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Customer Experience

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What Customers Expect from a Modern Brand Experience

By: Eric Smuda, CX Distinguished Practitioner in XI Strategy and Enablement

The experience world has seen a certain term crop up more and more in recent years: omnichannel. This word has gradually become a regular part of customer experience (CX) practitioners’ vocabulary, and indicates a grander shift in CX thinking from focusing on transactions to creating a more seamless journey for customers. This article will briefly introduce what customers have come to expect of brands, and how those organizations can begin to think about meeting that expectation.

The Sum of All Parts

The main reason why many CX practitioners have shifted their customer experience thinking from individual transactions to entire relationships is because, well, that’s how customers see things. Individual transactions and interactions are important, yes, but customers think about a brand relationship in its entirety. This trend has only become more prominent in recent years, and it’s key to designing a meaningfully improved experience.

One of the most important reasons why customers think this way, especially when it comes to expecting a seamless experience, is because they now interact with brands in many different ways: via an app, over the phone, in-person, on a website, etc. With this increase in touchpoints has come a customer expectation that brands will recognize and remember them no matter how they choose to transact. This expectation is at the core of creating a truly omnichannel experience.

The Problem with Legacy Systems

It’s reasonable to ask why more brands haven’t immediately created omnichannel experiences if customers have come to not just desire them, but expect them. Unfortunately, many organizations have legacy systems in place that rigidly silo experience data. Call center data stays with call center teams, website data stays with digital teams, so on and so forth. This setup makes it much more difficult for brands to even know where to start desiloing customer journeys, let alone to successfully execute that goal.

Another issue to consider here is how brands use CRM systems. Though many of these databases’ data isn’t all that divided, it’s common for too few people to have access to it. This reduces data democratization, which makes it harder for a brand to achieve the 360-degree customer view needed for desiloing journeys.

Where Brands Go from Here

It’s become clear that customers expect brands to recognize them at every touchpoint, and to use that recognition to enhance their experience. Customers also expect to be able to seamlessly jump from one channel to another in any given interaction. Many companies’ experience programs aren’t built to accommodate this trend, resulting in lost opportunities for both a better experience and a stronger bottom line.

How might brands circumvent these problems, desilo their customer journeys, and create a more seamless experience for all? Click here to learn more about how your organization can break these barriers down and achieve Experience Improvement (XI) in my Point of View on this subject.

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Three Paths to Understanding Why Customers Leave Your Brand

By: The InMoment Team

Retaining customers is one of the best ways to ensure that your brand is building a strong bottom line and an ever-improving experience, but keeping customer churn low is easier said than done. Customer churn is, unfortunately, an unavoidable fact of doing business, but that doesn’t mean that brands have to let it happen in vain. Today, we’re going to give you a quick rundown on understanding why customers leave your brand so that you can prevent future churn, retain loyal clientele, and continuously improve their experience.

Enabling Storytelling

One of the best ways to become aware of friction points within your experience is by letting customers point them out in their own words. We’re not just talking written survey answers, here; experience feedback programs that enable multimedia feedback are among the most powerful tools for learning about problematic or broken touchpoints in your customer journey.

Think about how much more human it is to see and hear customers express their concerns instead of just reading about them. Multimedia feedback empowers brands to understand customer concerns on a much more human level than surveys allow, which is also important for motivating employees. In short, empowering customers to express their concerns in their preferred format and sharing that frank feedback with the relevant teams is one of the best ways to motivate genuine improvement.

Seeking Disclosure

Receiving feedback from current customers is important, but what about past customers? What about the competition’s? The best customer experience platforms are sustained by the best market research, and brands that opt for the former can often receive the latter. Databases, customer panels, and other sources of market learnings are now available at the push of a button, and brands that want to understand their experience from all angles should seek this knowledge out as resources allow.

Once you have all of this feedback and intel from customers both inside and outside your brand, a handy next step is to feed all of that structured data directly into a real-time text analytics engine. This tool is incredibly helpful for brands because it can extract customer sentiment and reinforce organizations’ knowledge of customer churn’s root causes. 

