A New Recipe for CX Success with Auntie Anne’s

Auntie Anne’s understands that the guest experience and the employee experience are closely connected. But as a quick-service restaurant chain connected through millions of pieces of data and feedback, it became nearly impossible to understand exactly how the two are connected...

Not many of us can resist the enticing and familiar waft of a fresh batch of Auntie Anne’s pretzels. But no matter how phenomenal a product is, there’s always room for a business to take its customer experience (CX) to the next level—and that’s why InMoment stepped into Auntie Anne’s kitchen to cook up a new CX strategy. 

Keep reading to learn how the partnership between InMoment and Auntie Anne’s drove some pretty sweet results for the business. 

Food for Thought: Smarter Data

Auntie Anne’s understands that the guest experience and the employee experience are closely connected. But as a quick-service restaurant chain connected through millions of pieces of data and feedback, it became nearly impossible to understand exactly how the two are connected. Although mystery shopping was the brand’s previous method of receiving feedback, that tactic alone no longer cut it. Auntie Anne’s needed a comprehensive approach, one that would fuel a CX that’s not only meaningful, but delivers results, as well.

Before InMoment, Auntie Anne’s was drowning in data that was siloed and sporadic, which didn’t allow for insights that spurred meaningful change. By linking up with InMoment’s XI Platform, they were able to compile and organize data and rank stores on key metrics, like friendliness and value. Not only did this provide personalized insights to individual stores, but also drummed up friendly competition between franchises. Through this, Auntie Anne’s was able to implement new, successful processes at underperforming stores. 

Don’t Glaze Over the Small Details

According to Forrester, customers who have great experiences are 3.6x times more likely to spend more money with the brand. Research also shows that 3% of total CX-fueled revenue is generated by word of mouth from happy customers. These highly engaged stores also helped achieve higher OSAT, or overall satisfaction,  year over year, which resulted in higher sales. In the three years after implementing InMoment, Auntie Anne’s experienced a 6 point increase in their OSAT score.

The implementation of an intelligent tool such as the XI Platform directly increased Auntie Anne’s bottom line, more than justifying the technology investment for skeptical, higher-up business executives.

Roll the Guest and the Employee Experience into One 

With any company, the guest experience is only half the battle. Getting employees to champion a new CX strategy is key to a full experience transformation. 

That’s where Auntie Anne’s made it personal by implementing a “Guest Care Wall of Fame” to showcase how employees are being praised for their customer experience efforts. The company also inducted franchises into its “20/70 Club,” celebrating stores that receive 20 survey responses per month and achieve an OSAT score of 70 or above. 

These initiatives create HR benefits, too. According to industry research, it can cost up to $2,000 to onboard and train a new employee. When employees are more engaged, they perform better and stay longer, resulting in a cost reduction in employee turnover and training costs across all Auntie Anne’s franchises. 

With a robust CX-program in place and the right intelligent tools, companies like Auntie Anne’s can save dough and dip into new levels of success, ones that produce more business value and profit across the board. 

To read more about Auntie Anne’s sweet customer experience, check out this free webinar in which Chief of Operations Savannah Harper discussed how they leverage customer feedback across their entire organization!

What InMoment’s Integration with Adobe Experience Cloud Means for Marketers

Marketers have traditionally relied on acquisition, audience, behavioral, and conversion metrics to create customer segments and inform their efforts. While this tried-and-true method works to a point, the data provided from these sources is limited.

Today InMoment announced its integration with the Adobe Experience Cloud, but what does it mean for marketers? The short answer is that integration presents an entirely new way to look at the customer experience (CX) and gain more intelligence than ever before.

Marketers have traditionally relied on acquisition, audience, behavioral, and conversion metrics to create customer segments and inform their efforts. While this tried-and-true method works to a point, the data provided from these sources is limited in what it can tell you.

The fact is that traditional marketing data can provide you with the “how,” “what,” and “where” customers are buying, but it can’t provide you with perhaps the most crucial piece of understanding: why your customers are—or aren’t—buying.

Our Chief Marketing Officer, Kristi Knight, elaborated on this point when she said, “What [traditional marketing] datasets don’t tell you is why your customers are acting the way they are—the golden thread for marketers—and you can only understand customer motivation through feedback from the customers themselves.”

The InMoment integration with Adobe Experience Cloud provides the missing piece of the puzzle; it helps marketers understand the stories behind the numbers and move from metrics-based marketing to meaningful marketing.

By allowing them to tap into the data derived from customer feedback in tandem with their traditional marketing metrics, this integration through the InMoment Experience Intelligence (XI) Platform enables marketers to create more targeted and personalized segments and online experiences.  

