How to Collect Customer Feedback to Boost Business Revenue

Collecting customer feedback helps organizations understand their customers better and manage their experiences for positive business outcomes. Focusing on the most effective methods of feedback collection enables you to save time and costs without compromising on the quality of insights you capture.
Shot of a young call centre agent working in an office

From onboarding the customer to converting them into a loyal brand advocate, each step of the customer journey is an opportunity to learn how your customer views your business. Are they satisfied with your overall product? Is there anything about your service they wish they could change? How likely are they to recommend your brand to their friends? Knowing how to collect customer feedback is crucial to delivering consistent value as a business and staying ahead of your competition.

Why is Collecting Customer Feedback Important?

Collecting customer feedback is important for businesses because it gives them a roadmap for boosting customer satisfaction and retention. This practice is at the core of a successful customer-centric approach that is impactful for the following reasons:

  • It provides insight into customer behavior and expectations. Without an understanding of their customers’ needs and goals, a business might as well be walking in the dark! A clear understanding of your customers enables you to offer personalized services, which is what 60% of customers cite as their reason for becoming repeat buyers.
  • It helps pinpoint issues that are hurting your business. Categorizing and analyzing feedback is a great way to identify aspects of your operations that are creating pain points for customers.
  • It enables you to manage dissatisfied customers. Collecting feedback is the first step to successful customer experience management. 49% of customers who left a brand they had been loyal to over the past 12 months cited poor CX as their reason. By actively listening to dissatisfied customers, you can resolve their issues more effectively and improve your chances of retaining them or, at the very least, enhancing your brand reputation.
Summarized customer feedback that explain why customers don't like a restaurant.
  • It helps you retain satisfied customers for the long term. Not only does collecting customer feedback help identify issues, but it also highlights what’s working well for satisfied customers. By continuing to focus on features that have a positive impact, you can improve every aspect of the customer journey.
  • It generates ideas for product enhancement. Customer feedback also includes suggestions and feature requests, which can guide strategy on further improving your product to boost business revenue.
  • It helps reduce customer service costs for your business. By understanding common challenges for customers and how to resolve them quickly, your business can reduce the time it takes to offer effective customer support. As a result, you spend less on customer service.

Successful Ways of Collecting Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback doesn’t have to be tedious or inefficient. The following tried-and-test methods will help you capture actionable insights from your customers so that you can improve and evolve as a business.

  • Make it easy to provide feedback. Customers are more likely to complete simple and user-friendly surveys. In fact, once respondents begin a survey, there is a sharp surge in their drop-off rate for each additional question up to 15 questions! Therefore, a good practice is to make your feedback forms and surveys simple and concise. Tools like InMoment’s Survey Builder enable customized survey design to help you capture customer insights easily and quickly while reducing survey fatigue.
Survey design builder to help collect customer feedback
  • Ask your customers relevant and impactful questions. Focusing on the right questions helps you keep your surveys concise and gather high-quality feedback. For instance, if you want targeted feedback on your checkout process, you need to query customers on that specific touchpoint instead of asking them about their general thoughts on your business.
  • Leverage interactions with customers via live chat. Given that 72% of customers want immediate service, the live chat feature goes a long way toward customer satisfaction. Data from live chat interactions presents opportunities to learn about customer expectations, including common complaints or remarks.
  • Use conversational surveys to engage customers in impactful dialogue. Conversational surveys provide an interactive means of collecting feedback from customers. While they can elicit higher-quality feedback due to their mobile and conversational nature, they can be time-consuming to create and manage.  InMoment’s AI-powered Active Listening™ feature can simplify this process for you by listening and responding to customers in real-time without the need for human intervention.
Conversational intelligence in surveys that solicit more customer feedback
  • Collect feedback right after the purchase or service for accurate insights. Asking customers for feedback right after they complete a transaction helps you capture raw and honest thoughts on this key touchpoint. It also strengthens customer relationships, as buyers feel valued when their opinions are taken into consideration every step of the way.
  • Monitor social media comments and reviews. Social media is the top choice for US consumers when communicating with brands. Both positive and negative experiences are even more amplified when customers share them with their followers or online networks. A robust reputation management software like InMoment provides a complete picture of social media sentiment toward your brand and helps you generate the best possible responses by leveraging generative AI. These features empower you to make the most of online feedback and use it to enhance your brand reputation.
AI generating responses to Google reviews.
  • Connect with your customers via an online community. You can engage with your customers on a deeper level by creating an online community around your product or service. From Discord servers to Facebook groups, these communities provide access to targeted opinions and help boost your brand culture.
  • Offer rewards to incentivize customer feedback. Collecting feedback can be challenging when customers don’t feel inclined to do so. One tried-and-tested method of incentivizing feedback is to offer a valuable reward in exchange. From discounts to gift cards, these rewards not only encourage feedback but also foster customer loyalty. 
  • Integrate feedback forms on your website. Customers like knowing that they have options to express themselves while they are using your product. Adding feedback forms to your website makes it easier to collect your customers’ opinions at crucial touchpoints and gain their trust over time.
  • Measure your CX performance. By gathering feedback on how well your customer service team and contact centers are handling customer interactions and resolving issues, you can determine key areas for improvement. This practice helps you continuously improve your customer service and contact center optimization, which results in higher satisfaction and retention rates.
Contact center agent and manager dashboards to track performance metrics
  • Use icons and emojis to create short and sweet surveys. Customers might not be inclined to say much sometimes, especially after a neutral or even positive experience. A great way to improve response rates in these cases is to include icons (stars, thumbs up/down, etc.) and emojis that customers can simply click on to express themselves.
  • Include in-app feedback collection messages. An in-app request for feedback is convenient for customers as they don’t have to go to a third-party website to provide opinions. It’s also a great way to engage inactive users by sending them notifications for feedback after a certain period of inactivity.

How to Collect Feedback from Clients?

Sometimes, collecting feedback from clients calls for a tailored approach, especially when it comes to distinguishing between B2C and B2B interactions.

Collecting Client Feedback

When capturing insights from other businesses, you want to focus on more detailed and structured feedback collection. Methods like one-on-one interviews, comprehensive surveys, and dedicated online portals help gather specific and detailed context from decision-makers to enhance the B2B customer experience.

Collection Consumer Feedback

On the other hand, B2C feedback collection should prioritize simplicity and convenience while maintaining the quality of insights. This is because B2C clients usually expect quicker and more user-friendly ways to interact with the business or to resolve their issues. Methods like conversational surveys, simple feedback forms, live chat, and social media reviews are proven ways of successfully engaging B2C clients for feedback collection.

Collecting Customer Feedback for the First Time

A good practice for encouraging feedback from first-time customers is to keep it simple. The following feedback metrics enable businesses to quickly identify areas for improvement without intimidating new customers:

  1. Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a customer loyalty metric that measures how likely customers are to recommend a product or service to their colleagues, typically on a scale of 1-10. Based on the NPS value, customers are categorized as detractors (1-6), passives (7 or 8), and promoters (9 or 10).
  2. Customer Effort Score (CES) measures how easy it was for customers to perform a specific activity, like placing an order or reaching out to customer support. Typical methods include using a 7-point scale, emoticon survey, or even an open-ended question. A more positive CES score indicates that the customer experienced very little friction in completing a task.
  3. Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT) queries customers on how satisfied they are with the product or service, typically on a scale of 1-5. The higher the CES provided by the customer, the more satisfied they are with the business. This metric provides a quick snapshot of customer satisfaction, which is especially useful when collecting feedback from first-time users.

Example Questions to Gather Customer Feedback

The quality of feedback you collect is strongly linked to the clarity and specificity of the questions you ask. Some examples of questions to capture valuable insights from customers include:

  1. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our productivity app to a friend or colleague? (NPS)
  2. How easy was it to track your shipment on our website? (CES)
  3. On a scale of 1-5, how satisfied are you with the overall shopping experience? (CSAT)
  4. What can we do to make your experience better? (open-ended)
  5. On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our web hosting service for its cost-effectiveness? (B2B NPS)
  6. Was there anything about your experience that didn’t meet your expectations?

Challenges of Collecting Customer Feedback

Collecting customer feedback is a great way to make your brand stand out, but it comes with several challenges, including:

  1. Capturing detailed and meaningful feedback. Customers may provide short and vague responses, which can make it difficult to identify specific areas for improvement. For instance, a customer might say, “It was okay,” without going into detail as to what could have been improved. InMoment addresses the challenge of capturing detailed and meaningful feedback. Our patented Active Listening solution overcomes this by using advanced AI to encourage rich, context-driven conversations. This technology allows businesses to understand the reasons behind customer responses, ensuring that feedback is more detailed and actionable. 
  2. Asking the right questions every time. High-quality questions are likely to yield high-quality responses. However, determining the right questions to ask can be quite tricky at times. If the questions are too broad or irrelevant, the feedback may not be useful. Businesses often struggle to come up with questions that will provide actionable data aligning with their goals.
  3. Managing an overwhelming amount of feedback. The more feedback you collect as a business, the higher the volume of responses and insights you will have to manage. Sorting through and analyzing the data to find common trends or issues can be time-consuming and challenging without proper tools or processes in place. InMoment leverages artificial intelligence, machine learning, and self-serve analytical tools to uncover critical insights, enabling you to explore specific areas of interest within 100% of your experience data from various sources across your business. This saves you and your CX team significant time by eliminating the need to manually sift through large volumes of data to find valuable insights. With our software, your team can focus on prioritizing and executing actions that drive the most impact, enabling you to achieve a faster customer experience ROI.
  4. Prioritizing feedback for business goals. Even after collecting and analyzing feedback, businesses face the challenge of deciding which insights to act on first. Not all feedback will have the same impact on customer satisfaction or business growth, so prioritizing which areas to address can be difficult.
  5. Interrupting the Customer Experience. Collecting customer feedback, especially within digital interactions, can be viewed as intrusive, ill-timed, or irrelevant to the customer’s journey. This not only diminishes the overall customer experience but also creates skewed or misleading data. Customers might respond hastily or negatively due to the inconvenience, which can distort insights and lead to inaccurate reporting.

How to Collect Customer Feedback Without Ruining the Experience

To avoid interrupting the customer journey to obtain customer feedback, it’s essential to design requests that are integrated seamlessly into the digital experience—ensuring that they are relevant, timely, and respectful of the customer’s context. This thoughtful approach not only enhances the quality of feedback collected but also reinforces a positive brand experience.

Tip #1: Map Out Possible Site Pathways for Customization

Instead of drafting one intercept survey to serve your entire site, consider all the different touchpoints you want to collect data from and then craft questions.

  • Keep in mind how users are browsing your site and craft intercepts around that information. For instance, a feedback tab may be perfect for desktop users, but it’s far too small in size for mobile users. Consider using a banner on your mobile site instead.
  • Be creative by using triggers to target specific user groups for feedback. For example, if you want to collect more feedback from customers in a specific state, you can set a trigger based on IP addresses.
  • Avoid asking unnecessary questions or irrelevant questions. 

Tip #2: Gear Questions Toward the User’s Specific Experience

In order to get the best feedback possible, you have to ask the right questions about the right experience for each type of customer. For instance, a question asking about the checkout experience would be irrelevant to a customer who has yet to make a purchase. Instead, set a trigger for an intercept to appear for a customer with a few lingering items in their bag to learn why they haven’t taken the plunge. 

  • Keep it simple. Surveys that are too long are less likely to be completed and also take away from the user experience. Try to keep it to a few high-quality questions so you can get the information you need without losing your customer’s attention.
  • Revisit the map of possible visitor pathways you created to help prescribe questions to specific user situations. The more tailored your questions can be to a customer scenario, the better. For example, you can ask specific questions targeting those who use the mobile site in order to improve the mobile design and experience.
  • Don’t have a survey form pop up right away. 

Tip #3: Give Customers Time to Provide Informed Feedback

The phrase “garbage in, garbage out” is especially relevant when you’re collecting data; if you aren’t collecting quality feedback, your insights won’t create real business impact. This is why it’s especially important to give your customers the opportunity to navigate your site before asking them to give you feedback.

  • Strategically place a feedback tab or another always-available channel on the website for instant feedback. This way, customers have the ability to provide you with feedback outside of the triggers you’ve set up.
  • Set up an intercept for customers who have lingered on the site for some time but haven’t made a purchase or reached out. This allows you to check in and see if they have any questions or concerns.

When setting up a method to collect customer feedback, consider whether it will enhance or disrupt your customer’s experience. By ensuring that each question adds value and contributes to a positive interaction, you position yourself to collect more meaningful feedback and insights, ultimately leading to a greater business impact.

Make Collecting Customer Feedback Easy with InMoment 

Collecting customer feedback is a powerful tool for transforming your business, especially with its positive impact on customer relationships and brand reputation. From AI-powered conversational surveys to effective social media monitoring, InMoment helps you make the most of every piece of insight you collect from your customers. To see how you can simplify the feedback collection process for your business, schedule a demo today!

References 

Zendesk. 35 customer experience statistics to know for 2024. (https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/). Accessed 10/01/2024.

SurveyMonkey. Does adding one more question impact survey completion rate? (https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/survey_questions_and_completion_rates). Accessed 10/01/2024.

Emplifi. 11 key things consumers expect from their brand experiences today. (https://go.emplifi.io/us-uk-customer-expectations-report.html). Accessed 10/02/2024.

How to Improve Customer Experience In Your Organization

Working to improve customer experience is an important part of CX management and something that organizations should be continuously striving for. If your customer experience does not evolve with your business, it can negatively impact your revenue and overall business performance.
Group of people in a business meeting working to improve customer experience

Did you know that when you improve customer experience, you can realize financial benefits that directly affect the growth of your organization? By improving customer experience, you can: 

  • Increase sales revenue by up to 7%
  • Increase cross-sell rates by up to 25%
  • Increase shareholder return by up to 10%

These statistics show that customer experience improvement is something that should be a priority across your entire organization, rather than being a siloed effort. 

What is Customer Experience Improvement? 

Customer experience improvement refers to enhancing the interactions and overall satisfaction a customer has with your business across all touchpoints. This involves understanding customer needs and expectations, as well as any pain points they have in the customer journey, and working to address them. 

The goal of customer experience improvement is to create a positive customer experience where the customer always feels supported. 

What is A Customer Experience Improvement Program?

A customer experience improvement program is a structured initiative designed to enhance the interactions a customer has with a brand. Customer experience programs are built upon strategies for gathering customer feedback, analyzing voice of the customer data, and implementing changes to the customer experience. 

A customer experience program helps your organization improve customer experience by facilitating cross-functional collaboration between various departments such as sales, marketing, support, etc. 

Benefits of Improving Customer Experience

When you improve customer experience, you will notice benefits that reach every part of the organization. Some of the benefits of improving customer experience include: 

Increased Customer Loyalty

When you have a consistently positive customer experience, you will create loyal customers. Customers will become loyal to your brand after a varying number of positive experiences. 50% agree that it takes between three and four purchases, while 37% agree it takes more than five purchases. But, by improving customer experience, you will have no problem achieving these customer milestones and increasing customer loyalty

Higher Customer Lifetime Value

Satisfied customers tend to spend more over time, especially when compared to new customers. By improving customer experience, you increase the customer lifetime value by encouraging repeat purchases, cross-selling, and upselling opportunities. 

Improved Customer Satisfaction 

You will increase customer satisfaction by improving customer experience and reducing the pain points in the customer journey. As a result, those satisfied customers will be more likely to recommend your products or services to others. 

Enhanced Brand Reputation 

When you improve customer experience, customers will trust you more. And 88% of customers who trust a brand will become repeat customers. Improving customer experience will also result in increased brand equity, which is a key determining factor in what organizations consumers choose to give their business to. 

Stronger Competitive Advantage

In competitive industries, customer experience is often a key differentiating factor. As a matter of fact, 93% of businesses cite CX as either a primary differentiator or a partial differentiator. Improving the customer experience will help your business stand out in the market and attract more customers. 

10 Ways to Improve Customer Experience

It can be easy to get overwhelmed with all the things that can be done to improve customer experience for your organization. However, these ten action items represent the most important and impactful factors of the customer experience. 

