Customer Experience Archives – Page 5 of 24

7 Common Types of Surveys

By: The InMoment Team

June 13, 2023March 19, 2024

Customer Experience 101

Surveys are a way to compile data from a group of people, but they can be more than that. Surveys are also direct insight into your customers and information about how they feel about your company, products, and services. How did your customers perceive your most recent product launch? How do they feel about your company’s social media presence? Surveys are a direct line to find out and glean valuable information about your customers and your company.

But not all surveys are the same, and different types of surveys can provide different insights. There are many types of surveys your company can choose from, and it can be hard to determine which one would be the best for your needs. So to help you figure out the right type of surveys for your needs, we’ll walk you through the most common survey types, the benefits of using surveys, and how to get started today.

How to Choose the Right Survey Method

Prior to launching a survey, it’s imperative to consider what resources are available to you to conduct the surveys, your goals and objectives, the sample and population size and many other factors to consider:

Time: Typically in-person surveys require more time than online surveys. Consider how much time you have available and how soon you need results.
Money: Consider what your budget is and how much it will cost to conduct your survey of choice.
Audience: Consider your audience demographic. Online surveys are typically more difficult for an older population. Consider what type of surveys yield a higher response rate for your audience.
Technology Capabilities: Consider whether you have the proper technology that can handle your data analytics.
Research Expertise: Consider whether you have the proper research knowledge such as clearly defined problems, objectives, a target audience, proper data tracking capabilities etc.
Responses: Consider whether you have strategies in place to combat slow response or no response rates.

The Most Common Types of Surveys

There are so many survey types, but we’ll explore 7 types of surveys in depth since these are the most common and beneficial for most companies.

Online Surveys

Online surveys are one of the most popular types of surveys and for good reason. Online surveys are easy to create, disseminate, and gather responses—challenges many other survey types face. Using an online survey platform, your company can create a survey easily and quickly—often with a wide range of question types—and send it out to customers within seconds. Your customers can then answer the survey at their convenience and send their responses back to you instantaneously.

In addition, online surveys are beneficial for companies that have a wide reach and customers around the world. Online surveys are accessible by anyone anywhere with only the click of a button. You can reach a wide audience with this type of survey.

But like any survey type, online surveys do have their cons. Online surveys could be accessed anywhere, but the survey recipient has to have internet access. There are parts of the globe and some households that don’t have internet access (or easy access to public internet) that could be valuable contributors to your survey. In addition, online surveys can provide a wealth of information, but they fall short in some depth. There’s no organic way to ask follow up questions or to probe deeper into an answer when you want more insights.

Paper Surveys

Paper surveys are sometimes looked at as old fashioned, but they do still reach an audience that can’t access many other types of surveys. Many audiences—like senior citizens or those without internet access—are far more likely to respond or far more comfortable with paper surveys than online surveys. Plus paper surveys are often easier to read for many since they’re printed in large fonts with black text on white paper.

But one major con of paper surveys is that they can be one of the pricier types of surveys. Paper surveys have to be printed off, sometimes in large quantities, to reach your audience. That can add up if you’re trying to reach a large amount of people. In addition, paper surveys aren’t the most environmentally friendly way to survey.

Mail Surveys

Mail surveys are one of the most traditional types of surveys. While some people may look at them as old fashioned, there’s a reason this method has been around for so long: it feels authentic and offers you access to an audience that may be less inclined to respond online. Those demographics who are less likely to answer an online email survey are often familiar with mail surveys and will be willing to respond. In addition, mail surveys also have a wide geographic reach since most places are accessible by post.

When it comes to mail surveys, there are a couple of things to plan for in advance. First, creating the surveys can often be simple, and you do only need to print them off to distribute. But you should keep in mind that your response rate will often be lower if you don’t pre-paid return envelopes for the participants. One drawback of mail surveys is that they require some extra work on the part of the survey participants—something that often lowers response rates. You’ll want to reduce that level of work as much as possible by providing return envelopes that simply need to be dropped in a mailbox.

That brings up the second con of mail surveys: they can cost your company a little bit more. The cost of printing, envelopes, and postage can add up—but could be worth it for the responses you receive. Second, when it comes to response rate, less is more. Mail surveys have a better completion rate if they’re short. Try to keep your survey to about a page. Not only will that increase your chances of completed responses, short surveys also reduce printing and postage costs.

Telephone Surveys

Telephone surveys are another more old fashioned method of surveying that has been around since landlines. Now that nearly everyone carries a phone with them or has one at phone, telephone surveys are alive and well in surveying methods. For a telephone survey, a real live interviewer will ask a series of questions and record responses. With modern technology, it’s easy for interviewers to insert responses directly into a computer system to chart and track data. In addition, telephone surveys let interviewers add a personal touch to the conversation that isn’t possible for online, mail, or paper surveys. The chance to ask follow-up questions can give the interviewers a chance to probe for deeper insights and emotions.

Telephone surveys still face a few cons. These surveys may be cost effective, but they should be kept short. Fifteen minutes is the cap for an effective phone survey. In addition, phone surveys run the risk of looking like a telemarketing call or being ignored. With the saturation of telemarketing calls, many cell phone users don’t answer calls from unknown numbers. Some even block all unknown numbers. While telephone surveys can be effective, your team of interviewers will first have to be ignored a decent amount.

In-Person Surveys

While paper and online surveys lack a personal touch, in-person surveys excel at that. With these surveys, interviewers are able to directly interact with a respondent and to ask follow up questions that really delve into the nuances and intricacies of a response. These surveys provide accuracy and profound insights. In addition, in-person interviews are a great way to collect responses from audiences with low literacy—something that may hinder groups from participating in other methods.

While the insights gleaned from these surveys can be immensely valuable, there are still some cons to consider. In-person surveys can be time consuming. Your team will need to prepare a venue, schedule interviews, and spend the time actually performing the interviews. It’s a very hands-on process the entire time. In addition, in-person interviews run the risk of interviewer bias or inexperience. The interviewer is crucial to getting usable insights, so you will need to spend the time and money training or hiring one. Even a well-trained interviewer can still lead to interviewer bias skewing your information.

Panel Surveys

Panel sampling is when you select a group of people to survey repeatedly over a period of time. Your respondents will be randomly selected from your target audience, and they’ll respond to several surveys over a determined period of time. Longitudinal studies are a great example of panel surveying. These surveys can provide long-term insights and show in-depth understanding of a target audience. In addition, your company could use a third-party research company to perform a large bulk of the research and to ensure it’s done at a high level of quality.

But panel surveying takes time and preparation to make them effective and usable. In addition, some participants may choose to stop responding to surveys part way through the study, leaving you with gaps. Your company may need to provide incentives to encourage participants to follow through with the entire surveying process.

Focus Group Surveys

Focus groups are a variation of in-person surveying methods that includes a panel of 6–10 people that represent the target population. All of these people will answer questions and hold a discussion, moderated by a professional who attempts to keep everything on track and as unbiased as possible. These surveys can reveal personal attitudes and perceptions for a sampling of your entire target population—something that can be very valuable for market research.

The cons of focus groups, though, include the costs of preparing a moderator and participants. It can take time to select just the right panel of participants to make sure you are accurately exploring your target audience. You may also need to pay for the travel expenses and time of an effective moderator. Oftentimes you may also need to survey your focus group participants a second time to gather quantitative data, and that takes additional time and preparation.

Benefits of Using Surveys

If surveys take time, preparation, and work, why do companies keep turning them for market research? Aren’t there easier ways? Well, there may be, but there are few ways that can give you such insight into your target populations and how your brand is performing. Surveys provide strategic benefits based on customer feedback that can help improve CX and improve brand loyalty.

Here are some other key benefits of using surveys:

Large sampling size. Surveying can reach many customers in many locations or with many limitations. With a variety of surveys, you can reach people all over the world, people who don’t use the internet, and people who can’t normally participate in other marketing research methods.
More cost-effective. Even the pricier types of surveying are fairly cost effective when compared to the valuable insights you can gain.
Reliable and usable information. Surveys can give you information and insights that are a reliable reflection of your audience, especially of how they feel toward many parts of your brand. In addition, this information can actually be usable (with the right analysis) to improve your brand, customer experience, and, ultimately, ROI.
Improve the brand experience. Your customers deserve a brand they trust and have a positive experience with. Using surveys, you can get real feedback from your customers and improve your brand experience in meaningful ways.