Want to know more about how do we do it? Check out the market release to get the specifics on this first-of-its-kind integration!

Leave Your Mark

The entire premise of customer experience (CX) is based on the idea that brands want their customers to have positive interactions with them and their products. In other words, brands who focus on customer experience want to leave a positive mark.

When my team and I were putting together the content for CX Elevated 2018, I started thinking a lot about how the mark we want to leave can define not just our CX efforts, but our lives.

Our lives are made up of moments that create a certain kind of impact. Our choice is not if we will leave a mark, but rather what kind of mark we leave. Previously, our company referred to this stand-out way of affecting the people around us as “Red Shoes” living, but with the most recent evolution in company vision, we figured it was time for a new take on an old classic.

It was this line of thinking that lead me to create the Leave Your Mark award and share it with our InMoment community on the last day of conference. It was an absolute pleasure to present the first of these awards to Sean Rausch, a local high school student who chose to leave a legacy of sportsmanship and camaraderie that serves as an inspiration to everyone.

In a cross country state championship race, Sean chose to forgo personal victory when his teammate snapped his tibia mid-race, falling to the ground. Sean stopped, picked his teammate up and carried him on his back—stopping only to set his teammate down so he could hop across the finish line and finish the race.

Both boys were disqualified, but it wasn’t the podium that mattered here or the winners that exemplified true sportsmanship. It was the young man who gave up his chance for a medal because he wanted to do the right thing. Sean chose to leave a mark, and in my mind his choice is more meaningful than a thousand first place titles.

The award presented to this remarkable athlete was a plaque impressed with a sneaker-sole footprint. This print represented the mark that Sean chose to leave. We also presented all attendees and InMoment employees with a similar plaque, instructing them to write on the sole a description of the mark they want to leave. This mark could be personal or professional, family or customer experience-oriented, big-picture or in the moment.

Being intentional about the mark you want to leave makes a huge difference in how you live every day. Our hope with this new movement is to inspire our community so that in moments of reflection, we will all be able to look back and be able to say that we left the mark we wanted to leave.

How are you leaving your mark?

Are You Listening Where Your Customers Are Talking?

Learn how an omnichannel voice of customer feedback management solution can help you get the most out of your voice of the customer data, whether they want to provide feedback in-store, online, by phone, using video, social media, or just by the way they interact with your brand.

The world of customer experience is constantly evolving, especially when it comes to sources of customer feedback. Searching one single channel—or even two or three— means barely breaking the surface of the resources available to you.

Today, the best Voice of Customer programs survey multiple channels such as web, voice, video, mobile, and many more to get the deepest and most informative insights possible. Check out the graphic below to see how your listening methods can invite insights from every possible CX venue!

omnichannel voice of customer data collection

Customers want to be engaged across both physical and digital forums, so it is essential to meet those customers in both places with the tools you need to listen. By engaging your customers on all channels, you are creating seamless interactions with your brand and positive customer experiences.

With InMoment’s platform, feedback from any customer on any channel are available in just one easy-to-use interface. To schedule a demo and get actionable insights from your customer data, click here!

Avoiding Survey Fatigue: How to Filter Your Existing Customer Data

How do you avoid customer survey fatigue but still get the insights you need to drive your CX programs? Find out how to mine more, better insights from your existing data.

We all know the age-old comparison “like looking for a needle in a haystack” and we’ve all had experiences that make that saying relevant. While searching for your car keys may feel like looking for a needle in a haystack, sorting through your customer data shouldn’t.

You spend time and resources collecting customer data in order to gain the type of insights that can guide your business decisions, but sometimes the path from point A to point B can feel unclear. When you have a multitude of data from multiple channels, insights on one specific topic can seem hard to find. In fact, the task of picking through masses of data for one specific thing can seem so tedious and daunting that you may be tempted to just send a one-off survey out to your customers on a specific topic.

While this technique may be fine every once-in-a-while, using surveys as your main data collection method puts your customers at risk of one terrible CX pitfall: survey fatigue. If their inbox is flooded with surveys every few days, your customers are more likely to be irritable and less likely to give you the valuable feedback you need.

So what do you do? Do you look for the needle in the data haystack or do you risk survey fatigue? Luckily, there is an alternative option that gets you the answers you need in a timely manner: data filtering and prioritization.

Today’s most effective CX software features tools that will allow you to sort through the data you already have to find the information you need to create premium customer experiences. Tools such as Explore™ allow you to slice-and-dice data in multiple ways for multiple insights. To give you an idea of what this looks like, I will discuss three of these filters and how they can be effective problem solvers.