1. Listen to Customer Feedback

Most companies receive customer feedback, but few organizations take the steps necessary to listen to and implement customer feedback in their organization. It is important that you actively examine the voice of customer data to understand what is going well, and what could be improved, in your customer experience. You can also improve customer experience by utilizing tools like sentiment analysis, which will help you analyze unstructured data. 

How Can Sentiment Analysis Be Used to Improve Customer Experience

Sentiment analysis can be a powerful tool for improving customer experience by providing real-time insights into how customers feel about your products or services. By analyzing text data from reviews, social media, surveys, and support tickets, your business can identify trends in customer emotions as well as promptly address complaints, and adjust your offering based on customer sentiments.

A sentiment analysis that shows trending keywords by sentiment.

2. Personalize Interactions

The majority of today’s consumers expect personalized interactions. You can improve customer experience by tailoring communications and offerings based on individual customer behaviors. 

Examples of Personalized Interactions

For example, an e-commerce website might suggest a hat to go with a recently purchased shirt. Or a financial services institution might notice a customer opening a new savings account and suggest they meet with an in-house financial advisor. 

3. Streamline Processes

One of the best ways to improve customer experience is to improve organizational performance. If your organization is operating efficiently, your customers will almost certainly experience an efficient experience. For example, undergoing contact center optimization may help customer profiles become more easily accessible to agents. If agents can access customer information easier, they can improve issue resolution time and, as a result, improve the customer experience. 

4. Train Employees 

You can improve customer experience by ensuring that your employees are equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to deliver excellent service. Furthermore, suppose you understand the importance of employee loyalty. In that case, you know that employee retention is crucial in keeping costs low so that more time and effort can be spent trying to improve customer experience. 

Employee training goes beyond the onboarding process. It is also important to effectively manage and train employees continuously throughout their careers. Tracking employee statistics and their engagement with customers will help you train them to provide the best service.

Case management dashboard where employees can see top priority issues.

5. Reduce Customer Churn

It might seem counterintuitive to try and improve customer experience by decreasing customer churn. But, the two are closely related. If you analyze your customer churn rate and find out what is driving churn, you can implement initiatives to eliminate churn factors in your organization. 

By removing the things that are causing your customers to leave, you will give them more of a reason to stay, which will improve customer experience. 

6. Reward Loyal Customers

Implement a customer loyalty or rewards program that acknowledges and incentivizes repeat business. 83% of consumers say that belonging to a loyalty program influences them to buy from a brand again. By offering discounts, early access to new products, or other perks, you can retain loyal customers by creating a sense of appreciation and rewarding them for doing business with your brand. 

7. Offer Self-Service Options

79% of consumers expect organizations to provide self-service tools, and 77% view organizations more positively when they do. By offering self-service options, you can help customers save time while simultaneously reducing the pressure on support teams. This leads to overall increased issue resolution and increased satisfaction. 

8. Respond to Reviews

Responding to reviews is an important part of improving the end-to-end customer experience. InMoment research shows that the majority of consumers expect organizations to respond to reviews within a week, but 63% of consumers say they’ve never heard back from a business after leaving a review. Responding to reviews is an important part of making your customers feel valued and understand the real-time performance of your customer experience efforts. 

With InMoment’s reputation management software, you can utilize AI to generate review responses. The responses can be tailored to your organization to match your brand’s tone and style guidelines. This functionality can make sure all customer reviews receive a response in a timely manner. 

AI generated review responses.

9. Create an Omnichannel Experience

An omnichannel customer experience allows customers to have a consistent journey across all platforms whether online, in person, via mobile app, or over the phone. Customers should be able to switch channels without having to repeat information or experience a delay. By creating an omnichannel experience, you make it easier for your customers to interact with your brand how they want to, which will improve their experience. 

10. Track Customer Experience Metrics

You can continuously work to improve customer experience by tracking customer experience KPIs. You can use metrics such as Net Promoter Score (NPS), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and Customer Effort Score (CES) to monitor specific aspects of your customer experience and identify areas of improvement. By attaching metrics to your customer experience efforts, you make it easier to ensure that customer needs are consistently met and also gives you the ability to show customer experience ROI to key stakeholders in your organization. 

InMoment’s XI Platform gives you an overview of how your organization is performing on your most important metric, with the ability to dive deeper into specific aspects of the reporting. The XI platform also identifies the biggest areas for improvement to help you continue to realize CX success. 

Customer experience dashboard that shows a drop in CSAT and where the biggest areas for improvement are.

Improving customer experience is an initiative that requires alignment throughout your entire organization. While the tips listed above represent a great starting point in your customer experience improvement journey, some industries require more specific focuses to move the needle. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Retail

The ecommerce customer experience for retail brands has become increasingly important as consumers spend more time online shopping each year. In order to improve the overall retail experience, you need to take into account the ways in which your customers prefer to shop. Here are some tips to improve customer experience in retail: 

1. Offer Omnichannel Shopping Experiences

Retail consumers expect to switch between channels during their shopping experience easily. In the last 5 years, buy online pickup in store (BOPIS) orders have increased by over 200%. This means that more consumers than ever are starting their shopping online, and finishing it in-store. To account for this, ensure that your store is up to date with the latest technology so that these orders can be completed seamlessly. 

2. Implement Virtual Try-Ons

Using augmented reality technology to allow customers to try products virtually will enhance their shopping experience. One retailer saw that when a customer engaged with AR technology, they had a conversion rate that was 90% higher than customers who did not engage with the same technology. Utilizing this technology creates an interactive and engaging experience that helps customers make informed decisions and reduces returns. 

3. Curate Personalized Product Recommendations

88% of consumers are more likely to continue shopping with a brand that gave them a personalized experience, and 68% of consumers bought an item that they didn’t intend to based on recommendations. Using customer data to curate personalized product recommendations will increase customer loyalty and customer lifetime value. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Financial Services

The financial services customer experience has changed a lot in recent years. Consumers are rarely visiting branches, and digital banking usage has increased exponentially. However, there are some values that all financial consumers share, and capitalizing on those will help your institution improve customer experience. 

1. Implement Personalized Financial Advice

Use data analytics to provide personalized financial advice based on customers’ spending habits, life stages, and goals. For example, InMoment research found that 25% of Gen Z and Millennials were not interested in pensions and retirement plans. These customers would prefer to hear about other money management opportunities. Consider implementing online portals or virtual advisor meetings that allow for these consumers to get personalized advice. Offering tailored financial advice will make customers feel valued and increase customer loyalty. 

2. Focus on Security and Fraud Prevention

InMoment research found that 90% of financial consumers were concerned about cybersecurity. In order to retain these customers, they need to trust that your organization will keep their data secure. Implementing advanced fraud detection systems, offering two-factor authentication, and regularly educating customers on cybersecurity practices can enhance trust and create a sense of security.

3. Develop Financial Literacy Programs

One of the best ways to retain financial services customers is to assist in their education. Offering educational resources such as webinars, tutorials, or guides, can empower customers to educate themselves and make informed decisions. By supporting financial education, you show your customers that you care about their long-term financial well-being. 

How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare

In order to improve customer experience in healthcare, you need to make it easier for patients to engage with your practice. In an increasingly digital world, patients are spending less time making phone calls to a provider’s office and spending more time researching and booking appointments online. Here are three main things you can do to improve the healthcare customer experience

1. Simplify Appointment Scheduling

The majority of consumers prefer to book appointments through digital channels such as online or via a mobile app as opposed to calling an office. To match this demand, make sure your practice has user-friendly scheduling systems that can be accessed from multiple devices. By offering these services along with appointment reminders, you make it easier for new and current patients to book and attend their appointments. 

2. Manage Local Listings and Reviews

It has never been more important for healthcare providers to have up-to-date information online. The quality and completeness of a provider’s profile is the most important factor to someone looking to book an appointment. Reviews are also important, as patients read an average of five reviews before choosing a provider. 

Consider choosing a local listings management software to help you ensure that your practice has the most accurate information available to prospective patients. This can also be used alongside a review management platform that will help you monitor and respond to reviews across the most important sites such as Google, Yelp, and Healthgrades. 

3. Build Mobile-Friendly Pages

When conducting research and reading reviews about a provider, almost 70% of patients prefer to use a smartphone or tablet. Similarly, the use of laptops or desktops to do this same research has dropped by almost 30%. In order to make your pages available to consumers on all devices, make sure that your website can support mobile devices, tablets, and desktop computers. This functionality will allow all consumers to view information about your practice and read reviews with ease. 

Why Improving Customer Experience Is Important for Organizational Performance

Improving customer experience is important for organizational performance because it can directly affect the amount of revenue your organization generates. Forrester research shows that improving your CX Index score by just one point can generate anywhere from $36 million to $1.2 billion in additional annual revenue depending on your industry. 

Improving customer experience gives customers more of a reason to stay customers, as well as recommend your organization to others. By finding the relationship between CX and growth in your business, you can accurately predict the financial improvement driven by CX improvement. 

How to Start a Customer Experience Improvement Program

Starting a customer experience improvement program is a step forward to becoming a customer-focused organization. When starting from scratch, there are three important things to consider to improve customer experience. 

1. Define the Vision and Goals

Start by outlining the kind of customer experience your organization is trying to deliver. This should align closely with your brand’s values and overall business strategy. Furthermore, choose which customer experience metrics your customer experience improvement program will track. You can choose between customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), customer effort (CES), or any other metric that makes sense for your business. 

2. Secure Executive Support

It is important to make sure that the leadership and executive team at your organization understand the importance of CX and are committed to supporting the program. This will help secure resources and drive organizational alignment. 

After you have received executive support, you will want to appoint a CX leader. This can be a singular person or a team. The CX leader will spearhead the program’s initiatives and ensure accountability. 

3. Map the Customer Journey

After setting your goals and securing buy-in, you are ready to get started. You can start by utilizing customer journey mapping to understand the journey your customers go through when choosing to do business with you. This will help you understand the most important touchpoints and make an initial plan. 

To see a more in-depth look of running a customer experience improvement program, check out all the capabilities you gain with a dedicated customer experience platform

Improve Customer Experience with InMoment 

InMoment’s customer experience platform is designed to help you improve customer experience, regardless of if you are just getting started or already have an established system. Our best-in-class tools and experienced consultants will help you improve your main metrics. To see how InMoment’s platform can be customized to fit your needs, schedule a demo today!

References 

Mckinsey & Company. Experience-led growth: A new way to create value. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/experience-led-growth-a-new-way-to-create-value). Accessed 9/13/2024. 

Mckinsey & Company. Prediction: The future of Customer Experience. (https://www.mckinsey.com/tr/our-insights/prediction-the-future-of-customer-experience). Accessed 9/13/2024. 

Deloitte Insights. Challenging the orthodoxies of brand trust. (https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/leadership/brand-trust-and-challenging-orthodoxies.html). Accessed 9/16/2024. 

yotpo. How Many Purchases Does it Take to Create Brand Loyalty? (https://www.yotpo.com/blog/purchases-brand-loyalty/). Accessed 9/17/2024. 

Forrester. How Customer Experience Drives Business Growth, 2022. (https://www.forrester.com/report/how-customer-experience-drives-business-growth-2022/RES177564). Accessed 9/18/2024. 

Yotpo. The State of Brand Loyalty 2022. (https://www.yotpo.com/the-state-of-brand-loyalty-2022/).  Accessed 10/1/2024.

Higher logic. 15 Customer Self-Service and Experience Stats To Know (2020). (https://vanilla.higherlogic.com/blog/customer-self-service-stats-2020/). Accessed 10/1/2024.

Adobe. Adobe Digital Economy Index. (https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/dx/us/en/experience-cloud/digital-insights/pdfs/adobe_analytics-digital-economy-index-2020.pdf).  Accessed 10/1/2024.

Retail Customer Experience. Why retailers should embrace augmented reality in the wake of COVID-19. (https://www.retailcustomerexperience.com/articles/why-retailers-should-embrace-augmented-reality-in-the-wake-of-covid-19/).  Accessed 10/1/2024.

Elastic. Personalization’s critical role in converting ecommerce searches into sales. (https://www.elastic.co/explore/improving-digital-customer-experiences/personalizations-critical-role-in-converting-ecommerce-searches-into-sales). Accessed 10/1/2024.

Customer Experience Management: Why It’s Key for Retention and Growth

Customer Experience Management (CXM) helps businesses oversee and manage every aspect of a customer’s interaction with their brand. By providing rich insights into customer behavior, CXM informs strategies for improving customer retention and brand reputation.
Shot of two young businesswomen talking to each other while being seated in the office at work

A customer’s experience doesn’t start and end with purchasing your product or service. It’s a journey encompassing every point of interaction with your brand, from the initial awareness to leaving an online review. Managing this experience through a customer-centric approach can help businesses strengthen their customer relationships for long-term success.

What is Customer Experience Management?

To grasp customer experience management, it’s essential to first understand customer experience itself. Customer Experience (CX) is the overall perception someone has of your brand based on their thoughts and feelings after each interaction with your business.

From visiting your Instagram page to buying your product, each touchpoint along a customer’s journey contributes to their feelings about your brand and what it offers. If those feelings are largely positive, the customer is likely to become a loyal advocate for you and help enhance your brand reputation. In fact, businesses that prioritize CX witness an 80% increase in revenue, which further underscores the impact of a customer-centric approach. 

Furthermore, organizations that choose InMoment for the customer experience management solution realize ROI in half the time compared to competitors

Chart showing that InMoment software realizes ROI 2x faster than competitors.

To see how much customer experience ROI InMoment can deliver for you by utilizing the XI platform, fill out the ROI calculator below:

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Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the set of processes that aims to deliver that positive experience to your customers at each step of their journey. It helps brands track, analyze, and organize each customer interaction with them. As a result, businesses gain valuable insight into customer expectations, which guides strategy on boosting retention and loyalty.

Importance of Customer Experience Management

Focusing on delivering a positive customer experience gives you a crucial edge over your competition. Here is how customer experience management helps make that possible for you:

  • It enhances customer retention and loyalty. 83% of customers agree that they feel more loyal to brands that listen to their concerns and resolve their pain points. CXM will help you improve customer retention by giving you a better understanding of your customers. 
  • It increases revenue by bringing more sales from existing customers. By guiding you toward practices that improve customer satisfaction, CXM helps you boost sales. This is because satisfied customers are likely to interact with you again and recommend you to their peers.
  • It enables continuous improvement. Feedback collected and analyzed from customers as a result of CXM provides insights into continuously improving your products and services.
  • It helps you stand out by offering personalized customer experiences. 77% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that understands their specific needs and goals. CXM helps you differentiate your brand from the competition by creating memorable interactions that make customers feel heard and valued.

CXM vs CRM: How They Differ?

It’s easy to think of CXM and customer relationship management (CRM) as the same processes because they both offer a better understanding of customers through data. But, they have a few key differences as they address different aspects of the customer’s interactions with the brand.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Definition

CRM helps businesses understand customer profiles to increase sales and revenue. It involves the use of tools that highlight a customer’s purchasing habits. 

For instance, if a customer actively interacts with your brand during the last week of each month, your business could enhance its marketing efforts during this time for increased customer engagement.

Customer Experience Management (CXM) Definition

CXM, on the other hand, focuses on improving the overall customer experience beyond just transactional touchpoints. It involves the collection and analysis of customer feedback across all touchpoints, from the first visit to the company website to conversations with customer support. The feedback is used to improve the quality of each interaction so that a customer develops and maintains a positive perception of the brand. 

For example, you can segment customers based on shared experiences or traits. If you notice a group of customers received discount codes that didn’t work, you can group them together resolve the issue in order to prevent customer churn

Customer segmentation and issue resolution within the InMoment XI Platform.

Customer Experience Management Best Practices

Effective customer experience management involves making the most of the data and tools available to your business. With the right approach, you can optimize the utilization of your resources to track the customer’s experience across all touchpoints of their journey.