How InMoment Can Help

If you’re ready to get started with surveying, InMoment can help today. InMoment’s customer listening solutions provide your company with the tools you need to create strong surveys that will reach your audience and provide your team with the insights you need. InMoment surveys are conversational and designed to reduce survey fatigue while ultimately capturing every customer story, so you can design products that will benefit them.

Once you have survey data, the next step is to analyze it and thoroughly glean insights from the responses. Being able to make sense of information is where you’ll be able to create opportunities to increase revenue. InMoment’s text analytics can help your company find actionable insights and feedback.

Overall, surveys come in every shape and form—each one offering your team a new way to understand your customers and improve your customer experience and brand loyalty.

GET STARTED

Schedule a Demo & Get Started on Surveys!

With InMoment’s solutions, you’ll be able to take full advantage of the benefits of surveying and really understand your customers and be able to use that for actionable insights and informed business decisions. Conduct surveys and improve your customer experience with InMoment today!

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The Key to a Great Customer Experience Design

By: The InMoment Team

May 25, 2023May 25, 2023

Customers are the lifeblood of any business, and providing them with a great experience can lead to increased loyalty, higher satisfaction, and improved brand reputation. It’s simple: every company needs customers, but what happens when there are so many brands to choose from? How can brands stand out? The customer experience (CX) is crucial for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. Great customer experience doesn’t just happen as soon as you send out a survey; it needs to be planned and designed purposefully.

In this article, we’ll discuss what designing an effective customer experience looks like, what makes it different from user experience and customer service, why it matters, the elements of customer experience design, and how to design a great customer experience from start to finish.

What Is Customer Experience Design?

To start, what is customer experience? Customer experience is every interaction your customers have with your company at any point. That experience affects how they view your organization and products, as well as their loyalty. Customer experience design is the process of creating the customer experience at all touchpoints, from the initial discovery phase through to the post-purchase phase. It’s what your company does to ensure a positive customer experience across all stages of the customer journey.

The goal of customer experience design is to create a positive, memorable experience for customers that meets their needs, exceeds their expectations, and strengthens their relationship with the brand. It’s a way to move your customers through their journey while actively working to make that a smooth and easy process. Customer experience design involves a multidisciplinary approach, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and user experience (UX) design.

A great customer experience can lead to increased customer loyalty, higher customer satisfaction, improved brand reputation, increased revenue, and a competitive advantage. So focusing on customer experience design is a way to actively work toward creating that great customer experience and helping your company benefit from it.

Customer Experience vs. User Experience vs. Customer Service

Customer experience is often confused with other similar terms. While customer experience, user experience, and customer service are related, they are not the same thing and should not be discussed interchangeably. Understanding the differences between these concepts is crucial to creating a great customer experience. So, let’s dive into the differences.

Customer Experience

The customer experience encompasses the customer’s experience with the overall brand at all touchpoints before and after purchase. It includes all interactions with the brand, including marketing, sales, customer service, and post-purchase interactions. It’s every ad, every social media post or comment, every article that a customer reads, and much more. It’s even walking past your storefront or coming across your website. The goal of customer experience is to create a positive, memorable experience that will ultimately strengthen the relationship between a customer and your brand.

User Experience

User experience (UX) is specific to the experience of navigation, usability, and interface design of a specific product or service. It focuses on the user’s interactions with a product or service, including how easy it is to use, how it looks, and how it feels. Basically, it’s your customer’s experience with your product.

Customer Service

Customer service is the experience that customers have with your representatives about products or services. It includes interactions with customer service representatives, returns, and warranty claims. Again, customer service is a piece of the larger picture of your customer’s experience with your brand. Good customer service is crucial for creating a great overall customer experience because it helps customers feel valued and supported even after the purchase is complete and when something goes wrong.

Benefits of a Great Customer Experience Design

Let’s take a closer look at all of the benefits of dedicating time and effort to designing a great customer experience. A great customer experience design can lead to numerous benefits for your business, including:

Increased Customer Loyalty & Retention

A great customer experience design can create a strong emotional connection between a customer and your brand, leading to increased customer loyalty. Essentially, if your company can develop a real relationship with customers, they will continue to come back again and again. Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, recommend your brand to others, and provide positive reviews and feedback. Plus loyal customers are what makes running a business so rewarding.

Higher Customer Satisfaction

A great customer experience design can lead to higher customer satisfaction, as customers feel that their needs and expectations are being met. Higher customer satisfaction can lead to increased revenue and improved brand reputation. Plus you get the satisfaction of creating something that benefits people.

Improved Brand Reputation

When you provide a great experience for your customers, they’re going to spread the word. Satisfied customers are more likely to provide positive reviews and feedback, as well as recommend your brand to their friends. So if your customers have a great experience with you, that’s what your company will be known for.

Increased Revenue

A great customer experience design can lead to increased revenue. It’s a simple formula: satisfied customers are more likely to make repeat purchases and recommend the brand to others. This leads to more revenue for your company. Increased revenue can lead to business growth in the long run and help you have the opportunity to continue to provide excellent products and experiences.

Competitive Advantage

A great customer experience design can provide a competitive advantage in a crowded marketplace. There are so many brands for everything, but companies that provide a good experience are where people want to go. Customers are more likely to choose a brand that provides a great experience over a brand that does not. So to stand out and be chosen above a competitor, provide a great experience for your customers.

Elements of Customer Experience Design

Customer experience is so important, but what makes up the process of designing CX? These are the most common elements of customer experience design that are important to consider when crafting an excellent CX.

User Research

User research is the process of gathering information about customers to better understand their needs, behavior, and expectations. To understand how to provide a good experience for your customers, you need to understand who your customers are, what their problems are, and how to solve them. User research can include surveys, interviews, focus groups, and usability testing.

Journey Mapping

Journey mapping is the process of mapping out the customer’s journey from initial discovery to post-purchase interactions. It’s about knowing where your customers start and what leads them to an eventual purchase. It helps your company understand the customer’s perspective and identify any pain points that might hinder the journey. Journey mapping can be used to create a customer experience that meets the needs of the customer at every touchpoint.

Visual Design and UX

Visual design includes the look and feel of the product or service, including branding, colors, and typography. UX design focuses on the usability and functionality of the product or service, including navigation, information architecture, and interaction design. Visual design and UX design work together to create a seamless, enjoyable customer experience. When visual design and UX are prioritized, your company can create a website and products that are easy to use, meet customer needs, and provide customers with a great experience.

Designing a Great Customer Experience from Start to Finish

With those elements in mind, let’s look at the steps to designing a great customer experience, from start to finish.

Discovery Phase

The discovery phase involves identifying customer needs and understanding their behavior and expectations. This phase is when you utilize user research, market research, and analysis of customer data. It’s important to develop a deep understanding of who your customers are, their current journey, their pain points, and any areas for improvement when designing your customer experience.

Definition Phase

With a clear understanding of who your customers are, it’s time to define what success looks like. The definition phase involves defining goals, objectives, and key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of your customer experience design. The definition phase helps ensure that your customer experience design is aligned with your overall business goals and customer needs.

Design Phase

The design phase involves creating a blueprint for your customer experience. You’ve come up with great ideas for what your customers truly need (hopefully revealed in the discovery phase), and you know what success looks like (thanks to the definition phase), so now you can make a plan for how to get from A to Z. You might prototype, test, and refine the design based on research and goals. The goal of the design phase is to create a customer experience design that works when you put it into action.

Development Phase

The development phase involves bringing the customer experience design to life. You get to take your blueprint and make it into the actual experience for your customers. This phase can include developing necessary systems, processes, and tools to support the customer experience design.

Deployment Phase

Once you have a developed plan, you can put it into action. The deployment phase involves launching the customer experience design. This phase can include training employees, communicating with customers, and ensuring that everything is working as intended. Now your customers will get to experience a deepened relationship with your brand.

