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Customer Experience

Take Action on CX Feedback
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Why You Haven’t Been Able to Take Action on CX Feedback

By: Brian O'Connor, Client Success Director

One of the questions I am often asked by organizations is, “how do other companies use customer feedback?” Fortunately, the answer to that question is simple: most organizations use customer feedback to create PowerPoint reports or Excel spreadsheets to track performance. Then, they might tie results to compensation or be used to coach front-line employees. These are all good uses of customer feedback, but in many cases, they lead to chasing a score versus driving organizational change.  The real question, then, should be, “how do other companies take action on CX feedback?” 

The difference between “use” and “act” is subtle, but important. Taking action on customer feedback is not necessarily a more complex question to answer, but because there are many factors at play that need to be aligned to sustain action, it is more difficult to bring action to life.  In my twenty-plus years in the CX consulting industry, I’ve found the organizations that are best at taking action with customer feedback have five things in common.

5 Keys You Need to Take Action on CX Feedback  

Key #1: Senior Level Support  

One of the challenges many organizations face is gaining the support and influence to allocate both human and capital resources toward being customer-focused and action-oriented.  Thus, the critical foundation for all successful CX programs is a senior-level sponsor who embraces customer feedback and drives a customer-focused culture throughout their team.  

The role of a senior-level sponsor is most successful when they do more than just kick off the initiative and serve as a figurehead, but instead are an active participant in the process and ensure resources are allocated accordingly. When there are conflicts of interest, it is the senior level sponsor that should redirect focus toward the solutions that best align to the customer-focused strategies and, subsequently, provide sufficient firepower to allow people to maintain that focus.

Key #2: Cross-Functional Engagement

Some organizations, I find, build teams to drive action, but those teams are entirely composed of people from a single area—like marketing or corporate strategy.  Truly successful organizations will build their teams to include individuals from customer channels, product lines, leadership, technology, and the front-line.  

This cross-functional view will provide insights into how each group operates and, thus, how they can work together to push the organization’s customer-focused initiatives.  Additionally, a cross-functional team reduces the perception that any initiative is “corporate driven” and instead helps build advocates and spokespeople for the initiative across the organization.  

Key #3: Design with the End in Mind  

Consider the projects you may be currently involved with. Do you have a clear line of sight to who uses the information, how, and why?  How many times have you delivered a report or feedback to a mass email list, not knowing if people are actually looking at what you’ve produced?

The fact of the matter is that anyone can collect customer feedback, but collecting the right customer feedback is what best-in-class organizations do. Organizations who do not know their end goal, what hypotheses they are trying to test, who is going to use the information, or how they intend to measure the success or failure will have a difficult time gathering the input to drive action within an organization.  

“Designing with the end in mind” is about more than just determining how best to capture customer feedback. You also need to consider how you are going to get the feedback out to the organization. As part of the initial program design, organizations also need to think through how to get employees the right information in a timely manner.  This is where customer feedback dashboards—customized for each type of employee—can create transparency for how they are personally performing, as well as how the organization is doing against key metrics. If people do not know where they and the organization stand against goals, they do not know if what they are doing is driving the right outcomes or if they need to course correct.

Key #4: Hold People Accountable

 In a recent InMoment poll, we learned that 72 percent of CX professionals do not feel their programs are very successful at driving business outcomes. I am not surprised by this finding based on the several Action Planning sessions I have facilitated with organizations to help drill down into specific problem areas and identify strategies to address those problems.  

Often during these sessions, the energy level and intentions to take action are very high amongst cross-functional team members.  However, once people go back to their day jobs, the action steps and strategies identified frequently fall to the wayside.  

Successful organizations will not only encourage Action Planning sessions, but also hold people accountable for following through.  Typically, this is in the form of weekly check-ins with committee members and monthly and/or quarterly updates with senior leadership to keep the momentum moving forward and to change direction as needed.

Key #5: An ROI Story

Identifying what drives the customer experience most will help point an organization in the right direction. Action Planning can help identify the potential next steps, but management will want to know the ROI of focusing on a particular action item. This is not new, but the challenge is often the quality and accuracy of the customer information available within an organization’s database. Unfortunately, this is usually where the process breaks down because organizations will find themselves paralyzed in discussions about the accuracy of the available information.

In my experience, it is virtually impossible to develop an ROI prediction that is 100 percent accurate. Let’s imagine for a moment your database is 100 percent accurate (even though you and I know it’s not). Your ROI model might have the right inputs, but how are you going to control for what your competitors do, fluctuations in the stock market, the latest news, etc.? Creating an ROI story will require you to make some concessions and accept that your ROI calculation will never be perfect.  

I recommend organizations identify which internal metrics they feel most confident in and use those to create an ROI story. This can be done in a simple manner such as taking the average customer value and multiplying it by the number of customers who are at-risk to determine the potential loss should they actually leave. Or a more complex statistical linkage analysis can be developed that factors in multiple variables and data sources to provide more confidence in the ROI calculation. The former may take an hour or so of time, while the latter a few weeks. Either approach will give you and management some indication of the potential impact of a particular action—and all things considered, it is the relative magnitude of this impact that is most important.

Not as Easy as You Might Think

To sum it up, taking action on customer feedback is something all organizations should strive for, but it’s not as easy to do as some may think. While the factors above may seem intuitive, only the best-in-class organizations actually put these factors into practice. If you are not one of these organizations, I encourage you to revisit your CX program so that you can help your organization move closer to actually take action on your CX feedback.  

Want to learn more about how you can take action today to improve your customer experience (and your bottom line)?  Check out this eBook, detailing six specific steps you can take now to gain some CX wins!