Keeping Churn at Bay

Like we said earlier, brands can’t keep customer churn out of the equation, but they can do a great deal to prevent it with tools and methods like these. Reducing churn in this way is also great not just for churn reduction’s sake, but also for creating a more human experience, instilling greater loyalty in customers, and creating a stronger bottom line.

Want to read more on how you can improve customer retention? Our new eBook walks you through exactly how to build a holistic initiative and the math that will prove the value of your efforts! Check it out here.

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How Talking to Past and Present Customers Reduces Future Churn

By: Jennifer Passini, Ph.D., Senior Director of Solutions Strategy

Reducing churn and retaining a solid base of loyal customers is a constant challenge for brands, which is why setting out to reduce that churn must likewise be a constant company goal. I outlined a variety of churn reduction strategies in my recent point of view document on the subject, but there’s a two-pronged approach that merits an especially close look: talking to past and present customers to reduce future churn.

Talking to Past Customers

You can’t always save customers who have already left your brand for what they believe are greener pastures, but talking to these individuals can yield valuable intel that might save some of your current customer base from doing the same. This methodology is often referred to as win/loss research or Attrition Customer Experience (CX), and its findings are invaluable. Talking to past customers can help brands understand what parts of their experience might be driving customers away, as well as better tell which churn might be controllable or uncontrollable.

Win/loss research also affords brands an opportunity to scout out the competition. Past customers usually aren’t shy about sharing which company they switched to and why they think that competitor suits their needs better. While that criticism might sting a bit, it’s a great way to learn about why customers and prospects choose other companies over you. Thus, talking to customers who’ve already gone out the door is rarely a waste of time.

Talking to Current Customers

Once you’ve discussed your brand experience with past customers, it’s important to incorporate those learnings into saving current, at-risk customers from leaving your organization. Arming yourself with context from past customers can go a long way toward reshaping your approach with current customers, listening to their concerns, and understanding why they may feel one way or another about their own journeys with your brand.

Having a powerful Experience Improvement (XI) platform is a priority to take here too. Tools like sentiment analysis can provide brands powerful intelligence that they can compare with feedback from past customers. Combining all of this information can help brands know not just which touchpoints need improvement, but also how best to meaningfully change those areas to retain current business.

Working Upstream

Combining feedback from past and present customers is one of the best ways that brands can prevent future churn. Organizations can rely on this intelligence to be more proactive about saving at-risk customers, identifying and solving broken touchpoints and other experience issues before they result in a loss. Though this process is work intensive and may not save all of your at-risk relationships, the brands that dedicate themselves to soliciting this feedback from all their customers will come away with less churn, and thus more success, than their peers.

Interested in learning more about reducing customer churn? Click here to read my full-length point of view on the subject and to learn additional strategies for reducing churn at your organization.

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The Greatest CX Opportunities for Financial Services in 2021

One of our favorite things about the 2020 Wealth Poll is that it didn’t just dissect the investor mindset. It took that understanding one step further by identifying the best opportunities for wealth management firms, banks, and other financial services businesses to improve their experience in 2021.

So without further ado, let’s dive into our findings!

About the 2020 Wealth Poll

The InMoment Wealth Poll is a multi-wave poll of affluent investors done every few years for the past fifteen years. From June 30, 2020 to July 2, 2020, we surveyed 1,212 investors with over $100,000 of privately held assets to understand how the unsettled market has affected them, how they feel about their client experience, and where opportunities may lie for investment firms to improve and expand business.

Here is a quick breakdown of the investors we surveyed:

  • 790 Mass Affluent Investors ($100,000 to less than $1,000,000 in investable
  • 400 High Net Worth Investors ($1,000,000 to less than $10,000,000 in investable assets)
  • 22 Ultra-High Net Worth Investors ($10,000,000 or more in investable assets)

Experience Improvement Opportunities in 2021

Perhaps one of the most important functions an experience program can serve is helping an organization to identify what they do well in the eyes of the customer—and where there’s room to improve. Only when brands pinpoint those areas can they remove friction and improve experiences (and even move on to increase customer retention, save costs, and more).

That’s the idea that inspired one of the most telling questions in the InMoment Wealth Poll, “Thinking About Your Primary Investment Firm, How Satisfied Are You with Each of the Following.” The answers we received for this question are sure to inform financial services organization’s experience strategies for the upcoming year. Let’s take a look!