1. Location

Sorting through data by location is endlessly useful. Let’s say you want to see how a new product is doing in specific regions. You simply specify the region on your platform overview and search the product. Your CX platform will automatically sort through existing data to bring up product relevant customer feedback for that area. In filtering your data by location, you have an understanding of that area so you can make decisions that make good business sense and satisfy your customers.

2. Negative Score and Sentiment

Closing the loop with customer complaints is one of the ultimate goals of customer experience. In fact, 70% of the time a person will become a repeat customer when a complaint is resolved in that customer’s favor. The benefits of solving customer complaints are obvious, but it is time-consuming to try to solve every problem as it comes in. To resolve effectively, you need a strategy. Filtering your data by negative score and sentiment can give you that strategy. Simply sort, see what customers are saying, and come up with a way to address the issue. Then you can contact customers to let them know how you are resolving the issues. You’ve saved time and your customers feel heard: It’s a definite win-win!

3. Time

Sorting data by time has two major benefits. Firstly, it allows you to spot trends over time. For instance, you can identify which products are more popular at which time of the year and make decisions to reflect that insight. Secondly, you can put out fires before they start. When you sort your data by time, you can see the feedback that has come in most recently, identify anomalies, and address them before they become a greater problem.

Filtering data not only saves you time, but it also gives you the actionable insights you need to make your customers feel heard.

When it comes to dining out, everybody has a preference. Some people are held back by dietary restrictions, some are adventurous eaters, and some are just plain picky. There is not one type of restaurant that will please everyone, and that makes dining an incredibly personal experience.

The most obvious determinant for a positive customer experience in a restaurant is the quality of food, but there are many other factors that weigh into culinary satisfaction. The majority of these concerns can be sorted into five major categories: quality of food, staff interactions, speed of service, atmosphere, and value.

In a world where 91% of unhappy customers will not return to a brand, it is crucial for restaurants to drive customer satisfaction in these areas—but how can they keep up?

That is where Voice of the Customer (VoC) technology comes in. These technologies give providers direct access to their customer feedback so they can make impactful changes in the way they do business.

Voice of the Customer solutions can be applied to restaurants in many ways, but I am going to outline four specific VoC tools that can address these five main concerns and determine positive or negative customer experience for your diners.

Real-time Alerts

Some Voice of the Customer platforms offer real-time alerts that notify staff of customer concerns as they happen, allowing them to take action almost immediately. Though these can address all five categories listed above, they can be most helpful with issues of atmosphere and quality of food.  If a customer asserts that the bathrooms in a certain location are unclean or the food is cold, the location would receive a notification of that customer’s feedback as it was made. Management could then rectify the situation, helping to ensure positive atmosphere and quality of food experiences for other customers that day.  

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics give businesses the power to forecast demand and make differences in both speed of service and staff interactions. With this VoC tool, managers can determine when there is a rush and schedule staff accordingly.  This small adjustment stops one of the biggest customer complaints—long lines and wait times—before it even starts. As an added bonus, staff members won’t be under pressure from grumpy customers, ensuring positive staff interactions for customers.

Location-Specific Insights

VoC Programs with location specific insights are most useful for identifying anomalies in quality of food. For example, if there are three cases of food poisoning in one region, businesses will be made aware of the problem before it gets out of control. This tool is also useful when testing out a new product. If one region tests it, location-specific insights can surface conclusive customer feedback on the new product.

Benchmarking

Benchmarking VoC tools give restaurants the ability to see how they match up in comparison to their competitors. This can be most useful when comparing value of their meals versus other providers. With this information, businesses can make cost-effective changes to assure customers that they are getting the best value for their dollar.

At the end of the day, all restaurateurs strive for satisfied customers, no matter what kind of food they serve. By utilizing VoC tools, businesses can make day-to-day, time-relevant adjustments that tailor to their customers’ taste and give them the best dining experience possible.  

As a follow up to our recent white paper on resolving customer issues, we teamed up with CustomerThink for a webinar on closing the loop.

Led by InMoment’s SVP of Global Business Development, Erich Dietz, the webinar provided additional insights on closing the customer feedback loop more effectively, reducing business costs, increasing revenue, and creating loyal brand advocates.

Here’s a roundup of some of our favorite quotes and findings from the webinar:

To learn specific best practices on closing the loop, you can watch a recording of the webinar.

