Customer experience business case

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

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

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

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

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!

Group of people in a business meeting working to improve customer experience

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.

Experience Improvement

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

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

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

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!

Prove ROI

Every brand wants to crack the code to prove a skyrocketing customer experience (CX) return on investment (ROI). But obtaining stellar ROI is not a simple process, especially if businesses can easily become discouraged when it seems as if their CX programs aren’t producing the amazing results they expected. That’s why some consider it the “holy  grail” of customer experience! But proving the value of your CX program shouldn’t be a process that starts only after the work is done; to successfully show the value of your efforts, you need to consider how you plan to prove ROI from the very beginning. 

Additionally, it’s important to first recognize that the factors impacting ROI cannot be understood linearly. Every department within your company has a different perspective on how their area of the business affects ROI. This makes measuring ROI by customer experience not so straightforward. Your business needs a holistic view of your brand, customers, employees, and the market to drive ROI successfully. 

Here are three tips based on our eBook, “Five Steps to an ROI-Focused CX Program,” that will help your company build a CX program that directly increases revenue. Let’s get right into it!

  1. Design with the End in Mind
  2. Understand Your Customer
  3. Tailor Employee Behavior

Tip #1: Design with the End in Mind

Designing an experience for customers means not just meeting the present need, but the future one as well. This means optimizing the customer journey by adapting to what customers want—even if your business had never considered those ideas before. 

Your company needs to be ready to remove from, add to, and revise its CX program overtime. For example, our eBook 2021 Digital Customer Experience Trends Report, discusses how digital has been a trend in America and Canada long before the pandemic. The main point is that digital will stay relevant after the government removes restrictions, so businesses need to prepare for the future of digital customer journeys. 

As you already know, your CX program is a powerful tool. When your brand designs with careful attention to the intelligence informing you of incoming issues in the customer experience, your chances of increasing ROI improve immensely. In fact, one study found that a focus on the buyer’s journey reaps over 50 percent greater return on marketing investments than those that don’t. 

Tip #2: Understand Your Customer

Actionable intelligence stems from all kinds of sources and each type of data can contribute to your company’s overall knowledge of your customers. From CRM, to VoC, to loyalty, financial, transactional, and beyond, don’t underestimate the value of tons and tons of diverse information. 

By taking advantage of various data channels, Hawaiian Airlines was able to gain a deeper insight into their customers’ experiences. “InMoment appends upwards of 300 customer-specific data points to each response. As a result, Hawaiian Airlines understands the impact that seat location, aircraft type, departure time, delays, food, flight crew, stops, travel history, and other variables play in each customer experience. This extremely detailed analysis enables Hawaiian Airlines to understand trends and pinpoint the exact factors most likely to have significant impacts on customer satisfaction.”

The combination of CX, market experience (MX), and employee experience (EX) data gave Hawaiian Airlines the holistic viewpoint it needed to direct its CX Program towards greater business outcomes. And that’s the key! The right data can be a customer experience game changer and lead to better business performance.

Tip #3: Tailor Employee Behavior 

Now that your brand knows its customers, it can train employees to accommodate them according to their specific needs. Employees are often the most crucial contact point with a customer because they act as company representatives. What customer would stay loyal to your brand or purchase anything if they encounter an employee who fails to meet their standards?

This case study shows that there was a growth in NPS when the business conducted behavioral initiatives instead of primarily focusing on operational improvements. The data tells the truth! By involving employees your brand learns not only about the employee experience but the customer experience through their lens. When both business and employees work in tandem your CX program reaches a higher potential to increase ROI.

We just explained three tips to capture more revenue through customer experience, but there’s more! Read this eBook that goes over five essential steps on how to focus your CX Program on ROI.

Unstructured Customer Feedback

It’s no secret that businesses need unstructured customer feedback to have a successful customer experience (CX) program. Without honest, detailed criticism or praise, it’s hard to assess how well a product or service is doing, but it’s also difficult to understand the “why” and take action to improve. That’s why more and more, customers are seeing open-ended questions in surveys instead of metric-based ones: unstructured feedback can lead to a more authentic insight into the customer experience.

But how should brands harness the power of unstructured feedback in their existing surveys? And how can they take the next step of not only collecting that feedback, but derive actionable intelligence from it so they can improve experiences? Our latest eBook, “Unstructured CustomerFeedback: The Key to Unlocking the True Voice of Customer,” walks you through best practices we’ve learned from our many years of experience. This blog will spell out the major benefits of employing those best practices. Let’s get started!

Three Ways Unstructured Customer Feedback Improves Experiences

  1. Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses
  2. Collects the Missing Pieces
  3. Follows the Right Patterns

Benefit #1: Gathers More Genuine and Less Filtered Responses

What makes for a “good” survey? Businesses often make the mistake of only asking metric-based questions, which prompt customers to answer very specific questions in very specific ways. This leaves brands only learning what they want to learn and possibly missing other important aspects of the customer experience.

Let’s say a restaurant uses an NPS question to gauge the success of their customer experiences. The brand’s post transaction survey therefore reads, “on a scale of 1-10 how much would you recommend us?” Customers then respond with only a single number and the restaurant is left wondering why customers rate it as low as a 5. As you can see, this metric-based question can only measure the experience, and therefore fails to explain why a customer would or wouldn’t recommend the eatery. 

If the restaurant had followed up the first question with an open-ended “why” question, then its feedback would include the reasoning behind the score, and would help the business understand what it needs to do to improve the CX program. With open-ended questions, brands hear the voice of customer more clearly because customers have more freedom to candidly express themselves, telling your brand what they actually want to tell you, not what you want to hear.

Benefit #2: Collects the Missing Pieces

Open-ended questions mean unpredictable and varied responses, but that’s a good thing! The feedback you receive is so much more detailed, so it can answer questions and address issues your brand wouldn’t have considered in the first place.

One of our clients, a large hotel and entertainment brand, couldn’t figure out why one of its locations was receiving such low scores from guests. This is because it was using a metric that could only see that guests were unsatisfied with their stay, but not exactly why. Through text analytics, the brand was able to analyze its unstructured data and discover that an air filtration problem was allowing smoke from the casino to enter the rooms.

By leaving survey questions open-ended, your brand not only learns the genuine opinion of customers, but also about problems it might have never known about. At the same time, feedback is not always negative; it’s important for your business to know how well it’s executing at certain touchpoints along the customer journey! These game changing pieces of intelligence can help to fill in the blanks so you have a truly holistic view of the customer experience.

Benefit #3: Follows the Right Patterns 

Listening to the true voice of customer gives your business a greater capability to track common problems your customers are having over time. Your brand will then be able to identify and analyze patterns that emerge from responses and address those issues with an actionable plan.

For instance, let’s imagine that customers are having complications with your company’s website. A recent system update has caused a bug that’s disrupting functionability, leading to a seemingly random rise in customer frustration. With unstructured feedback, your brand would be able to recognize a new trend in responses, spot the platform issue, and take action to fix it. 

Unstructured responses make it easier to recognize both positive and negative trends in your CX program, and also helps you to pinpoint new areas to focus on as customer expectations develop over time. 

In the end, failure to employ unstructured feedback means that your CX program will have a hard time realizing its potential. Metrics alone can only measure the past; they can’t help you take action and create better experiences in the future. That’s why the stories you derive from open-ended questions are so vital to your big picture success—and to your bottomline.

 
Unstructured customer feedback can help your business improve customer experiences by unlocking the true Voice of Customer—but how do you best leverage that feedback in your program strategy? Read our latest eBook to read about the best practices recommended by our experts here!

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