the Customer (VoC) approaches. 

Evolving from this stage requires a focus on the business impact of CX. Start with a few CX metrics like NPS and CSAT to build an initial use case. Leverage internal communications channels to convey the importance of CX across the company. Build a basic VoC program to start surveying customers for data collection.

Investing in robust CX software can simplify these activities. InMoment offers an all-in-one customer experience platform that collects and connects data from various channels across the customer journey. From survey design to data analysis, the software provides organizations with the tools to set up a VoC program.

Mobilize

The organization establishes a full-time, dedicated CX team in this pivotal stage. The team is responsible for evolving the VoC program, sharing insights with leadership, and mapping customer journeys. 

For example, the team starts collecting and integrating experience data from multiple channels. It identifies customer pain points across various touchpoints and works to improve them. Audience segmentation and journey mapping emerge as useful CX strategies. These activities help realize significant customer experience ROI, motivating organizations to continue evolving.

Businesses can progress to the next stage by doubling down on CX tools and training. Invest in employee coaching to align more of the workforce with the customer-centric vision. Focus on a cross-functional approach to improving customer experiences. 

For example, a collaboration between marketing and product teams to engage a specific user segment with a new feature.

Scale

A solid customer-centric culture begins materializing in this stage. Organizations integrate CX processes across departments and incentivize customer-centric efforts. In fact, CX becomes a crucial part of hiring and performance management. This step encourages the use of customer experience metrics to improve business processes.

Organizations advance to the final stage by leveraging the entire workforce and advanced technology. Investing in AI-powered analysis to gain valuable insights from customer experiences. Align every department with the CX vision to continuously evolve and adapt to customer trends.

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The last stage of maturity establishes CX as a core organizational value. It sets the foundation for product development, marketing, and human resources. Employees across the organization understand the power of CX metrics and work toward improving them. Data-driven decision-making enables companies to deliver the best possible experiences.

Why Has It Become Increasingly Important?

  • Growing Customer Expectations
  • The Impact of AI
  • Competitive Advantage
  • Adaptability

With evolving customer expectations, organizations must shift from static approaches to dynamic, data-driven strategies. Here’s why a CX maturity model is becoming essential for staying competitive:

Growing Customer Expectations

Customers expect quick, smooth, and personalized services more than ever before. 59% of customers believe businesses should use the data they collect to personalize their experiences. Companies that fail to meet these expectations risk losing market share to customer-centric competitors. A CX maturity model highlights tools and processes to meet these growing demands.

The Impact of AI

AI is transforming the way businesses interact with customers. It enables real-time analysis of key metrics to uncover customer insights and predict behavior. Companies using AI-powered automation also reduce repetitive tasks by up to 40%.

As a result, it’s essential to harness the power of AI to improve customer service. Invest in self-service options like intelligent chatbots for quick issue resolution. Leverage Natural Language Processing (NLP) to better understand customer feedback. Consider churn prediction models to retain at-risk customers and enhance their satisfaction.

Competitive Advantage

CX maturity is a crucial differentiator for businesses in a hyper-competitive market. Organizations that evolve to higher stages of maturity are more likely to retain customers, convert leads, and increase their market share. This competitive edge is the result of a stronger focus on customer relationships.

Adaptability

CX maturity empowers organizations to be flexible and proactive. The integration of CX principles across the organization helps teams pivot and respond to new challenges. 

For example, investing in a social listening tool helps businesses stay on top of online conversations. This approach ensures they identify issues and resolve them before it’s too late. Similarly, it’s a useful strategy for tracking market trends and adapting to them.

How CX Leaders Use CX Maturity Model to Scale Their CX Program?

  1. Evaluate CX Maturity Levels
  2. Establish Data-Driven Processes
  3. Expand the VoC Program
  4. Encourage Cross-Functional CX Teams

CX leaders use a CX maturity model as a framework to evaluate and scale their experience programs. It provides a strategic approach to streamlining CX processes for business growth. Here are four ways in which organizations use the model to achieve CX maturity:

Evaluating CX Maturity Levels

CX leaders start by assessing the maturity of their current customer experience program. A maturity model helps with this self-assessment, enabling companies to prioritize and take action.

This self-evaluation typically involves the analysis of current practices and team capabilities. It helps outline the next steps and set realistic goals for scaling. For example, an organization in the “Investigate” stage must focus on securing leadership buy-in as a first step. Businesses in the “Initiate” stage must invest in a dedicated CX team to lead initiatives.