It is important to note which firm types have advantages in specific areas. Mutual fund firms, for instance, are currently outperforming others when it comes to “Investment Performance” according to their clients. Additionally, full-service brokerage and insurance firms are showing particular strength when it comes to delivering for their clients, specifically when it comes to the relationships clients have with their financial advisors. Discount firms are also showing strength when it comes to their online services.

When it comes to the big picture, however, it is clear that elements like “Financial Stability” and “Reputation” are mere table stakes for investors. “Fees” are areas of dissatisfaction across the board—which is not surprising—but discount brokerages seem to have a particular advantage here in that investors seem more satisfied with their fees. 

Looking for More?

If these findings peaked your interest, our full length report, “How the Investor Mindset Has Evolved in the Last Decade (and Where It’s Headed)” is full of them! You can download it and see all of the insights our 2020 Wealth Poll here for free. Enjoy your read!

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How to Calculate Net Promoter Score (NPS Calculation)

You hear the term tossed around in most any meeting focused on customers: “What’s the NPS? How many Promoters do we have? How many Detractors?” You may be asking yourself “What is NPS and what should we be doing with it?” 

Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a simple, powerful measure of customer loyalty. By asking customers to rate their likelihood to recommend a product or service on a 1-10 scale, you can gain actionable insights to guide decisions across your business.

Let’s break down NPS calculation and see how it works.

The NPS survey

Essentially, an NPS survey asks your customers this simple question:

Nps question, NPS example, NPS survey, What is NPS

The survey then logs the response and gives the responder a chance to explain their answer in an open-text format.

Nps feedback, NPS question, NPS concept

That’s it! Because the survey is short, sweet, and to the point, customers are more likely to respond. And you’ve just gained valuable information ready to be turned into insights and used to improve your offerings.

Many NPS surveys offer this text box at the bottom of the questionnaire asking for reasoning behind their responses. This is also a valuable tool to gain better insight into your customer’s specific experiences.

Collect NPS Data with a Survey 

Make sure that during the process of NPS calculation you are determining what specific information you are looking for from your audience. Make sure you know what you need feedback on, where you have the bandwidth to improve, and how you want to segment your customers in order to get the most specific results. 

InMoment can help you get instant NPS analytics when you download the NPS software. Want to try it out? Get a free 30-day trial here.

How to Calculate NPS: The NPS Calculation Process

Once you have the customer feedback (step one), the fun part begins with NPS calculation.

Respondents are classified into three groups based on their answers:

  • Promoters: Rating 9 or 10. Loyal customers who are a great source of referrals.
  • Passives:  Rating 7 or 8. Customers who are satisfied with the service but are susceptible to competitors.
  • Detractors: Rating 0 – 6. Unhappy customers who can damage your brand.
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What is the NPS Formula, and How Does it Work NPS Calculations?

NPS Calculation gives you a clear indication from one moment to the next of how happy your customers are. Real-time tracking can alert you to threats to your business, allowing you to take quick action. Tracked over time, it gives you insight into which of the company’s actions have resulted in the most customer value. Step three is to find the percentage of promoters and detractors. Lastly, step four is to calculate the NPS score using the information you have acquired so far.

To do the actual NPS calculation, subtract the % of respondents who are Detractors from the % of respondents who are Promoters.

NPS = ((# of Promoters – # of Detractors)/Total Survey Participants) x 100

Interpreting Your NPS Score

Now that you’ve calculated your net promoter score, of course you want to know what the number you ended up with actually means. Net promoter scores are expressed as a number ranging from -100 to +100. Any score above 50 is typically a good NPS. This would be because at least 50% of your company is a promoter, while less than 50% would fall under detractor. The most important thing you can do with your net promoter score is acknowledge it, and try to improve it.

Utilizing Customer Feedback

The answer to the open-ended NPS follow-up question tells you the “why” behind the rating. Mining this text for insights is what makes NPS calculation so powerful – because it gives you rich information on the customer experience you’re providing. Analyze the text answers and use them to guide the actions you take.

NPS Survey Feedback

Don’t forget to follow up with the customer and close the feedback loop. Imagine immediately responding to a Detractor’s complaint, targeting your Passives with an information campaign, or asking a Promoter to review your product online.

