How to Select the Best Customer Experience Management Software

Did you know that 92% of CEOs agree that customer experience (CX) improvements have a direct impact on their bottom line? It’s clear that a customer experience program is no longer a luxury, but a necessity. 

The process of choosing the best customer experience management software can be tricky and extensive, so there are some things you need to keep in mind as to find the perfect CX partner for your business. 

Benefits of Customer Experience Management Software

Delivering consistent, memorable experiences is no longer a luxury, it’s a necessity. Consumers are more likely to become repeat customers if they have great experiences. But, in order to achieve this, you need an actionable customer experience strategy. That is where customer experience management software comes in. Customer experience management (CXM) software offers several benefits for businesses aiming to enhance their customer interactions and satisfaction such as:

  • Improved Customer Satisfaction: CXM software helps businesses understand customer needs, preferences, and expectations. By addressing these effectively, businesses can enhance overall customer satisfaction.
  • Enhanced Customer Loyalty: By consistently providing positive experiences, CXM software contributes to building customer loyalty. Satisfied customers are more likely to become repeat customers and advocates for the brand.
  • Personalized Interactions: CXM software allows businesses to collect and analyze customer data, enabling personalized interactions. Personalization enhances the customer experience by delivering relevant content, recommendations, and offers.
  • Brand Differentiation: Providing an exceptional customer experience through CXM software can set a business apart from competitors. Positive experiences contribute to a positive image, and improved brand reputation management, which aids in differentiating your brand in the market.
  • Employee Engagement: Happy and engaged employees are more likely to provide better customer service. CXM software can also contribute to employee satisfaction by providing tools and insights to enhance their ability to serve customers effectively.

How to Choose the Best Customer Experience Management Platform

Choosing the right customer experience management is a critical decision for businesses aiming to elevate their customer interactions. A robust CXM platform can significantly impact customer satisfaction, loyalty, and overall business success. But, choosing the right partner for your business is a complex process. In order to ensure you choose the right vendor, there are some preliminary steps you need to take. 

Look at Third-Party Evaluations

When evaluating CXM platforms, it’s essential to consider third-party evaluations and industry reviews. Independent research firms like Forrester and Gartner provide assessments, such as the Gartner CX Magic Quadrant, that provide valuable insights into the strengths and weaknesses of different platforms, helping you make an informed decision. Look for reviews from reputable sources, industry analysts, and customer experience experts. Assessments often highlight features, scalability, integration capabilities, and overall performance. By leveraging third-party evaluations, you can gain a well-rounded perspective on the platforms you’re considering, ensuring that your choice aligns with industry standards and best practices.

Look at Customer References

Another crucial aspect of selecting a CXM platform is examining customer references. Real-world experiences from businesses similar to yours can offer unparalleled insights into the platform’s practicality and effectiveness. Focus on understanding how the platform addressed their specific needs, the level of support provided, and any challenges faced during implementation. Customer references provide a firsthand account of the platform’s performance in diverse business environments, aiding you in making a decision that aligns with your unique requirements. 

For example, if you are looking for an example of how a customer experience platform helped a large organization put loads of data into one place, look no further than Foot Locker. Foot Locker utilized InMoment’s AI technology to gather data into one place, and sort by sentiment so that customers with negative experiences could be contacted and prevented from churning. 

Look at Their Integrated CX Offering

When considering a CXM platform, it is important to choose a partner that will allow you to do more than one thing. You don’t want a partner who can only do surveys or contact center optimization, you want a partner who will give you an end-to-end look into the customer journey. 

That is why Integrated CX is so important. Integrated CX allows you to bring in data from multiple sources into one central location. From there, you can uncover holistic insights that lead to data-driven decisions. 

10 Questions to Ask CX Companies

When in discussions with your top CX companies, it is important that you delve deeper into their specific product offerings and understand how they go about supporting their customers. You want to ensure that you have a dedicated partner that will help you reach your goals, not just a platform that you will be left in the dark with. In order to do so, make sure you ask questions that will allow you to make an informed decision on a vendor that will work best for you. 