Discover: Your Treasure Map to Customer Insights

Have you ever been asked to find an answer in a set of customer data only to find out that it involves combining information from multiple siloed sources, millions of data points, and no clear indicator of where to even begin?

Then, adding insult to injury, have you ever been given a limited amount of time to locate the insight, share it, and get it in the hands of the right people within your organization who can act on the insights you provide?

If this situation sounds familiar, know that you are not alone. Searching for insights in your customer data can be a little bit like going on a time-sensitive treasure hunt without a map. You know there are valuable customer insights buried within the mountains of data, but you don’t know where to start digging—or where the treasure is hidden.

Analysts have always had obstacles in their way, but as technology advances and the channels in which customers provide feedback increase, so does the amount of data that needs to be analyzed. Siloed data and working with multiple tools makes it challenging for analysts to make sense of customer stories in a timely manner.

Take two of our clients, for example. One brand has a team of over 50 analysts ready to dive into issues as they occur. The other brand has a smaller team of about five. Despite the stark differences in size, each team takes about 30–60 days to find insights. While these analysts are able to surface insights from the customer data sets they’re working with eventually, it’s often too late to take meaningful, business-driving action.

InMoment’s latest product, Discover™, is designed with analysts in mind. It’s an always-on customer experience analyst tool that sifts through the millions—sometimes billions—of unstructured customer data points in real time to identify trends, anomalies, insights, and sends you automatic alerts, so you know exactly where to find your brand’s CX gold before it’s too late.

Here are some of the other ways Discover helps CX analysts:

  • Helps pinpoint where to start digging, so you can be proactive, get answers more quickly, and understand if something significant is happening in real time
  • Identifies unexpected issues you didn’t know to look for
  • Addresses pain points of analyzing unstructured data
  • Collates data from a variety of sources (even data from other VoC vendors) and determines impact of issues on your main scoring metric.

You don’t know what you don’t know. Discover helps you act more quickly, and provides you with a more accurate pulse on emerging trends and issues.

Where are your customer insights hidden?

Here’s What You Should Know About Discover

It seems like every week there is another PR emergency or brand failure in the news. What is even more interesting is that in many cases with just a little prior insight and action the whole mess could have been avoided!

Most brands understand that customer feedback is critical to improving their business, but with the thousands of comments that you receive on a daily basis, finding the insights that can alert you to emerging issues is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

This month, we publicly announced InMoment’s newest product, Discover™. Simply put, Discover can be described as an always-on analyst that digs through any type of customer comments to detect anomalies, or abnormal spikes, in topics. In other words, if your customers are talking about any particular incident, product, staff member, promotion—you name it—in a significant way, Discover will let you know.

Its built-in text analytics and sophisticated predictive algorithms analyze past data to establish a baseline, then compare it to current data in order to determine if any topics are emerging as anomalies. It then alerts the correct person in your organization who can address the issue and take action.

No more spreadsheets, no more reading through thousands of comments, no more finding out about an issue after it’s too late. Discover will tell you things you might not have ever known about your customers—or may have never thought to ask.

Customer relationships are fragile. Even the smallest error can dramatically impact your brand’s perception, but you can’t address the problems you don’t know about.

Here’s just one real-life example of how Discover™ can automatically find and alert you to issues hidden in your customer comments.

Text Analytics Infographic

For one outdoor retailer, Discover was set up to identify and alert decision makers when anomalies popped up in customer comments related to certain topics (or tags).

One day, this retailer’s business analyst received an alert that there was an unusual amount of activity related to the topic of promotions. She immediately turned to Discover to see what was going on.

This program manager instantly saw not only the impact this issue was having on the retailer’s Net Promoter Score, but also the exact geographical area it was coming from, as well as the total percentage of all customer comments mentioning a problem with incorrect pricing.

By reading through the comments pulled out by Discover, it was quickly apparent to her that in one specific state, customers reported being charged sales tax on the retail price of an item instead of on the sale price of the item. Customers were quick to mention this practice wasn’t in line with the Department of Commerce.

This valuable insight was distributed to front end store managers in that state, as well as the retailer’s information technology department. The group is working together to correct the sales tax calculation error in the retailer’s point-of-sale system.

This data empowered the retailer to respond to an issue they were previously unaware of, and keep an innocent error from souring the customer relationships it spent years to build.

If you’d like to learn more about this technology, or layer it on top of your existing VoC data, take a look at Discover for yourself.

Your customers are talking about you behind your back and the entire world is listening.

Luckily, you can hear what customers have to say even if they aren’t speaking directly to you. Every mention provides an opportunity to replicate the good (or troubleshoot the bad before it turns into a national or global brand crisis).