Continuous Improvement

Simply executing a plan does not mean that your work is done. The continuous improvement phase involves monitoring, evaluating, and improving your customer experience design. You can seek out customer feedback and make any needed changes. The goal of the continuous improvement phase is to ensure that the customer experience design is always improving and meeting the real needs of your customers.

Design a Great Customer Experience With InMoment

The InMoment XI Platform offers a comprehensive suite of tools and services that allow businesses to collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback in real time. Businesses can use these tools to do necessary research about their customers and to evaluate CX design and work toward continuous improvement.

InMoment’s solution is also valuable when developing your CX design. InMoment provides businesses with actionable insights that can be used to identify and prioritize areas for improvement, design, and test new customer experiences, and measure the impact of changes on customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

In addition to its platform, InMoment offers expert consulting and professional services to help businesses develop and implement effective customer experience strategies that align with their business goals and customer needs. InMoment’s team of experts can provide guidance on user research, journey mapping, visual design, UX design, and more.

Final Thoughts

A great customer experience design is essential for any business that wants to succeed in today’s highly competitive market. In today’s competitive landscape, simply having an exceptional product may no longer be enough to win over customers. By designing a great customer experience, businesses can increase customer loyalty, improve brand reputation, and increase revenue. Designing a great customer experience involves multiple elements, including user research, journey mapping, visual design, and UX design—and it is a step-by-step process that includes multiple phases.

By using InMoment’s platform and services, businesses can create a great customer experience that meets the needs of their target audience and aligns with their business goals. InMoment can help businesses stay ahead of the competition by providing real-time feedback and insights that can be used to continuously improve the customer experience. Get started with InMoment to begin designing a great customer experience.

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How Aegon Is Reaping the Benefits of Customer Centricity

By: Derek Eccleston, XI Consultant

May 23, 2023May 23, 2023

At Forrester CX EMEA, we heard from InMoment client Aegon, a Dutch public company for life insurance, pensions, and asset management. The key message throughout the conference was to be bold and ensure that organisations are aligned, focused, and ready for the future. Aegon are certainly delivering on this agenda and are continuing to succeed by connecting people and processes across the entire organisation to achieve shared goals and focus on growth.

Aegon’s ‘Connecting with Customers’ programme is an award winning programme which has delivered spectacular results for the business, colleagues and customers. Using a customer centric approach, Aegon has successfully enabled their teams to receive real-time feedback in order to drive change and as a result, are increasing customer satisfaction and accelerating growth.

Connecting With Customers

The experience programme ‘Connecting with Customers’, is successfully embedding a customer-focused culture throughout the business, underpinned by the strong CX & Insight framework run in partnership with InMoment. The programme reaches all parts of the business through online learning, customer talks, animated games and cartoons, podcasts, skills workshops, topic masterclasses, and more.

In their Forrester CX EMEA presentation, Aegon explained how their program has resulted in deeper customer understanding and colleague empowerment, which translates into measurably better outcomes for the customer and a healthier business. Keep reading for the top takeaways:

3 Key Takeaways From the Presentation:

Takeaway #1: Be BOLD

Set out to create a customer-obsessed culture, and get there! Aegon has taken the Connecting with Customers (CwC) roadshow to all locations and functions in the business. It is a very high profile campaign, an ‘all or nothing’ approach because the business knows the customer must come first.

The Board Directors have shown their support and CwC manifests in many different forms from a regular podcast to learning and development resources, an audio library of customer calls and customer feedback videos.

Making VoC a part of the entire business might seem like a bold move, but the effort is worth it. As a CX leader, you need to ensure the whole business is aware that every decision affects the customers’ experience.

Takeaway #2: Break Down Silos

Everybody has a role in serving the customer so be inclusive! Recently, a customer was invited into the Aegon offices where he met all those who had helped him on his retirement journey, both back office and customer facing. This event really brought it home how everyone at Aegon has a unifying purpose, to connect with customers.

Creating a customer focused culture throughout the entire organisation breaks down barriers and allows for better communication and understanding, and as a result, better customer outcomes.

Takeaway #3: Have Fun

Customers can tell when employees enjoy their role and connect with their purpose. Aegon threw a CwC 2nd birthday party recently with music, discussions, and games. And for the New Year’s quiz, Jenny Ryan from ITV’s “The Chase” was the guest of honour! Connecting EX and CX is massively important and by understanding that employee experience can have a positive impact on customer experience is key to creating a customer centric culture.

One final point that stands out from successes such as Aegon’s is how vital it is to have an inspirational CX leader with the charisma, vision and drive to elevate customer centricity to new levels. In Iain O’Connor, Head of Customer Experience & Insight, Aegon has one of the best, along with other great CX leaders such as Claire Tidey, CwC Programme Manager.

Want to hear from Iain as he speaks about understanding customers’ expectations? Check out this video!

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InMoment’s eNVy Awards and Buyer Expectation Study Shines Light on the Top Vehicle Models in 2022

By: Kelley K. Johnson, VP, Communications, InMoment

May 18, 2023May 18, 2023

–Automotive benchmark study with 50 year track record reveals top vehicle models ranked by consumers

–The New Vehicle Customer Study (NVCS) is used by major automotive manufacturers and suppliers, government agencies, think tanks, and academia

SALT LAKE CITY, May 18, 2023—InMoment®, the global leader in automotive Customer Experience Improvement (XI)™, announced winners for the fifth annual eNVy Awards^®. The New Vehicle Customer Study, 2023 eNVy Awards, recognize 2022 model year vehicles consumers rated on comfort, quality, performance, safety, and ownership cost.The study data is used by global automotive companies and automotive suppliers.

Study Observations for 2022:

This year, Kia won 5 segments in the mass market category: compact car, small car, mid car, mid SUV, and compact van
Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) won 4 segments and Plug-in Hybrids won 2 segments
Honda Ridgeline maintains its perfect record of winning the Small Pickup Truck segment
Porsche 911 was the overall winner for the first time

The New Vehicle Customer Study is one of the world’s longest running benchmarks of vehicle satisfaction with over 50 years of data, and provides consumer feedback about vehicle experiences, shopping and buying patterns, and feature preferences. The study data is available to help automotive manufacturers and suppliers make smarter decisions to exceed buyer expectations.

If you’re interested in the New Vehicle Customer Study, please contact your InMoment sales representative or Shawn St. Clair, our syndicated research lead.

2023 WINNERS, BASED ON 2022 MODEL YEAR AND DATA

Overall Winner

Porsche 911

Premium Market Vehicle Segment Winners

Small Car: BMW i4 (Electric Vehicle)

Mid Car: Mercedes Benz E class

Small SUV: Volvo XC60 Plug-In Hybrid

Mid SUV: BMW X5 e Plug-in Hybrid

Large SUV: BMW X7

Mass Market Vehicle Segment Winners

Sports Car: MINI Cooper

Compact Car: Kia Soul

Small Car: Kia Forte

Mid Car: Kia Stinger

Large Car: Dodge Charger

Compact SUV/Crossover: Subaru Forester

Small SUV: Hyundai Ioniq 5 (Electric Vehicle)

Mid SUV: Kia Telluride

Large SUV: Dodge Durango

Compact Van: Kia Carnival

Small Pickup: Honda Ridgeline

Full-Size Light Duty Pickup: Ford F-150 Lightning (Electric Vehicle)

Full-Size Heavy Duty Pickup: Rivian R (Electric Vehicle)

“The New Vehicle Customer Study continues to be used by the largest OEM manufacturers globally and we’ve seen an extensive increase in the use of the study data for automotive suppliers like technology and batteries, think tanks, and academia to understand consumer shopping and buying patterns and feature preferences,” said Tim Englehart, VP Automotive, InMoment. “This year’s study shows that new vehicle design and newer hybrid and BEV vehicle models are the top choices at addressing buyer expectations of comfort, quality, performance, safety, and cost.”

Congratulations to the Winners of the 2023 eNVy Awards for Making Your Buyers and Their Expectations a Priority!

