Integrated CX

Local listing management is crucial for any business that relies on local foot traffic. That makes it an essential function for supermarkets and grocery stores, whose revenue is almost entirely local.

But keeping listings accurate and up to date across every possible service, directory, and platform isn’t easy to do. For supermarkets with numerous locations, the job becomes nearly impossible without the right local listing management software.

What Is Local Listing Management Software?

Local listing management software is a tool that helps businesses manage their online information (name, address, phone number, and other key details) across multiple directories and platforms. 

It’s an ideal solution for keeping listings consistent and accurate across all the online channels where customers may search for a local physical store. These tools are especially useful for multi-location businesses that need to maintain and update separate pages for each location.

Local Listing Management for Supermarkets vs. Other Businesses

Supermarkets and grocery stores can benefit greatly from local listing management software, as this industry deals with some unique complexities and challenges like:

• Frequent updates to business information: Hours of operation may change with some frequency (holidays, inclement weather), and consumers want confidence the supermarket will be open before they make the trip.
• Real-time inventory and product listings: Supermarkets have massive inventories with thousands of SKUs (the 2023 average was 31,704 unique items). Keeping this information up to date is a huge task.
• Promotions and deals integration: Showcasing deals and promotions in local listings can be a big boost to foot traffic, but watch out for a backlash if these fall out of date.

Why Supermarket Businesses Should Use Local Listing Management Software

Despite the complexities of managing local listings in the grocery industry, supermarkets stand to benefit significantly from using local listing management software. The key is to choose a software platform that understands and effectively solves these industry challenges.

Here are some ways supermarkets benefit from local listing management software:  

Boosting Visibility in Local Search Results

First up, local listing management software is the most efficient way to improve a physical store’s visibility in local search. 

Local business listings are a significant part of optimizing for local search, also called local SEO. The more accurate and consistent these listings are, the better they look to the search engines, which tends to improve rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs). 

This is especially important for supermarkets. In the broader retail industry, some stores and brands rely on local traffic more than others. But for supermarkets, local traffic is pretty much the only traffic! Boosting visibility in local search (including Google and Apple Maps) enables customers searching in a specific geographic area to find your store.

Managing Multiple Locations Efficiently

For supermarket businesses with multiple locations, the challenges of manually managing local listings grow exponentially. Every single change must be made to each listing for every physical location. 

A local business listing management solution streamlines all of this, allowing you to batch update similar information across multiple stores. This is a great way to save time and reduce errors when updating any information that’s similar for all locations.

Enhancing Customer Trust

If a customer (or prospective customer) is taking the time to look up your local listing, it’s because they want to know something before heading to your store. If the information they’re seeking is presented consistently and accurately, you’ll build confidence, trust, and loyalty. 

That’s the positive news, but we need to look at the negative too, because plenty can go wrong here. If that potential customer lands on a listing that’s talking about a holiday from six months ago or features a phone number or URL that doesn’t work, it doesn’t inspire confidence. 

Worse, if they see incorrect information and take action based on it, the negative experience (e.g., driving across town only to find the supermarket doors locked) can damage your brand’s reputation and even sever a customer relationship.

In other words, your local listings can either build or destroy trust—local listing management software helps you tilt the scale toward building trust.

Increasing Foot Traffic and Driving Sales

Improving local listings means better search visibility and stronger customer trust, and both of these support the ultimate goal of getting more people into your stores and selling more products to them. After all, locals can’t become customers if they don’t know you exist.

Best Local Listing Management Services for Supermarkets and Grocery Stores

There are dozens of listing management services available, but not every option out there is a good fit for supermarkets and grocery stores. The seven reviewed below are top contenders in the grocery niche.

1. InMoment

InMoment is a full-service integrated customer experience (CX) platform designed for the needs of multi-location businesses, including supermarkets of all sizes—all the way up to enterprise scale. InMoment’s Integrated CX suite has everything you need, including listings management, competitor analysis, reputation management, and more.

With InMoment, supermarkets can keep business listings full of accurate information and stay consistent across the entire web. The platform also provides the best of both worlds in terms of automation vs. control. Updates can push automatically to any and all listings, or brands can keep granular control, fine-tuning listing updates at the directory level. 

Rich ROI-focused data insights, keyword tracking, and powerful connections to other InMoment tools round out this powerful platform that drives results.

Learn more about InMoment’s local listing management capabilities.