Customer experience business case
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Four Pro-Tips For Building a Customer Experience Business Case in Superannuation

By: The InMoment Team

Like many superannuation funds, legalsuper has had to quickly adapt to increased customer demands in response to legislation change and economic and global events like COVID-19. Like many businesses, legalsuper did its best to adapt to the increase in demand, but knew there was a better way to provide outcomes to its customers. 

The answer? Customer Experience! The business used real-time intelligence to react quickly to COVID-19 demands, which enhanced customer experiences through the pandemic and beyond. 

Elizabeth Swartz, legalsuper’s Manager of Insights and Service Design, shares how her team built a business case for a customer experience platform, and how this helped their brand adapt and evolve to a changing industry.

Pro-Tip #1: Establish Financial Linkage

The most compelling part of the business case was financial linkage. Swartz focused on the value of a customer feedback loop and drew a line back to ROI. She knew if the business could reach detractor customers and recover them from churning, it would help impact legalsuper’s bottom line and make sure members are happy with the service they receive.

Pro-Tip #2: Show the Impact Your Program Can Have by Explaining Top-Line Growth 

Top line growth and increased revenue from an experience management perspective looks like retaining existing customers, finding new customers, discovering opportunities to cut the costs involved with serving customers and establishing sustainable, recurring revenue.

Pro-Tip #3: Describe the Coaching and Performance Impact to Your Call Centre

A CX program can involve real-time insights that help your front-line staff become more efficient. In legalsuper’s case, the business was able to save the contact centre from pulling lists and analysing insights, as this was now done automatically in the platform. 

The Results? Direct and Immediate Business Value

Whilst the program is still new, Elizabeth says that it’s easy to see the value. Every time a new part of the program is implemented, the value is clear right away. Some of the immediate improvements to the business have been:

  • Customer satisfaction scores increased by seven percent, exceeding customer experience targets 
  • Survey response rates increased by 8.5 percent over twelve months 
  • Customer feedback is reviewed and responded to within two business days 

Interested in learning more? Read legalsuper’s full story here: https://inmoment.com/en-au/resource/legalsuper-improves-member-experiences-through-real-time-intelligence/ 

Emotional Customer Experiences
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How to Create More Emotional Customer Experiences in Three Steps

By: The InMoment Team

Humans are emotional creatures whose search for meaning influences which brands they want to share experiences with. That’s something that many companies strive to provide, but more often than not, the customer experience (CX) programs they use are built around reporting and increasing metrics, not providing a bolder and more human interaction. Numbers are certainly important, but creating a more connective experience for customers isn’t just good for them—it’s great for your employees and your bottom line.

Here’s how to make your experiences more emotional and more connective in three steps:

  1. Gather Unstructured Data
  2. Disseminate Findings
  3. Execute

Step #1: Gather Unstructured Data

Metrics are great for telling a brand that a problem might be occurring somewhere in the customer journey, but that’s about all they can tell you. Unstructured data, on the other hand, consists of what customers are saying about your brand and the experiences it provides. This type of raw, expressive feedback is crucial to creating a more emotional experience, which means that brands everywhere need to focus on gathering and analyzing it.

If you haven’t already, take some time to consider what questions your customers would enjoy answering. Perhaps more importantly, put space in your surveys and feedback collection tools that allows customers to express themselves in their own terms. This strategy enables organizations to learn what customers consider most important about an experience and alert them to touchpoint breakages that companies themselves may not even know about. It also allows brands to put that customer sentiment toward a more connective experience.

Step #2: Disseminate Findings

Once you’ve gathered unstructured feedback and fed it into an experience platform that can analyze it for actionable insights, it’s vital that that intel be shared with the rest of the organization. A lot of companies keep these findings siloed up with their CX teams, but roping other departments into the process allows everyone to make the improvements necessary for a more emotional experience.

This process is also essential for better understanding your customer. When every team in the company collaborates, you can paint a 360-degree picture of your customer, which creates a deeper understanding of who your customers are and what meaning they seek from you. This further allows your organization to make an emotional experience, as well as tweak nearly anything else about both transactions and relationships to create Experience Improvement (XI).

Step #3: Execute

This is another area where a lot of brands fall short with their experience programs. They put a lot of time into gathering findings, but stop short of actually executing on them. Putting this work in is far from easy, but it’s absolutely essential to creating a more emotional experience for your customers. Tie your program actions to concrete financial goals and closely monitor how things go. Making your goals as quantifiable as possible doesn’t just simplify tracking progress; it also makes asking the board for more funding a lot easier when you have numbers to back your success up.

Creating emotional customer experiences is essential in a world of fierce competition. When customers feel they have a special bond with you, they’ll keep coming back even when other brands are trying to woo them. Experience Improvement (XI) also creates a much stronger bottom line for your brand, enabling you to become a marketplace leader or maintain your dominance in your vertical.

Click here to learn more about the power of emotional customer experiences. Kristi Knight, our CMO, applies decades of marketing and CX expertise to a strategy that will empower your brand to build better customer relationships, make more revenue, and find greater marketplace success all in one motion.

Customer Experience Analytics
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How to Use Customer Experience Analytics to Identify Key Touchpoints in the Customer Journey

By: The InMoment Team

To meet your customer experience (CX) goals, you first need to understand the current state of your customer journey. But gaining the level of understanding necessary is easier said than done. The customer journey is made up of countless moments—even a CX program with boundless resources wouldn’t be able to examine them all! The key is, then, to focus on the moments with the greatest impact on your customers, be they positive or negative. And that’s where customer experience analytics come in.

What Are Customer Experience Analytics?

Many of you may be familiar with the basics of CX analytics, but for those of you who could use a primer, we’ve got you! 