Want Access to the eNVy Award Study?

The latest eNVy data is available immediately for customers and InMoment provides Experience Improvement solutions through technology and services that help automotive and mobility companies around the globe make smarter decisions that help exceed buyer expectations. Visit Shawn St. Clair, our syndicated research lead

eNVy Award Details:

The eNVy awards are based on the new vehicle buyers’ independent feedback of verified vehicle owners via the New Vehicle Customer Study. The final eNVY award scores were calculated using NVCS independent feedback and segment-specific importance weights. Only 2022 model year vehicles were included, and each vehicle required a minimum of 90 ratings to be included in the rankings. This year awards were not given for the Premium Sports Car and Premium Large Car segments because too few models reached the minimum number of ratings to be included.

The Inoment New Vehicle Customer Study is one of the most used new vehicle buyer behavior studies in the market. The study has been integral to automotive manufacturers and suppliers for over 50 years to gain insight into vehicle shopping and buying patterns to give automotive manufacturers a roadmap for vehicle design and marketing initiatives.

With 290,000 domestic and 50,000 Canadian responses from buyers and lessees of approximately 325 vehicles types, automotive manufacturers are able to cost-effectively leverage a massive amount of current and historical insight from this long-standing study.

The eNVy awards leverages the New Vehicle Customer Study data to recognize vehicle manufacturers in the United States. The award winners are determined based on a full year of NVCS score responses from thousands of buyers who purchased new 2022 model year vehicles.

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How to Navigate (and Strengthen) Your Customer Experience Strategy in Turbulent Times

By: The InMoment Team

May 4, 2023May 4, 2023

Read a blog by Phil Sager, Expert Partner and Daniel Moellerhenn, Expert Partner, Bain & Company, speakers at the XI Forum in Cologne on June 13 & 14

Reports of record inflation, ongoing labor constraints, rising capital costs, and other macro trends are ongoing and have compounded in unique ways. As in previous cycles of historical uncertainty and downturns, these increased headwinds across the globe mean customers and companies are behaving differently.

So, how can CX leaders and their teams best navigate customer experience in such challenging times?

We’ll explore below how to prioritize customers and strategically use customer experience tools to drive growth for your business and keep on course.

Understand the Landscape

As outlined in Bain’s The New Recession Playbook, a successful approach to strategy during a downturn requires businesses to:

Have a realistic assessment of your company’s starting point. Establish a clear understanding of your current strategic position and financial strength in relation to your peers and competitors. From this viewpoint, you can more easily strategize and weigh the types of risks your company can handle.
Be aware that, historically, downturns provide an opportunity for more dramatic gains and losses. In this moment, it’s vital to follow a decisive strategy, as the consequences will have long-term impacts on your business, talent, and customers. Those with a successful approach can end up stronger than before the downturn.

Take a Human-Centric Approach

How does recession strategy talk translate into CX planning and approach?

Customer experts Phil Sager and Daniel Möllerhenn suggest strategically doubling down on customers & employees. You can strengthen your experience management efforts by understanding your customer segments and taking special action to better serve those populations.

In one segmentation use case, a major Retailer Co leveraged existing capabilities and assigned unique Guest IDs to consistently collect detailed data on customers. They were then able to provide specific coupons and product suggestions, even leveraging life events (i.e. expecting parents, new college students) to provide an ecosystem of products at specific points in those customer journeys.

In another example, a major Asia-Pacific Telecom Co utilized segmentation to align their growth strategy with changing customer needs and, as a result, exceeded revenue goals and cemented their leadership in the industry.

From a recent survey of CX leaders conducted at Bain, we learned that while 61% of respondents have existing segmentation that drives action toward different customer segments, the majority of those same leaders do not use segmentation data strategically to buffer the negative impacts of budget cuts. In less-turbulent times, segmentation provides potential opportunity for growth, but in today’s challenging climate, it’s a necessity to strengthen your position and better connect with your customers.

How can you make better trade-offs using segmentation?

Strategic Use of Customer Segmentation

This demonstrates an important opportunity to strategically use customer segmentation to make informed trade-offs, especially in challenging times, to buffer budget cuts, potential downsizing, and other factors outside of the control of CX teams.

Segmentation will help you zero in on the best ways to provide for and delight your customers and with a tailored approach, lean into specific areas to drive customer retention and customer loyalty to weather the storm, earning growth in the short and long term for your business.

Our experts have compiled actionable ideas below to help companies prioritize customers and strengthen their customer experience strategy:

Provide For Your Customers

Where can you deliver a stellar customer journey point?

Offer unique services on top of products that service the customer’s greater overall need
Remove junk / nuisance fees from the equation
Understand the emotions of your customers and build responses in kind

Inspire Your Teams

Invest in a culture that empowers teams to continuously improve and work toward a common purpose.

Equip your front line employees and customer service representatives (CSRs) with proper product, procedures, and communication for supporting customers in challenging situations
Deepen their customer connections / distil a clearer voice of the customer
Invest in your current employees to create future leaders
If applicable, clarify expectations around hybrid / work-from-home (WFH) models

Activate Your Promoters

Their customer value increases exponentially over time.

Find the right implementation of referral programs to reward promoters and grow your base
Provide loyalty programs that enhance customer experiences in a meaningful way
Improve communications with customers – timely responses over preferred service channels

Your Customer Experience Strategy Going Forward

In conclusion, navigating turbulent times requires a human-centric approach that prioritizes customers and employees. Customer segmentation is an effective tool for understanding customer needs and taking action to better serve specific segments. By leveraging segmentation, companies can make informed trade-offs, buffer budget cuts, and drive growth in the short and long term. To strengthen their customer experience strategy, companies should focus on providing stellar customer journeys, inspiring their teams, and activating their promoters. By adopting these strategies, CX leaders can steer their businesses through challenging times and emerge stronger on the other side.

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Announcing the Latest XI Platform Product Enhancements

By: Levi Roberts, General Manager & Vice President, Software Development

April 27, 2023April 27, 2023

Q2 Product Enhancements

InMoment announced today new innovative capabilities in the award-winning XI Platform for clients around the globe. This release of enhancements builds on InMoment’s integrated CX approach and AI-powered product foundation to give organizations the best chance of competing in today’s changing business environment.

Below you’ll find the latest innovations to:

Summarize customer feedback more effectively to save time and resources
Improve the closed-loop service experience to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value
Infuse feedback into enterprise systems to save time and resource expense
Elevate your CX programs and the teams that drive them to create program efficiency and a quicker time to value

“We’re proud of our innovative and aggressive product cadence to deliver innovation and product enhancements into the market regularly,” said Sandeep Garg, Chief Product Officer at InMoment. “We believe it is important to continually enhance products alongside introducing new innovative solutions that benefit our clients and the goals they are trying to achieve to improve their customers’ experiences.”

If you’re a client and want to talk to someone about the updates to the XI Platform, contact your account rep. If you simply want to learn more about our innovative products and services, a representative can answer your questions by completing the form below, and we’ll get right back to you.

Product Enhancements to Increase the Business Value of CX Initiatives Include the Ability to:

Summarize Customer Feedback More Effectively to Drive Focused Action

First-of-its-kind technology–Smart Summary Generator powered by Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) technology, intelligently transforms feedback into easily consumable short, structured paragraphs. to surface the most important topics and trends to help organizations take immediate action on their customer feedback. What’s so exciting about this technology is it reduces the time spent analyzing and helps immediately summarize key themes and topics, making it easier for businesses to get to the root cause quickly. Read the press release about this innovation and other exciting AI capabilities that help save a ton of team time and resources by summarizing customer feedback more efficiently.

