InMoment Highlights

Happy CX Day! We hope you’re taking advantage of today and celebrating your customer experience efforts.

Wherever you are on your CX journey, it is always helpful to share stories and hear from other companies on the same path to customer experience success. With this in mind, I’ve gathered some quotes from our CX Spotlight video series to share and discuss with you.

1.

“We actually consider [open-ended feedback] to be the most valuable feedback that we get. Although scores are important, when we hear something specific from the guests, that’s very valuable and we can either go back and make a correction or reinforce the behavior that wowed our guest.” — Jeff Jacobson, Chief Operating Officer at Costa Vida

Customer Experience is more than just the sum of your scores; it’s your unstructured data that can give you the best idea of how you are doing as a company. Even more so, it’s the open-ended feedback Jeff mentioned that will give you the actionable insights you need to truly make a difference.

2.

“It’s one thing to say, ‘hey, we provide great guest service and we welcome people’ here and there. Everyone can say it and you could potentially use profits or sales to understand if you’re really performing, but until you have a good feedback system and listen and understand what your guests are saying, I’m not sure how you can attach those two things together.” — Helmuth Mayer, Director of Strategic Initiatives at Dave & Buster’s

When it comes down to it, every business strives for consistently satisfied customers. CX programs help you to bridge the gap between data and results, telling you what the key drivers are for your business and therefore, where you should place your efforts.

3.

“Our customers are directly telling us what’s important, and I think that really helps the team to focus our energies… it’s the comments from the customer that are important.” — Cathy Dages, Customer Support Supervisor at KARL STORZ Endoskope

Every business has an idea of what their customers want, but without feedback, it’s hard to know if those supposed standards reflect what customers truly want. By keeping open dialogue with your customers through a VoC program, your picture of your customer is 100% correct, because you are getting your facts from the source.

4.

“The catalyst [for implementing a CX program] was really the end of our mystery shopping program. The one store, one visit per month had run its course. It just wasn’t productive enough and there was too much technology out there to give feedback.” — John Heatherington, International Operations Manager at Marks & Spencer

Mystery shopping is helpful at gaining specific insights from one location on one day, but it is hard to derive actionable insights for overall business objectives from one instance. With VoC programs, you can survey mass amounts of data from multiple locations at multiple times to get a 360° view of how your customer experience efforts are really going.

5.

“We are always surprised at what our customers are telling us. With the surveys, what we found out was the certain words that the customers were looking for were very different than the words we had in mind for that specific moment… this information helps us to react [to client expectations] quicker.” — Alexa Larsson, Senior Retail Operations Manager at The North Face

The whole purpose of collecting customer data is to predict customer demand so you can meet them. Every moment matters, so knowing what your customers want to hear in each touchpoint with your brand is pivotal to CX success!

We consider our clients to be CX heroes, and so when we celebrate CX Day, we celebrate all the work they’ve put in and the lessons they’ve learned in their pursuit of positive customer experience.

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:

“Get executives personally involved in closing the loop. It will build empathy for both the customer and the employee.” #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

91% of unhappy customers won’t return to your brand. Executing on the inner and outer loop leads to hard ROI.

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Brand experience is found at the intersection of 3 questions: Why are you loved? What are you good at? Why are you different? #CX

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

What’s the good to great story? Some of the biggest ROI from closed loop is found in moving passives to promoters. #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

“Every metric in your business needs to have an owner.” #CX #closingtheloop

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Don’t miss the opportunity to share what you’re doing with customer feedback. Communication is key.

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

Golden rule of CX: Don’t ask if you’re not willing to make changes. If you do make changes, tell your customers and employees. #CX

— InMoment (@WeAreInMoment) May 4, 2017

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

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.

For anyone that was unable to make it to this year’s CX Elevated conference, we’re sorry we missed you! Over the course of one week, we had the opportunity to speak with brands across different industries, learn how others are using the InMoment platform to solve business problems, and share best practices for creating loyal and satisfied customers.

Here are a few of the big takeaways from the week:

1. InMoment got a new CEO.

We are excited to introduce Andrew Joiner as InMoment’s new Chief Executive Officer. With past experience in high-growth, market-leading SaaS organizations, Joiner will build on InMoment’s financial strength, technology, and the market opportunity. John Sperry, former CEO and founder, will act as chairman of InMoment’s board of directors, and will focus on future innovation for the company.

2. We launched an amazing solution called Discover.

Discover™ is a first-of-its-kind analytics tool that produces a new level of CX intelligence.

Using InMoment’s advanced analytics technology, Discover dives deep into CX data to uncover statistically significant patterns, trends, and anomalies. The tool then routes the information to the right people across the organization. With this real-time intelligence, leaders in every corner of the business can take appropriate action immediately to avoid damage to their brands and capitalize on opportunities.

3. Dan Pink taught us how to influence others effectively.

Pink, author of three New York Times bestsellers, demonstrated the new ways leaders are persuading, influencing, and motivating others. He introduced and explained the power of overlooked techniques, such as perspective-taking, problem-finding, and using purpose as a motivator, and offered concrete steps to put these ideas into action.

4. Comcast, Ipsos, and McKinsey & Co nailed it in the Executive Leadership track.

Graham Tutton, Vice President of Customer Insights at Comcast, presented best practices for identifying and connecting customer and financial interests for maximum stakeholder value.

Jon Atkin, Senior Vice President at Ipsos Loyalty, discussed practical advice on what it takes for an organization to become truly customer-centric, creating buy-in and alignment from the top down.

Victoria Bough, Measurement Expert at McKinsey & Co., discussed how InMoment’s technology is supporting and elevating brands’ ability to more effectively understand, improve, and leverage customer journeys.

5. A Forrester analyst taught us how to power employee behavior change.

Samuel Stern, an analyst at Forrester, discussed how organizations utilize the feedback from customers and employees to guide customer-centric behavior change among employees. Stern explained just how significant company culture is to customer experience outcomes, emphasizing that individual behavior change is at the heart of any culture change.

6. Our ridiculously fun Snow Day.

With a packed week of CX information and best practices, we were happy to sneak away for a relaxing afternoon at Snowbird Resort and Lodge. Attendees were able ski our world-famous slopes, unwind with a trip to the spa, or enjoy other snow activities like snowmobiling and snowshoeing. What’s a trip to Utah without experiencing the Greatest Snow on Earth?

We hope to see you next year!

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.