Here are a few CXM best practices to collect rich insights into your customers:

  1. Build and maintain customer profiles. Understanding all your customers is the first step toward improving their satisfaction rates. Each customer has a certain profile that describes their specific needs and goals. By evaluating these various user personas, you can deliver consistent and valued experiences to your customers.
  2. Personalize your customer interactions. Maintaining user profiles also allows you to create personalized experiences for your customers. For instance, you can send product recommendations to customers based on their specific persona, making it more likely for them to make a purchase.
  3. Collect customer feedback at each stage of the journey. Surveying your customers at each step of their journey gives you comprehensive data on their complete experience. From the onboarding stage to the moment they choose to leave, gathering feedback across all stages ensures you don’t miss out on valuable insights.
  4. Invest in a comprehensive CXM platform. You can gain a significant advantage over your competition by investing in a robust CXM platform. The right tools will offer features like real-time feedback collection, omnichannel support, and sentiment analysis to help you make data-driven decisions on enhancing customer experience.
  5. Encourage a customer-centric culture. By prioritizing customer satisfaction throughout your organization, you can align your departments toward developing the best possible CXM strategy. Customer-centric companies are also 60% more profitable than their competitors.

Customer Experience Management Examples

The goal of customer experience management is to make informed decisions on retaining customers and transforming them into passionate advocates for your brand. Let’s look at a few examples of how businesses put CXM into practice:

  1. An online sports watch retailer enables omnichannel support to let customers interact with them via Instagram, email, and live support chat. The options make it easier for customers to voice their suggestions or complaints.
  2. A productivity tool startup sends Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to its customers and analyzes the responses to see how it can further improve its product.
  3. A hotel chain implements a loyalty program to reward repeat customers with points that can be redeemed for discounts or other special offers. The program is likely to boost satisfaction and give existing customers an incentive to book rooms in the future.
  4. An e-commerce app analyzes customers’ purchasing behaviors to send personalized recommendations to them via notifications and email. This strategy makes customers feel more connected and loyal to the brand.

Advantages of Customer Experience Management

Customer experience management offers the following advantages to businesses:

  • It enables continuous improvement in customer experience. Improving CX is never a one-and-done process. By tracking patterns and trends in customer behavior, CXM helps businesses stay attuned to their customer’s evolving needs and goals.
  • It helps enhance customer loyalty. CXM is all about placing the customer at the core of the business. This approach makes customers feel valued, making it likely that you retain them for the long term and reduce customer churn.
  • It reduces customer service costs. By improving the contact center experience, CXM helps lower the cost of serving customers. The feedback from customers provides actionable insight into how issues can be resolved quickly. When you utilize InMoment’s conversation intelligence software, you can understand individual speaker insights with customizable NLP. 
  • It enhances brand reputation. Loyal customers are also more likely to recommend your business online or to their peers. This positive word-of-mouth enhances the brand’s online reputation by establishing it as a trustworthy business.

Moreover, CXM helps identify pain points throughout the customer journey that can be addressed to make continuous improvements. Here is a quick look at how you can improve each phase of the journey with this approach:

  1. Awareness: CXM allows you to build user profiles that you can target with your marketing efforts to ensure more prospects find your brand during their research phase.
  2. Consideration: Your enhanced brand reputation as a result of focusing on CX will make it more likely that prospects consider your specific products and services over those of your competitors.
  3. Purchase: Collecting and analyzing the customer’s purchase will help you understand their goals and expectations from your brand.
  4. Retention: The insights gained from analyzing a customer’s purchase patterns and behavior help you retain them by offering personalized support and recommendations.
  5. Loyalty: Delivering consistent value to your customers across their journey with the help of CXM will eventually convert them into loyal consumers.

Therefore, by engaging customers and delivering personalized experiences, CXM helps businesses drive revenue and gain a competitive edge in the market.

Challenges of Customer Experience Management

A keen understanding of common CXM challenges can help you invest in the right tools and strategies for your business. The majority of CX programs are ineffective at driving systemic improvements because they face one or more of the following challenges:

  • Lack of customer data. You need sufficient Voice of the Customer (VoC) data to pinpoint issues, trends, and opportunities for improvement. If your CX datasets are sparse, it will be difficult to make accurate assumptions about customer behavior and expectations.
  • Absence of qualitative data. While quantitative metrics are valuable in their own right, combining them with qualitative insights provides a more comprehensive overview of the customer experience. Focus groups, interviews, and surveys with open-ended questions are just a few ways to capture this kind of data.
  • Limited channels for feedback collection. Customers offer their thoughts and ideas through various channels, including email, social media, customer support chat, and in-app feedback widgets. Without omnichannel support, you will struggle to collect enough feedback from customers to improve your operations.
  • Inadequate tools for customer experience management. The collection, organization, and analysis of customer data requires a comprehensive CXM platform. The lack of such a platform will make it difficult for you to track and process key CX metrics across the customer journey.
  • A vague understanding of the ROI. Improving customer experience through CXM is important, but exactly how much is it helping your business? CX practitioners often have trouble linking CX to business metrics. If you’re struggling to understand the customer experience ROI, it will be difficult to justify investments in CXM strategies.
  • Siloed CX datasets. Businesses should aim to capture data across all touchpoints of the journey to get a complete picture of customer behavior. However, 87% of CX programs track CX at the touchpoint level, with only 49% evaluating the overall journey. This is partly due to inadequate CXM technology, but also a result of departmental silos that make it difficult to have all the data in one place for accurate insights.

What Should You Look for in Customer Experience Management Software?

The best customer experience management software will help you oversee and improve every aspect of the customer journey. Here are a few key features to look for before investing in a CXM platform:

  1. Omnichannel Voice of the Customer (VoC): The collection and organization of customer feedback from multiple channels allows for more accurate insights into the customers’ feelings and pain points. InMoment’s CX integrations ensure that your customer experience management platform can integrate with all the systems that you currently use so that you can make data-driven, customer-focused decisions. 
  2. AI-powered text analysis: The ability to analyze structured and unstructured customer data in one place can uncover valuable information about the customer’s current and intended behaviors. Industry analysts have named InMoment as a proven leaders of AI and natural language processing (NLP) with the ability to discover and automate insights from your data. 
  3. Automated workflows: From quick response resolution to smart recommendations for satisfying customers, automated workflows are key for effectively closing the feedback loop without wasting time.
  4. Custom Integrations: The software should allow you to integrate with various systems, from Salesforce to Zendesk, to make the most of the customer experience data available to you.
  5. Actionable reporting: Dashboards and comprehensive reports for visualizing the results of CX efforts help provide a clear path forward for your business. InMoment’s reporting capabilities allow you to build customized reports and easily share them across your organization.
Customizable reports in InMoment's XI Platform

Discover Customer Experience Management Solutions from InMoment

InMoment’s CXM solutions let you track, organize, and analyze every aspect of the customer experience end-to-end to make better business decisions. From omnichannel feedback collection to AI-powered workflows, InMoment helps you better understand the customer journey so that you can enhance satisfaction and retention. Schedule a demo today to see how you can get started!

References 

Zendesk. 35 customer experience statistics to know for 2024. (https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/). Accessed 9/25/2024.

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics) Accessed 9/24/2024.

Digital Web Solutions. 9 Customer Experience Statistics You Need To Know For 2024. (https://www.digitalwebsolutions.com/blog/customer-experience-statistics/) Accessed 9/24/2024.

Porch Group Media. Customer-Focused Companies are 60% More Profitable. How Do Your Strategies Line Up? (https://porchgroupmedia.com/blog/customer-focused-companies-are-60-more-profitable-how-do-your-strategies-line-up/). Accessed 9/25/2024.

Forrester. The State Of VoC And CX Measurement Practices, 2023. (https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-voc-and-cx-measurement-practices-2023/RES180658). Accessed 9/25/2024.

How Customer Retention Strategies Can Facilitate Business Growth

Customer retention measures the ability of your organization to keep existing customers. Tracking and improving customer retention will help you drive revenue growth and enhance customer loyalty.
Customer Retention

Did you know that customer acquisition costs have risen by over 200% over the last 10 years? It is increasingly expensive and difficult to improve customer acquisition, which means that it is just as important to keep your current customers happy. Focusing on customer retention will help your organization reduce costs and increase revenue. 

What Is Customer Retention?

Customer retention is your organization’s ability to keep your existing customers coming back to you over a set period. This is a key indicator of your organization’s customer loyalty and success in building lasting customer relationships. 

Why is Customer Retention Important?

High customer retention rates indicate high customer satisfaction, which leads to repeat business and increased word-of-mouth referrals. Customer retention is important because the longer a customer stays with your brand, the higher their average purchase is. Also, the top 10% of customers spend more than the other 90%. Keeping customers will increase your average customer lifetime value, and help create a sustainable business model. 

How Is Customer Retention Measured?

Your customer retention rate is an important metric. To calculate it, you will first need to decide the period for which you will calculate it. For example, 97% of businesses calculate their customer retention rate at least once a year, with 71% of those businesses reviewing their customer retention rate monthly or weekly. To calculate customer retention, assume the following definitions:

  • CE = The total # of customers when the period ends
  • CN = The total # of new customers that you acquired during the period
  • CS = The total # of customers at the beginning of a period

To calculate your retention rate, you need to use the following equation:

Customer retention rate formula.

What is A Good Customer Retention Rate?

Customer retention rates vary widely depending on the industry you operate in. That being said, knowing the average customer retention rate for your industry will help you benchmark against your competitors to see how your business compares. Here is the average customer retention rate by industry: 

Customer retention rate by industry chart.

Customer Retention Strategies

Effective customer retention strategies are essential for fostering long-term customer relationships and producing a customer retention rate that rivals your competitors. While these strategies can vary based on your business model or resources available to your customer experience program, these proven strategies can help any organization reduce customer churn and improve customer retention.

1. Implement Loyalty Programs

Implementing a loyalty program can be one of the most effective customer retention strategies that your organization invests in. 79% of consumers say that loyalty programs caused them to purchase from an organization more frequently. By implementing a loyalty program that rewards customers for repeat purchases, such as discounts or early access to new products or services, you incentivize them to remain loyal to your organization. 

2. Personalize Customer Experiences

Did you know that 71% of consumers expect a personalized customer experience? Furthermore, 78% of consumers are likely to repurchase from an organization that personalizes their customer experience. 

Personalization helps create a deeper connection with customers by showing that your organization cares about their individual needs and preferences. When you personalize your customer experience, customers are more likely to make the initial purchase and more likely to return for future purchases, which will increase customer retention. 

3. Seek Customer Feedback

In order to improve customer retention, you will need to solicit and respond to customer feedback. This makes customers feel more connected to your organization. As a matter of fact, 83% of customers agree that they are more loyal to organizations that respond to and resolve their complaints. To increase customer retention, make sure you have dedicated resources to responding to customers and identifying actionable insights from customer feedback. 

With InMoment’s customer experience platform, you can not only respond to reviews, you can get actionable insights from that data. With InMoment’s AI-powered Active Listening solution, you can get 40% more actionable data points than similar platforms. This ensures you are getting the most out of your customer feedback.  

4. Stay True to Your Brand

Consistency is key to building trust and loyalty with your customers. Ensure that your brand consistently delivers on its promises and that business decisions align with your core values. Research shows that 82% of consumers prefer a brand’s values to align with their own. By sticking to the core values of your business, you will attract customers with similar beliefs. By staying true to those values over time, you will build brand equity and easily retain those customers. 

5. Improve Customer Experience Metrics

Another strategy to improve customer retention is by improving other customer experience metrics surrounding customer retention. For example, if you focus on eliminating the factors that are causing customer churn, you will eliminate the things causing customers to leave. As a result, you will retain more customers. 

Customer churn analysis charts

By implementing these customer retention strategies, you can build better customer relationships and build sustainable business growth. These strategies apply to all businesses, but customer retention strategies can be different for businesses in different industries looking to improve client retention, account retention, patient retention, and guest retention. 

With InMoment’s platform, you can build a fully customized customer experience dashboard that contains the metrics that are most important to your business. These dashboards also allow you to build reports that are easily shareable with stakeholders in your organization, regardless of their having access to the platform. This makes it easy to share customer experience insights across the organization. 

Client Retention Strategies

In service-based industries, retaining clients is critical for growth and getting referrals. Client retention is built upon strong relationships and trust. Implementing effective client retention strategies can help you improve client relationships and enhance profitability. Here are some strategies that can help improve client retention: 

1. Build Personal Relationships

In the same way that customers want to have personal experiences with a brand, your clients want to have a personal relationship with your organization. You can personalize your interactions by remembering key details about their business and showing genuine interest in their success. Taking the time to schedule regular check-ins, personalize communication, and remember important dates such as client anniversaries will help strengthen personal relationships and improve client retention. 

2. Offer Value-Added Services 

You can realize more client retention by providing additional services or resources beyond the basic agreement the client has with your business. These additional items could include industry insights, training, or additional strategic advice. Offering these services shows that you are invested in their success for the long term, not just the duration of their contract. 

3. Create a Clear Onboarding Process

A clear, structured onboarding process helps new clients feel comfortable and ensures they have all the information they need to get started. A smooth onboarding process sets a positive tone for the relationship. On the other hand, almost 25% of client churn happens because of an ineffective onboarding process. By focusing on the onboarding process, you decrease the likelihood of early termination and increase the likelihood of client retention. 

4. Foster A Partnership Mentality

You want your client to see you as a partner, not just a service provider. It is important to show clients that you value them and their time. When presenting plans or strategies, be sure to ask for their feedback and consider it when finalizing your proposed plans. This partnership mentality helps build trust and reinforces the value of your relationship.

5. Stay Relevant and Adaptable

Client needs evolve over time. It is important to stay current with market trends and be adaptable to changes. You don’t want your clients leaving for a competitor who offers more current services than you, so be sure to regularly update your services to meet new client demands and industry standards. Demonstrating your adaptability will improve client retention. 

With InMoment as your partner, you will never fall behind. The XI platform has been named a leader in Gartner, IDC, and Forrester reports. As updates are made to the Integrated CX approach, clients are always the first to be updated with new upgrades and features. 

Account Retention Strategies

Account retention is important for B2B businesses looking to improve the B2B customer experience. In these industries, the loss of a single account can significantly impact the bottom line. Implementing account retention strategies can help minimize churn and help drive growth. Here are some strategies that can enhance account retention:

1. Understand Account Needs and Goals

Understanding your account’s business objectives, challenges, and industry dynamics is important for setting up the account in the best way possible and delivering relevant solutions. 86% of B2B organizations are more likely to buy if companies understand their goals. By taking the time to understand them in the purchasing process, as well as conducting regular needs assessments, you can stay aligned with their goals and present offerings that add value. 

2. Provide Dedicated Account Management

In order to keep account satisfaction levels high, assign dedicated account managers that serve as a single point of contact. These account managers can provide personalized service, respond to inquiries quickly, and gain a better understanding of the account’s needs. 

With InMoment, you will always have access to the best resources. Our personnel have over 50 years of advisory and research experience across multiple industries. Furthermore, InMoment never outsources services. InMoment takes full accountability for CX program success for the lowest cost of ownership. 

3. Identify and Address At-Risk Accounts Early

To increase account retention, you need to prevent account churn. You can implement predictive customer analytics to identify signs of dissatisfaction or disengagement, such as decreased platform usage or negative feedback. It is important to have a system in place to flag these accounts so that immediate action can be taken to keep them from churning. 

4. Ensure Cross-Departmental Coordination 

Improving account retention also requires internal work. Effective account management requires communication across multiple departments to ensure a cohesive experience. For example, if the account manager promotes a new feature to the client that won’t be ready for six months, this would cause frustration and might lead to churn. However, if the account managers are informed about the product development roadmap, they will know when it is appropriate to start promoting new products or features. 

5. Offer Incentives and Rewards for Loyalty

Rewarding long-term accounts with special incentives can reinforce their loyalty. This could include discounts, priority access to new features or products, or invitations to exclusive events. Recognizing their loyalty shows that you value their business and encourages account retention. 