Improve the Closed-Loop Service Experience

We’ve made major UI upgrades and introduced additional features to increase the performance of case management systems. Organizations can now also include employee insights that describe the moods of the employee and the customer at the case close (the person who called into the call center and you resolved their issue). There is also the capability to use closed-loop data for reporting alongside operational data to get additional insights about the customer and their experience. This allows teams to use customer case data to dig deeper into segments and geographies, enabling a better understanding of what to take action on to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

Drive CX Program Engagement by Infusing Feedback into Enterprise Systems

We often mention integrated CX and the ability to integrate different systems, feedback channels, and key insights that lead to action as key contributors to the success we see our clients have when it comes to understanding their customers. With that in mind, we’ve made major updates to our workflow application to easily export text analytics data and send it directly into BI tools. It allows users, like analysts or researchers, the ability to pivot on data from tags to mine data and find insights that no one else can find in their BI tools of choice. This gives business analysts the flexibility and control over data analysis, which saves time and resource costs by minimizing the need for manual or scripted analysis. This process is critical to helping organizations identify trends and actionable insights more quickly, regardless of the data source or language.

Elevate CX Programs and the Professionals that Drive Them

InMoment and NPSx by Bain & Company have entered an exclusive strategic partnership to continue our efforts in alleviating the angst organizations are having as they struggle to understand where to begin when setting up a CX program or how they can evolve their program’s maturity level. Our joint expertise helps organizations understand how to assess current CX capabilities and how to create and execute successful CX strategies and initiatives to improve program efficiency and quicker time to CX value. NPSx Bain is also an expert in training and certifications with accreditation for CX professionals and practitioners to enhance their expertise around the latest customer experience and NPS prowess or training and certification to stay current with industry best practices, develop new skills, and advance careers.

These enhancements and more, including 26 new language capabilities added to the platform, have been designed to help our clients summarize and leverage customer feedback more efficiently, identify how to take targeted action on closed-loop feedback, leverage AI to intelligently transform feedback into easily consumable paragraphs to understand themes, and export text analytics to current BI tools.

To learn more about the latest product innovations and enhancements, you can find additional detail on the web pages linked above or check out the release notes here!

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How to Write Email Survey Subject Lines That Increase Your Open Rates

By: The InMoment Team

April 10, 2023April 10, 2023

Customer experience (CX) surveys are foundational to soliciting the customer feedback you need to power your CX program, and many of these surveys are sent via email. However, the first step to receiving that survey feedback can be one of the most difficult: getting your customer to open your email.

When it comes to open rates, your email’s subject line is more important than you might think it is. Two helpful email stats drive this point home:

69% of recipients will look only at the subject line before flagging an email as spam.
47% of recipients decide to open an email based only on the subject line.

If you’re trying to figure out all the possible reasons why your survey emails aren’t getting decent open rates, it makes sense to start with your subject lines.

5 Tips to Help You Write Engaging Email Survey Subject Lines

Tip #1: Establish the Right Tone

Effective customer interaction is super dependent on speaking your audience’s language. This doesn’t just refer to the words and terms you use in your emails, even though that is obviously also extremely important.

No, we’re referring to your “voice” here – where you pitch the subject line on the “familiarity” spectrum. On the one side of this spectrum is “ultra conversational,” and on the other side, “ultra professional.”

On the conversational side, you’ll use language that makes your recipients feel like they’re being asked a question by a friend or a trusted colleague. These subject lines should make the recipient feel comfortable because they have an approachable tone.

Here are some examples:

“A quick question for you”
“Leslie, got a sec? ”

On the professional side of the spectrum, you’re using language that builds trust in your brand’s ability to take your service seriously. You don’t have to come off pompous or like you’ve swallowed a thesaurus. Stick to the point, and treat the recipient like someone who appreciates professionalism in the workplace.

“We’d genuinely appreciate feedback on our performance.”
“Leslie, how can we make you more productive?”

There are quite a few things to consider when choosing the tone of your survey email subject lines. Your brand image is arguably the most important, but things like recipient demographics and the industry you’re playing in should also play a role.

Building buyer personas is a standard practice in digital marketing. Many successful businesses go through this process to understand exactly who they’re selling to. This data is invaluable when deciding on the tone of your survey email subject lines.

Tip #2: Go Beyond Basic Personalization

According to Campaign Monitor, recipients are 26% more likely to open an email if the subject line has been personalized.

What you use to customize the subject line will obviously depend on the data you have on the customer. Using their name is an obvious starting point. However, you can also reference their most recent purchase if your CRM has logged it. Or a virtual event they attended. A modern CX platform can grab this info and personalize the subject line.

If you’re online mattress retailer Zoma and you’re sending out a customer satisfaction (CSAT) survey email to find out how a support query was handled, if the shipping went well, or if the customer is satisfied with the quality of a recent purchase, you could take one of the following approaches:

“How did we do on your support query [#66456]?”
“James, how was the webinar with DocuSign?”
“How’s that Zoma mattress working out?”

Showing evidence that the email comes from a reputable origin (i.e., the actual company they interacted with) is critical if you want to maximize that open rate.

By using their name and referencing their purchase, you’re landing a one-two punch of credibility and massively increasing the chances of a response.

Tip #3: Talk About Benefits

Let’s be frank here. When you send out a net promoter score (NPS) survey email, you’re basically asking an established customer to take time out of their day to reveal their feelings about your brand despite there being no immediate reward in it for them.

But that shouldn’t stop you from letting your recipients know that their feedback will result in long-term benefits for you and them.

Good feedback — both positive and negative — means improved service for everyone. A large number of honest responses will help you get better at designing new product features. Let your recipients know! Make them feel like their voice is important and that it benefits them to be heard.

Here’s an example. If you’re an energy services company like Ecopreneurist, and you’re sending out an NPS survey, you may want to try subject lines like these:

“Help us get even better at saving you energy.”
“Leslie, your feedback helps us save you money.”

Even though the email content will ask them a typical NPS question like “How likely are you to recommend Ecopreneurist to a friend?” the subject line can illustrate the eventual reward customers will experience by responding.

There’s a genuine correlation between improved service and receiving this type of information from customers. There’s no reason you can’t creatively leverage this relationship to create highly engaging subject lines.

Tip #4: Ask Your Recipients a Question

A good subject line engages the recipient. You’ll want the subject line to make them think and feel something. Trigger their thoughts and their emotions.

A great way to do this is by asking a question.

The right question can trigger introspection. It can make the recipient think about something they want to share with you.

A SaaS company like ShowMojo might employ a customer effort score (CES) survey to help them spot inefficiencies and/or improve in two areas:

Onboarding. Good onboarding helps ensure “trial subscribers” see the product’s value and eventually become paying customers, and it’s a critical step in maximizing a subscriber’s lifetime value (LTV).
Product features. A CES survey can gauge how easily customers are adopting a new product feature and help you optimize for improved adoption.

In both cases, positioning the survey in question form is a great way to maximize open rates. For example:

“How hard was the migration to ShowMojo?”
“How easy was it to create a new rental dashboard?”

You can see in the above examples that the subject lines don’t even mention the survey. The two questions are directed at the customer and their experience.

Tip #5: Keep It Simple and Short

You should keep your survey email subject lines to under 50 characters to be sure everyone sees it. The number of people opening emails using their mobile phones is increasing every year. And the limited amount of real estate on a mobile device means that subject lines are often truncated.

Yes, it’s hard to make a compelling case for someone to open an unsolicited email using so few words, so take your time writing. Constantly try whittling the number of characters and words down to an absolute minimum without compromising your core message.

Let’s take a look at some concise and effective customer survey subject line examples:

“Are we doing a good job, Leslie?”
“Where can we improve?”
“We’re always looking for honest feedback.”
“Give it to us straight; we can take it.”

A Quick Word on Open Rate Benchmarks

What kind of open rates should you expect from your survey emails? Having a sense of benchmarks is critical if you intend to measure how effective your new subject lines are.

According to our customers’ results, an open rate over 20% is solid, with only a small number of emails achieving a 30% open rate. If you see this level of engagement, you’re probably doing multiple things right. If it’s below this figure, realize there’s room for improvement and review your subject line copy against our recommendations.

Some Final Thoughts

Regardless of what industry you’re operating in, certain best practices will always be relevant when crafting email subject lines.

Here’s a summary of the most important things to bear in mind (along with a fifth bonus tip):

Personalize as much as possible.
Tell recipients about the benefits of completing the survey.
Ask a question.
Keep it short and to the point.
Try to keep your subject lines under 50 characters.
Avoid spammy words like “opportunity,” “offer,” “cash,” “discount,” or “click here.”