Creating Additional Questions for Your NPS Survey

When you create an NPS survey, you typically do so with the sole purpose of measuring NPS. However, sometimes you need to measure NPS and acquire additional information that can help you to improve after you’ve learned your NPS score. This is where you need some key driver analysis. While it’s usually used for Customer Acquisition, key driver analysis can help you identify what your strengths and weaknesses are specifically and how you should address them in the future.

Ongoing Voice of the Customer

Repeat the NPS survey at regular intervals. Segment your NPS by types of customers to understand the “why” behind your score and how your decisions impact customer loyalty.

Once you have NPS calculation down, you’ll be ready to add in additional metrics over time at key customer journey touchpoints. When you combine the feedback from your NPS survey with feedback from CSAT (customer satisfaction) and CES (customer effort) surveys, these 3 core CX metrics give you a great foundation for making business decisions based on the authentic voice of the customer feedback.

Build end-user loyalty. Sign up today for free in-app NPS calculation feedback with InMoment.

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How to Ensure Your Brand Promise and Customer Experience Are Always Aligned

By: The InMoment Team

One of the toughest challenges that many brands face is making sure that what they promise lines up with what their customers are experiencing. This alignment is huge for attracting new customers, keeping your current ones, cross-selling to your customer base, and lowering cost to serve. Brands want to succeed for themselves and their customers, so keeping these elements aligned is crucial. However, it’s not always easy.

If you’re looking to make sure your brand promise syncs with your customer experience, never fear! We’ve got a few quick steps you can run through to double-check that everything’s in order:

  1. What is Your Brand Promising?
  2. What is Your Brand Delivering?
  3. What Do Customers Think?

Step #1: What is Your Brand Promising?

This step isn’t as simple as booting up an ad or reading your brand’s website. Those things are important, yes, but be sure to get your marketing and customer experience folks together as you consider this question. Having these two perspectives in the same room is vital to assessing what your brand is promising. Marketing teams offer up ideal goals. Customer experience teams assess how well things are going on the ground.

It’s always good for these two teams to be aligned anyway, but take the time to hash out what exactly your brand is promising. Don’t be afraid to go beyond slogans; take a close look at your organization’s product promise and how it’s being transmitted to customers.

Step #2: What is Your Brand Delivering?

This step is another reason it’s so important to get your CX team on the line for this brand alignment chat. Making a brand promise is one thing, but a CX team will quickly tell you how well that’s playing out in customer interactions. This gives both CX and marketing teams a chance to see where things aren’t quite lining up between brand promise and customer experiences (and gets a good conversation going about solutions).

Step #3: What Do Customers Think?

Your CX team’s perspective is important, but when it comes to evaluating experiences, nothing beats seeing things through your customer’s eyes. What are customers saying about how and why they interact with your brand? How do they feel about the experience you deliver? Is your experience consistent at every touchpoint?

Questions like these go a long way toward spotting the gap between brand alignment and customer experience. More importantly, they give brands a chance to see where things could be better and to shape those touchpoints up. With this process handy, brands can work to align what they promise with what they deliver, creating a better experience for their customers and stronger bottom lines for themselves.

Click here to learn more about the crucial link between CX and marketing, and how uniting those perspectives can transform your entire brand!

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Three 2021 Customer Experience Trends You Need to Know

By: Kiri Burgess, Senior CX Consultant

Looking back on last year, there’s one word that personifies the customer experience industry’s response to 2020’s unprecedented events: adaptation. Very few periods in history have tested and challenged our industry to level up, listen harder, and adapt our efforts to meet customer and employee feedback. With the new year already here, we’ve assembled a list of the three top customer experience (CX) program trends you can look forward to in 2021:

CX Trend #1: The Value of Continuous Listening 

We saw it throughout the year—when circumstances shift, our programs need to adapt as well. New channels, ways of purchasing, servicing, and working emerged overnight as people were suddenly required to stay home, go contactless, and take extra steps to ensure personal safety in a matter of days, or in some cases, overnight.