Customer experience analytics concern the strategic process of discovering, collecting, and analyzing customer data in order to obtain the intelligence businesses need to inform the decisions they make. 

Whether this customer data is solicited (through email or SMS surveys or in-app/online intercepts) or unsolicited (via review sites or social media), the right customer experience analytics can pick up on opportunities for improvement throughout the customer journey.

Identifying Moments of Impact with Customer Experience Analytics

There are various vendors that offer customer experience analytics (you can check out a third party analyst ranking here), but today, we are going to talk about a specific solution: Touchpoint Impact Mapping.

Touchpoint Impact Mapping is a unique analytical approach that brings the emotional state of the customer journey to life at every touchpoint. This approach is based on behavioral sciences’ “Peak-End Rule,” which states that our perception of our experience with anything—a brand, a person, a place, etc.—is largely shaped by intense positive or negative moments within that experience. 

This approach, unique to InMoment’s Strategic Insights Team, discards traditional survey metrics, analyzing only customers’ comments for frequency and emotional intensity. This analysis highlights the “peaks” across an experience in a visual map which pinpoints areas of experience excellence that should be celebrated, as well as touchpoints that should be improved.

Not only does it show brands where to focus their efforts, but Touchpoint Impact Mapping also clarifies what about those touchpoints elicited such emotional intensity from the customer. For instance, if the onboarding process was identified as an emotional low, customer experience analytics would reveal that customers found the process confusing. To improve the experience in this area, the brand could publish an FAQ article, rewrite directions, or include additional context on the webpage.

Want to Learn More About Touchpoint Impact Mapping?

If you’re in the market for customer experience analytics that can help you focus your resources on the moments that truly matter, you can learn more about Touchpoint Impact Mapping from InMoment’s Senior Insight Design Specialist Dan Jones in this video:

Want to see a Touchpoint Impact Map in action? Contact our team to demo our unique solution!

Brand Experience
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2 Things Metrics Can’t Tell You About Your Brand Experience

By: The InMoment Team

Customer experience (CX) programs have been laser-focused on numbers ever since the experience space came into being. A lot of organizations consider achieving high scores in NPS, OSAT, and the like to be the holy grail of customer experience, and a goal that every program must be tuned to. After all, if scores are high, that must mean customers are consistently happy, right?

The truth is a bit more nuanced than that, which isn’t to say that metrics aren’t useful—they’re great for letting an organization know that a problem might be occurring at one touchpoint or another. Unfortunately, that’s about all they can telegraph. They’re good for letting brands know that a problem is occurring somewhere in the process, but there are two major brand experience factors beyond that that they can’t clue brands into: brand perception and shared values.

Key #1: Brand Perception

Numbers alone cannot tell you how customers perceive you. The only way to gather that insight is by allowing your customers to submit unstructured, open-ended feedback, then analyzing that feedback for intelligence that you can act upon. Understanding how your brand is perceived can be tricky, even frustrating if you’re contending with perceptions you feel are beyond your control. However, knowing how your customers perceive you is vital to building long-term relationships with them.

More directly, brand perception plays a huge part in individual customer transactions and product experience. In many respects, it may not seem like perception should impact individual interactions, but remember that how customers see you influences whether they want to do business with you in the first place! Understanding how your brand is perceived can give you an opportunity to achieve Experience Improvement (XI), so compare customers’ unstructured feedback to your own messaging goals and work on the gaps preventing a bridge between the two.

Key #2: Shared Values

Every brand has a perception it wants to achieve for both its target audience and the wider world. We’re sure you’ve seen how many companies strive for an environmentally friendly or ethical image. That idea of shared values is also tremendously important to customer relationships, customer experience, and brand experience, and it’s another factor that brands can’t account for with numbers alone.

Much of customers’ trust in your brand is built on the values and identity they feel they share with you, even in a product experience sense. So, similarly to brand perception, go beyond numbers by letting customers tell you why they feel that bond with you, or why they may not. You can then create experience initiatives that build upon what customers see, or want to see, in your organization and the values that you express in your brand mission. When customers feel that fundamental connection to a brand, they’ll continue to come to you even when competition and other market forces are intense.

Click here to read our full-length point of view paper on brand experience. Expert Simon Fraser takes a deep dive into how these forces impact everything from transactions to relationships, and how your organization can leverage them to create Experience Improvement!

Customer Experience Survey
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Three Tips for Shortening Your Customer Experience Surveys

By: The InMoment Team

Let’s face it: shortening your customer experience survey can be overwhelming. You have so many priorities, stakeholders, and initiatives to inform and consider, but you want to capture that information with as few questions as possible in order to avoid survey fatigue.

However tedious the process may be, there’s no denying that CX surveys are one of the best ways to gather feedback for your company. InMoment research has found that responding to a survey was customers’ most preferred feedback method, with the second being to send an electronic message to the company. 

So, How Long Should My Customer Survey Be?

The general rule is that your survey should ask as few questions as possible while still getting your business all the answers you need. Ideally, they would take five minutes or less.

Remember: customers want to give direct feedback—but they also don’t want to spend more than a few minutes doing so. If you’re looking to simplify and optimize your surveys, here are three useful tips to remember when shortening your CX surveys!

  1. Shortening Your Surveys Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Higher Response Rate
  2. Think of Others Before Cutting a Question
  3. Aim for Short, but Complete Surveys

Tip #1: Shortening Your Surveys Doesn’t Necessarily Lead to Higher Response Rates

Having a compact survey is helpful to produce more valuable responses, but it doesn’t directly correlate with a higher response rate. According to our study, survey respondents acknowledged that the frequency of receiving surveys has gone up (an increase of 42%), but that their willingness to complete those surveys has stayed about the same (58%). From these results, we can glean that customers aren’t feeling overwhelmed by the increase in survey requests. But what about length?