There’s little point in rethinking your subject line strategy if you’re not backing up your efforts with data on the success or failure of a new approach.

You’ll want to A/B test your survey emails. A simple way to do this is:

Split your email recipients into two groups (Group A and Group B).
Target Group A with subject line A. “Welcome! How was the sign-up process?
Target Group B with subject line B. “Answer one question and help us improve.”
Measure each email’s open rate. If Group A gets a higher open, a post-onboarding greeting works well for your new customers.

By A/B testing your email subject lines over time, you gain valuable knowledge about the subject lines that resonate with your customer base. Not only will that information help you with your specific survey, but it can also help other CX-focused teams optimize their customer communications as well.

Want to learn more about best practices for surveys? Check out this white paper from the experts! And if you want to learn more about how you can listen to your customers not only via surveys, but by leveraging data from social media, online reviews, and more, let’s chat!

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Three Tips for Building an Award-Winning CX Program

By: Josh Marans, Director Experience Improvement at InMoment

April 3, 2023April 11, 2024

In March, I spoke at InMoment’s XI Forum Sydney, and it shouldn’t surprise you that I chose to talk about building a customer experience (CX) program! In the spirit of sharing insights for those who couldn’t attend or want to revisit my key points, I’m here on the InMoment blog to briefly recap my presentation!

When I started working at InMoment, I knew nothing about CX. I didn’t know what a closed-loop system was and certainly didn’t know the difference between the inner and outer loop.

So at the recommendation of my supervisor, I read two books that you’re probably familiar with: The Ultimate Question 2.0 and Outside In.

I started to understand customer experience. NPS made sense. The case studies in the books made sense. And using customer experience to drive business outcomes felt common sense.

However, it wasn’t until a couple of years ago that our leadership team asked me to lead the effort to rethink and revamp our CX program: Elevate. Here’s my story of going from a CX newbie to turning Elevate into an award-winning program in 365 days. And I entirely attribute it to the three tips below!

In the post below, I’ll cover these three practical, simple, and impactful tips to turn your CX efforts into award-winning programs.

Tip #1: Stop Doing Things That Don’t Work

My first tip is “stop doing things that don’t work.” While you likely know what’s not working in your program, here are some red flags: low response rates, high drop-off rates, homogenous responses (i.e., only hearing from one type of customer), or a lack of actionable insights. Sometimes surveys are not the proper listening methodology for a given touchpoint.

Here’s an example:

Previously, we sent a post-sales survey to buyers after our sales team closed a deal. This is a critical touchpoint to understanding the buying process and competitive landscape. However, we received fewer than 20 responses from hundreds of invites yearly.

Everyone knows the saying, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” right? Well, if a picture is worth a thousand words, then in the world of CX, a customer conversation is worth a thousand surveys. As companies move toward more automated, impersonal interactions, I’d argue that live customer interviews are more important than ever.

So, instead of trying to increase survey response rate, we realized we were using the wrong listening method at this key touchpoint. We scraped the after-sales survey completely and doubled down on doing live Buyer Interviews.

We found that many customers would rather spend 30 minutes live on Zoom with us than two minutes completing a survey. We upload our interview transcripts and summaries to our XI platform for tagging and analysis—and the insights are invaluable.

Maybe you can’t conduct customer interviews, but I bet you have existing customer conversations in the form of call and chat transcripts, social reviews, or email support.

If something’s not working, try something new! Although there are best practices in CX, you know your business and your customers best. You need to do what works for you.

Tip #2: Listen With Purpose

No CX leader intends to ignore customer feedback. But too often, we launch surveys—or other customer listening posts—without purpose. Every customer feedback data source should have a clearly defined purpose, owner, and governance (i.e., a way to analyze the data, identify insights, and take action based on the themes).

Otherwise, customer feedback goes into a bottomless pit… and eventually, you’ll stop receiving it.

Sandeep Garg, our Chief Product Officer, is the most customer-centric product leader I have ever worked with. He is committed to ensuring the InMoment solution works for every single customer and that we continue to innovate to meet the emerging needs of our customers. And there’s no better way to achieve that than through customer feedback.

Sandeep and his team receive and review every piece of customer feedback, whether it’s a survey from our current customers, in-platform user feedback, or the Buyer Interviews I mentioned previously. He cares deeply about every nuance of the platform and ensuring it meets customer needs.

Here’s an example:

On February 1st, we received feedback from a customer. They were mostly happy, but the feedback contained a specific qualm about the platform. Sandeep received and triaged the feedback; by the next day, his team had resolved the issue for the customer.

The response from the customer: I wish I had given feedback sooner!

That’s what listening with purpose looks like. And when customers know you’re not only listening but taking immediate action, they’re more likely to give feedback repeatedly!

Tip #3: Always Be Celebrating

I saved my final topic for last: celebrating employees, as I call it, “Always Be Celebrating.”

Our Relationship survey asks, “Has any individual or team at InMoment gone above and beyond to ensure your success?” When we were revamping the Elevate Relationship survey, I knew I wanted to include this question, but I had no idea how much of an impact it would have.

We call this “Above & Beyond,” and it’s become a key metric for account health, customer satisfaction, and employee performance. We know that when an Above & Beyond employee is recognized, NPS is 5x higher. So while we’re primarily a technology company, our customer-centricity drives loyalty and continued value.

Whenever a customer calls out an individual, we pipe that comment into Slack and tag the employee. We also recognize Above & Beyond employees at:

Company All-Hands Meetings
Weekly Company Emails
Moments Boards in Conference Rooms
Our Mobile Application

Through this process, we’ve also identified the DNA of Above & Beyond employees, which we use for hiring, coaching, and training. And all of this results in highly effective employees that know how to meet customer needs!

Wrapping Up

Taking your experience program from the early stages to “award-winning” doesn’t have to be complex or require massive investment. Simply reframe your mindset and implement these three practical tips to build a program that customers, employees, and even executives love.

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Realistic and Personal: How Avnet Strengthens the Bond Between EX and CX in a Post-Pandemic Workforce

By: The InMoment Team

March 21, 2023March 20, 2023

These days, social media seems polarized with posts from friends or colleagues either about starting new positions or sharing that they’ve been a part of recent layoffs. This hectic environment is on the top of both employees’ and employers’ minds, making employee experience (EX) initiatives vital to retaining talent and keeping morale up.

Peggy Carrieres, Avnet’s VP of Global Sales, Enablement, and Supplier Development, shared with InMoment how Avnet is taking a realistic but personal approach to strengthening its employee experience to sustain its customer experience (CX).

Where Employees Will Work—And Why It’s Complicated

Most employees are grappling with what work-life balance means in the new normal, and while some CEOs say they don’t care where employees work (at home, on the beach, etc.), others are pushing hard to get everyone back in the office.

Carrieres shared that the answer of whether employees should return to the office full-time is much more complex than anyone is giving it credit for. She says the last two years of pandemic living are not truly in the past. While employees and clients adjust to this new normal and experience stress and change, reconnecting to each other may result in a dynamic that is difficult to navigate. This new challenge makes an effective EX program much more important in a company.

A good EX program needs to be realistic by looking at employees holistically. Because when they come to work, they come as their whole selves, and a burnt-out employee can be a detractor to the overall employee experience, which may, in turn, affect customer experience.

Creating a Culture of Community

In these unprecedented times, allowing employees to voice their stress and worry is a big part of a productive employee experience. Carrieres says a good EX program has to allow employees a safe space so they know they’re not alone in their struggles.

Carrieres shared an experience of a time she became aware of a specific piece of employee feedback. She then gave the employee’s concerns an anonymous platform in a staff meeting, where she found that nearly every employee in attendance shared a similar worry. This act of acknowledgment uncovered a conversation that led to ideas and changes that may have been overlooked otherwise. This experience proved that how employers leverage employee feedback for learning and growth is crucial to reducing churn and growing a healthy employee base that is sustainable.