Establishing Data-Driven Processes

Data collection and analysis are key drivers of CX maturity. Advanced customer experience programs ingest more experience data for insights than their less mature counterparts. The latter usually rely on basic resources like contact lists with little analysis.

Therefore, a CX maturity model encourages an omnichannel, analytical approach. CX leaders invest in Voice of Customer Analysis to identify pain points and growth opportunities. As a result, they are in a better position to personalize customer experiences.

Expanding the VoC Program

Evolving the VoC program is crucial to delivering consistent value to customers. A CX maturity model helps evaluate the current state of the VoC program and highlights steps for improvement. This expansion ensures the company stays on top of market and customer trends.

For example, companies moving from “Mobilize” to “Scale” expand the scope of their VoC program with the help of technology. They rely on AI customer feedback tools like InMoment to dive deeper into customer experiences for actionable insights. These insights help them close feedback loops and improve satisfaction levels.

Encouraging Cross-Functional CX Teams

CX leaders start focusing on cross-functional teams as they evolve through CX maturity. This shift in priority occurs due to CX becoming a key business strategy. As a result, harnessing the entire workforce for CX improvements becomes essential. The model encourages greater employee engagement as the CX program continues to progress.

For example, CX leaders in the “Mobilize” stage work with marketing and product teams to provide a consistent experience across all touchpoints. The insights from customer feedback can guide feature development to solve specific pain points. The marketing team can target specific segments with this feature to boost retention and acquisition.

How InMoment Can Help Expand Your CX Program

Achieving customer-centricity is a journey well worth the investment. A CX maturity model provides a tiered framework for organizations to progress toward this goal. InMoment’s award-winning XI platform helps companies realize ROI in less than 12 months, which is twice as fast as the industry average. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can guide you toward higher stages of customer experience maturity!

References 

Zendesk. 35 customer experience statistics to know for 2024 (https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics). Accessed 11/28/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/28/2024.

User Feedback for SaaS: Best Practices & Tools for Business Success

Collecting user feedback for SaaS businesses helps improve products and customer experiences. A comprehensive feedback tool can capture the user's voice and analyze key metrics to help deliver exceptional customer service.

Customer experience (CX) is crucial to SaaS business success. Companies that focus on CX initiatives witness an 80% increase in revenue, highlighting the value of user feedback. With intense competition and changing customer preferences, businesses must better understand their users to stay ahead. Collecting user feedback for SaaS companies is a powerful step in this direction.

Why is User Feedback Important for SaaS Companies?

User feedback helps you refine your product to meet customer needs, resulting in increased satisfaction. Here are a few reasons why collecting customer feedback is important:

  1. It helps you build and optimize products. Your SaaS product should deliver consistent value to customers. It should address their unique pain points and help them achieve their goals. 

    User feedback enables continuous product improvement by highlighting customer behavior and expectations. For example, if a specific integration is in popular demand, implementing it can improve retention and satisfaction.
  2. It boosts revenue. Happy customers are more likely to extend their subscriptions and purchase additional features. Collecting and analyzing feedback allows you to provide more value, which increases sales, subscriptions, and revenue.
  3. It enhances brand reputation and lead generation. Customer satisfaction results in positive reviews and testimonials. This feedback supports brand reputation management efforts, attracting high-quality prospects. Therefore, better customer service lets you generate valuable leads without stretching your marketing budget.
  4. It helps you stay ahead of competitors. Happy and loyal customers give you a competitive edge by consistently choosing and advocating for you over other companies. Feedback analysis also improves product strategy, ensuring you continue delivering value that retains and acquires clients.

What User Feedback Metrics Are Essential for a SaaS Company to Track?

  1. Net Promoter Score
  2. Churn Rate
  3. Customer Lifetime Value
  4. Retention Rate
  5. Customer Satisfaction Score
  6. Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate
  7. Customer Effort Score
  8. Activation Rate
  9. Lead Conversion Rate

Customer feedback metrics provide data-driven insight into user activity and engagement. However, deciding which KPIs in customer experience to track can be overwhelming. Here’s a breakdown of the most impactful user feedback metrics for your SaaS business:

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a commonly used metric that measures customer loyalty. It asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product to others, usually on a 0-10 scale.

Customers are divided into three categories based on their numerical response: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10). The goal is to convert as many users as possible into loyal customers promoting your product and business. 