Ideally, new products, services, and ways of working are tested prior to going live, but this wasn’t always possible in 2020. Therefore, a test and learn mentality proved to be a valuable business asset. Many brands had to and learned to take a “launch first, listen second” approach using an adaptive, always-on listening solution to understand how customers and employees were responding to new initiatives, and then take action to adapt and improve those initiatives. To evolve at speed, brands will need to consider continuing or adopting this approach as external factors such as the Coronavirus require them to change and evolve quickly for success.

Further Reading: How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback

CX Trend #2: Focusing on the (New) Moments that Matter

Respecting our customer’s effort and time continues to be paramount, especially when considering the  busy lives and conflicting priorities customers must balance. Factor in any extra anxiety around COVID-19 and our appreciation for people’s time and energy must be even greater. 

Heading into 2021, it is more important than ever to design and structure a CX program around the key moments that matter to your customers. With all of the changes in 2020, those key moments may have altered slightly or changed all together, especially with the new purchasing and servicing paths that have emerged and new channels that have appeared. Customer journey mapping will help you with this in two ways: 

  1. To identify and prioritise the high-impact and high-emotion moments for your most valued customers
  2. To help employees recognise, react to, and own those moments that matter. From there, you can make meaningful and impactful adjustments to the business. 

Customer journey mapping will more than ever help brands ensure they are respecting their customer’s effort and time by focusing on and enhancing the moments that really matter to them.

Further Reading: Five Steps for Uncovering the Real Customer Journey 

CX Trend #3: Understanding and Communicating the ROI Impact of CX

Many CX programs start out with the belief that “CX is the right thing to do” and are able to gain sponsorship from a senior executive within the organisation based on that logic. However, 2020 brought about greater scrutiny on resources and budgets. So, as we go into 2021, it will be more important than ever for CX teams to understand and prove the return on investment of CX programs. 

Understanding how your CX program supports key financial and business outcomes for your organisation is paramount. To connect the dots, combine your CX and business/financial data, analyze the relationships between the two, working collaboratively with your finance team. Ensure the links are understood across the organization so it is obvious to internal stakeholders that your CX program is contributing to the overall success of the business. Many CX programs initially have the goal ‘to improve the customer experience,’ but undertaking the necessary analysis to prove the financial benefits will ensure ongoing investment for your program and CX initiatives.

Further watching: How to Demonstrate the Value of Experience Improvement to C-Suite and Beyond

Wrapping Up

It goes without saying that 2020 has been a year like no other. As we head into 2021 with new resilience, at InMoment we are looking forward to the upcoming industry trends that will come along with it. Adaptation is what defined 2020, but more importantly, it will be what takes us forward.

‌Here’s to a healthy and happy 2021 for you and yours.

If you’re interested in learning more, here are some of our top content pieces of the year for you to read.

Download here:

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Wootric Joins InMoment to Accelerate CX Innovation and Growth

As we begin this new year, we want to share some great news. 

Today we’re excited to announce that Wootric is joining InMoment, a market leader in customer and employee experience. InMoment serves many of the largest, most sophisticated global organizations from Starbucks to Ford to VMWare. 

This next step in our evolution means great things for our customers and other businesses seeking a modern approach to CX improvement.  

We will continue to deliver the world-class product experience you expect from us. In addition, our pace of innovation and our ability to support our customers around the globe will accelerate as we leverage the considerable resources and expertise of InMoment. 

Our customers will also be able to tap into InMoment’s expertise and enterprise solutions as their CX needs evolve beyond our turnkey approach.

Read the official press release here. 

Seven years ago, we founded Wootric with a mission to empower customer-centricity in every organization through modern, always-on CX improvement.  We launched with a high-response in-app microsurvey and quickly disrupted a dated approach to gathering and responding to Net Promoter Score feedback. 

Guided by input from our customers, we invested in omni-channel feedback collection, AI-driven customer journey analytics, and native integrations with the modern tech stack — all the while staying true to the flexible, lightweight, user-centric approach to CX improvement that businesses expect from Wootric.  

Wootric now delivers the fastest ROI in the Experience Management category on G2.  Over 1200 businesses worldwide, including DocuSign, Zoom, and Comcast, use Wootric software to improve customer lifetime value with insights and action from voice of the customer data.  

We thank our customers, partners, investors, advisors, and above all members of our exceptional team for their support, and for choosing to be on the CX journey with us.  