Guest Retention Strategies

Guest retention is critical for businesses in the hospitality industry, such as hotels, restaurants, and entertainment venues. Working to improve the guest experience and encouraging them to return can lead to increased revenue, positive online reviews, and valuable word-of-mouth marketing. Here are some effective strategies for retaining guests and creating lasting impressions:

1. Personalize the Guest Experience

Personalization is especially important in the hospitality industry. It can make guests feel valued and create a memorable experience that often coincides with important occasions. Use guest data, such as past preferences and special requests, to tailor their stay or visit. Whether it’s a personalized greeting, a favorite room setup, or a preferred table in a restaurant, these small touches can make a big difference in the guest experience and increase the likelihood of guest retention. 

2. Maintain An Omnichannel Experience

An omnichannel customer experience is key for guests in the hospitality industry. Customers engage with companies on an average of nine different channels, and they expect their experience to be consistent with each one. Be sure you are utilizing voice of the customer software to house all the customer feedback data in one place. A consistent guest experience across all channels will increase guest retention. 

3. Recognize and Reward Special Occasions

Celebrating special occasions, such as birthdays or anniversaries, with a complimentary gift or personalized service can leave a lasting impression. Guests are more likely to return if they feel that your establishment goes above and beyond to make their milestones memorable. 

4. Create a Sense of Community

Build a sense of community around your brand by hosting events, creating social media groups, or engaging guests through newsletters and blogs. This sense of belonging encourages guests to stay connected with your brand. As a matter of fact, 49% of businesses said that online communities had a direct impact on their revenue. 

5. Go Above and Beyond

Going beyond the basics can elevate the guest experience. Depending on where you operate within the hospitality industry, consider providing complimentary services like welcome drinks, free Wi-Fi, or late check-out options. These can make a stay or visit more memorable and increase the likelihood of repeat business.

Patient Retention Strategies

Patient retention is an important part of customer experience in healthcare and helps identify a stable practice. Retaining patients not only helps improve health outcomes but also supports the financial health of the practice. Effective patient retention strategies can enhance patient satisfaction, and build trust. Here are some key strategies to retain patients:

1. Streamline Appointment Scheduling

Over 60% of patients prefer to book appointments via digital channels such as online, on an app, or through email. This means that you need to make it easy for patients to schedule, reschedule, or cancel appointments with online booking options or you may be at risk of losing their business. Reducing barriers to access care can improve patient satisfaction and retention. 

2. Provide Patient Education

Listening to patient feedback and educating patients about their conditions, treatment options, and preventative care methods will help you earn patient trust and empower patients to take a more active role in their health. Consumers rated receiving excellent care as the biggest factor in a 5-star patient experience. By taking the time to educate patients, you are providing more complete patient care that will make patients feel more comfortable in your practice. 

3. Develop a Patient Portal

Patients want easy access to their medical records and test results. As a matter of fact, 90% of patients who accessed their online medical records were looking to view test results. A well-designed patient portal can enhance engagement and patient retention by providing easy access to medical records and test results. Patients appreciate the convenience of managing their health information and communicating with their care team in one place.

4. Offer Telehealth

There has been a 103% increase in telemedicine consultations in the last five years. By providing telehealth services, you can improve accessibility and convenience for patients by meeting them where they are. Telehealth can help keep patients engaged and ensure continuity of care. 

5. Create A Comfortable Environment 

58% of patients agree that the cleanliness of facilities is the second most important factor in their patient experience, behind receiving the best care. A welcoming, clean environment can make patients feel more at ease before their visit. Consider investing in comfortable seating and creating informative brochures to put in the waiting room. 

Customer Retention Examples

Understanding how successful companies implement customer retention strategies can give you an idea of what successful customer retention strategies might look like in your organization. 

legalsuper

The CX team at legalsuper noticed that their member experience was declining. To improve retention, they partnered with InMoment to transform their member experience program. After pulling in administrative and membership data in the InMoment platform, they realized they needed to understand more about their clients to give them a personalized experience. 

Next, legalsuper leveraged the InMoment platform to conduct primary research to fill in their knowledge gaps about their client base. Using an AI segmentation model, they were able to cluster members into specific groups based on their preferences, needs, and behavior. 

After segmenting their customers, they were able to develop specific customer journeys for each segment and offer more personalized experiences that led to increased member retention. 

B2B Retention

An InMoment client focused on retaining and acquiring B2B customers implemented a training program for the account managers in the organization. This training program offered workshops, meeting templates, and guidance on how to hit goals. 

One example of the success of this B2B retention program was when an $8M account was growing faster than the current account team could handle. The team then set up a channel to receive detailed client feedback on the areas that needed the most improvement. Using the feedback from the channel, the team was able to redistribute resources which led to the renewal of the account, which has since grown to over $16M. 

Improve Your Customer Retention and Generate Revenue with Your CX Program

Customer retention can help you increase revenue in your organization by increasing customer lifetime value and helping you achieve sustainable growth. To learn more about generating revenue through customer retention, read this eBook to learn about: 

  • The four cornerstones of a successful retention approach
  • The math that will help you prove the value of reduced churn
  • The world-class brands that have proven retention is a revenue generator for businesses

Get your copy below!

EBOOK

How to Improve Customer Retention & Generate Revenue with Your CX Program

Losing customers can have a huge impact on your business, but we’ve got it down to a science when it comes to increasing customer retention—and generating revenue!

Check out this eBook to learn about:

  • The four cornerstones of a successful retention approach
  • The math that will help you prove the value of reduced churn
  • The world-class brands that have proven retention is a revenue generator for businesses!

Download

If you’d like to see how InMoment’s XI Platform can be customized to help your business track customer retention, schedule a demo today!

References 

Simplicitydx. Press Release – Brands Losing a Record $29 for Each New Customer Acquired. (https://www.simplicitydx.com/blogs/press-release-brands-losing-a-record-29-for-each-new-customer-acquired). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

smile.io. What is a Repeat Customer, and Why are they Profitable? (https://blog.smile.io/repeat-customers-profitable/). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Customer Success Collective. The State of Customer Retention. (https://www.customersuccesscollective.com/the-state-of-customer-retention-2022/). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Mckinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Statista. Leading ways in which loyalty programs influenced consumer behavior according to consumers in the United States in April 2022, by type of program. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1375145/top-ways-loyalty-programs-influenced-consumer-behavior-us/). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Google Cloud. New research shows consumers more interested in brands’ values than ever. (https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/consumer-packaged-goods/data-shows-shoppers-prioritizing-sustainability-and-values). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Relently. The Three Leading Causes of Customer Churn. (https://www.retently.com/blog/three-leading-causes-churn/). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

Salesforce. State of the Connected Customer. (https://www.salesforce.com/content/dam/web/en_us/www/documents/research/State-of-the-Connected-Customer.pdf). 

Leader Networks. The Business Impact of Online Communities. (https://www.leadernetworks.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/The-Business-Impact-of-Online-Communities_Leader-Networks.pdf). Accessed 9/19/2024. 

PressGaney. Consumer experience trends in healthcare 2023. (https://info.pressganey.com/e-books-research/consumer-experience-trends-in-healthcare-2023). Accessed 9/20/2024. 

HealthIT.gov. Individuals’ Access and Use of Patient Portals and Smartphone Health Apps, 2022. (https://www.healthit.gov/data/data-briefs/individuals-access-and-use-patient-portals-and-smartphone-health-apps-2022). Accessed 9/20/2024.

Statista. Telemedicine – statistics and facts. (https://www.statista.com/topics/12106/telemedicine/#topicOverview). Accessed 9/20/2024. 

Statista. Customer retention rate of businesses worldwide in 2018, by industry. (https://www.statista.com/statistics/1041645/customer-retention-rates-by-industry-worldwide/). Accessed 9/23/2024. 

Understand Active Listening and How It’s Revolutionizing Feedback Collection with 2.4x More Actionable Responses

Active Listening utilizes AI to improve the feedback collection experience. This allows you to gain a better understanding of the customer experience and what can be done to improve it.
Customer Satisfaction Survey

Capturing genuine and actionable feedback from customers and employees can be a challenge, especially when traditional surveys feel long, tedious, and uninspiring. Many organizations struggle with vague, short responses that offer little insight, leaving them chasing scores rather than focusing on meaningful improvements. This is where Active Listening comes in—a revolutionary approach to feedback collection that enhances the quality and depth of responses.

What is Active Listening?

Active Listening is a conversational AI agent designed to improve the feedback collection experience by engaging respondents in real-time. It prompts users with context-aware follow-up questions, encouraging them to provide richer, more detailed answers. Whether through simple rule-based interactions or advanced AI, Active Listening transforms survey data from shallow comments into meaningful insights.

AI prompting a user to share more detail in a survey response

Active Listening Agents

  • AI-Powered Active Listening: This agent uses advanced AI to continuously learn and adapt based on user feedback, evolving its language to elicit more detailed responses. It identifies patterns in real-time, helping businesses quickly uncover emerging trends and improve decision-making.
  • Basic Active Listening: For organizations that prefer full control over their feedback collection process, this agent offers customizable rules. It allows you to tailor how Active Listening interacts with respondents, adjusting trigger phrases and follow-up prompts to gather more valuable data on specific topics.

Benefits of Active Listening for Feedback Collection

Why does it matter for your business? The benefits of Active Listening go beyond improving survey response rates; it drives more actionable insights and ultimately enhances your overall customer and employee experiences.

  • Actionable Insights: Captures deeper, more meaningful feedback, enabling businesses to uncover the root causes of issues and identify growth opportunities.
  • Improved Engagement: Respondents feel heard, leading to higher satisfaction rates as surveys become more conversational and personalized.
  • Increased Efficiency: By automating follow-ups with AI or customizable prompts, teams spend less time chasing responses and more time acting on valuable insights.
  • Enhanced Security: With locally hosted AI models, businesses can maintain strict control over their data, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
Active listening and rapid resolution demo inmoment

Who Would Benefit

Organizations that prioritize understanding and improving experiences will find great value in advanced feedback collection tools.

  • Experience Leaders: Those responsible for customer and employee experience will benefit from more detailed, actionable feedback that allows them to address pain points and drive loyalty.
  • Customers & Employees: Respondents appreciate the ease of giving feedback and knowing it will be used to make meaningful improvements, increasing their willingness to engage.
Business improvement suggestions from AI Active Listening

How is Active Listening Different from Competitors?

InMoment’s Active Listening stands out in the feedback market by offering both AI-powered and customizable rules-based agents, giving businesses flexibility that competitors lack. 

  • Unlike others, InMoment uses a privately hosted LLM to keep data secure, while real-time follow-up prompts improve feedback quality before submission. 
  • The platform’s Strength Meter gamifies the survey experience, increasing engagement, and its Topics to Avoid feature ensures on-brand prompts. 
  • Designed for both CX and EX, Active Listening keeps surveys concise and impactful, delivering deeper, actionable insights more efficiently than traditional platforms.
An overview of AI Active Listening software

Why Active Listening Matters

For businesses seeking to transform vague, unactionable feedback into insights that can drive real change, Active Listening is the solution for effective feedback collection. It’s a game-changer for brands looking to improve both customer and employee experiences. Companies using Active Listening have seen a 10x increase in survey responses and are resolving issues 62% faster. With the ability to customize every aspect of the feedback process—whether through AI or predefined rules—Active Listening ensures that businesses get the insights they need while maintaining full control over the process.

Elevate Your Feedback Collection with Active Listening

Ready to take your feedback collection to the next level? Active Listening is your key to deeper insights, better engagement, and stronger results.

Why the End-to-End Customer Experience Should Be A Priority

The end-to-end customer experience is how a customer feels about the sum of their experiences with your brand. When a customer feels better about the end-to-end customer experience, they are more likely to be loyal, which is why brands need to focus on it.
A man on his phone as part of the end-to-end customer experience

When you think of your most recent purchase, you don’t think of the experience in silos. You don’t remember how you felt during the awareness phase separate from the consideration phase. You recount your experience based on how you felt about the whole process, from start to finish. This is how we view the end-to-end customer experience. 

What is End-to-End Customer Experience?

End-to-end customer experience refers to all the different experiences a customer has with your organization, and how they feel about those experiences as a whole. For example, in the context of retail customer experience, suppose a customer had a smooth checkout experience, but then experienced a shipping problem. When they contacted the support team, their problem was resolved and they were awarded 20% off of their next order. 

This customer had three experiences for this transaction: shopping, ordering and shipping, and post-transactional. While this customer may have had a bad shipping experience, it was made up for by the support team. So their end-to-end customer experience was a positive one because they felt their issue was resolved. 

End-to-End Customer Experience vs Customer Journey

The difference between end-to-end customer experience and the customer journey is that one of them is business-focused while the other is customer-focused. The customer journey maps out the path a customer takes and focuses on individual touchpoints.

The end-to-end customer experience, however, is how the customer feels about each of those touchpoints. It takes a broader view, emphasizing not just the sequence of interactions but the quality, consistency, and emotional impact of those interactions. It’s about the holistic experience, not just isolated steps.

86% of customers agree that they would switch to a competitor after three or fewer negative experiences with a brand.

Why is the End-to-End Customer Experience Important?

The end-to-end customer experience is important because it can be key to retaining customers. 86% of customers agree that they would switch to a competitor after three or fewer negative experiences with a brand. So, it is important to create a customer experience that ends with the customer being satisfied so that they develop into a lifetime customer, rather than take their business elsewhere. 

Benefits of End-to-End Customer Experience

A memorable end-to-end customer experience will have a tangible impact on your business. It can have an impact on everything from sales to operations. Here are some benefits you may realize from having a positive end-to-end customer experience: 

Increased Customer Loyalty

When customers know they will get a good customer experience from start to finish, they are more likely to return for future purchases. As a matter of fact, customers are willing to pay more for a product or service from a brand with a better end-to-end customer experience than competitors. A positive end-to-end customer experience will help you improve customer loyalty

Improved Brand Reputation

Improving the end-to-end customer experience can also improve your brand equity. When your brand delivers a consistently positive experience, customers trust you more and think of your products or services as higher quality. Customers are also more likely to share their positive experiences through online reviews, social media, or by recommending your brand to others. 

Reduced Costs

A good customer experience often results in fewer customer complaints and support tickets. Focusing on the end-to-end customer experience will also help you revamp or retire processes that are causing frequent issues or customer churn. A streamlined customer experience will improve operational efficiencies and reduce overall costs. 

How to Improve the End-to-End Customer Experience

To improve the end-to-end customer experience, you will need to make sure you are doing everything you can to listen to and understand your customers while they interact with your organization. Here are some steps that you can take to improve your end-to-end customer experience:

1. Understand the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping will give you a visual of all the touch points that a customer has with your brand. Understanding what the customer experience looks like in your organization will help you identify where you may be falling short. Every member of your CX team must understand the customer journey. 

2. Collect Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is useful when improving the end-to-end customer experience because it can give you insights into how customers feel at every stage of the customer journey. For example, an online review might reflect a customer who had a positive purchase experience, while a social media post may reveal a customer who didn’t make it to the purchase phase because of poor customer service. 

3. Ensure Consistency Across Channels

The end-to-end customer experience doesn’t include a set start and end point. Where customers start their experience will depend on the industry and type of organization you run. They might start their journey via social media, a paid ad, a search engine result page, or coming to visit you in person. 

Regardless of where they start, they are going to take multiple steps before they reach the end of their experience. It is up to you to ensure create an omnichannel customer experience so that their experience is consistent across whichever channels are most convenient for them.

4. Personalize the Customer Experience

Personalization is one of the most important things you can do to improve the end-to-end customer experience in today’s market. In fact, 71% of customers expect personalization, and 76% are frustrated when they don’t get it. 

A lack of personalization in your customer experience will hurt your business. To improve the end-to-end customer experience and your bottom line, consider implementing personalization such as product recommendations, unique discounts, or personalized communication. 

5. Measure Customer Experience Metrics 

One of the ways to track the effectiveness of your end-to-end customer experience improvement is by tracking customer experience metrics. As you work to improve your end-to-end customer experience, measuring the performance of your chosen metrics will help you know the success and ROI of your efforts. 

How to Create An End-to-End Customer Experience Strategy

Your end-to-end customer experience strategy can be an extension of your overall customer experience strategy. The most important part of creating an end-to-end customer experience strategy is communication. Communication between different stakeholders and teams will drive the success of your CX initiatives. Here are what you will need to get started: 

1. Define Your CX Goals

Before you get started, you have to know where you’re going. What do you want to achieve with your end-to-end customer experience strategy? Are you aiming to increase customer loyalty, reduce churn, differentiate from competitors, or some other goal? 