You can use NPS surveys to gather responses and track the score to identify areas for improvement. InMoment’s survey design tools enable you to quickly create custom surveys that collect user feedback for tracking NPS.

Churn Rate

Customers churn when they stop using or interacting with your SaaS product. This can happen if your product fails to deliver value and better alternatives are available. Churn rate tracks the number of customers who abandon your product within a certain period.

A good practice is to understand the drivers of churn alongside monitoring the churn rate. For example, a recent change in your pricing model could explain the uptick in churn this quarter. Leveraging a churn prediction tool can help you understand why customers might leave, which enables you to retain them before it’s too late. 

InMoment offers text analytics solutions to let you capture customer intent from their feedback. The intent appears as a complaint, praise, suggestion, inquiry, purchase, will return, comparison, requested help, recommend, not recommend, and churn. This advanced analysis helps you identify churn indicators and proactively recover at-risk customers.

Customer Lifetime Value

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) predicts the total revenue a customer will bring your business throughout their relationship with you. This metric provides an accurate portrayal of the long-term value of the average customer. It enables you to evaluate the return on your acquisition and retention strategies.

Therefore, tracking CLV helps you identify high-value customers so that you can focus on engaging them. Retaining customers who boost your CLV will help you maximize revenue and reduce churn.

Retention Rate

Retention rate tracks the percentage of customers who renew their subscriptions to your product over a specific period. It highlights the effectiveness of your customer retention and satisfaction efforts. A high rate indicates strong engagement with your product and loyalty to your brand.

You can measure the retention rate by comparing the number of paying users at the beginning and end of a period. For example, if you start a month with 50 active users and end with 30, your retention rate would be 60%.

Customer Satisfaction Score

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) measures satisfaction levels with specific aspects of your product. These interactions could include navigating your website or talking to customer support. Companies collect this data through surveys asking customers to rate their satisfaction, typically on a 1-5 scale.

Tracking customer satisfaction helps you understand how to improve the customer journey. For example, if your low CSAT is due to a clunky website experience, you should focus on improving your user interface. 

Free-to-Paid Conversion Rate

While free plans are great for lead generation, paid plans drive revenue and impact your bottom line. The free-to-paid conversion rate measures the percentage of customers who shift from a free trial to a paid plan. 

This metric highlights the level of customer satisfaction and engagement with your product. It also shows how well your trial plan acquires new customers. A good trial should deliver enough value to intrigue clients while withholding key features that would be well worth the upgrade.

Customer Effort Score

Customer Effort Score (CES) evaluates the effort customers put into using your SaaS product. Companies obtain this score through a CES survey, typically measuring the effort on a 5- or 7-point scale. A higher score indicates smoother product usage with low-effort interactions.

While a good product should be feature-rich, it won’t be able to deliver value if it’s difficult to use. 94% of customers with low-effort interactions intend to continue business, compared to just 4% in the high-effort category. Therefore, ease of use promotes continuous product usage, increasing retention and revenue.

Activation Rate

The activation rate measures the percentage of new users completing a key action after realizing the value of your product. These actions could include creating a profile or uploading a document. 

The truth is that every product’s user activation milestone will be different, so it’s impossible to define a benchmark action. However, the common theme with these actions is that they occur due to the customer finding genuine value in your product. 

Therefore, a high activation rate suggests that you are effectively onboarding customers. If you can quickly guide them to discover your product’s value, you will likely retain them. Tracking this metric can help you identify friction points in your onboarding process.

Lead Conversion Rate

Lead Conversion Rate tracks the percentage of leads that become paying customers. This metric evaluates the effectiveness of your marketing and sales teams in converting prospects. 

A high lead conversion rate indicates effective marketing and a strong value proposition. Tracking this metric helps you identify issues in the sales funnel, such as unclear messaging or ineffective follow-ups. It also guides strategy on delivering value to your target audience.

How to Collect User Feedback for SaaS?

  1. Invest in a high-quality user feedback tool
  2. Use surveys to collect key CX metrics
  3. Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback
  4. Leverage the power of social listening
  5. Collect feedback when customers leave
  6. Analyze customer support tickets
  7. Run beta tests for new features
  8. Close the feedback loop

Collecting user feedback is essential for SaaS businesses to deliver better experiences. Here are a few key feedback collection strategies to consider:

Invest in a high-quality user feedback tool

A comprehensive feedback tool makes all the difference if you struggle to collect and organize your customers’ opinions. The right tool is easy to use, scalable, and rich in analytical capabilities. It helps you collect and integrate customer data from every relevant source to avoid missing out on crucial information. As a result, you can build and analyze your dataset in one place for effective decision-making.