The vast majority of non-response actually occurs on the first page of the survey or when respondents never open the survey after receiving an invite. In fact, in some of our CX measurement programs, when respondents are asked if they would be willing to continue answering additional questions about 50% to 75% agree to continue. This doesn’t mean that you should make your surveys as long as you want. But it does show, to an extent, that a shorter survey won’t equal more responses.

Tip #2: Think of Others Before Cutting a Question

A brand typically shortens its surveys because it isn’t using all the information. This makes complete sense, but the reality is that data can often become siloed, keeping other departments in the company in the dark. Corporate research managers may forget how their information can be useful for other departments (e.g., marketing, product development). So make sure that your questions don’t just support your department, but your brand as a whole! 

Additionally, before cutting a question out, make sure you know who “owned” that question, and notify them as to why it’s being cut. For instance, if the information that stakeholder needs is readily available via customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce, let them know. That way you are serving both your internal stakeholders and your customers’ needs for a shorter survey at the same time.

Similarly, when shortening your customer experience survey, always keep the customer in mind. When we asked customers why they respond to CX surveys, the top reason was because they believed that companies valued their input. Asking meaningful questions shows the customer that your business actually cares. And you can go even further! For example, an InMoment client that manufactures medical devices and supplies  tells customers they care by sending them letter updates explaining how they’ve taken action based on their survey responses.

Tip #3: Aim for Short, but Complete Surveys

We are going to refer back to the guiding principle we spoke about above: when creating a survey, ask as few questions as you can while still getting all the answers you need. Yes, that’s easier said than done, but not impossible! We recommend using a backward research process where you first ask your internal team, “what decisions do we want to make when we get our survey results, and what information do we want to be able to tell others?” Having other corporate departments in mind will help you create a more condensed and complete survey.

Additionally, your survey should include an open-ended question that allows your customers to talk about whatever they want. Your brand will get a better idea of what customers care about and want changed—and what you need to do to take action. However, keep in mind that “short for shortness’ sake” is not necessarily a good thing. Customers are willing to take longer surveys, but it’s the thoughtfulness and quality of each question on a survey that’s important—not the survey being short itself. 

Your survey should be long enough to allow your customer to completely express themselves and tell their story. With that context, your CX platform will be able to identify opportunities to maximize success and minimize friction—and isn’t that what we all want at the end of the day?

We’ve gone through a couple tips for shortening your customer experience survey. Looking for more?  Click here to understand the empirical evidence that supports shorter customer experience surveys!

ROI
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Three Ideas for Showing the ROI of Experience Improvement (Once and For All)

By: Andrew Crowhurst, NZ Country Manager

Let’s be frank—establishing a customer experience (CX) program’s return on investment (ROI) is one of the greatest challenges that CX practitioners and the organisations they serve face in the modern experience landscape. 

Did you know, according to Forrester research, only 14% of CX Professionals strongly agreed that ROI from CX is well established in their firm?

Across all businesses, the entire C-Suite leadership team is looking to validate an experience program by understanding: what is the financial impact of my CX investment?

The dilemma we face as CX and EX professionals is that across our organisations people can rationalise the need and function of excellent customer experiences with relative ease. We easily create an “emotional connection” and take the leap of faith that our belief will be true.

However, at a business level, when we are looking to make decisions to invest more in our voice of customer and voice of employee programs, we as CX/EX professionals often struggle to show the return on the CX and EX investment and thus can miss out on further invested funds as the rational minds look to maximise returns on what is tangible.

Here are some suggestions I’ve put together to enable the organisation to be customer centric, but also to understand how that centricity adds value to the organisation beyond “emotional connection”.

First Up: Map Your Program to Economic Pillars

In order to prove business value, it’s essential to draw a line back to economic pillars. Here are a few examples of economic pillars that could be affected by your experience program:

  1. Customer Acquisition. Understand the market environment and changing consumer preferences.
  2. Customer Retention. Address organisational or procedural issues that negatively impact customer experience.
  3. Cross-sell and Upsell. Identify opportunities to expand loyalty and share of wallet within existing customer base.
  4. Minimise Costs. Find areas for achieving greater efficiency, eliminating unnecessary elements.

Next: Understand Your Driver Tree

While the industry conditions and expectations for a CX investment vary from one organisation to another, there are basic ingredients across the board that should be included in your benefits driver tree. 

CX practitioners have a much greater chance of proving financial linkage between CX and ROI if they can demonstrate CX’s ability to increase revenue, decrease costs, and reduce capital.

These pillars are fundamental to how a company’s CEO and CFO manage a business (and how both shareholders and the broader market evaluate a brand’s future viability).

When looking at the wider driver tree there are some more common areas of focus the VoC programs can focus on like a reduction on failure demand costs, a reduction of churn, an increase in tenure and more—see graph below.

Finally: Build Your Financial ROI Roadmap

To win the minds of your executive leadership team, it’s really important for each listening post (i.e. survey program) to think about the related operational and finance measures already being used by the business and link to those so the program is relevant. In other words, you need a financial ROI roadmap to continually point back to.

For example, your roadmap might include steps to reduce repeat calls or reduce wait times. An in-person brand could be focused on sales, basket size, queue time. For an episode survey like onboarding, it could be increasing product/service uptake or reducing early tenure churn. Your organisation already has success metrics that it’s focused on. Find out what these are and draw a link.

Focus where you can on cost saving assumptions first, as these models are typically easier to defend than revenue based models (e.g. reducing churn, increasing share of wallet, increasing average tenure or LTV). They generally require less calculations, less assumptions, and less time to prove an impact. For example, failure demand—where you identify the issues that drive avoidable contacts into the organisation—can be much quicker to identify and act upon. Empowering frontline teams to deliver better outcomes, increasing engagement and reducing staff attrition (or turnover) is another. But something like proving the multiplier effect on acquisition (so how WOM drives new business) is often a lot harder.