Together, with InMoment, we will make 2021 an amazing year for customer experience!

With gratitude,

Deepa Subramanian, CEO  &  Jessica Pfeifer, Chief Customer Officer

The founders would also like to extend a special thank you to Steve Gurney at Viant Group for representing Wootric through this process.

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Fight Change with Change: How Brands Can Overcome COVID

By: Simon Fraser, Vice President, XI Strategy

We’ve explored how COVID-19 has changed customer experience (CX) and behaviour in prior conversations, and how those changes are likely to leave the CX landscape altered for the foreseeable future. While the announcement and gradual deployment of a COVID vaccine is certainly cause for hope, it’s important to remember that the pandemic will be with the majority of us a while longer.

This is not the most welcome of news, especially for brands in hard-hit verticals like non-grocery retail and food service, but those organisations still have recourse for keeping their heads above water and thriving in the post-COVID world. Here’s how brands can stay ahead—how they can fight change with change.

Choose Your Transaction

Customers have enjoyed being able to choose how to transact with brands, but the rise of COVID-19 has put most of them on high alert in this regard. Customers are now especially wary of any threats to their health or personal safety, and take these factors into account when considering everything from in-person interactions with employees to touching a self-service kiosk.

As I mentioned in a previous discussion, contactless payments have skyrocketed during COVID-19 and will certainly remain the norm even after this pandemic concludes. There’s a more abstract shift underlying this trend, though, and it’s that customers are expecting brands to deliver greater transaction choice whatever its form. Foot Locker, for example, has continued to offer contactless payments, but has also begun offering Klarna as an online option. Customers have also come to expect these changes at a quicker pace thanks to COVID, and will continue to do so.

Tech’s Time to Shine

As difficult as this pandemic has been for many organisations, it also presents an opportunity to create new, oftentimes unorthodox solutions to the virus and other business challenges. Innovation has gotten many a brand through adverse times before, which is why companies must think outside the technological box as much as their resources will allow.

My favorite example of COVID-era innovation right now is Tesco, which has sought to address the rise in contactless payments by piloting its own drone programme. With this initiative, the grocer is using a fleet of drones to deliver groceries to customers in Ireland, satisfying those individuals’ desire for contactless payments and personal safety all at once. Tesco may very well continue the programme even after the pandemic subsides—after all, the innovations minted during crises rarely just go away after the fact.

A New World

That last idea is something that brands should bear in mind going forward. Not to sound indelicate, but crises come and go. Innovation, however, is forever. Organisations should remember that the tools they’re developing to combat COVID-19 now will likely serve as the foundation of a post-pandemic world. Fighting change with change is not just a stopgap measure; it provides a map for what brands can expect from their customers (and what customers will expect of them) going forward.

Click here to learn more about my take on this subject, the obstacles brands face in the age of COVID, and how they might find success for themselves and their customers as we transition to 2021.

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3 Steps to Intentional Customer Listening

By: The InMoment Team

Listening to customers carries obvious importance for any customer experience (CX) program. Employee and marketplace perspectives are important too, make no mistake, but customer feedback is an incredibly meaningful source of intel on where your brand experience is at, what’s great about it, and what could be better. Because of this, analyst firms like Forrester have begun more critically examining how to achieve intentful listening.

Intentful listening is where customer experience and Experience Improvement (XI) intersect. Experience improvement allows brands to create fundamentally transformed experiences that connect to customers on a deep level, enticing them to return to your brand for more even amid fierce competition or other marketplace conditions. Thus, it makes sense to constantly evaluate how to better listen to customers. Our three-step guide to better listening can help you achieve that goal:

How to Achieve Intentional Customer Listening

  1. Go Beyond Survey Ratings
  2. Contextualize Feedback
  3. Identify Changing Attitudes

Step #1: Go Beyond Survey Ratings

Survey ratings can be a quick source of customer sentiment, but they also run the risk of being too superficial. Or, put another way, numerical ratings and scales are great for rapidly letting brands know whether customers had a great experience or not… but that’s about all the information they provide. Thus, survey ratings are not the best means of listening intently.