Use surveys to collect key CX metrics

Surveys are tried-and-tested tools for collecting user feedback. By following good design practices, you can gather actionable insights without causing survey fatigue. 74% of customers are only willing to answer five questions or less in a survey. Design surveys with concise, relevant questions to capture metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES.

A lack of personalization is another factor for low response rates. This is where InMoment’s conversational surveys have an edge over their traditional counterparts.

These surveys work by engaging customers and responding to them in real-time. They leverage generative AI to ask follow-up questions based on customers’ previous responses. As a result of its personalized, two-way communication, this method helps collect insightful feedback. 

Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback

Quantitative feedback, like NPS and retention rate, provides measurable data. It’s easy to track, analyze, and visualize. For example, a chart highlighting the trend in NPS over the last six months provides instant insight into your customer loyalty efforts.

However, quantitative data lacks context, so you can’t explain why your NPS is trending downward. Qualitative feedback provides the necessary information to better understand customer needs and expectations. For example, open-text comments from customers can reveal issues in your product that make it difficult for them to recommend you.

Leverage the power of social listening

There is only so much customer data you can collect through surveys. Social media platforms host vast amounts of unstructured feedback that can provide deeper insights into the customer experience. Comments, posts, threads, and other forms of content can feature opinions on your product, business, and competitors.

You can use InMoment’s social listening tool to track relevant keywords and conversations across your social media channels. It monitors mentions of your brand and product to flag potential issues or highlight positive experiences. Additionally, it can perform competitor analysis by tracking what your competition is doing right or wrong. This information is crucial to building effective marketing campaigns for retention and lead generation.

Collect feedback when customers leave

It’s essential to understand why customers cancel their subscriptions or downgrade their plans. A brief exit survey can provide insight into why they decided to churn. This feedback can guide retention strategy by helping you understand what you could have done differently. For example, if pricing is a significant factor, you can boost retention by introducing flexible plans.

Analyze customer support tickets

Categorizing and analyzing support tickets helps you spot recurring issues. For example, an increase in tickets regarding a specific feature is a good sign that it requires immediate improvements.

Tag and sort support tickets by category, urgency, and sentiment. This organization will simplify the process of capturing and analyzing customer feedback. Additionally, you can track issue resolution times to see if you’re delivering timely and practical support.

Run beta tests for new features

Beta testing offers a valuable opportunity to collect feedback before a full product rollout. This helps you identify areas for improvement and address critical issues before it’s too late. It also creates a collaborative environment where users feel invested in your product’s growth.

Ask the testers to rate the product’s functionality and usability. Collect feedback on bugs that could impact the average user’s experience. Use the input to refine your product so that it’s likelier to deliver value to your target audience.

Close the feedback loop

Closing the feedback loop is essential for building trust and showing customers you care. Inform your users about any changes you make due to their feedback. You can share updates through in-app notifications or even social media posts. Leverage automation to provide instant updates to customers, saving you time to invest in stronger customer relationships.

What Key Features Should a SaaS Company Prioritize when Choosing a User Feedback Tool?

A user feedback tool simplifies the collection and analysis of customer opinions. The right software helps you make the most of each interaction with your business. Key features to look for include:

  • Omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC): Your business will have incoming feedback from various sources, from surveys to social media channels. The right tool should pull and organize customer data from every relevant channel to provide accurate insights.

InMoment ensures a complete view of user sentiment across all touchpoints in their journey, delivering an omnichannel customer experience. It works by collecting and connecting VoC data from everywhere so you don’t miss out on critical insights regarding customer behavior.

  • Customizable Surveys: Your tool of choice should enable surveys tailored to your goals. With InMoment’s XI platform, you can create targeted surveys for your specific audience and data collection needs. It allows you to build surveys from scratch or choose from existing templates for flexible feedback collection.
  • Sentiment Analysis: AI-powered sentiment analysis helps you interpret unstructured feedback, such as reviews and comments. 

Industry analysts have recognized InMoment as a proven leader in natural language processing (NLP) with its ability to automate insights from user feedback. It helps you categorize feedback by sentiment and intent for effective CX management.

  • Integration Capabilities: The user feedback tool should integrate with existing systems for smooth and seamless workflows. 