Having specific goals will ensure that every CX action that is taken will be taken to improve your goal. It is also important that every stakeholder in your organization, such as executives, is aware of this goal as well. 

2. Empower Employee

Once the key customer experience stakeholders in your organization know and understand the objectives of the end-to-end customer experience strategy, it is time to empower employees to help deliver on those goals. Frontline employees are the most important part of any organization’s customer experience program since they are the group that interacts with the customer the most. 

Consider offering trainings that help define the business goals and what steps can be taken to get there. You may also be able to drive employee engagement by offering incentives once certain metrics are met. Securing the buy-in of employees will drive a successful end-to-end customer experience. 

3. Create a Continous Feedback Loop

Once your goals are created and employees are empowered, you can implement your end-to-end customer experience strategy. Once implemented, it is important to have a customer feedback loop as well as an employee feedback loop. 

A customer feedback loop will help you enact changes requested by customers. On the other hand, an employee feedback loop will help employees make stakeholders aware of what is or is not working in your end-to-end customer experience strategy. Make sure that you have created an environment that supports employee feedback, as it will often have a positive impact on your overall customer experience goals. 

End-to-End Customer Experience Examples

Implementing a seamless end-to-end customer experience can differentiate brands in competitive markets. Below are some real-world examples of companies that excel at delivering exceptional customer experiences from the first interaction to post-purchase support.

Metro Bank 

Metro Bank worked to improve the end-to-end customer experience by restructuring its customer insights program. Before this restructuring, customers had to go to a third-party platform to take a survey. One of the biggest changes made during this restructure was moving the survey within the app. This, as well as other changes, helped Metro Bank was able to realize growth in revenue, customer accounts, and overall operational efficiency. 

Juniper Networks

Juniper Networks has created a positive end-to-end customer experience by making it easy for customers to leave feedback. By leveraging InMoment’s platform, they have created short, mobile-friendly surveys that can be sorted by keywords. This allows unstructured data to be analyzed easier and ensures the most important feedback takes priority. These customer-focused features have allowed Juniper Networks to increase customer resolution times by 62%. 

Improve Your End-to-End Customer Experience with InMoment

InMoment’s platform allows you to view every point in the end-to-end customer experience and gives you the tools to track and measure changes over time. To see how this can be customized for your business, schedule a demo today!

References 

Emplifi. 11 key things consumers expect from their brand experiences today. (https://go.emplifi.io/us-uk-customer-expectations-report.html). Accessed 9/9/2024. 

McKinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 9/9/2024.

Customer Experience in Healthcare: Transforming Patient Care

Customer experience in healthcare is about the journey patients undergo with your organization, from appointment scheduling to the quality of care and follow-up. Positive experiences build trust, foster loyalty, and lead to better health outcomes.
Image of female doctor greeting woman in a clinical setting

In today’s healthcare landscape, patient expectations are higher than ever. It’s not just about treating ailments anymore—it’s about delivering care that’s seamless, compassionate, and easy to access. So, what does it take to create an exceptional customer experience in healthcare? Discover the most important factors, common challenges, and top trends shaping the future of healthcare customer experience—and how you and your organization can lead the way.

What is Customer Experience in Healthcare?

We’ve all been a sick patient before, and we know that the experience can make or break how we feel about a healthcare provider. Customer experience in healthcare goes far beyond just scheduling appointments. It includes every touchpoint—whether it’s the way you’re greeted at the front desk, how well your concerns are listened to during an exam, or how smooth the follow-up process is. A positive experience doesn’t just create happy patients—it builds trust, fosters loyalty, and can even lead to better health outcomes. To sum it up, it’s about ensuring each step of the patient journey feels seamless, compassionate, and human.

What is Customer Experience Management in Healthcare?

Managing customer experience in healthcare involves actively monitoring and improving every touchpoint patients have with your organization. Think of it as building a feedback loop: you collect patient insights, analyze them, and take action to enhance the patient journey. Healthcare organizations that leverage tools like InMoment’s CX solutions can gather feedback in real time, identify problem areas, and streamline operations to make the experience as smooth as possible.

What is the Importance of Customer Experience in Healthcare?

In healthcare, the stakes are high. Patients aren’t just customers—they’re individuals often dealing with stress, illness, or pain. Their experience can have a profound impact not only on how they perceive your care but also on their overall well-being. It’s not just about providing excellent service to retain patients—it’s about being empathetic and making the entire process as easy and comforting as possible. This care extends beyond patients to their loved ones, making the experience smooth for everyone involved.

Most Important Factors in Healthcare Customer Experience 

The patient experience in healthcare hinges on several important ingredients. Here are the top factors that make or break a great healthcare experience:

  • Ease of Access: Make it simple for patients to book appointments, access test results, and communicate with your team.
  • Wait Times: Long wait times can quickly sour an otherwise good experience. Reducing them shows respect for patients’ time.
  • Clear Communication: From appointment reminders to treatment plans, patients need clarity and consistency at every step, such as balancing efficiency with delivering empathetic and thorough responses within healthcare contact centers.
  • Staff Empathy: Friendly, compassionate care is key. A simple smile or a comforting word can make a huge difference.
  • Personalized Care: Treating each patient as an individual, with tailored care, makes for a more meaningful experience.
  • Facility: A clean, safe environment is a top concern for patients, especially for infection control and hygiene, but facility comfort, including ease of navigation and privacy, is also important.

Mastering these areas will set your healthcare practice apart and keep patients coming back.

What are Common CX Challenges in Healthcare?

Of course, healthcare comes with its unique set of challenges. For many organizations, it’s about balancing efficiency with compassion. Here are some of the most common CX hurdles healthcare providers face:

  • Long Wait Times: Whether it’s waiting for an appointment or in the waiting room, delays are a top frustration for patients.
  • Scheduling Issues: Limited availability or complicated booking processes can drive patients away.
  • Bedside Manner: Healthcare professionals who lack empathy can create lasting negative impressions, even if the care is clinically sound.

These challenges vary depending on the type of provider. For example, hospitals may struggle with fragmented care coordination, dental offices often face appointment management issues, and pharmacies might have long lines or delays in prescription fulfillment. Addressing these issues head-on is the first step to improving CX.

How to Improve Customer Experience in Healthcare?

Improving healthcare customer experience doesn’t happen overnight, but there are actionable steps you can take:

  • Streamline Scheduling: Use online booking systems to make it easier for patients to secure appointments at their convenience.
  • Reduce Wait Times: Improve internal workflows to ensure patients aren’t left waiting unnecessarily.
  • Enhance Communication: Keep patients informed with clear, compassionate communication, whether it’s before, during, or after treatment.
  • Offer Training for Staff: Ongoing training on empathy and bedside manner ensures your team is offering the best possible patient care.
  • Use Technology: Implement CX platforms like InMoment to monitor patient feedback, identify pain points, and optimize the patient journey in real time.
Case management system being used to improve customer experience in healthcare.

How to Create an Omnichannel Customer Experience in Healthcare

In today’s digital world, patients expect seamless experiences across multiple platforms. An omnichannel approach ensures that patients can interact with your organization through their preferred channels—whether it’s in-person, online, or via mobile. This could mean offering online appointment scheduling, a user-friendly mobile app, or telehealth services. Ensuring that patients have consistent, high-quality experiences across all touchpoints makes it easier for them to engage with your services and boosts overall satisfaction

Customer Experience Trends in Healthcare

As the healthcare landscape evolves, so do customer experience trends. Here’s what to expect:

  • Telehealth Expansion: Virtual care isn’t going anywhere. As telehealth becomes more mainstream, expect continued improvements in remote care delivery.
  • AI and Automation: AI is making its way into everything from appointment scheduling to treatment recommendations. It’s helping reduce wait times and improve efficiency.
  • Personalized Healthcare: Data-driven insights allow healthcare providers to offer more personalized care, improving both outcomes and satisfaction.
  • Natural Language Processing (NLP): Tools like NLP in healthcare are being used to analyze patient feedback at scale, allowing providers to address concerns faster and more effectively. 

Improve Your Customer Experience in Healthcare with InMoment

Delivering a great healthcare customer experience takes more than just good intentions—it requires the right tools and strategies. With InMoment, you can capture real-time patient feedback, analyze it, and make data-driven decisions that improve every aspect of the patient journey. From reducing wait times to enhancing patient communication, our solutions are designed to help healthcare providers create the best possible experience for their patients.

Ready to start transforming your healthcare CX? Explore our healthcare reputation management and download our healthcare reputation report for insights on how to take your organization’s customer experience to the next level.

Customer Journey: Understanding Every Interaction

The customer journey is the path a consumer takes to become a customer. Improving the customer journey can drive acquisition, retention, and loyalty for your organization.
Sales associate providing a positive customer journey

Did you know that 38% of Millennials and 39% of Gen Z consumers reported that they are most likely to give up solving a problem with a product or service if they cannot find a solution themselves? With younger generations becoming the dominating force in the overall consumer base it is more important than ever to be able to identify their needs and understand how they want to interact with your brand. 

As a matter of fact, 56% of customer service leaders said they plan to invest more into their customer journey, which would be a first-time investment for 45% of them. These investments highlight how crucial the customer journey is to a great customer experience and creating lifelong customer relationships.

What Is the Customer Journey?

The customer journey is the process a customer goes through from awareness to purchasing and beyond. To provide an exceptional customer journey, you need to understand your customers—how they interact with your website and what they’re looking for. It’s important to point out that the customer journey is different from the customer experience. Customer journeys are what your customers are doing, while the experience is how they’re feeling. A fully optimized customer journey can help improve your customer experience. 

Why Is the Customer Journey Important?

The customer journey is so important because it is the foundation on which customer acquisition and customer loyalty are built. Most consumers express a desire to interact with a brand across multiple channels, but 77% of brands admit they struggle to create a cohesive customer journey across those channels. 

If a customer chooses to interact with your organization, it is your responsibility to have a customer journey that gives them a stress-free experience. Without a customer journey, you could have low acquisition rates or increased customer churn rates. 

Benefits of Understanding the Customer Journey

When your organization understands the customer journey and can give your customers what they need at the right time, you will realize benefits that will improve your overall business performance. Some of the benefits include: 

  • Improved Customer Experience: Understanding the customer journey will give your customers a better end-to-end customer experience, which will result in increased customer satisfaction. 
  • Increased Customer Retention: An understanding of the customer journey allows your business to proactively address issues and provide timely support, which will increase the likelihood of repeat business and long-term customer retention.
  • Increased Conversion Rates: By identifying and removing friction points, your business can guide potential customers through the sales process more smoothly. 

What are the Principles of Customer Journey?

While there are no set principles of the customer journey, an important step to understanding and designing the customer journey in your organization is to create your own set of customer journey principles that represent an effort to develop long-term customer relationships. Some possible principles include: 

Customer Empathy 

Customer empathy refers to working to understand the emotional states of customers at each stage of the customer journey. By understanding how customers will feel at certain points, rather than focusing on what action you want them to take, you will create a journey that is easier and less stressful. 

Customer Empowerment

Give customers the ability to manage their journey by offering self-service options and transparent processes. Empowered customers feel more in control and satisfied with their experience.

Proactive Engagement

At some point in the customer journey, your customers will connect with you. When they do, be sure to be equipped with the right information in a timely manner to assist them during the customer journey. 

These principles are an example of what the principles of customer journey could look like in your organization. The exact principles you choose will depend on your business and the journey you build for your customers. However, they should be customer-focused and put your organization in a position to make the customer experience better. 

What Are the Customer Journey Phases?

While the exact steps in the customer journey can vary, these are the six most important parts of the journey for any business: 

The Problem

First, customers need to realize they have a problem, a need, or a want that must be solved. Once they recognize a problem, they can begin looking for solutions, which should hopefully lead them to your company. 

Awareness

During this stage, the customer is gathering information, researching, and looking for options to solve the problem. Hopefully, with your marketing efforts and channels, the customer will come across your company and become aware of your solution to their problem. They’ll still be weighing options and researching what suits them best, but this stage is a great place to use content to showcase your brand. 

Consideration

During this stage, your customer will be considering using your product or service. They may be deciding between you and another option debating pricing options, prioritizing features, and weighing drawbacks. When a customer is considering, brand recognition is crucial. Having a trusted and well-established brand could be what sways a customer toward your product during this stage. 

Purchase

The customer decides on your product and makes the purchase. Even once they’ve purchased your product, companies benefit from reaching out to customers and acknowledging the purchase. 

Retention

Once a customer has bought a product or service, it doesn’t mean they will return to your company again. A key part of the customer journey is retaining the customer for future purchases. Providing support is important to improve customer retention. You want customers to come back repeatedly and look for your product or service when faced with a problem. 

Loyalty

Once your customer comes back to you a few times, they’ll start to develop loyalty to your brand. Loyal customers will almost always come to your company if they can because they trust your products, services, and customer experience. Getting to the loyalty stage takes effort, but loyal customers are the goal of every company. 

Understanding the Digital Customer Journey

Businesses such as restaurants, hotels, and retailers have to consider certain aspects of their locations when creating a customer journey such as signage, lighting, walkways, and more. Most other businesses, however, will only ever interact with their customers through digital channels. The digital customer journey is just as important as any customer journey and is crucial to a positive digital experience

A successful digital customer journey can be difficult to create because you need to make your customers feel understood and wanted, without being able to talk to them in person. This can be done by creating easy self-service options and being readily available through support channels in case they have any questions or concerns. 

A Customer Journey Example

To see what the customer journey looks like in action, let’s walk through the journey a manager might take to improve operations. 

1. Recognizing the Problem

A hypothetical manager at a finance company recognizes an ongoing issue with managing data for customers. Realizing that this is affecting their efficiency, they start looking for a data management solution

2. Researching Potential Solutions

The manager starts exploring different data management tools. A friend in the industry recommends a solution they use, while another contact from networking suggests a different option. The manager also conducts internet searches and reads online reviews to find more potential solutions. Meanwhile, targeted ads on Google and social media bring additional products to their attention. Using reviews and priorities, they narrow the list down to two companies. 

3. Comparing Final Options

Once they have their two favorites, they use the companies’ software demos and pricing packages to consider each one. They make their selection based on which one works best for their company and is the most affordable.

4. Making the Purchase

After purchasing the data management software, the company immediately acknowledges and thanks the manager for their business. This gesture makes the manager feel valued, reinforcing a positive customer experience.

5. Returning for Future Purchases 

A few months later, this same manager is looking for data architecture solutions that will provide security and big data management. They remember their experience with the data management company and start their search on that particular website. When they see they offer software for their needs, they spend less time in the consideration stage and move quickly into purchasing. They also begin recommending the company to other people in the industry when they’re looking for similar products.

The Importance of Improving the Customer Journey 

Spending time and resources focusing on the customer journey may seem like a luxury, but the benefits it can have for your organization are a necessity in today’s business environment. Here are some statistics about the importance of focusing on the customer journey:

  • 87% of companies use their understanding of the customer journey as a decision-making tool
  • 89% of companies can identify gaps in their service by looking at the customer journey
  • 91% of companies say an improved customer journey led to increased sales

Overall, this shows that companies that focus on customer journeys can benefit in revenue and profitability. Optimizing the customer journey also helps decision-makers at the company to stay focused on customers. It also helps improve the customer experience and your brand. A well-optimized customer journey makes the purchasing process easier and more enjoyable for the customers, which improves their experience. 

Customer Journey Management Best Practices

Successful customer journey management requires every interaction a customer has with your brand to be satisfying while also aligning with business goals. To have an effective customer journey management strategy, you will need to consider these best practices:

1. Map the Customer Journey

Customer journey mapping is a great way to visualize every expected touchpoint a customer will have with your brand. A customer journey map can help you understand the flow of the customer experience. 

2. Segment Your Customers

Not every consumer will have the same customer journey, nor will they want to. By segmenting your customers based on demographics, behaviors, preferences, and buying habits, you can create tailored versions of the customer journey to meet the specific needs of these different customers. 