What’s Next for EX Programs

Employee choice and control within their professional experience is invaluable, and taking a holistic view of the organization and its employees will allow companies the opportunity to meet their people where they are, help them feel valued, and, ultimately, reduce churn.

Providing optimal customer experiences hinges on employees feeling valued, happy, and confident. That’s why it’s so important to include the voice of employees in your experience programs!

Learn more about how your employees can impact your customer experience in this eBook!

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Q&A: B2B Customer Experience Conversation with Avnet’s Peggy Carrieres About Supply Chain Challenges, Capturing the Voice of Customer, and More!

By: The InMoment Team

March 14, 2023August 28, 2023

One of the best ways to overcome obstacles is to fall back on your community and brainstorm solutions together. That’s why InMoment hosts regular Experience Exchanges to help customer experience (CX) professionals do just that.

InMoment XI Strategist Jim Katzman had the opportunity to sit down with Peggy Carrieres, Global Vice President of Sales Enablement and Supplier Development for Avnet and electronics components-industry expert.

In the conversation, she offered insight into how B2B brands can create transparency, combat supply chain challenges, redefine “customer loyalty,” and drive trust for customers who face an increasingly complex supply chain in one of the most volatile market cycles in recent history.

Our Conversation with Peggy Carrieres of Avnet

Jim: Great to see you again, Peggy! I’d like to start the conversation about the connection between the supply chain challenges many B2B companies are facing and how these challenges affect loyalty. What role does Experience Improvement play here, and how?

Peggy: I have been in this industry for over 25 years, and back then, it was all about process-focused engineering and technology—and that’s great. Still, we’ve seen the pervasiveness of electronics, and everything we use—from work to play—is packed with technology to make our lives easier.

For example, a simple light bulb used to house a filament and now has many semiconductors in it. It’s a huge industry and growing like crazy, but over time, it has gotten incredibly complex.

Our product goes to 40 countries to get to market, and we sit in the middle of the value chain between suppliers and customers.

We’re a value-added distributor with almost 2K engineers globally who work on designing a journey to help our customers get their products to market in a complex supply chain. But at the end of the day, what we’ve found from our trend data since we started our CX program back in 2014 is that relationships still matter. That is probably the most significant lesson in our voice of the customer journey: relationships can drive so many other factors in your business, and if you miss the boat, you are going to miss your customer.

Jim: We all know about supply chain challenges, but in the semiconductor industry specifically, can you talk about how or what role agility plays?

Peggy: It’s important to know that this industry, by nature, is cyclical; it ebbs and flows about every four years and is driven by technology. What we’re seeing today is different and more complex and has permanent changes to initially temporary solutions. Early 2020 COVID-19 hit but didn’t drive the situation yet, but as it became more and more complex, its influence grew.

Avnet is a broad-line distributor, operating in over 140 countries globally in every region. We are able to move our customer’s demands from one country to another quickly. So when you put that through a CX lens, I would say in this industry, what we’ve learned is that it’s imperative to understand global and cultural norms and how people get work done on a day-to-day basis in different cultures.

A lot of the hiccups that happen in B2B are due to miscommunication. We’ve learned that being agile through our supply chain means distributors like Avnet become the control tower, creating transparency across the full product lifecycle. If you think about it, a customer may have 300 suppliers to purchase from to get their product to market. Their demand signal can be diluted, but because we have established relationships with suppliers, we can get the early warning and adjust to be flexible in our supply chain with our clients. I don’t think this is a temporary standard; it’s going to completely change how we get business done on a daily basis.

Jim: Would you say Avnet is like a hub for those 300 suppliers?

Peggy: Absolutely, 100% I do—a global hub! We have customers who’ve engaged with us that haven’t traditionally engaged with “the channel” and who prefer or even try to go direct to the supplier, but the process is so complex it’s just very difficult. They can’t physically manage every supplier and every step of bringing their products to market, so they come to us.

Jim: Since Avnet is a global company, you have many different cultures to navigate. How do you listen for, understand, and drive action to counter the communication problems you may encounter due to those differences?

Peggy: That has been one of the most significant values of our voice of customer program. When we started it, we wanted to build a coalition in every country, but every country did its own thing and tracked its own trends over time.

It’s essential to give the feedback to someone who has context and insight into that culture. For example, we have one response that came through in Hebrew, and our translation team couldn’t translate it. So, I took it to someone who is Israeli, who works on our team here in Phoenix, and who knew the context. She relayed that the feedback was such an endearing phrase that no translation can convey its special meaning.

This experience taught me that we need global understanding and empathy across the organization. However, we also need context in regions and countries that offer nuance because it’s hard to hear those things sometimes.

We do that in a consultative manner, and by doing that, over time, our teams have been conditioned to get that feedback and use it to drive revenue and benefit, our teams have made that connection, and it has been highly successful.

Jim: How does customer experience play a role in how Avnet deals with global supply-chain challenges?

Peggy: The market will change—we are seeing signs of it now. Who the customer is can also change over time. We’re the largest revenue-generated AZ-based company, with 45% in Asia, 30% in Europe, and 25% in the US, so we’re well-balanced. But from the perspective of customer experience and relationships, we needed more.

We did a cross-correlation with NPS and what has the most uplift in “loyalty,” which is a term I hate because it can change quickly depending on how you react and respond. However, the pillars and drivers for us are ease of doing business, the quality of products and services, and, at the end of the day, how we engage with customers matters.

For instance, how we respond to a customer’s challenge will be remembered when a customer’s partnership is on the line. I am their advocate to our supplier base; being present at the table to show them I care is mission-critical. These relationships are what drive the B2B space.

Jim: Yes, I learned that when the executive escalation call comes in, you first hit mute and listen for pockets where you can fix something, even if it’s not everything. I think the key is honing your skill of listening to encompass the whole pain point and resisting the urge to jump in immediately at the first sign of distress.

Peggy: Right, and we’ve seen a complete shift in the focus of this industry. Raw materials, labor, and logistics all cost more now, and so we’ve had to change an industry’s discussion. It used to be from the total cost down to total price, but now it’s the total cost of ownership, which is the assurance of supply and mitigating risk for our client.

The conversation has shifted, and if we didn’t have a finger on the pulse of the market and work collectively with our customers, we would’ve missed the boat. If you just show a price increase without offering a conversation, you’ve hurt your relationship as well, and you don’t just come back from that.

Jim: One thing I hear from our clients is that it’s hard to capture the B2B voice. I’d love to hear how you think and process capturing that flavor in your design approach and how Avnet built its relationship survey with the employee experience in mind.

Peggy: The value of feedback is trends over time, so one thing we do (as we know who our demographics are) is we have the customers self-identify their role in the organization. We’ve got buyers, engineers, executives, and supply chain materials, and because they see the relationship differently at each level, it’s important to know the perspective behind the individual feedback.

I own our design tools and capabilities, and I focused specifically on the feedback from customer engineers. One thing that has been valuable is we ask them in a simple survey if they’d like to opt-in for a focus group, and we’ve had a pretty good response there. This volunteer participation allows us to quickly pose further and more profound questions to that group about what we’re developing at Avnet. So, I think it’s important to ask customers to self-identify because every company is different in B2B. A supply chain person in one company may be completely different from a supply chain person in another.

Another thing we are seeing is what we call “customer lifecycle convergence,” where the supply chain and design chain are becoming more integrated than ever before, so you have to be in touch with both of those voices if you want to be successful.

Jim: So, do you have different relationship questions for the different audiences you’ve identified?

Peggy: We actually just did a voice of the engineering survey, and what we found was that 93% said they spent the majority of their time looking for parts and needed someone to help them. With this, we were able to develop a new design process based on the current state of the market and trained the field application engineers to use that process.

In return, our revenue, that’s tied to what we call demand creation, has really increased over the last two years. So having that outside-in perspective and then changing the approach and the selling motion had a huge benefit for us.

That’s a Wrap!

This B2B Experience Exchange was packed with valuable insights about the supply chain challenges. Additionally, awesome employee experience insights also packed a powerful punch in this conversation, and we’ll be including those as part two! Look out for our next quarterly experience exchange, and in the meantime, check out this Guide to building a customer-centric B2B experience.