InMoment helps you break free of silos by connecting experience data with CRM systems, ticketing platforms, or project management tools. These integrations help your teams transform customer data into actionable insights.

  • Real-Time Analytics and Reporting: Immediate insights into user feedback are crucial for making quick decisions. Therefore, a good feedback tool should let you visualize and share key CX metrics across your organization.

InMoment’s reporting features enable you to build custom reports featuring engaging visuals. Its dashboards support compelling storytelling, highlighting the effectiveness of your customer service efforts to stakeholders.

  • Automated Feedback Loops: Closing the feedback loop makes customers feel heard and valued. The right tool should automatically close feedback loops by providing instant updates to customers. 

InMoment leverages automation to help businesses send custom responses to user feedback, including updates, follow-up questions, or a note of gratitude. This enables you to boost customer loyalty while saving valuable time.

Top Customer Feedback Tools for SaaS Companies

  1. InMoment
  2. FeedBear
  3. Qualaroo
  4. Hootsuite
  5. UserVoice
  6. Userpilot
  7. Canny
  8. Zonka Feedback
  9. Usersnap
  10. SurveyMonkey

The right feedback tool can elevate your customer experience management efforts. With an overwhelming number of options available, we have rounded up the ten best tools to help you make an informed decision.

InMoment

InMoment leverages award-winning AI and CX tools to collect user feedback across the customer journey. It enables custom survey design, social listening, and reputation management to connect CX data from various sources.

The platform’s AI-enabled analytics generate actionable insights from the feedback to guide loyalty and retention strategies. With features like sentiment analysis, custom integrations, and journey mapping, InMoment helps you capture a comprehensive view of the customer experience in one place.

FeedBear

FeedBear helps businesses collect and manage feature requests through feedback boards and roadmaps. Its boards allow customers to upvote and comment, enabling businesses to identify the most popular and impactful requests. Finally, its changelog tools allow companies to document changes and close the feedback loop with customers.

Qualaroo

Qualaroo features a no-code survey builder that simplifies feedback collection for companies. Its crucial feature is Nudge™, which enables businesses to customize and deploy feedback collection intercepts on their channels. Qualaroo helps companies understand customer sentiment and behavior with word cloud engines and sentiment analysis.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media management platform that helps companies manage online interactions via a central dashboard. It allows businesses to create content, track brand mentions, and boost engagement across major social media channels.

Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform that helps businesses manage customer experiences. Key features include survey templates, analytics, and dashboards for visualizing NPS scores. Brands can leverage Userpilot to understand customer profiles better and monitor KPIs to determine areas for improvement in their CX efforts.

Canny

Canny is a user feedback platform for collecting and analyzing feature requests. Its feature voting and segmentation help businesses filter and prioritize requests according to key user segments. Canny also helps close the feedback loop by issuing automatic updates with its product changelog tool.

UserVoice

UserVoice lets businesses create a dedicated feedback portal for customers to share suggestions and comments. The voting feature helps highlight the most in-demand requests so that companies can make effective decisions. As a result, the platform provides community-driven insights into product improvement.

Zonka Feedback

Zonka Feedback is a multi-channel user feedback platform for capturing actionable insights from customers. Its no-code survey builder lets businesses create surveys from scratch or select from existing templates. The tool leverages sentiment analysis to highlight customer emotions and intent in feedback. With Zonka Feedback, companies can also visualize and share CX insights across teams.

Usersnap

Usersnap offers a range of features to streamline feedback collection. Businesses can use the tool to let customers provide detailed bug reports with screenshots and annotations. Users can also record themselves talking about the features they would like to see in the product. Usersnap also lets companies design surveys to capture metrics like NPS, CSAT, and CES to gauge customer loyalty and satisfaction.

SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is an established survey design tool that helps businesses collect feedback at various touchpoints. It supports multiple survey types, including market research, product feedback, marketing, and NPS surveys.

Better User Feedback and Richer Insights with InMoment

User feedback is a vital component of the customer-centric approach. It provides valuable insights into customer behavior to help you make smarter decisions. InMoment’s omnichannel, AI-driven user feedback tool for SaaS businesses simplifies the collection and analysis of customer data to drive growth and revenue. See how InMoment can elevate your CX efforts by scheduling a demo today!

Sources 

Zendesk. 35 customer experience statistics to know for 2024 (https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics). Accessed 11/20/2024.