3. Utilize Data and Analytics

Customer journey analytics are important to gain insight into how customers interact with your organization. You can start to use customer journey analytics by identifying customer journey touchpoints. Your touchpoints could be ads, your website homepage, a physical storefront, reviews, newsletters, phone calls with sales, or emails. 

Once you identify all the touchpoints, you can start to measure how customers interact with them. By keeping track of your customer journey touchpoints, you can optimize them to keep your customers moving through your customer journey seamlessly. 

A dashboard showing phases of the customer journey and how much revenue has been realized over a set period.

What Is Customer Journey Analytics?

Customer journey analytics is a method of tracking and analyzing every interaction a customer has with your brand across various customer journey touchpoints. By leveraging customer journey analytics, businesses can measure each phase of the customer journey in a detailed and data-driven manner. This includes understanding how customers discover your brand, how they interact with your content, their decision-making process, and the quality of their post-purchase experiences.
This approach provides insights into the effectiveness of your overall customer experience strategy. By evaluating key metrics at every stage, such as conversion rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction scores, businesses can pinpoint areas of success and identify potential bottlenecks or pain points.

A customer journey analytics dashboard

Customer Journey Metrics to Track

Once you have created your customer journey, you should be able to track where a customer is based on what checkpoints they hit. This may include a free trial, demo appointment, payment, or other points. Since you can track where customers are, you should also be tracking metrics that give you an insight into how effectively your customers move through those stages. Here are some common customer journey metrics you can track:

1. Customer Acquisition Cost

Customer acquisition cost (CAC) measures how much it costs to acquire a new customer, including marketing, sales, and advertising expenses. Tracking CAC can help you evaluate how efficient your customer journey is and help you identify the most cost-effective paths that customers take. 

2. Conversion Rate

The conversion rate shows the percentage of potential customers who take a desired action, such as signing up for a newsletter, making a purchase, or completing a demo. By monitoring your conversion rates, you can identify any possible bottlenecks that may be hindering customers from moving forward in the customer journey. 

3. Customer Churn Rate

Customer churn rate measures the percentage of customers who stop using your product or service over a given period. This is an important metric to track because it reminds businesses that the customer journey does not end with a purchase. A high churn rate indicates that you may need to improve your customer retention efforts. On the other hand, a low churn rate suggests that your customers value your brand. 

4. Customer Satisfaction 

Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) is a key metric for evaluating how happy customers are with their overall experience. This metric can be used to track satisfaction levels at various stages of the customer journey or track overall satisfaction. 

5. Net Promoter Score

Net Promoter Score (NPS) gauges customer loyalty and their likelihood to recommend your product or service to others. NPS provides insight into whether or not your customer journey is producing strong advocates of your brand that will promote your products or services. 

Customer Journey Software

Customer journey software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to map, track, and optimize the interactions customers have with their brands throughout the entire customer journey. Customer journey software platforms provide valuable insights into customer behaviors, preferences, and pain points, which allow companies to create more personalized experiences. Here’s how customer journey software can benefit your business:

1. Visual Journey Mapping

Customer journey software gives you the tools needed to create a customer journey map. This feature helps you visualize the customer journey and understand what metrics can be tracked and where. It can also be a useful sharing tool to get the rest of your CX team on board with the customer journey improvement process. 

2. Multi-Channel Tracking

Modern digital customer journeys are often non-linear and span multiple channels such as websites, mobile apps, social media, email, and in-store interactions With customer journey software, you can integrate data from various channels to get a unified view of the customer journey. This helps deliver a cohesive and consistent experience to the customer regardless of where or how they engaged with your business. 

3. Behavioral Analytics

Customer journey software can track user behaviors such as click paths, product views, time spent on site, and more. This will help your business identify patterns and behaviors that indicate customer intent. 

Improve the Customer Journey with InMoment

Improving your customer journey will help your customers learn about your company, products, and services. It will also help you keep your customers moving seamlessly through to the purchasing stage. But ultimately, your customer journey can help you improve your customer experience. 

Your customers can enjoy the ease and support your company offers them.
To improve your customers’ journey, you’ll need tools to understand your customers and to utilize your customer journey touchpoints. InMoment CX solutions provide feedback and active listening tools to help you understand where to tighten your process and bring more customers to your brand. Schedule a demo today to see how InMoment can help you improve the customer journey. 

References 

Gartner. Top Priorities for Customer Service Leaders in 2024. (https://www.gartner.com/en/customer-service-support/insights/service-leaders-priorities). Accessed 9/3/2024. 

Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 9/4/2024. 

Hanover Research. The Power of Customer Journey Mapping. (https://www.hanoverresearch.com/reports-and-briefs/corporate/power-customer-journey-mapping/). Accessed 9/5/2024.

Collecting Patient Feedback: A Guide to Improve Patient Satisfaction & Retention

Patient feedback is a powerful tool for enhancing the quality of health care and patient satisfaction. With the help of patient feedback management software, healthcare providers can collect this feedback to acquire and retain more patients.
A mature male patient signs a medical form on a digital tablet.

What is Patient Feedback?

Patient feedback is the opinions, reviews, and thoughts that healthcare organizations gather from their patients. From the healthcare contact center to the doctor’s diagnosis, each step of the patient journey presents an opportunity to learn about patient expectations and behavior.

The goal of collecting patient feedback is to pinpoint areas for improvement in healthcare operations. For instance, a hospital could have world-class medical staff delivering high-quality care. But, if patients have to endure long wait times to see the doctor, they are still not likely to report a positive experience.

Healthcare centers usually capture this feedback with the help of surveys, reviews, and conversations at different points of the patient journey. Here is an overview of when and why each institution collects feedback.

Hospitals and Clinics

In hospitals and clinics, the medical staff gathers feedback from inpatients and outpatients to see what steps in the patient journey need improvement.

Each type of patient care involves feedback collection at the following points in the patient journey:

  • Inpatient care
    • Appointment booking – helps understand if the patient is satisfied with wait times or staff behavior.
    • Medical diagnoses – provides information on the patient’s experience with the accuracy and price of medical tests.
    • Hospital stay – gathers feedback on the patient’s stay in the hospital, including quality of treatment, staff support, and cleanliness.
    • Discharge – captures patient opinions on discharge, such as how long it took and how well the doctor followed up with them.
  • Outpatient care
    • Check-in – gathers patient feedback on wait times and quality of staff support during the check-in process.
    • Consultation with the doctor – offers information on the patient’s satisfaction with the doctor’s communication and overall behavior.

Dental Clinic

Dental clinics capture feedback from patients to pinpoint any issues with their oral healthcare service and general operations. They usually collect patient feedback at the following points:

  • Appointment scheduling – helps understand the patient’s experience with ease of booking, staff support, and wait times.
  • Dental treatment – captures patient feedback on the quality of dental care, dentist’s communication, and treatment plan.
  • Billing process – collects feedback on the transparency of costs and availability of various payment options.
  • Follow-up – provides information on how well the dentist followed up with the patient post-treatment, including the quality of aftercare instructions.

Aged Care

Aged care facilities rely on feedback loops to make residents feel more comfortable and satisfied. The goal is to check in with them and their family at the following points to see if the center is meeting their unique needs:

  • Patient admission – collects information on the ease and convenience of admitting a new resident.
  • Medical check-ups – highlight issues, if any, with daily health assessments and if the resident is satisfied with them.
  • Daily care – captures resident feedback on the quality of care, support from staff, and general activities.
  • Family visits – collects feedback from family members on their satisfaction levels with the facility, including staff, hygiene, environment, and healthcare.
  • Discharge – covers any complaints from the resident or their family about the convenience of the discharge process and support from staff.

Pharmacies

Did you know that 58% of Americans view pharmacies as a first step when faced with a non-emergency medical issue? A pharmacy gathers feedback at the following touchpoints to better understand patients:

  • Prescription dispensing – helps understand if the medication was safely, correctly, and appropriately dispensed to the patient.
  • Consultation – captures patient feedback on consultations offered by the staff, including dosage and general medication advice.
  • Purchase and billing – collects information on how smooth it was for the patient to purchase medicine and process payments.

Why is Patient Feedback Important?

Patient feedback is primarily important for enhancing patient satisfaction and helping the healthcare organization with brand reputation management.

Feedback highlights the organization’s strengths and weaknesses when it comes to fulfilling a patient’s needs. Hospitals and clinics use this kind of insight to make data-driven decisions to improve their workflow and enhance patient satisfaction. 

For instance, if a hospital receives multiple complaints about wait times during appointment booking, it has an immediate area of concern to address.

Moreover, collecting patient feedback encourages transparency and communication with patients. By becoming proactive listeners and responders to their needs, organizations show that they value their patients’ thoughts and feelings.

As a result, patients are likely to trust these healthcare centers and give them a positive review online. Given that over 70% of patients consult online reviews before visiting a new center, it’s important to focus on practices that boost patient satisfaction ratings.

Benefits of Collecting Patient Feedback

Collecting patient feedback helps organizations make informed decisions on delivering a positive patient experience. Here are a few key benefits of capturing feedback from patients:

Higher Quality of Healthcare

A key component of performance assessment is to look at areas for improvement, especially those suggested by patients. This is where feedback is beneficial as it pinpoints the exact issues to prioritize and fix in order to deliver a higher quality of care. It provides specific answers to important questions about the patient experience.

Enhanced Patient Satisfaction and Retention

A higher quality of health care has a positive impact on patient satisfaction ratings. When patients feel that an organization successfully met their care needs, they are more likely to give it a glowing recommendation online or otherwise. 

Satisfied patients not only provide positive recommendations, but they are also likely to become loyal customers themselves. Therefore, by collecting and acting upon feedback, healthcare providers boost patient retention.

Data-driven Decisions

The last thing healthcare centers want to do is take a guess at what works for their patients. It’s important to have access to actionable data that provides specific insights into improving the customer experience. Collecting patient feedback helps organizations capture and analyze this data to enable continuous improvements in their services.

How to Collect Patient Feedback?

From kiosk surveys at check-in to post-treatment email surveys, patient surveys help organizations collect valuable feedback at each step of the patient journey.

Patient Feedback Survey

Surveys are great options for feedback collection because they let patients reflect on their experience right away. Moreover, surveys allow patients to be more forthright and accurate in their feedback by removing the need for an in-person conversation.

By issuing surveys at key touchpoints during the patient journey, healthcare centers gain targeted insights on improving their operations. Here is an overview of the surveys healthcare centers use throughout the patient journey:

1. Kiosk surveys

A touchscreen display device placed at strategic points in the hospital, like the reception area, is a popular way to collect feedback. 

Kiosks are typically used to survey patients on their experience after check-in, consultation with the doctor, and booking follow-up appointments.

2. Email surveys

According to a 2024 report on email statistics, 88% of respondents said they use email daily, with 39% checking their inboxes 3-5 times a day. Therefore, email remains one of the most reliable channels for organizations to gather customer feedback.

For healthcare centers, sending an email survey right after discharge is a great way to collect insights from the patient. Emails can feature a link to the full survey form or a straightforward one-click survey embedded within the email body itself.

3. Mobile app and website surveys

Healthcare providers can also leverage mobile apps and website widgets to collect patient feedback smoothly. The idea is to integrate always-on surveys within the apps and websites to prompt customers for specific (post-consultation, discharge, etc.) or general feedback.

Feedback from Online Reviews

In addition to surveys, online reviews offer another valuable method for gathering patient feedback and play a crucial role in healthcare reputation management. Beyond providing key insights and actionable data, online reviews can:

  1. Authentic Patient Experiences: Reviews often capture unfiltered, real-world patient experiences, providing healthcare providers with genuine insights into what patients appreciate or dislike about their care.
  2. Volume and Diversity of Feedback: Healthcare providers can gather a large volume of feedback from a wide range of patients, offering a broader view of service quality across various demographics and healthcare needs.
  3. Timeliness: Patients tend to leave reviews soon after their visits, giving providers immediate feedback that can highlight pressing issues or recent successes.
  4. Publicly Accessible Insights: Since reviews are public, they not only provide feedback but also shape the provider’s reputation. This transparency encourages healthcare providers to address concerns quickly and improve their services.
  5. Building Trust: By engaging with reviews, responding to patient concerns, and showcasing a commitment to improvement, healthcare providers can enhance trust and credibility within the community.
  6. Benchmarking: Reviews allow providers to compare their performance against competitors in the same field or location, giving insights into areas where they can improve relative to others.

Regardless of which method is used, healthcare providers will receive both positive and negative feedback:

Examples of Positive Patient Feedback

  • “Efficient, friendly, and informed doctor. She carefully checked my medical records and I felt confident in her expertise.”
  • “The receptionist was very helpful on the phone. He was polite and took care to answer each of my questions in detail.”
  • “I visited the app to book an appointment, thinking it might take a week to get one. However, to my pleasant surprise, I got an appointment the next day!”

Examples of Negative Patient Feedback

  • “Avoid going to this doctor’s clinic. He didn’t seem interested in spending time on the patients at all. He just prescribes medication and goes away without any explanation!”
  • “I found that I’d been billed for services I never received! I won’t be returning to this dentist as this is unacceptable.”
  • “The facility was dirty and outdated, which is not what I expect from a hospital. I didn’t feel comfortable at all.”

How to Manage Patient Feedback?

Be it positive or negative, it’s important to know how to effectively manage patient feedback. The goal is to organize the collected feedback, analyze it to gain valuable insights and focus on high-priority issues before checking in with the patient again.

Here are four key steps to follow after collecting patient feedback:

1. Organize and respond to feedback

The first step to effective feedback management is organizing the patient feedback coming from various channels.

A dedicated feedback portal or a CRM system helps integrate multiple pieces of feedback in one place for easier analysis. It is also useful to categorize feedback in this step by overall sentiment (positive or negative) for a targeted approach.

The next step is to respond to the feedback based on its sentiment. While automated responses save time, it’s good practice to have a dedicated support team to contact the patients as well.

2. Analyze the feedback for useful insights

Analysis of patient feedback reveals the exact issues and opportunities that healthcare providers must focus on. With the help of AI-enhanced customer feedback analysis, organizations can speed up the process of capturing actionable insights.

One popular method here is sentiment analysis, which leverages natural language processing (NLP) to determine if the feedback is positive, negative, or neutral. Similarly, AI is useful for detecting patterns in data, such as recurring issues faced by patients concerning wait times or staff behavior.

The results of this analysis reveal priority areas to fix immediately for an enhanced patient experience.

3. Take immediate action based on the analysis

Healthcare centers should encourage their staff to take instant action on patient feedback. For example, if the analysis shows a recurring issue with wait times, the staff should optimize their workflow or look to hire more people to reduce delays for patients.

A good practice for organizations is to offer a token of apology, regardless of the exact action taken. These tokens could include a free checkup or a discount on medication. The idea is to offer a bonus that further affirms the organization’s commitment to patient satisfaction.

4. Follow up with the patient

In order to create a feedback loop, healthcare providers should follow up with the patient, informing them of the actions taken. This step builds trust as it signals to the patient that the hospital or clinic is willing to hear them out and act on their feedback.

Patient Feedback Software

When choosing the right patient feedback software to collect, organize, and analyze data, there are a few key factors to consider:

  1. Multi-channel feedback collection: The software should be able to accept and collect feedback from various sources, including email, kiosk surveys, and SMS.
  2. Automated survey and feedback response: The software should feature automated workflows for issuing surveys at key touchpoints in the patient journey, from check-in to discharge. Similar workflows for sending instant replies to patient feedback are also helpful.
  3. Customizable surveys: Healthcare providers should invest in software that allows them to represent their brand. Personalized surveys featuring the brand’s colors and style are likely to engage more patients.
  4. Analytics: The software should feature analytical tools to provide useful insights from patient feedback. For instance, it should support sentiment analysis to distinguish between positive and negative reviews.
  5. Integrations: To ensure smooth patient feedback management, the software should support integration with electronic medical records (EMR) and CRM systems. By providing information like patient demographics and clinical records, these integrations enable more specific analysis.

How InMoment Can Help Collect Patient Feedback 

InMoment’s feedback management system lets you collect, organize, and analyze patient feedback in one place. Our integrations and award-winning technology will help you capture actionable insights into patient expectations. 