To solve this problem (and to delve into deeper listening) brands need to provide customers the chance to express feedback and sentiment in their own terms. This means building surveys that include open-ended questions and utilizing platforms that can effectively analyze the sentiments hidden in that written feedback (also known as unstructured data). This approach, unlike ratings, gives brands actionable feedback that they can work into improvement plans.

Step #2: Contextualize Feedback

Letting customers provide unstructured feedback is a great start, but it’s only the first step toward more intenful listening. To truly understand customer sentiment, brands must also consider the context in which that information is being presented. For example, which element of the experience are customers referring to? Was there a particular step they found praiseworthy or unwieldy?

Contextualizing feedback is just as important as collecting it in an unstructured format if brands want to meaningfully improve the experiences they create. Much like allowing for unstructured data, context goes a long way toward helping brands create specific action plans and, subsequently, meaningful improvement. This is yet another arena that ratings-based questions aren’t always as useful for.

Step #3: Identify Changing Attitudes

Unstructured, contextualized feedback is important enough on its own, but its ability to help brands see the writing on the wall (i.e., identify changing customer tastes and attitudes) cannot be understated. As every experience practitioner knows, customer tastes are anything but static. They evolve and change in response to everything from world events to product trends. Brands that hope to become or remain successful must tune into those changes as they happen, which is why being able to identify changing customer attitudes is so important.

By staying on top of customer tastes and responding accordingly via meaningful experience improvement, brands can demonstrate that they are committed to both improving interactions with customers and staying well aware of the important factors that keep those individuals coming back to them instead of the competition. This constant awareness is the crown jewel of listening intently to customers, and it means the difference between being an industry leader or a follower.

Want to learn how to get more out of your customer listening efforts? Check out our eBook, “How You Listen Matters: Modernizing Your Methods & Approach to Customer Feedback” for free here!

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COVID-19’s Effect on the Investor Mindset (as Told by Our 2020 Wealth Poll)

By: The InMoment Team

There isn’t an organization in the world that has not been affected by COVID-19. But every organization and industry has been affected differently. The same can definitely be said for investment firms, who must also be concerned about the mindset of their investors;  without a keen understanding of the investor mindset, it’s hard for them to develop a strategy for 2021.

That’s why InMoment is releasing the results of its 2020 Wealth Poll, to give investment firms a glimpse into the minds of their clients—and how they’re feeling about the year to come. Today, we’ll take a closer look at what investors are saying specifically about the effects of COVID-19.

What is the 2020 Wealth Poll?

Before we dive into specific takeaways and data, let us give you a few more details about the 2020 Wealth Poll itself. For this study, we surveyed 1,212 investors with over $100,000 of privately held assets. This group included 790 Mass Affluent Investors

($100,000 to less than $1,000,000 in investable assets), 400 High Net Worth Investors ($1,000,000 to less than $10,000,000 in investable assets), and 22 Ultra-High Net Worth Investors ($10,000,000 or more in investable assets). 

Our goal was to understand how the unsettled market has affected affluent investors as well as how they feel about their client experience, and where opportunities may lie for investment firms to improve and expand business. In our survey, we asked a series of questions specifically about the Coronavirus and were able to unearth four key takeaways. Let’s dive in!

Four Takeaways on the Investor Mindset

  1. Investors Don’t Expect a Full Recovery Until Late 2021
  2. Investors Are Staying the Course
  3. Most Have Funds but Many Don’t Plan to Invest
  4. Investment Firms Learned the Lessons of 2010

Key Takeaway #1: Investors Don’t Expect a Full Recovery Until Late 2021

After a decade of success, COVID-19 has cast a shadow of uncertainty over the global economy—and affluent investors aren’t completely sure what to expect. In fact, an overwhelming majority (64%) said they expect the next twelve months to be volatile. 

Regardless of how investors feel, financial services firms and advisors must be prepared to guide investors through the ever-changing market over the next 12 months!

Key Takeaway #2: Investors Stay the Course

Despite investors’ uncertainty concerning the market, 85% of investors say their risk preference has not shifted because of the pandemic. In fact, our results for pre-pandemic risk preference were almost the same as our post-pandemic results.

Key Takeaway #3: Most Have Funds but Many Don’t Plan to Invest

For as many affluent investors who plan to stay flat in 2020, the same amount plan to invest more in their portfolio, despite the fact that 78% report that they have available funds.