For more ideas on building a business case for your CFO (or anyone else!) check out this guide of our most frequently asked questions.

Experience Improvement
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From Boardroom to Breakroom: How to Make Your Organization an Experience Improvement Machine

By: The InMoment Team

You’ve heard us talk about how your employees are the best resource you have when it comes to experience improvement, but how do you truly harness their power? What decisions and changes can you make in the boardroom that empower employees in the breakroom to deliver on customer experience?

The truth is that training for a customer-centric culture on a location-by-location basis is simply not enough. Because when it comes down to it, turning your employees into your best customer experience advocates is an initiative that needs to be led, enforced, and encouraged on an organizational scale.  

If you’re looking to get started and lead the way for your organization, we’ve broken down your mission into four key parts. And we’re including specific actions you can take to transform your employee culture into something that puts the customer at the heart of everything. Let’s dive in!

Mission #1: Dial in on Core Competencies 

To get anywhere, you first need to understand where you’re headed, right? This is especially true for your Experience Improvement (XI) strategy. 

At the beginning of your journey to a customer-centric culture, you must first craft detailed definitions of the competencies required for employees to deliver on your organization’s ideal customer experience. Additionally, it wouldn’t hurt to audit the level of the required competencies in staff who are currently carrying out customer experience management roles and compare them to your required standards.

Once you understand where you are and where you want to be, you can implement a competency development plan that includes a mix of formal training, on-the-job coaching, mentoring, self-learning, etc. 

Examining legacy and new training initiatives that impact customer-facing staff allows you to ensure that the messages and techniques employees promote are consistent with your organization’s customer experience strategy.

Mission #2: Publicly Encourage a Customer-Centric Culture

Now that you know what your end goal is, don’t let your mission of creating a customer-centric culture be an afterthought in your organization. Be loud about it! 

You should have plenty of examples of best-case scenario customer/employee interactions from your feedback data, so take advantage of them. Regularly share examples of behaviors that illustrate your organization’s desired customer culture. You should include perspectives about what individuals did and indicate why those specific actions had such a positive impact on customers. You can do this in an internal newsletter or use our Moments app to share with company leaders.

Additionally, make sure you’re in constant communication with human resources. You need to ensure that recruitment processes have explicit steps in place in order to check that potential candidates possess the attitudes and beliefs that are consistent with your organization’s customer culture. That way, any person you bring in is already on the same customer-centric path as your company.

Mission #3: Engage and Motivate Employees

You’ve started openly and actively discussing your customer-first perspective; now it’s time to get employees motivated to join in.

Within key teams, identify social leaders or customer experience all-stars and harness their influence by asking them to lead training exercises. Be sure to arm them with coaching materials and other collateral that break down your organization’s approach to customer experience. You can even supply them with feedback data so they can relay to the team exactly what behaviors or processes need to be replicated or improved.

At the same time as you want to be a cheerleader for your initiatives, it’s also important to understand the questions and potential resistance some line managers and supervisors may face when implementing any changes. That’s why it’s vital to hear them out and  support them via training, supplemental materials, and processes to implement desired actions and maintain continuous improvement.

Additionally, you need to be mindful when it comes to employee incentives. You want to be sure that reward structures reflect your customer strategy. For example, many CX programs have shifted their focus from metrics to big-picture business improvements via customer acquisition, retention, cross-sell and upsell efforts, or by reducing costs. When they make this shift, they often change their rewards programs from incentivizing customer surveys to rewarding employees who have been shouted out by customers for providing an exceptional experience.

Mission #4: Organize with Customers in Mind

Just as your training initiatives and rewards programs need to be aligned with your Experience Improvement strategy, so too must your org chart and processes be equally aligned. 

Review existing barriers to delivering your desired customer experience, paying particular attention to handoffs between functions/departments and to potential conflicts in functional objectives and targets. 

For instance, let’s say that customers are complaining that it takes too long to have an issue resolved in your online portal. You investigate and find that, in order for any online portal issues to be fixed, a customer must call up your contact center, which in turn must hand that customer off to the IT team in order to actually fix the issue. An organizational solution to such a problem would be to have a team in your contact center dedicated specifically to online portal issues so there is no lengthy handoff.

Additionally, your customer team should have a window into any proposed organizational change to assess—and, if necessary, mitigate—any potential negative impact that changes might have on the customer experience. Remember, your goal is to have everything in your organization—including the way your org chart is structured—work toward the good of your customers. 

Strategizing for Experience Improvement

In the end, Experience Improvement isn’t something that can merely happen overnight. It takes hard work and dedication to create a customer experience that keeps customers choosing you over the competition. And, in a world where customers have more options than ever before, being able to differentiate on the experience means everything, making your experience improvement strategy something everyone—board members and frontline employees alike—can get behind.


If you’d like to learn more about how your employees can help to foster your ideal customer experience and fuel your financial success, check out our new infographic, “How Employees Can Help You Grow Customer Loyalty & Value”

RG-271
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New RG 271 Regulations Are Coming to the Australian Financial Services Industry: Is Your Customer Experience Program Ready?

By: Simon Benns, Director of Banking, Financial Services and Insurance

The 5th of October of this year marks an important deadline for the financial services industry: there are new Internal Dispute Resolution (IDR) standards and guidelines outlined in Australia’s RG 271. And for many companies, this is proving to be a difficult nut to crack. A lot of customer experience (CX) teams are being asked by the business to solve new problems for the first time. This marks one of the first times that many elements that make up a holistic CX program will dictate a financial services firm’s adherence to a legally enforceable regulatory requirement.  