Key Features 

• Unique map ranking view: See where you rank against the competition on the map.
• Auto-fix information: Identify out-of-sync information and automatically fix those inconsistencies.
• Robust ROI-centric analytics: Learn from your Google listings and Google Maps performance with metrics that stay focused on what matters most: ROI.
• Keyword rank tracking: Identify how you’re ranking vs. the competition on specified keywords, then track progress over time.
• Real-time automatic push changes: Change business hours, add photos, and more, then automatically push those changes to all relevant listings.
• Granular directory-level control: Gain full control at the directory level, auto-publishing information as unique as you need it to be for each directory.

2. Yext

Yext focuses on automated listing management, and its thorough citation network helps supermarkets build search authority. With Yext, businesses pay per listing service, enabling an a la carte approach where a business can choose to focus on Google Business, Yelp, Bing, Apple Maps, or a hundred other services—whichever best supports their goals.

Yext is big on AI, with AI insights, an AI-powered Listings Recommendations tool, and AI-search compatibility (meaning generative results on Google and elsewhere can find and pull from your local listings).

Key Features 

• AI-search: Google Gemini and other AI search tools can read and understand Yext-made listings.
• Full automation: Listing management is 100% automated, saving time but limiting your ability to manually intervene.
• Listings Recommendations: AI-powered suggestions based on current performance.
• Data cleansing/duplicate prevention: Avoid headaches associated with duplicate listings and old data hanging around.

3. Moz Local

Moz is one of the longest-standing and biggest names in SEO strategy, and Moz Local is the company’s set of local SEO tools, which includes listing management.

Moz Local centralizes listing management, allowing supermarkets to update business information once and then push that update to more than 70 listing destinations (including online directories, search engines, social media platforms, and more). Like Yext, Moz Local includes tools for identifying and removing duplicate listings, and it will help you refine existing listings so they perform better.

Moz Local works in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., making it an ideal choice for businesses with a presence in multiple countries. Like InMoment, Moz Local enables supermarkets to monitor and interact with reviews and publish Google Posts updates—but only at the higher price tiers.

Key Features 

• Familiar Moz interface: Businesses already using Moz can quickly adapt to Moz Local.
• Search Visibility Score: Moz Local continually monitors search visibility and updates businesses with an easy-to-read score.
• Data-rich reporting and insights: Moz Local’s robust insights outperform many others.

4. Whitespark

Whitespark is a little different from the listing management tools reviewed thus far. It’s a local search service with a big focus on local citations, which are separate instances of name, address, and phone number (collectively known as NAP) across the web. It also allows businesses to manage Google Business Profiles centrally, and you’ll find other tools like review collection and management and local rank tracking.

But what sets Whitespark apart is that it isn’t automated in the way Yext and Moz Local are. Working with Whitespark means working with (and, yes, waiting on) a real team of humans who intelligently refine your listings and help you improve. 

You also own your listings, which means they don’t disappear when you cancel your subscription. So Whitespark is a good choice for businesses that want a more hands-on approach.

Key Features 

• Local Citation Finder: Build a better network of local citations.
• Local Platform: It’s a powerful way to manage Google Business Profiles, including rejecting unwanted automatic updates.
• Listings service: Enjoy a hands-on, nearly bespoke refresh of your business listings.

5. Brightlocal

Brightlocal is a popular and affordable solution for listing management built around three primary tools: Citation Builder, Active Sync, and GBP Post Scheduler.

Like Whitespark, Brightlocal uses a one-time payment structure for building citations and gives businesses ownership of their listings. The other tools (Active Sync and the post scheduler) do carry a monthly cost, but many businesses find BrightLocal to be the most affordable option for the services it provides.

You’ll have to sacrifice some features for cost savings though, as analytics, listing recommendations, and AI capabilities aren’t available here.

Key Features 

• Citation Builder: Build and manage a network of local citations and remove inaccurate information.
• Active Sync: Centralize business listing management and sync changes across multiple sites and services. 
• GBP Post Scheduler: Create, schedule, and post Google Posts to one or more Google Business Profiles simultaneously.

6. Uberall

Uberall is another AI-powered and mostly automated solution, but this platform is designed specifically for multi-location businesses (like restaurant franchises and national brands). The tools may feel geared toward restaurants and banks more than supermarkets, but if you’re a leader at a supermarket chain of any size, then Uberall may be worth a closer look.