1. What Percentage of Your Total Customer Base Relies on You for Enterprise CX Programs?

When you’re looking for a partner in business, you want them to be an expert in their field. This holds true for customer experience, yet some major companies only dedicate a small percentage of their resources to CX expertise. For example, some major companies claim to specialize in CX, but really the vast majority of their business is devoted to market research. For great customer experience, pick a vendor that is 100% dedicated and will not be distracted by other ventures.

2. What Percentage of Those Customers Have Been With You for Over Three Years?

Some vendors will tout big numbers of clients, but the information that really matters is how long those clients have been with the company. With a strong partner, you get what you were promised and clients are more likely to stick with them longer. Get past the smoke and mirrors and find the right vendor by asking about client longevity.

3. How Many of Those Customers Exceed 1 Million Interactions with You?

If you’re an enterprise, you want to differentiate those who say they can handle a large program with over a million responses and those who are just running a small research survey at

a big company. So how do you tell? Some companies will charge extra with “custom pricing” for responses over 1 million, which highlights their high cost of business and limited experience. You want a partner who doesn’t blink at 1 million.

4. Who Specifically Will Provide Implementation and Strategic Consulting Services?

Continuing the point from the previous question, it’s one thing to claim to be collaborative, but another to have a blueprint for partnership. Ask who specifically will be helping you implement your technology and help you map out your CX strategy to pick out the vendors who walk the walk, not just talk the talk.

5. How Often Will Those Resources Be Available to Us? At What Rates?

Strategy sessions and check-ins are vital to a healthy partnership with your CX vendor. Though they’re vital, many vendors charge extra for the bare minimum amount of sessions. It’s best to clarify that these partnership best practices are included in your contract, rather than an add-on that will cost you more than a pretty penny.

6. Will We Be Charged for Survey Responses? Why?

Some major vendors in the CX industry do not charge you as you’d expect. They don’t charge you based on the number of surveys you send or other elements, but by the number of survey responses you get. If you’re thinking this seems backwards you’d be right, especially seeing as the number of survey responses you’ll get is difficult to estimate going into a contract.

7. What Happens if We Over or Underestimate Our Responses? 

When you sign a contract with a vendor who charges based on the number of survey responses, there is a high probability that you will overestimate and therefore pay more money for services you don’t need. However, these companies do not offer any refunds; in fact they charge steeply if you overestimate. Weed these vendors out to make sure you aren’t backed into a very expensive corner.

8. Are We Subject to Any Parent Company’s Policies and Contracts?

This question is especially relevant due to recent acquisitions across the CX landscape. Now more than ever, it’s important to know if you’re partnering with just the technology vendor or if you’re signing something that makes you beholden to a parent company’s interests and policies. Ask this question to clarify if your vendor is working for you or for their parent company.

9. Can We Review the 24-month Product Roadmap?

Crafting a roadmap for your initiatives is necessary to not only get the quick wins you need, but to set long-term goals. However, not even CX professionals can see the future. There will be unexpected events that may necessitate adjustments to your roadmap, yet some vendors don’t allow tweaks to the plan. Clarify this with your vendor to make sure your program is future-proofed.

10. Which Customers Can We Speak to Verify Your Responses?

Strong partners create strong advocates. It’s as simple as that. Ask prospective vendors if you can speak to current customers and the best of them will refer you to an advocate that will be more than happy to tell you about their experience.

InMoment as a CX Partner 

InMoment has best-in-class NLP capabilities and has the highest user ratings of all Voice of the Customer companies according to Gartner Peer Insights. Schedule a demo today to see what we can do for your business! 

References 

Dimension data. (https://www.dimensiondata.com/en-us/insights/blog/how-ai-analytics-and-cloud-can-elevate-customer-experience). Access 1/25/24.

Announcing the Latest XI Platform Product Enhancements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

XI Workflow minimises data work on your side by:

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

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

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

You Can Give Different Employees Varying Levels of Access to Data

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

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

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

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

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

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