InMoment. What Is Customer Effort Score (CES)? (https://inmoment.com/xi-terms/customer-effort-score). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Enchant. 108 Customer Service Statistics & Facts You Must Know for 2023 (https://www.enchant.com/customer-service-statistics). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Voice of Customer Analysis to Improve Customer Loyalty and Retention

Voice of Customer (VoC) analysis is the process of understanding the intent and expectations behind customer feedback. Monitoring and analyzing key VoC metrics can help businesses deliver consistently positive experiences.
VoC analysis data on a laptop

Customers are increasingly likely to switch brands if they don’t feel satisfied. 83% of customers agree they feel more loyal to companies that respond to and resolve their complaints. Loyal customers are likely to spend more and advocate for your brand. As a result, businesses must double down on efforts to understand their customers’ goals and pain points to drive loyalty. Voice of Customer analysis is a useful system for accomplishing this goal.

What Is Voice of Customer Analysis?

Voice of Customer (VoC) refers to customer feedback on a business and its offerings. It includes thoughts, feelings, and opinions regarding the brand, product, or service. The process helps you build a rich dataset that provides insight into customer behavior.

The next step is identifying patterns in this data to help you better understand your customers. Voice of Customer analysis enables you to capture these key insights for customer satisfaction and retention.

For example, this analysis can reveal why a customer canceled their subscription to your service. Their feedback across various touchpoints on the customer journey will highlight how you can better retain similar customers.

Importance of Customer Analytics

Customer analytics provides a blueprint for delivering exceptional customer service. Here are a few reasons why it’s a powerful tool for brands:

  • It helps improve customer satisfaction. VoC analysis enables you to understand overall satisfaction levels with your business. For example, key metrics like CSAT help you improve aspects of your business to satisfy specific customer needs.
  • It enables informed decision-making for CX teams. VoC insights help businesses make data-driven decisions for customer experience (CX) improvements. The data shows what features to prioritize to enhance customer perception. For example, if price is a significant factor for your customers, you can satisfy them by adjusting your pricing model or offering loyalty rewards.
  • It informs product improvement strategy. A deeper understanding of customer expectations highlights areas for improvement. It shows you what features to prioritize based on customer pain points. As a result, you can continuously improve your product or service to meet changing customer needs.
  • It gives you a competitive advantage. Enhanced customer service helps retain existing customers and supports brand reputation management. Positive word of mouth helps you attract prospects away from your competitors. As a result, you can increase your market share with this customer-centric approach.

Voice of the Customer analysis is emerging as a key consumer trend for 2025 and is poised for continued growth in the years ahead. Businesses are set to revolutionize how they gather and respond to customer feedback, shifting from traditional surveys to AI-driven VoC analytics. Companies that embrace these advanced tools will gain a powerful competitive advantage, enabling them to understand and meet customer needs in real-time. Get more details about the future of Voice of the Customer analysis and other key insights in our 2025 Consumer Trends Report.

How To Analyze Data From VOC?

Voice of Customer analysis starts by categorizing the customer feedback data. This helps you create targeted approaches for identifying patterns in each category. The four main VoC data categories are as follows:

  • Unstructured feedback refers to open-ended responses in the form of emails and social media content. Analyzing this qualitative data requires conversational analytics solutions, such as the ones offered by InMoment. These tools help capture customer intent and sentiment from unstructured feedback for improved service.
  • Structured feedback appears as quantitative data on customer loyalty and satisfaction. You ask customers to rate their feelings and experiences on a numerical scale. Structured data is easier to track and analyze, enabling straightforward insights.
  • Unsolicited feedback is when customers provide feedback without requests or prompts from your side. For example, a customer reviews your latest feature in a Facebook post. 

Any online conversation around your brand provides an opportunity to collect unsolicited feedback. With the help of InMoment’s social listening tool, you can monitor this public opinion to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. It also keeps you in the loop regarding competitor behavior to help you further refine your marketing efforts.

  • Solicited feedback is when you proactively ask customers their opinions and feelings about your brand. Surveys and questionnaires are popular methods of collecting solicited feedback.

Key Metrics To Track for Voice of Customer Analysis

  • Net Promoter Score
  • Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
  • Customer Effort Score (CES)
  • Response Rate
  • Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)
  • Churn Rate

VoC metrics provide valuable insight into customer satisfaction and loyalty. Here are some KPIs in customer experience to help you understand the effectiveness of your CX efforts:

Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a popular metric for tracking customer loyalty. It asks customers how likely they are to recommend your product or service, typically on a 0-10 scale. Responses are categorized into three groups: detractors (0-6), passives (7-8), and promoters (9-10).