There are two ways to look at this—you can take on the new regulations as a difficult inconvenience, or instead, there’s an opportunity for CX and insights initiatives to demonstrate ROI and start adding significantly more value to the wider business. Here at InMoment, we would advocate strongly for CX and Insights teams to see this as an opportunity.

RG165 Is Out and RG271 Is In. What’s Changing? 

  • The definition of ‘complaint’ now incorporates dissatisfaction expressed on social media. “It is the complainant’s expression of dissatisfaction (that meets the definition of ‘complaint’ in RG 271.27) that triggers a firm’s obligation to deal with the matter according to our IDR requirements, not the referral of a complaint to a specialist complaints or IDR team.” 
  • There is a reduction in deadlines for complaints, including superannuation complaints. “Staffing numbers must be sufficient to deal with complaints in a fair and effective manner within maximum IDR timeframes. This includes resourcing the IDR function to deal with intermittent spikes in complaint volumes.”
  • There is updated guidance on the identification and management of systemic issues, including the role which the boards and the front line staff have to play in the process.  “Financial firms must also have robust systems in place to ensure that possible systemic issues are investigated, followed up and reported on.”  “Firms should analyse complaint data regularly so that they can: (a) monitor the performance of the IDR process; (b) identify possible systemic issues and areas where product or service delivery improvements are required;”

A key takeaway for CX and Insights teams—and what makes this such a difficult regulation to adhere to—is the blurring of the lines between unsolicited/unstructured feedback and a traditional complaint. Likewise the traditional strategic “outer loop” has now become a compliance requirement.

So how can CX and insights teams become compliance heroes? Here are three ideas for complying with new regulations while elevating your program at the same time:

Tip #1: Use Text Analytics to Uncover Implied Dissatisfaction

Implied dissatisfaction is an incredibly hard thing to identify, but is a key component of RG 271 compliance. Explicit dissatisfaction is as easy as someone giving you a low NPS score in your opening question. However, uncovering the true implied meaning in their responses requires a high level of technological sophistication. This is especially true at scale, where this process must be automated. There are several approaches to text analytics that can start to provide this insight, and they work in roughly the same way. That is, all verbatim (unstructured written or transcribed communication) is run through an analytics engine, and keywords and phrases that are used in the text then categorise the communication according to a predetermined set of rules (knowledge-based and/or machine-learned). In addition to determining categories, most text analytics solutions will also determine the sentiment associated with each category. Also, some advanced text analytics solutions will also determine what (if any) emotions are being expressed.

To make that distinction, we first need to define the difference between sentiment and emotion. 

  • Sentiment is essentially a 3 point score (positive, negative, and neutral (and/or mixed which indicates that both positive and negative sentiment are present)). 
  • Emotion, on the other hand, is a deeper expression of feeling that goes beyond simple positive/negative. 

At InMoment, we have a team of linguists and behavioural scientists who currently map verbatim into 14 different emotions, and this keeps growing. Just as multiple categories and sentiments can be expressed in a single comment, so, too, can multiple emotions. The difference between sentiment and emotion is important. Take for example the following phrase:

“As a customer we have received an abysmal level of service. On top of that the system is so complicated that it requires lots of effort to understand it and make sure I have not been invoiced incorrectly. Thankfully the person who helped me was very good, he had all the answers and my problem was sorted out quickly and professionally”

There is both positive and negative sentiment in this statement, and sentiment analysis would likely place this in a neutral/mixed basket overall, with negative sentiment associated with service and system, and positive sentiment associated with staff and problem resolution. However, if you look at the emotions, the first section expresses Anger, Confusion, and Dissatisfaction. The second part—although expressing positive sentiment about the staff and the problem resolution—does not really express any emotion.

Although sentiment analysis may pick up some implied satisfaction/dissatisfaction, customers are not binary, especially when ranting on social media. Human communication is significantly more complicated than a simple “positive, negative, or neutral,” and having emotional analysis can identify more complex customer expressions. 

Tip #2: Leverage Case Management to Manage IDR Complaints

Most financial services firms have both a complaint management system and a case management program running simultaneously. Even complaints management and customer advocacy often sit in different business units according to the team responding to detractors. 

RG 271, however,  has removed the distinction between the feedback and complaints. Where does “feedback” end and a “complaint” start?  We would encourage any organisation with a comprehensive case management system to look at combining the two functions and using the case management capability to help drive efficient resolution. The goal is to meet the reduced timeframes whilst trying not to increase the cost of management.

In order to manage the challenge, you need to be able to strategically disaggregate the responses. If you already know the problem the customer has, you can route their case to the right person automatically, and you can give your staff insight into the customer’s complaint straight away. This will allow you to streamline your processes and increase your ability to respond effectively and efficiently at speed.

However, most organisations’ complaints systems do not have the ability to pinpoint the drivers behind customer sentiment to understand what the root cause of the problem is. But many CX programs have the ability to run layers of text analytics at speed in order to provide immediate and accurate routing of cases.Likewise, a good case management system has many layers of rules in a hierarchy that automatically control the case routing to ensure that there is no overloading or double handling.  

Many communications can also be automated by leveraging a robust case management system. By reducing manual handling as much as possible, you increase the capacity of your team to deliver on the requirements of RG 271. More importantly, it allows you to deliver a better service to your customers.

Tip #3: Use Text Analytics to Uncover Systemic Issues

Text analytics is the tool of choice for deriving meaning from unstructured text. Most commonly, this involves categorising words and phrases to uncover key themes and trends in verbatim at scale. Now, not all text analytics is created equally and to be effective you need a high degree of accuracy, combined with other statistical analysis tools such as correlation analysis. 