From this same question, we also were able to arrive at the conclusion that affluent investors were more likely to invest if they are self-directed investors, believe their investment expertise is higher than average,  or do not work with a dedicated financial advisor.

Key Takeaway #4: Investment Firms Learned the Lessons of 2010

Remember 2010 and the burst of the housing bubble which wreaked havoc on the markets and the economy? In 2010, investors across the board were not happy with how firms responded to the financial crisis. Since that time, investment firms have made significant progress in delivering to their clients.

The proof? Investor satisfaction has held steady the highs achieved during the market’s long bull run even in the midst of the pandemic.  Financial planning, more proactive advice, and better online tools have made investors much happier with the response to the current crisis.

Want to see more data from our 2020 Wealth Poll? You can check out the infographic on the effects of COVID-19 here, or watch the full webinar with each and every insight we collected here! 

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5 Steps to Improve—Not Just Manage—Your Experience

By: The InMoment Team

Since the inception of customer experience (CX), the conversation about feedback and listening tools has largely revolved around data collection. Many brands have emphasized turning listening programs on immediately, gathering feedback from everyone, and using that feedback to inform both metrics and strictly reactive experience management.

Is there not a deeper layer to experience, though? Top-tier analyst firms like Forrester certainly seem to think so. That conversation about gathering feedback, about experience management, is being taken a step further to a new paradigm: Experience Improvement (XI).

Rather than being about reactive management and just watching metrics like NPS, experience improvement encourages brands to amp things up by creating meaningful, emotionally connective experiences for each and every customer. What follows are five steps to getting your program to that level.

Five Steps to Improve Experiences

  1. Design
  2. Listen
  3. Understand
  4. Transform
  5. Realize

Step #1: Design

Until now, most experience program frameworks encourage brands to turn listening posts on immediately and use gathered feedback to shape eventual goals. However, with experience improvement, this model is inverted to great effect. Rather than getting feedback first, forming goals later, brands should carefully think about what objectives they want their program to accomplish and design their listening efforts around those goals.

For example, does your brand want to reduce customer churn by a given percentage? What about increasing retention or acquisition? Whatever your company’s goal, your experience program can help you get much further toward it if you spell out concrete, numbers-driven goals before turning any listening posts on. Frankly, some audiences are also more worth listening to than others, and completing this step can help your brand better decide where to tune in and why.

Step #2: Listen

Once you’ve established your experience program’s goals and audiences, you can then turn your aforementioned listening posts on. Having determined which audiences to listen to before doing so can help your brand consolidate experience program resources toward much more helpful groups. For example, if you’re looking to boost customer retention, it makes more sense to focus on your established customer base than anyone who interacts with your brand in any context. This approach saves your brand time and resources hunting down helpful intel.

Step #3: Understand

After gathering more focused, relevant feedback through your program, take time to carefully digest it and sort out what might need improvement. An experience platform armed with capabilities like sentiment analysis can be a huge help here.  Additionally, it bears repeating that understanding your feedback means more than scoreboard-watching NPS—it means diving deep into customer feedback to understand common themes, praises, problems, and possible solutions.

Step #4: Transform

Understanding your customer feedback is one thing; using it to meaningfully transform the business is another. This is arguably the most work-intensive step of the experience improvement framework… and one of the most important. Meaningful transformation means sharing CX intelligence with leaders across the business (especially in the departments most relevant to the feedback) and working closely with them to outline and implement process improvements. Desiloing data is always a good idea because it gives employees a holistic view of the brand’s purpose.

Step #5: Realize

Realizing experience improvement means circling back to the goals you set forth in the design stage to ascertain how things shook out. Did you meet your program numbers? Perhaps more importantly, have the improvements implemented as a result of your program resulted in positive cultural changes? Having an initial goal to compare your outcome to is vital to realizing experience improvement… and simplifies proving ROI to request more resources for additional efforts.

By following these steps, organizations can transcend managing experiences and start meaningfully improving them. As we mentioned up top, Experience Improvement leads to the sorts of deeply connective experiences that keep customers coming back no matter what, leading to fundamental brand success.

To read more about these five steps—and brands who have found success with them—check out this article for free today!

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