With InMoment’s XI platform, you can leverage NPS survey design tools to collect the data you need to analyze this metric. You can also create intuitive dashboards to monitor your NPS in one place and make adjustments when necessary. This will help you increase the number of promoters among your customers for improved business performance.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) asks customers to rate their satisfaction with your brand and offerings, typically on a 1-5 scale. 

Low scores highlight customers at risk of churning, making it necessary to retain them. Businesses prioritizing retention over customer acquisition are 60% more profitable. Therefore, regularly tracking satisfaction levels with a customer satisfaction survey is important to increase repeat business.

Customer Effort Score (CES)

Did you know that customers with a high-effort interaction become more disloyal compared to just 9% with a low-effort experience? 

Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how much effort customers have to put into interactions with your business. It is usually measured on a 5- or 7-point scale, with a higher score corresponding to smoother interactions.

For example, if it’s difficult for the average individual to find customer support on your website, they will be dissatisfied. Tracking CES helps you evaluate aspects of your business that require high effort so that you can simplify them. Since CES is a strong indicator of loyalty, it’s important to focus on delivering smooth experiences.

Response Rate

This metric highlights engagement levels with your surveys. For example, if you send out a monthly customer feedback questionnaire and only 10% of customers respond, it suggests low engagement. This is concerning since you need customer responses to build your VoC program in the first place.

Focusing on good survey design can help improve the response rate. Make your surveys short and simple to prevent fatigue. You can also offer incentives like gift cards for survey completion. A higher response rate provides a wide range of customer insight, making it easier to understand and address common issues.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

CLV helps estimate the total revenue a customer will bring during their entire relationship with the business. It factors in data like customer lifespan, purchase frequency, and transaction history.

Monitoring CLV helps you understand and improve the long-term value of your customers. It helps inform loyalty strategies to reduce customer churn and drive revenue.

Churn Rate

Churn rate indicates the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a specific period. 

High customer churn indicates dissatisfaction with your brand. If your competitors deliver better services, your customers won’t have to think twice about switching. Therefore, lowering the churn rate is key to increasing revenue and maintaining a competitive edge.

Identifying churn drivers is the first step to reducing churn. If feedback analysis suggests that customers expect more incentives, you can retain more customers by investing in a loyalty program.

Voice of the Customer Analysis Methods

  1. Define your VoC Goals. 
  2. Collect Customer Data.
  3. Leverage Advanced Analytics Tools.
  4. Take Action.
  5. Involve Stakeholders and Teams.

Once you identify key metrics, you can implement analytical methods to improve them. Your exact strategy will depend on your goals and will require adjustment over time based on performance.

Define your VoC Goals

Understanding your most pressing problems as a business will help you make the most of your VoC data. Define your problems and establish specific goals you want to accomplish. You should know exactly why and how you want to analyze customer data.

An example could be tracking and improving the NPS as part of your customer loyalty efforts. This step narrows your focus on high-priority issues for effective resolution. Additionally, it ensures your program is unique to your business and customer needs.

Collect Customer Data

Establish comprehensive systems to collect data across the customer journey. You can capture solicited feedback from customers through surveys and questionnaires. These surveys should be simple and easy to complete, combining qualitative and quantitative data collection.

However, surveys alone aren’t enough in the online age. Customers are vocal about their experiences on review sites and social media platforms. Online activity, from a simple comment to a detailed thread, is an opportunity to collect unsolicited customer feedback.

Besides providing actionable insights, social listening helps prevent survey fatigue. Since you don’t have to send frequent surveys to learn as much as possible, you won’t be overwhelming your customers! Instead, you can tap into unbiased feedback to capture a complete view of the customer sentiment towards your brand.

Leverage Advanced Analytics Tools

Analyze the customer feedback to uncover insights into current trends and expectations. Look for patterns in the data to understand customer perception regarding your product or service. 

A common analytical method is to track key metrics according to your goals. For example, if you see a downward trend in CES over the past few months, a newly released feature is likely creating friction in the customer experience.

What about textual data in the form of reviews, call center scripts, and social media activity? The Natural Language Processing (NLP) approach helps analyze this unstructured data for valuable insights. It uses machine learning and vast amounts of data to uncover customer sentiment and intent.