As a result, you get access to all the data you need to deliver the best possible patient experience. Schedule a demo today to see how you can get started!

References 

Wolters Kluwer. Wolters Kluwer’s Pharmacy Next survey shows 58% of Americans likely to first seek non-emergency healthcare at pharmacies. (https://www.wolterskluwer.com/en/news/survey-shows-americans-seek-non-emergency-healthcare-at-pharmacies) Accessed 9/16/24. 

Healthgrades. Top Five Things Patients Prioritize When Choosing a Doctor. (https://b2b.healthgrades.com/insights/blog/top-five-things-patients-prioritize-when-choosing-a-doctor) Accessed 9/16/24.

ZeroBounce. Into the Inbox: Email Statistics Report for 2024. (https://www.zerobounce.net/email-statistics-report/) Accessed 9/16/24.

Customer Churn and Its Impact on Business Success

Customer churn is when a customer stops doing business with your organization. This is an important statistic for businesses to have to assess customer satisfaction and build sustainable growth.
Customer Churn

It’s important to keep track of how many customers leave and why they leave so that you can make the right adjustments for future customers and hopefully improve customer retention. However, it can be difficult to measure these types of factors and produce usable data. That’s why businesses need to keep track of customer churn, which is the metric used to measure how well you are retaining customers. Discover the ins and outs of customer churn and what business owners can do to make the most of their circumstances.

What Is Customer Churn?

Customer churn occurs when someone chooses to discontinue using your products or services—or in other words, they are no longer a customer. Also known as customer attrition, customer churn gives a business owner insight into how well their business is doing over time, which is an essential part of management and growth.

More specifically, customer churn is measured and evaluated using a customer churn rate. This rate reflects the number of customers who stopped using services or products during a set period. This set period could be any relevant time frame your company is analyzing, including a year, a financial quarter, or even a single month. This churn rate is also useful in customer churn analysis. 

Types of Customer Churn

When looking at customer churn, each case can be divided into one of two categories: voluntary churn or involuntary churn. 

  • Voluntary Churn: Voluntary churn occurs when a customer actively chooses to stop doing business with you. This decision is driven by dissatisfaction, a change in needs, or moving to a competitor. This may look like a customer buying from a competitor after experiencing long wait times with your organization. 
  • Involuntary Churn: Involuntary churn occurs when customers stop doing business with you without intending to. This is often due to avoidable factors such as payment issues or subscription expiration. An example of this is a customer’s credit card expires, and they forget to update their payment information, leading to an unintentional cancellation of their subscription.

It is important to understand these two types of churn and how each of them can be addressed. 

Why is Customer Churn a Problem?

Customer churn is a problem that businesses should seek to solve because it directly affects revenue, reputation, and growth. 

When customers leave, your business loses the immediate sales from those customers and the potential for future revenue. Since acquiring new customers is more expensive than retaining existing customers, you will be forced to spend more to cover the churned customers’ loss. 

Furthermore, a high churn rate can be indicative of dissatisfaction with your products or services. Dissatisfied customers who have churned can harm your brand reputation by leaving a negative review or sharing their bad experiences on social media. 

These results of customer churn will ultimately end with your business struggling to maintain sustainable growth. Long-term customer relationships are important for an organization to be able to grow, and customer churn disrupts this cycle. 

Why Is Customer Churn Important?

Churn rates examine the recurring business and value lost over certain periods. It’s important to look at customer churn to prevent customers from leaving due to problems you could potentially solve, which protects your brand, money, and future. Here are some of the more specific reasons why customer churn is important to measure:

Brand Impact

Dissatisfied customers negatively impact your brand equity, and especially in a market that is driven by the internet and influencers, it can be dangerous to your company if customers leave for a similar reason and discuss it online. 

Not only are you losing their business, but having dissatisfied customers also makes it more difficult to find new customers if the brand receives a bad reputation from dissatisfied customers. This could be news spreading by word of mouth, reviews, or social media.

Costly Consequences

Customer churn costs money, not only because you would be losing someone’s immediate purchases, but because customer loyalty is a huge asset to companies. Returning customers tend to spend more money on a brand once they have made a decision to become loyal customers, and finding and persuading new customers can be very costly and time-consuming. Ultimately, losing customers who spend a lot on your brand can affect the bottom line in the present and over time.

Future Growth

You need the loyalty of your customers to sustain your business, especially when you roll out new products or initiatives. If there aren’t people around to get excited about new products and services, companies can wear themselves thin because they focus on the basics that need to be fixed rather than healthily expanding.

Competitive Advantage

With every industry getting more and more competitive, it’s more important than ever to be at the top of your game. The last thing you want is a new competitor stealing clients or customers, especially if you can offer a solution for those customers. This competition should encourage organizations to focus not only on new business but also on retaining existing customers.

Proactive Business Strategies

Some problems arise seemingly out of nowhere and businesses must adapt as needed. Others, though, can be identified in advance by closely watching customer churn, which means you can put certain procedures in place to prevent serious losses. If you can predict customer churn after measuring it over time, you can do more to prevent it than wait until it is too late.

Why Does Customer Churn Happen?

Customer churn is more than a metric; it’s an indicator of how well your services, products, and sometimes employees are performing. Sometimes all companies go through a higher customer churn period, but it’s always important to know your potential blind spots and look for creative solutions. The most common reasons include the following scenarios.

Poor Customer Service

Whether you offer an immediate service or online resources for purchases, how people feel treated makes a big impact on whether or not they stick around. High customer churn rates may be an indicator that your employees or teams “on the field” directly interacting with customers may need more training or evaluations.

Misalignment with Customer Needs

You may have a great product, but you aren’t going after the right group of customers. Marketing is a key element of any business venture, including gathering research about who needs your products and how. It’s also possible that customers need new or improved features, so you may have the right audience, but you don’t understand their needs. Feedback is critical to understanding the needs of your customer community.

Pricing Concerns

If your prices are lightyears ahead of competitors and you don’t update your services, especially as other competitors join the market, even the most loyal of customers may switch to either a more affordable option or whoever gives them the biggest bang for their buck. 

External Factors

If you’re in a niche industry, you may not get consistent sales—a Christmas lights company isn’t going to have the same customer volumes year-round. You should consider this when calculating your churn rate and also see if there are things you can do during the off-season to bring in more customers. This could be adding products or services to make your offering more appealing outside of your primary season.

Furthermore, economic downturns or personal financial difficulties can cause customers to cut back on spending, resulting in churn. These factors do not affect your business exclusively and need to be taken into consideration when examining churn rates. 

Lack of Engagement

Most businesses need to have an online presence to properly promote and market their company and products. Without it, your brand awareness and loyalty will go down, meaning valuable old customers won’t stick around with a decent competitor actively drawing them away. Similarly, low-quality content and communications are also a turnoff for a lot of customers.

What is Customer Churn Analysis?

Customer churn analysis examines an organization’s customer churn rate to understand what caused customers to churn and how it can be improved in the future. Customer churn analysis is a critical part of improving your organization’s customer churn rate because you will gain the necessary information to create an action plan to reduce churn and improve overall customer satisfaction. 

An example of customer churn analysis is seeing why a specific subset of customers are churning. To do this, you can take the number of customers that churned and filter that data to represent just the demographic you are examining. Then, you can identify what caused these customers to churn and work on making customer experience improvements to prevent it from happening in the future. 

Customer churn analysis software

How To Calculate Customer Churn Rate

The customer churn rate is usually expressed using a percentage, and the higher the percentage, the more customers are leaving and the more business you’re losing. At its core, the customer churn rate is calculated by dividing the number of customers lost by the number of total customers in a set period.

Another way to look at it is by using a formula. The customer churn rate equation looks like this:

Customer churn formula

For example: let’s say a company has 500 customers at the beginning of the quarter, but by the end, it has 450 customers. That means the company lost 50 customers, and when you divide that by the total number of customers for that quarter (500), you get 0.1. Multiply that by 100 to get your percentage and there you have it: the company had a 10% churn rate for that quarter.

Depending on the service or product, it may be challenging to determine what losing a customer looks like. If your service is a monthly subscription to your product, it’s easy to determine when someone unsubscribes. However, if you have a one-time service, it’s more difficult to approximate when you’ve “lost” a customer. 

Some industries go months before services are needed, like home furniture stores or car dealerships. Those sales cycles are much broader and if they don’t see returning clients for even years, it doesn’t mean they’ve lost any value or money—that’s simply the nature of the field. Generally, you can estimate when a customer no longer uses your service by using the frequency of their purchases as a baseline.

Average Churn Rate
Ideally, everyone would have a 0% churn rate, but that’s not a realistic expectation to have. A 5%-8% churn rate is usually considered average, but it depends on the market, the industry, the size of your business, and more.

What is A Good Customer Churn Rate?

A good average churn rate across all industries is 4%, which can generally be used as a good benchmark for your business. However, customer churn rates vary widely by industry. 

For example, the median churn rate for the digital media and entertainment industry is 6.9%, while the median churn rate for the software industry is almost half of that at 3.5%. Knowing these industry-specific metrics will be much more valuable than an umbrella statistic. 

Tips for Customer Churn Rate

To predict customer churn, you need to be able to identify the things that have the biggest impact on your customer experience. This involves a combination of data analysis, customer feedback, and understanding the nuances of your customer journey. Here are some steps you can take to predict customer churn:

Know Your Key Drivers

In order to identify customer churn indicators, you need to identify the key drivers behind your customer experience. If you know that sales promotions have the biggest impact on your customer experience metrics, then a lack of sales promotions could be an early sign of churn. Other factors include a drop in engagement, lower transaction volumes, or an increase in negative feedback.

Once you know your biggest CX drivers, you can continuously monitor them to keep customers from churning. 

List of customer satisfaction drivers

Identify and Address Early Warning Signs

Depending on your business, there can be many early warning signs that a customer is about to churn. For example, if they become inactive or are using your product less frequently, cancel or downgrade a subscription, or start making late payments, these are all early signs of churn. 

When customers exhibit these behaviors, it is important that they become a top priority and are re-engaged as soon as possible. 

How can Customer Churn be Prevented?

Preventing customer churn is essential to your business strategy. It starts with measuring customer churn and finding the root of the problem. Then, you work on solutions. Here is a list of ideas and tips on how to tackle customer churn.

Focus on Your Best Customers

Pay special attention to your most loyal customers and make sure they feel appreciated. Loyal customers will share your content and be a promoter for your brand without being paid if they feel appreciated.

Analyze Churn in Real-Time

Analyze churn as it occurs instead of waiting to fix the issue. The more preventative maintenance you can do, the better. In order to prevent customer churn, you need customer experience software that can accurately predict customer sentiment. Being able to detect customer sentiment will allow you to predict what actions a customer is likely to take based on their feedback. 

For example, a customer might leave an online review expressing their negative feelings about their most recent purchase. With the right tools, you can recognize the importance and flag this review as a high-priority case so that it is resolved quickly, which will result in a saved customer.

Case management software

Conduct Competitive Analysis

Do a competitive analysis to see what your competitors are offering that may persuade customers to abandon your brand.  Understanding their strengths can help you address gaps in your own offerings that might be driving customers away.

Lower Customer Churn with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform gives you all the tools you need to analyze, track, and reduce customer churn. With the ability to view customer interactions from every source in one place, measure unstructured feedback, and more, it is the perfect tool to help you connect more with your customers. To see how it can help your business, schedule a demo today!

References 

Recurly Research. What is a good churn rate? (https://recurly.com/research/churn-rate-benchmarks/). Accessed 8/30/2024.

Customer Experience Consulting: Why It’s the Key to Your Success

Customer experience consulting is a strategic necessity. A skilled customer experience consultant can transform your business by driving loyalty, satisfaction, and ROI. Explore what customer experience consulting entails, why it’s crucial for your business, and how working with a top-notch customer experience consultant can drive your business to new heights.
Financial Services Grow Share of Wallet

What is Customer Experience Consulting?

Customer experience consulting is a specialized service that helps businesses enhance the experiences they provide to their customers across every touchpoint—from the initial awareness stage to post-purchase support.

But what does that really mean for your business? Essentially, a customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer interactions, analyzes data, and helps you craft strategies that not only meet but exceed customer expectations. It’s about making sure every interaction adds value and strengthens the customer relationship. By partnering with a customer experience consulting firm, businesses gain insights and strategies tailored to their unique challenges and opportunities, ensuring they stand out in a crowded marketplace.

What are the Benefits of having a Customer Experience Consultant?

Why should you invest in a customer experience consultant? Can’t your in-house team handle it? The truth is, while your team knows your business inside and out, a customer experience consultant brings a fresh perspective and specialized expertise that can make all the difference.

A customer experience consultant dives deep into your customer data, identifies pain points, and develops strategies that are proven to improve customer satisfaction and retention. But it’s not just about solving problems—it’s about driving growth. Customer experience consultants, like the experts at InMoment, can help you craft experiences that turn customers into brand advocates, increasing their lifetime value and positively impacting your bottom line. By leveraging their expertise, you can avoid common pitfalls and fast-track your way to a more loyal and satisfied customer base.

What to Look for in a Customer Experience Consultant?

With so many options out there, it can be overwhelming to select a customer experience vendor with the right consulting services but asking the right questions can help you find the perfect fit.

Experience and credentials are key. Look for consultants who have years of experience and a track record of success across various industries. Questions you should ask when meeting with a CX consultant should include:

  • How many clients have they worked with?
  • Can they share examples of businesses they’ve worked with that are similar to yours (in terms of industry, size, or challenges)?
  • What is their specific expertise within customer experience (e.g., journey mapping, voice of customer programs, etc.)?
  • How do they stay updated on the latest CX trends and technologies?
  • What is their process for assessing and improving customer experience?
  • How do they tailor their approach to the unique needs of different businesses?
  • What frameworks or tools do they use to measure customer satisfaction and other CX metrics?
  • How do they leverage data and analytics to improve customer experience?
  • Can they help integrate customer feedback systems with your existing platforms?
  • What kind of results have they delivered? 
  • What is the average customer experience ROI have their clients seen?
  • Do they have experience in your industry? 

In addition to the questions, a reputable customer experience consulting firm should offer proof of their success—whether through CX case studies, testimonials, or data showcasing improved customer satisfaction and ROI.

Additionally, consider their approach to consulting customer experience. Are they focused on understanding your unique needs and challenges, or do they offer one-size-fits-all solutions? The best consultants take the time to understand your business and tailor their strategies accordingly.

What Services Should be Included in Customer Experience Consulting?

It’s not just about receiving advice—it’s about a comprehensive partnership that equips your business to succeed. A comprehensive service package should include the following:

  • Onboarding and Training: Your consultant should provide a thorough onboarding process, ensuring that your team understands the tools, strategies, and processes involved in the new CX approach.
  • Journey Mapping: One of the first steps in consulting customer experience is creating detailed customer journey maps. These visual representations of the customer experience help identify pain points and opportunities for improvement.
  • Regular Meetings and Reporting: Ongoing communication is key. Expect regular check-ins and detailed reports that track progress, analyze data, and adjust strategies as needed.
  • Tool Integration: Whether it’s a CRM system, customer feedback tools, or analytics software, your consultant should help integrate the necessary technology to support your CX strategy.

This is where InMoment’s CX services shine. Our customer experience consultants are dedicated to setting you up for long-term success, offering a personalized approach that aligns with your business goals.

Working with InMoment’s CX Experts 

At InMoment, we believe that exceptional customer experiences are integral to business success. Our mission is to help you drive business value by being bold in the moments that matter. Our CX experts bring years of experience across diverse industries, offering best-in-class technology and comprehensive consulting to ensure you achieve outstanding results.

We don’t just provide consulting services—we become an extension of your team. Our approach is hands-on and collaborative, ensuring that we understand your unique challenges and goals. From the initial consultation to ongoing support, our customer experience consultants work closely with you to design and implement strategies that resonate with your customers, improve customer experience KPIs, and drive measurable outcomes.