If your organisation has a text analytics capability, it is likely that it exists within your CX and insights initiatives, and not the complaints management function (where one-to-one recovery is more of the focus).  Collating feedback data, complaints data, other unstructured data (social, webchat, etc.), and operational/behavioural data in one place, then applying text analytics to that data is the most efficient and effective way to uncover key systemic issues that are causing complaints.

The benefit to this approach is not just compliance to RG 271, but also is a fantastic way to identify fracture points, reduce cost to serve, and reduce churn, whilst maintaining compliance.

As an example, one of our health insurance clients tasked their CX team to address a critical pain point for customers—excessive contact centre wait times. The team had to figure out a way to reduce failure demand (avoidable call volume) rather than increasing available staff. 

To determine what was driving the greatest volume of avoidable calls, the client reviewed multiple data sets including call reason codes, agent call notes, NPS survey results, complaints data, agent feedback, and qualitative research. No individual data source delivered sufficient levels of insight into the underlying challenges, nor were they providing adequate coverage across all the calls they were receiving.

As a result, the client leveraged Natural Language Processing (NLP) powered text analytics, which was applied to 12 months worth of agent call notes. The subsequent analysis generated a custom text analytics category set incorporating 184 unique categories. Tens of thousands of call notes were then categorised at a phrase level with sentiment also assigned. Then each comment was married up to detailed operational data to enrich the analysis.

By addressing the pain points surfaced through the failure demand analysis, the client was able to reduce 20% of total calls coming into the call centre. The financial impact was very significant, saving the company millions of dollars in operating costs and ensuring that the business did not have to continue expanding its contact centre workforce in line with overall business growth. All of this without sending out a single survey!

Here at InMoment we strongly encourage the CX and insights teams to take ownership of this element of RG 271 compliance, as it is in alignment with one of the core capabilities that should already be embedded in their initiatives. Compliance also results in significant business value and further demonstrates the value of customer experience across the business.

Wrapping Up 

At a time when many organisations are struggling to demonstrate the value of customer experience, RG 271 has made a robust inner loop and outer loop a compulsory requirement. As long as CX and insights teams can keep control of these processes and continue to demonstrate compliance as well as business impact, then this is a real opportunity to move up the value chain.

Want to learn more from the experts at InMoment? Check out our InMoment Resources Page, which is packed with industry thought leadership, best practices, and more!

*All quotations are from this article.

Upselling and cross-selling customers
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Proving ROI: A Holistic Approach to Upselling and Cross-selling Customers

By: The InMoment Team

Cross-selling and upselling customers gets a bad rap in the world of customer experience (CX). A lot of brands hesitate to enact full-on initiatives because they don’t want to come off like the worst stereotype of a pushy car salesperson to their clients, and while that’s a worthwhile concern, it’s not the true nature of cross-selling and upselling. In fact, when handled properly, cross-selling can let your customers know that you’re not just interested in their money; you’re invested in their success and the part you play in achieving that. If you want to learn how to telegraph that to your customers, you’re in the right place!

Being Mindful

The first tip we can provide for good cross-selling/upselling is to be mindful of what your client expects. This doesn’t ‘just’ apply to your product—it also applies to your relationships with your point(s) of contact and when customers expect you to reach out to them. Knowing that cadence is its own reward, but it also helps clients stay secure in the fact that you respect their time and bandwidth.

Another, deeper factor here is the notion of a holistic customer, which means getting your company’s departments together and working off of a singular, 360-degree view of said customer. Not only does this help your brand deliver a better experience, but it also helps you know what your customer expects, which informs your cross-selling/upselling strategy.

Best Practices

When you’re ready to upsell, make sure you reach the right point of contact. We know; that point sounds obvious, right? But consider that each part of your offering could sound more or less relevant to multiple people. So don’t bother reaching out to finance about your new marketing tool; instead, take the time to figure out who to talk to in marketing (CX tools are great for this legwork). That way, you’ll be able to reach the person who actually cares about a given part of your product, and they’ll appreciate that you did your homework to find them.

Once you find that person, be prepared to quantify your new feature’s business value. Don’t just reach out to clients thinking that they’ll appreciate a new element solely because it’s new—that approach is guaranteed to give off boiler room telemarketer vibes. Rather, focus not just on knowing what your new feature would do, but how it can help your customer specifically. Case studies, proposed use cases, and the like are extremely powerful tools here.

Good Intentions

This approach to cross-selling and upselling takes more time and effort than reactively reaching out to clients every time you have something new… but it’s also a much more successful tactic. Yes, getting the upsell is great, but doing the due diligence that our approach calls for also lets your clients know that you’re genuinely interested in their business success! When you’ve demonstrated that interest, your clients won’t just be quicker to pick up the phone at the same time next month; they’re going to actively anticipate what you come up with next. In other words, cross-selling and upselling the right way meaningfully improves customers’ interactions with your brand, making it simple to strengthen your bottom line and those relationships in a single motion.


Want to read more about how you can inform successful cross-selling and upselling efforts that will positively impact your bottom line? Read the full article by experience expert Jim Katzman here!

Customer Journey Analytics
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How to Leverage Customer Journey Analytics to Improve Experiences

By: The InMoment Team

Each key touchpoint throughout the customer journey plays a huge role in how a customer judges their experience as a whole. This means that at every touchpoint, the stakes are high and there’s a risk of damaging your brands’ reputation. And the scariest thing? It’s not enough to do the work to understand the customer journey at one point in time; businesses need to constantly keep up because customer journeys evolve overtime. That’s where customer journey analytics can come into the picture!