You can leverage NLP for your business needs with the help of InMoment’s text analytics software. Its award-winning NLP engine transforms textual data into meaningful insights for smarter decision-making. These insights include the customer’s intent, perceived effort, and overall sentiment. As a result, you can take immediate and effective action to improve customer experiences.

Another valuable technique in VoC analysis is data correlation. This statistical tool helps you understand how specific variables relate to each other. In the context of customer service, it can help you understand how features of your business affect key CX metrics.

For example, making your website more user-friendly might correlate to a higher CES. But, does this increase in CES improve the overall CSAT? You might find that another variable, like “product quality”, impacts CSAT more than “ease of use”!

Take Action

Customers provide feedback with the expectation that improvements will follow. Therefore, once you have completed your VoC analysis, it’s time to act on the conclusions and insights.

Start with high-priority issues and create an action plan for resolving them. For example, if most of the negative sentiment is focused on your website, you must prioritize immediate UI/UX improvements. 

Ensure you close the feedback loop with customers by following up with them after taking action. This step helps you affirm the impact of your efforts and fosters customer loyalty.

Involve Stakeholders and Teams

VoC analysis is most effective when it’s a collaborative effort. Start by sharing insights with relevant departments. For example, if you identify long wait times in customer service, the support team can work on optimizing response times. At the same time, the operations team can look at resource allocation to address capacity issues.

Engage the leadership by showing how VoC analysis affects company goals like boosting retention and revenue. Along with cross-functional collaboration, the buy-in from leaders ensures consistency in addressing customer needs. Invest in a centralized CX platform to make VoC insights accessible across teams in real-time.

What To Look For in a Voice of Customer Analysis Tool

Collecting and analyzing the voice of the customer enables continuous business improvements. It encourages a customer-centric approach that helps you meet evolving needs and enhance your brand reputation. The right voice of customer analysis tool simplifies this process and helps address potential challenges. Key features to look for include:

  • Omnichannel Feedback Collection: The voice of the customer comes from many different sources, including surveys, social media, reviews, and call center interactions. Invest in a tool that supports omnichannel data collection to capture a complete view of customer sentiment.

You can leverage NLP for your business needs with the help of InMoment’s text analytics software. Its award-winning NLP engine transforms textual data into meaningful insights for smarter decision-making. These insights include the customer’s intent, perceived effort, and overall sentiment. As a result, you can take immediate and effective action to improve customer experiences.

  • Sentiment Analysis: Look for advanced sentiment analysis capabilities that classify feedback as positive, negative, or neutral. This helps you gauge overall customer satisfaction and spot emerging issues.

InMoment’s advanced sentiment analysis combines key metrics and real-time intelligence to help you better understand customer feelings.

  • Real-Time Insights: It’s crucial to have real-time updates when tracking key VoC metrics. This feature helps reduce potential churn by providing instant insights into customer behavior. The sooner you learn of a dip in satisfaction levels, the quicker you can react and recover.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): NLP-powered tools can analyze unstructured text data like reviews or comments to uncover customer intent and pain points.

InMoment’s award-winning text analysis uncovers the meaning and emotion behind each piece of feedback. It helps you accurately understand the customer experience so you can work to improve it.

  • Predictive Analytics: The tool you select should also support AI-driven predictions of customer behavior, including churn. This feature is useful as it helps brands proactively deal with issues and retain customers before it’s too late.

InMoment offers churn prediction capabilities to help businesses understand why and which customers may churn. It leverages machine learning algorithms and text analysis to identify churn drivers accurately. This enables brands to take a proactive approach to customer retention and reduce acquisition costs.

  • Customizable Dashboards and Reporting: Choose a tool with intuitive dashboards to track and visualize key metrics. InMoment’s reporting capabilities help you build impactful visuals for effectively sharing VoC analysis results with stakeholders.

How InMoment can help with Voice of Customer Analysis

Voice of Customer analysis is a powerful tool for elevating your CX program. It helps you understand customer preferences and expectations so you can better meet them. InMoment’s software handles the VoC analytical workload, allowing you to act on the insights and strengthen customer relationships. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can help you transform customer feedback into CX improvements!

Sources 

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024 (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 11/14/2024.

G2. 69+ Eye-Opening Customer Retention Statistics to Know in 2024 (https://www.g2.com/articles/customer-retention-statistics). Accessed 11/14/2024.