Whether you’re looking to enhance your current customer experience efforts or need a complete overhaul, InMoment’s CX experts are here to guide you every step of the way. With our support, you’ll be equipped to deliver experiences that not only meet but exceed your customers’ expectations, fostering loyalty and driving sustained growth. 


InMoment’s integrated CX approach has proven to boost customer lifetime value and accelerate bottom-line performance in just 12 months—well ahead of the industry average of 25 months. Get more insights and details with our ROI calculator

Final Thoughts

In today’s market, customer experience is no longer a “nice-to-have” but a critical component of business success. By investing in customer experience consulting services, you’re not just improving customer satisfaction—you’re building a foundation for long-term growth. Whether you’re looking to enhance existing strategies or start from scratch, a skilled customer experience consultant can guide you every step of the way. And when you choose InMoment, you’re choosing a partner committed to your success. Schedule a CX demo to get started on transforming your business.

A Deep Dive into the Voice of the Customer

Embracing the Voice of the Customer (VoC) is a powerful strategy for businesses looking to thrive in a customer-centric environment. By actively listening and responding to customer feedback, you can build stronger relationships, enhance your products and services, and position your business for sustained success.
A man in a woman in a shopping mall

Did you know that over 70% of consumers expect personalized communications and tailored products/services from companies they buy from? Of those customers, 76% get frustrated when they do not receive any level of personalization. When companies do offer personalized experiences, 78% of those customers who receive that level of personalization are likely to make repeat purchases.

With these statistics in mind, it is clear that delivering consistent, memorable experiences is a must for any organization looking to build and sustain a loyal customer base. The only way to do this is by listening to what your customers are saying, which is referred to as the Voice of the Customer.

What is Voice of the Customer?

Voice of the Customer (VoC) is the process of gathering information regarding what customers think and feel about their experiences with a business. The goal is to learn about their expectations regarding the business’ products or services. 

Often applied as a market research technique by firms looking to achieve a better and more complete understanding of the customer, Voice of the Customer can also help companies measure and understand the experiences that they deliver to customers. Armed with this knowledge, companies can build stronger brands, function as more efficient organizations, and deliver a better customer experience.

A Voice of the Customer program helps your business reap the benefits of listening, acting, and responding to what customers say about your brand, product, service, or business location. This can help you deliver improved experiences, offer better products and services, and create more value for customers.

Why Voice of the Customer Is Important

Voice of the Customer data is important for several reasons in business and product development. Primarily, Voice of the Customer programs help organizations become more customer-centric by understanding customer needs, preferences, and expectations. This customer-centric focus is crucial for developing products, services, and experiences that align with what customers truly want.

VoC data is also a valuable source of insights for innovation. Understanding customer pain points and desires can guide the development of new products or features that address unmet needs, giving companies a competitive advantage.

Essentially, once fortified with this extensive and comprehensive data, CX leaders can: 

  • Discover why feedback scores, such as net promoter scores are not up to par. 
  • Comprehend customer desires, needs, and criticisms. 
  • List the above data in order of importance for improving performance. 
  • Fully grasp customers’ perception of the value of a company’s product(s) and/or service(s) offer. 
  • Learn if and where the company is fulfilling its promises and areas where it fails to do so. 
  • Utilize all the data to inform improvements in the way products and services are created and offered to a now better-understood customer demographic.
  • Solicit customer feedback to evaluate new ways of gaining a competitive advantage.
  • Generate advanced marketing insights and opportunities.

Benefits of a Voice of the Customer Program

Businesses without a Voice of Customer program observe which of their products or services are being sold most frequently, and assume that is what customers want more of. However, this approach leaves out key qualitative details such as which areas of the buying experience customers would change. 

Voice of the Customer programs allows organizations to gain a deeper understanding of their customers and the decisions they make. These benefits can range from operational improvements to changes in product development. Here are some common benefits of effective voice of the customer programs: 

Improve Customer Retention

It is no secret that your existing customers are easier to sell to and will spend more than first-time customers. By implementing a Voice of the Customer program, you can open a direct line of communication for customers to address their concerns and frustrations so that the company can act on those frustrations to improve the overall experience. This will allow you to decrease customer churn and improve customer retention. 

Improve Brand Reputation

A Voice of the Customer program enhances brand reputation by ensuring timely and thoughtful responses to customer feedback. By staying connected to the platforms where customers share their experiences, your business can quickly address online reviews, demonstrate attentiveness, and show a commitment to customer satisfaction. This responsiveness not only resolves individual concerns but also builds trust and reinforces a positive brand image across your customer base.

Reduce Customer Complaints and Faster Resolutions

By systematically gathering customer opinions and experiences, businesses can identify issues early on, even before customers actively complain. Early detection allows for proactive problem-solving.

Moreover, Voice of the Customer programs help businesses understand the severity and impact of different issues. This allows for the prioritization of problems based on their urgency and potential impact on customer satisfaction. Addressing high-priority issues first contributes to faster resolution.

Drive Product Innovations

Voice of the Customer data helps companies stay aligned with market trends and shifts. This knowledge is crucial for driving product and service innovation, adapting strategies, staying relevant, and ensuring that your offerings remain in tune with evolving customer expectations. 

Boost Your Revenue

A natural consequence of expanding the customer base and retaining customers is an increase in revenue. As companies monitor customer feedback and trends, they have a clear picture of what products and services customers want and are willing to pay for, which means that the company can provide those with greater accuracy.

If you want to see how much revenue InMoment can deliver for you with Voice of Customer surveys, check out our ROI calculator!

Improve Customer Experience 

All of these benefits work together to create a more cohesive and satisfying customer experience. By actively listening to customer feedback, addressing their needs, and continuously improving products and services, businesses can deliver a personalized and seamless experience at every touchpoint. This holistic approach not only meets but often exceeds customer expectations, fostering loyalty, encouraging positive word-of-mouth, and ultimately driving long-term success.

3 Questions to Consider Before Building a Voice of the Customer Program

These three questions can guide companies’ efforts to implement an effective Voice of the Customer program to improve the customer experience, retain customers, and boost revenue.

1. What Is the Goal of the Voice of the Customer Program?

Without a clear goal, it is difficult to start a Voice of the Customer program since the strategies used should reflect the business objective. Before companies start building a program, they should first examine potential objectives and determine which will be the most beneficial for their specific needs. 

The objectives of a voice of the customer program can be divided into two main categories: benchmarking and continuous improvement. 

Benchmarking

Programs that focus on benchmarking as an objective tend to be more comparative. This means that the surveys used to gather customer feedback will use the same set of questions for every respondent, typically in a rating format, and then compare those ratings to each other to find areas for improvement. Often, the focus is on the scores themselves instead of the reason for those ratings, so companies that use this objective will get more general feedback and causality. 

Continuous Improvement

Continuous improvement objectives, on the other hand, can be more personalized based on certain aspects of the customer and their interaction with the company. While the accompanying surveys can include rating questions, there will also be some open-ended questions that allow respondents to clarify their reasons for the scores they gave. This method can give more detailed insight into the causes of dissatisfaction.

Companies should choose one of these objectives based on the information that they wish to gather to work towards certain goals. Some of the possible goals are:

  • Customer research: For this, companies gather the information that helps them better understand the needs and wants of their target customers.
  • Customer retention: Learning how to best keep existing customers satisfied with the products and services offered is crucial for customer retention.
  • Acquiring new customers: Just as important as retaining customers is acquiring new ones. With this goal in mind, companies should learn how to increase interest in their brand to attract new customers.
  • Improving brand image: This goal focuses on finding out how customers view a company’s brand and what can be done to improve that image.
  • Cost reduction: Focusing on cost-effectiveness by recognizing where you can reduce spending will help you increase profitability and prove ROI. 
  • Increasing customer lifetime value: Customer lifetime value is the revenue earned from a single customer over time. Increasing that will cause your customers to promote your brand for you.

2. What Metrics Should Be Measured Throughout the VoC Program?

Once a company has chosen a goal to drive its VoC program, it should define which metrics will be measured to demonstrate progress and focus the efforts for more improvements. Some common metrics in a Voice of the Customer program include customer experience KPIs such as Net Promoter Score, Customer Effort Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score.

When selecting metrics, consider the holistic picture they paint and how they align with your business goals. Combining quantitative metrics with qualitative insights from customer feedback ensures a comprehensive understanding of the Voice of the Customer. Regularly review and adjust your chosen metrics to stay responsive to changing customer needs and business objectives.

3. How Should the Success of the VoC Program Be Measured?

A Voice of the Customer program is only effective if it drives action. To determine whether the feedback being gathered is useful, it is important to look at what has changed since the program was implemented. Measuring success is dependent on setting a clear goal and choosing specific metrics that align with that goal. Because of this, companies should consider whether the metrics being measured are improving over time. The changes made to improve the metrics should help the company work towards its main objective.

Building a Voice of the Customer Program: Best Practices

Before you jump in and begin building your Voice of the Customer program, you’ll need to earnestly attempt to see through your customers’ eyes and link their experience to your business outcomes. Here are some areas of focus and best practices to follow:

Identify Customer Touchpoints 

Customers form their impression of a product or service through multiple interactions with an organization. For instance, folks may find a business by doing an online search or via an ad. They might be introduced through blogs or site reviews, then shop on the company’s website, stop by at a brick-and-mortar retail location, and later on, get in touch with the customer service department. 

A Voice of the Customer program often starts with customer journey mapping and identifying the various touchpoints that will add up to the full customer experience with the company. Keep in mind that combining insights from multiple touchpoints provides a comprehensive view of customer experiences and helps drive informed decision-making.

Collect and Connect Feedback Across Data Channels

Successful Voice of the Customer programs are founded on a company’s ability to listen to customers. To do that successfully, your Voice of the Customer program needs to work as part of your omnichannel customer experience so that you can monitor what customers are saying across all different platforms.  

Analyze Customer Data

After gathering a sufficient amount of data, it’s time to make sense of it. Whether you’re working alone or as a part of a team, you will need to come up with a standard way to understand the Voice of the Customer. 

Analytical methods like natural language processing (NLP) and sentiment analysis can help your business pin down customer sentiment data, emotions, and feelings, helping you see more clearly than ever what customers like and dislike about your brand. 

By translating information into vision, you can achieve a better understanding of the needs, wants, feelings, sentiments, and expectations of your customers. The insights you gather from the Voice of the Customer data will help your entire organization more accurately measure — and more efficiently improve — customer experience.

Collaborate with Teams Across the Entire Organization

Collaboration with other teams within your organization is crucial when managing Voice of the Customer data. This enhances the effectiveness of your efforts and ensures a more comprehensive and integrated approach to customer-centric strategies.

Cross-functional insights are also made possible with greater collaboration. This is why it is important to understand what CX teams in an organization work for your business. When you understand what time is heading the Voice of the Customer program, they can facilitate collaboration across the business. By working with other teams, you gain insights into the end-to-end customer journey, enabling a more comprehensive analysis of customer interactions and pain points.

Take Action and Deliver Insights to the Right People

With all the data and analysis done, you’re ready to create a custom, on-brand Voice of the Customer plan that spurs your team to action in ways that meet the needs of your customers. But it’s not enough to just create a plan and execute it. You’ll also need to monitor its effects regularly. Integrated customer experience platforms allow you to create custom reports that inform company leadership of the effects of Voice of the Customer data on a daily, weekly, or even monthly basis. 

Don’t forget to share your Voice of Customer insights with key stakeholders and decision-makers. This will unite your company around the goal of meeting customer needs, and to guide and empower everyone to foster improvements in customer experience.

Monitor and Act on Customer Experience Trends

Ongoing monitoring assists in tracking a company’s progress as time goes on. Companies can get stuck debating what metrics they should target. What is more important is to stick to a metric, build a system that lets feedback flow in effortlessly, and watch the metric improve over time, as employees act on this valuable feedback.

How to Collect VoC Data

There are multiple ways to gather or capture Voice of the Customer data. Each of these has benefits and drawbacks, which is why a company may choose to use a combination of these sources and techniques instead of a singular method of collecting data.

As you collect Voice of Customer data, it’s good practice to select the right touchpoints and consider the variety of channels that customers use to interact with your brand throughout their journey. With customer data fragmented across different systems and departments, it may be challenging to identify or prioritize opportunities for improvement without a holistic or integrated approach to managing Voice of the Customer and the customer experience.

Customer Interviews

The traditional technique of gathering data through a customer interview has stuck around for so long because it is a direct way of gathering feedback. Interviews can be done in person, over the phone, or through email depending on the preferences and needs of a company. This technique allows companies to better understand the point of view that a customer or group of customers shares in their interaction with the company.

Surveys

Different types of surveys can be useful when collecting customer feedback. Online, email and SMS customer surveys can include different types of questions to help your team gather meaningful insights into issues that customers face. Some of the different survey questions include multiple-choice questions, drop-down questions, and open-ended questions. The key is to ask the right questions at the right time to gain a better understanding of customers and their expectations at any given point in the customer journey.

Live Chat

A live chat feature on the website is becoming increasingly popular due to the ability to collect real-time customer feedback. Live chats can gather more than customer complaints; they can also provide companies with the opportunity to schedule a follow-up survey to learn about the customer experience on the site. Another great feature is the ability for companies to respond quickly to an issue, which reduces the risk of customers leaving the site feeling unsatisfied with the services or products.

Online Reviews and Social Media

Another way for companies to interact with customers and gather VoC data in real time is through online reviews and social media. Companies can engage in two-way communication with their client base to learn more about what customers are looking for, predict future trends, and gather feedback directly from the source. 

A large part of retaining customers is a positive brand reputation, and responding to online reviews can demonstrate that a company is aware of how customers view their products or services. A good review management strategy also allows companies to learn more about the frustrations that customers face so that they can implement measures to resolve these frustrations and issues.

A business using voice of the customer software to respond to a customer.

Website Behavior

Along with these other techniques for collecting data, a company can analyze the behavior of customers on their website by using tools like heat maps. The company can track these behavior patterns and test potential changes to see what works and what doesn’t, all to create a smoother user experience.

Focus Groups

Focus group discussions are a common and effective method for collecting Voice of the Customer data. Focus groups involve a small, diverse group of participants who discuss their opinions, perceptions, and experiences related to a particular product, service, or topic. 

By leveraging focus groups for Voice of Customer data collection, businesses can gain valuable qualitative insights that go beyond quantitative metrics, helping them better understand the nuances of customer perceptions and preferences.

Voice of Customer: Examples of Survey Questions 

The questions that a company asks as part of its Voice of the Customer program will depend on the goal set at the beginning. For example, if the goal is general customer research, the company will want to ask questions that tell about the demographics of their audience, including:

  • Which of the following categories best describes your age?
  • Which of the following genders do you most identify with?
  • What is the highest level of education you have achieved?
  • How many people work at your company or organization?

On the other hand, the company should ask questions about its products and how they compare to competitors if the goal is to increase customer retention. For example:

  • How does [company, brand, product, or service] compare to the competition?
  • What do you like best about [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • What do you want to be improved about [company, brand, product, or service]?

If the goal is to acquire new customers, companies can ask about how the audience makes decisions. A potential question is:

  • What factor(s) matter most to you when selecting a company for [product or service]?

Finally, companies should ask about their brand if the goal is to improve their brand image. These questions could ask things like: 

  • What word or phrase comes to mind when you see or hear [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • What company comes to mind first when you think of [company, brand, product, or service]?
  • Where have you seen or heard information about [company or brand] in the past six months?

How InMoment Can Power Your VoC Program

Firms are no longer limited to managing Voice of the Customer data from a random sample of customers; now, they can listen in to every customer and every conversation at various stages of the customer journey — not to mention, dig deeper into data on both macro and micro levels.

InMoment’s combination of award-winning technology and expert services can power your Voice of the Customer program and make it comprehensive, simple, and scalable. Experience the transformative capabilities firsthand by exploring our demo. With InMoment, you can navigate and interpret valuable Voice of the Customer data to understand where to focus and how to create the maximum impact for your customer and your business.  

References 

Mckinsey & Company. The value of getting personalization right—or wrong—is multiplying. (https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/growth-marketing-and-sales/our-insights/the-value-of-getting-personalization-right-or-wrong-is-multiplying). Accessed 8/27/24.

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