Enter: InMoment Social Listening.

Social Listening taps into popular online review and social sites where customers share meaningful experiences about brands. But the social sphere is a big place. InMoment helps find, compile, and analyze brand mentions and reviews, and sorts them into easy-to-digest insights for all levels of an organization, from frontline staff to top-level executives—and everyone in between.

For many companies, the initial plunge into Voice of Customer (VoC) begins with customer experience surveys. However, with the prevalence of social sharing, listening isn’t complete without the social perspective, and this angle is becoming more central to business strategies. Large brands with multiple locations don’t have the ability to easily monitor social media and review sites, glean a sense of customer opinion, and take action to rescue dissatisfied customers. There’s simply too much data from too many sources to compile, analyze, and act without some help.

Social Listening allows companies to track multiple social channels in one place. InMoment embeds these social stories alongside experience data from voice, online, and other sources into alerts, reports, dashboards, and apps for a broader view of customer sentiment.

Several powerhouse brands have seen significant benefits from using InMoment technology to streamline social listening. Here are just a few real-life examples from some of our clients.

Aggregated Insights

Comprehensive insights are integrated directly into InMoment’s platform, and are analyzed and displayed in a centralized location alongside other types of customer feedback for comparison. Area and regional managers receive rollups relevant to their service area, while executives receive a companywide outlook.

Competitive Analysis

Companies receive the added—and critical—ability to “listen” to competitors and gauge how a specific location is performing within a given area, such as a shopping mall.

Real-Time Response

Designated employees are alerted on customer complaints, and may respond directly within the same social channel, or transfer the case to a dedicated customer service department.

Employee Coaching and Recognition

Social listening allows location managers to identify key areas of service and focus their employee training and coaching. Additionally, managers may recognize service teams and individual team members who receive praise on social channels.

Access to Richer Data

By taking in feedback from various social sources, companies find the conversations on review and social sites form an in-depth set of unstructured data to complement the data from customer experience surveys.

Less Intrusive Collection

Collecting critical feedback through social channels allows companies to keep their customer experience survey short, which increases the response rate, and keeps interactions feeling more like conversations than interrogations—gaining insights without having to ask too often.

Focused Marketing Efforts

Companies are able to create targeted social content, based on social conversations, in the form of offers and advertisements.

Social Media Dashboard

Companies receive at-a-glance information about customers’ experiences, including a breakdown of the most common topics mentioned on social media, so they can easily identify trends and address common issues.

Advanced Text Analytics

Companies are able to run the same advanced text analytics on social comments as they do on unstructured survey feedback, automating the ability to quickly understand the large amounts of social data, instantly alert on urgent issues, and easily spot emerging trends.

Asking for feedback from your customers is a good thing. Being able to listen to the stories, understand what they mean to your business, and then act on them quickly, is a great thing.

Ever since I was a boy growing up in Colorado, I have loved exploring the mountains. By now I have run, hiked, and skied thousands of miles through this magnificent wonderland and have learned some great life lessons from it—one of which is, “More does not necessarily mean better.”

When I was young, I carried everything I thought I might need. My legs might have gotten stronger, but my experience was hindered with the weight of my pack. Now, before I go out I ask myself, “Do I need this, or can I make do with what I have?”

When it comes to data, businesses are in a similar situation. They have all the data they can handle, but often are asked for more to answer specific questions for other areas of the organization. The rise of DIY surveys have made it fast and easy to survey customers. On one hand, this is a positive: It illustrates that organizations are understanding that customer feedback can inform every facet of their business.

On the other hand, if businesses are not careful, they risk unnecessarily overburdening their customers and contributing to survey fatigue.

We know that if customers care about something, they will tell you—so why not take a closer look at the data you already have?

For example, one InMoment client I recently spoke with was asked to report to executives on a specific seasonal event. Instead of sending out a survey to ask customers for feedback, he used Explore to search comments that had already been provided. He quickly learned that what customers were expecting did not match their actual experience, leaving them with a negative perception of the brand. Customer comments illuminated a clear discrepancy between the marketers who advertised the event, and the store managers who actually carried it out, which can now easily be avoided next time this event takes place.

So, just as I’ve learned to do when hiking, before you send out yet another survey, try asking yourself, “Do I need to do this or does my data already provide the answer?”

Change Region

Selecting a different region will change the language and content of inmoment.com

North America
United States/Canada (English)
Europe
DACH (Deutsch) United Kingdom (English)
Asia Pacific
Australia (English) New Zealand (English) Asia (English)