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Where Should Customer Experience (CX) Teams Live Within An Organization?

By: The InMoment Team

February 1, 2023March 16, 2023

Oftentimes, CX practitioners will discuss the best reporting position for a core CX team to give an organization the best chance for Customer Experience (CX) success. Here at InMoment, we’ve seen far too many instances of programs turning into (or frankly never becoming more than) measurement-only programs no matter where they live within an organization.

After working with many of the world’s best brands for over two decades, we’ve seen CX teams report to the CMO, the COO, and directly to the president/CEO at various points—this conversation made us think about what impact the reporting relationship has on CX success. Is there one best place for CX to live, or can it be successful in multiple areas?

More importantly, it made us think that, in addition to where the function reports, there are other organizational factors that contribute to program success. The skills and characteristics of the person spearheading the CX efforts matter a great deal as well.

Is There An Optimal Organizational Position for Your CX Team?

Regardless of where your CX team lives, the team must remain unbiased and have the purview to work cross-functionally in order to drive collaboration and break down silos. Without that organizational freedom and neutrality, the team’s efforts are already handcuffed and chances of CX success are greatly diminished.

While many companies have added a seat at the table for a Chief Customer Officer (CCO) or Chief Experience Officer (CXO) in recent years, we still see most CX functions report to either marketing (the CMO) or operations (the COO). There are pros and cons to each of these reporting relationships:

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Marketing & the CMO:

Pros:

Tied More Closely to the brand promise of the organization (since CX is the fulfillment of that promise)
Tied more closely to the communication function. Too many CX functions don’t think about the role communication plays in the overall experience, but this is where the customer expectations get set
Part of a more holistic view of the company and the customer journey
Marketing (or strategy) is more likely to consider the experience of the future as opposed to only today’s experience

Cons:

May be too far removed from the actual frontline customer interactions, so it can be more difficult to implement change
Often too closely tied to marketing’s priorities and budget
Can marketing enforce an effective closed-loop process if that work happens elsewhere in the organization?
Marketing is often more focused on customer acquisition and top-of-funnel activities

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Operations & the COO:

Pros:

More closely tied to frontline customer interactions
Typically has good success with enforcing a strong closed-loop process (if staffed and funded properly)
Operations typically focused and measured on customer retention

Cons:

Unless digital and call centers report to the COO, the program can get too focused on in-person or physical interactions
Can be too focused on break/fix of today’s experience and not focused on overall CX strategy, process redesign, or experience design. Programs can get very tactical
Susceptible to budget cuts and quarterly targets, whereas CX tends to be a medium-to-long term proposition

The Pros and Cons of Your CX Team Reporting to Executives Such as the CEO:

Pros:

Easier alignment to executive goals and buy-in
Budget is set aside specifically for one purpose and can have less constraints
Easier to build relationships around CX with each department to break down silos

Cons:

Difficult to get all departments aligned to taking action as they can be seen as an outsider
More difficult to be in synch with the day-to-day business rhythm
Focus often on medium- or long-term initiatives while peers focus on quarterly results

Customizing CX Team Organization: Considerations for Success

In terms of the reporting relationship of the CX function, one size doesn’t fit all. Every organization, leadership dynamic, employee culture, and business is different. We mentioned above that we have led CX reporting to the CMO, reporting to the COO, and as an independent function. What we learned is that it can be successful in any of these reporting relationships, though we suggest it has a head start if it reports into the predominant power core of the organization.

Some companies are operations-led, others are sales & marketing-led, while others are product-led. Tying CX to the true cultural and power core of the company, though it brings some of the bias mentioned above, aligns it better with the core of the company.

Regardless of where your CX function reports, there are key organizational elements that must be present and the CX leader also has to have certain key skills, strengths and characteristics for it to be successful.

Keep an eye out for two subsequent discussions in this series to learn more about what those elements and success drivers are. In the meantime, compare your current CX structure to the pros and cons laid out above to consider what your reporting structure’s strengths and weaknesses are. You may find that it’s time for a change; if so, don’t be afraid to enact it and thus drive greater Experience Improvement success!

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5 Tips For Choosing the Right Survey Rating Scale

By: Kiri Burgess, Senior CX Consultant

January 24, 2023January 27, 2023

You’re sitting down to carve out the newest survey in your customer experience (CX) program. You know what touchpoint you’re examining, what you’re hoping to learn, and what questions you’re going to ask. Now it’s time to settle on the survey rating scale you’ll use.

Unsure of which scale to choose? I’m Kiri Burgess, a Senior CX Consultant at InMoment APAC. Together, with our Director of Marketing Sciences, Sharon Allberg, in this post we’ll share with you a collection of best practice tips for using rating scales in your customer surveys

What Is a Survey Rating Scale?

If you’ve ever put together a customer survey, you will no doubt have used a rating scale as an option for respondents.

Survey rating scales are a way to ask a “closed question” to survey respondents, and collect valuable input in a quantitative way. Here’s an example:

There are a number of important considerations when using rating scales including:

Number of scale points
Anchoring of scale points
Midpoints
Colors and images

The choice of which survey rating scale to use can be perplexing. And while academic research is vast, it’s not always relevant to market or customer experience research, which can leave a number of unanswered questions.

Whatever scale you choose, the aim with a survey rating scale is to limit individual interpretation and ambiguity. In an ideal world, you want all respondents to view a scale in the same way.

Having reviewed scale literature and our own internal research; then overlaid client and research experience, here are five tips for survey rating scale success:

Here Are Five Pro Tips for Survey Rating Scale Success

Tip #1: Longer Scales Typically Reveal More Actionable Insight

There is not a great deal of evidence on the difference in performance between shorter (i.e. 5 point) or longer (i.e. 10 point) scales from a respondent point of view—but the advantage of a longer scale is you’ll get greater differentiation in response. Responses will be more spread out due to having a longer scale. This typically results in stronger driver analysis revealing more actionable insight.

Tip #2: Keep Survey Rating Scales as Consistent as Possible

If you can, decide on a rating scale size and stick with it throughout your survey. Greater scale consistency will not only make it easier for respondents but it also makes it easier to communicate what a good result looks like to the business as all questions will calculate ‘good’ the same way with the same scale points. We understand that this isn’t always straight forward so if you do change your scale in your survey, that’s okay. Our advice would be not to chop and change scale lengths multiple times which will cause respondents confusion and fatigue.

Tip #3: Label Your Scales Appropriately

How to best label your scale will depend on the scale length. For shorter 5 point scales, we recommend labeling each scale point for clarity. However, this isn’t an easy task for longer 10 or 11 point scales as you quickly run out of space (particularly on mobile devices!). Therefore for longer scales, we recommend labeling the end points only. Whatever scale you go for, labels should only be attached to the appropriate single scale point.

Tip #4: When It Comes to Mid Points, Assess On a Case-by-Case Basis

Researchers like to include mid points for respondents who are undecided.

There is some evidence that neutral respondents will answer randomly if they don’t have a neutral option to pick; however, this point-of-view comes from the world of public policy research. Therefore, at InMoment we recommend a case-by-case approach and to include a midpoint if it makes sense. With satisfaction or agreement scales, it is more common to use a midpoint.

Tip #5: Avoid Scale Colors and Images

Research has shown that coloring scales (even shades of gray) or adding images or icons (including smiley faces) is not recommended, as this leads to scales being inconsistently interpreted by respondents. Examples include colors being an issue for those who are color blind; and images, icons and smiley faces having different meaning for everyone, particularly those who are neurodiverse (which is estimated at 15-20% of the population).

There you have it—five best practices to help you avoid bias, optimise your surveys, and collect the most actionable insights possible. To learn more about best practice surveys, check out this paper on Transactional Customer Experience Survey Best Practices.

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5 Tips to Help You Write Engaging Email Survey Subject Lines

Tip #1: Establish the Right Tone

Tip #2: Go Beyond Basic Personalization

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A Quick Word on Open Rate Benchmarks

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Wrapping Up

Where Employees Will Work—And Why It’s Complicated

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