With the appropriate analytics and action, your company can prevent mistakes along the customer journey from happening. Our eBook, Understand and Predict Your Customers’ Needs with Customer Journey Analytics, breaks down a three step process to improving your brands’ customer journey. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Get the Inside Scoop
  2. Pinpoint the Target Areas
  3. Strategize for the Future

Step #1: Get the Inside Scoop 

The customer journey can often feel like a never-ending puzzle. How do we create the best experience for a bunch of strangers? Well, that’s correct, customers are technically strangers, which makes it infinitely harder to cater to them. A logical first step then is to get to know your customers!

With powerful customer experience technology, InMoment can help your brand eliminate silos and combine data according to segmented groups, so you can feasibly sort through all sources of customer feedback, whether they’re solicited (phone, email, or text surveys etc.) or unsolicited (social, third party review sites, and more). Seeing these data points altogether can give you a general idea of how your customers behave, what they care about, and more. When you have an inside scoop on how your customers are interacting with your brand, suddenly, customers aren’t strangers anymore but people you can get to know better and better!

Step #2: Pinpoint the Target Areas

One of the benefits of having data collected from a myriad of sources is the ability to statistically analyze trends, patterns, and anomalies. By measuring what topics have the most traffic, your company can focus its priorities on the issues that matter. Leveraging customer journey analytics to identify the impact of a topic often proves to be a big time saver!

InMoment’s advanced analytics can generate all the associated comments and details about an issue, where it’s happening, the words and themes most commonly associated with it, how widespread it is, what impact it has on your business, and more. It can also generate actionable alerts so you can closely monitor problems that arise—and take action. 

Step #3: Strategize for the Future

With so much data to manage, businesses often forget the potential for feedback to predict customer concerns and behavior. These predictions allow brands to execute dynamic offers, personalized incentives, and customer-focused policies that build loyalty and drive new business. By utilizing your customer journey analytics to predict future problem points and subsequently implement an effective strategy, your company can proactively meet customers’ needs.

Predictive models work the best when they forecast risks and opportunities, including churn/attrition, revenue, customer segments, likelihood to return/recommend, and potential cross-sell and upsell opportunities. With these forecasts, your brand can maintain an informed and preemptive action plan that will keep customers loyal. Customer journey analytics are not only useful today, but for making business improvements in the long run!


You’ve just learned a bit about how to leverage customer journey analytics in your CX Program—but if you’re looking for a more in depth guide to understanding and predicting customers’ needs, read our eBook!

implementing a CX Program
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Implementing a Customer Experience Platform? Here’s Three Things CIOs Need To Know

By: Robert Van Veenendaal, Head of Delivery APAC

Implementing a customer experience program (or any new technology) is exciting—it takes a massive effort from your whole team to get through the RFP process, work out what your new experience technology will look like, how it will integrate with your existing systems, and sign the contracts. At this point, almost everyone in the business is ready to hit the ground running. That being said, there’s usually one team that feels nervous around this stage: the IT team. This team knows what it looks like to onboard a new partner, handle mass amounts of data, and actually get the project off the ground. 

After thousands of implementations globally, we at InMoment have seen every angle of what it’s like to migrate enterprise-level IT projects: the good, the bad, the ugly. What’s more, most of our clients are working with limited resources and stretched teams with no room for headaches. We’ve designed our entire InMoment Platform implementation process to mitigate our clients’ stress and make this one of the most seamless onboarding processes they have ever experienced.

Here’s three things you need to know about implementing a CX platform:

We Protect Your Team’s Time and Resources During the Implementation Process 

Whether this is your first time implementing a CX platform or you are migrating from another vendor, the implementation process has been carefully designed to minimise the effort on your side. During the onboarding process, our team will work with your IT team to design a robust, low maintenance integration with your existing systems—even out-of-the-box connectors to CRMs like Salesforce. 

Our cloud applications don’t require investments and installation of hardware and software, you should be able to get them running and productive in a fraction of the time compared with on-premise software. DNS configuration, digital certificates, and SSO integration are typically all that is needed to get started with the platform.

Beyond desktop support we do not expect our customer’s IT teams to assist the users in the use of the application itself.

The InMoment Platform uses a built-in ETL tool called “XI Workflow,” which is a data processing and workflow engine built for the needs of large programs. 

XI Workflow minimises data work on your side by:

  • Configuring business rules and calculations
  • Automating data imports and exports
  • Transforming data from its raw source to consumption
  • Establishing data processes through drag and drop features
  • Simplifying and accelerating implementation processes

Furthermore, our data warehouse exports are designed in a way in which introducing new surveys or questions does not require any change to the interface itself. 

Don’t just take it from us—we have endless experience integrating data across some of the biggest brands across Asia-Pacific, and they are happy to endorse the seamlessness of the integration process.

You Can Give Different Employees Varying Levels of Access to Data

The InMoment Platform is able to grant specific authority to different user groups. A single report or dashboard can be shared with different users across the organisation, from C-Suite to the frontline. Using flexible hierarchies, this single report or dashboards can have embedded permissions levels and will automatically open on a drill down level that is meaningful to the user.  

If You Need Support After Your Program is Implemented, We’ve Got You Covered

What sets InMoment apart is our award-winning partnership approach to client relationships. Kicking off from the implementation phase, InMoment has technical resources available globally (including in the APAC region) to act as an extension of your team. Beyond desktop support, we do not expect our customer’s IT teams to assist the users in the use of the application itself.

InMoment offers 24/7 support, which means you’ll always be able to connect to a human and resolve any issue that may surface.  From there, our team at InMoment partners with clients through our Continuous Improvement Framework, so they can evolve their programs as their CX and EX maturity grows. 

Interested in learning more? We’ve outlined thirteen Q&As from leading CIOs here in this guide. Get your free copy here! 

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