The platform helps protect against suggested edits in Google Business Profiles, runs duplication checks, delivers performance insights, and offers suggestions for improving listings—all geared toward businesses with multiple locations. Bulk changes to listings can be extremely helpful, though some businesses may chafe at the lack of customization or flexibility.

Key Features 

• Automated review response: Create prebuilt answers and let Uberall handle the rest.
• Voice assistant integration: Uberall connects to Alexa and others, giving brands greater exposure to audiences using these devices and services.
• Bulk GBP management: Make adjustments to multiple local listings simultaneously.

7. Birdeye

Birdeye is much more than just local listing management software. Its primary features revolve around social media management and online reputation management (both powered by AI). Local listing management is a complementary tool, but it works well. 

Birdeye takes a heavily automated approach to creating and maintaining listings on all major platforms and in many industry-specific directories. Other notable capabilities include image uploads, appointment request links, and a deep scan tool that puts your listings up against relevant benchmarks in your industry. 

Key Features 

• Automated listings management: Create listings at scale with generative AI.
• Reputation management: Automatically respond to reviews across multiple platforms.
• Social media management: Create and schedule social media posts from a central interface.

Manage Your Local Businesses and Drive Revenue With InMoment

Supermarkets face unique barriers when it comes to managing their local listings, so they need a uniquely powerful solution that equips them to solve those challenges, thrive, and scale. 

InMoment combines powerful listings automation, granular control, stellar visibility, ROI-focused analytics, and much more into a feature-packed solution. And for brands that need additional reputation management capabilities and a fully integrated CX, InMoment delivers it all through one comprehensive, intuitive platform.

It’s time to see what InMoment can do for your supermarket brand: Schedule your free demo now.

For enterprise grocery businesses with hundreds or even thousands of individual stores, local SEO is tricky business.

Maintaining an effective online presence is crucial for increasing foot traffic and online visibility. But manually keeping every listing on every site and service up to date is challenging with a single store. Scaled up to hundreds or thousands, it starts to seem impossible!

Plus, due to several unique characteristics of the industry, grocers must contend with extra logistical challenges in their local SEO compared to other businesses.

Local SEO for Grocery Stores vs. Other Types of Businesses

Local SEO is strategically important for any business that relies on local foot traffic, grocery stores and supermarkets included. Yet, in the grocery industry, local SEO is even more important—and simultaneously more complex to get right. Here’s why:

• Hyperlocal focus: Supermarkets generally pull from a smaller geographic footprint, requiring a focus on neighborhoods, villages, townships, shopping districts, street names, and so on—not just on big city names.
• Real-time updates for inventory and promotions: Sales change weekly, and inventory changes constantly. Keeping digital materials consistent and up to date is a challenge.
• Importance of reviews for freshness and quality: Potential customers are especially concerned about freshness and quality, so grocery stores need reviews that mention these elements positively, not just generically good reviews.
• Visual content optimization: The age-old truism, “We eat with our eyes,” affects how grocers approach print and digital marketing. No matter where viewers are finding information about a store, the visuals must be appealing and on target.

The Top Local SEO Challenges for Grocery Store Businesses

As supermarkets and grocery stores (from enterprises down to local multi-store businesses) seek to implement effective local SEO strategies, these are the 12 most pressing challenges they face.

1. Optimizing Both Your Overall SEO and Local SEO Strategy

Overall search engine optimization (SEO) works differently than local SEO, and it can be tricky to balance the two or, better yet, to build them into a cohesive SEO strategy that supports both well.

Especially for enterprise grocery businesses, overall SEO focuses on brand-wide goals, such as brand awareness, prestige, and dominance in specific search categories. Local SEO involves a different set of priorities centered around helping prospective local customers find specific locations based on both branded and unbranded search queries.

Both are important, and it’s tough to strike the right balance.

2. Multi-Location Management

Another challenge is managing SEO effectively for multiple locations. Each store needs its own optimized online presence and local business listings. 

A Google Business Profile (formerly called Google My Business) is especially essential, as it allows stores to collect Google Reviews and communicate information to searchers, like the business name, address, phone number, and hours.

Numerous other services and directories have similar functions, and they all need to be kept current—for every location.

3. Optimizing Google Business Profiles

Speaking of Google Business Profiles (GBPs), they need to be optimized for each store. These listings provide information in Google Maps and location-oriented Google searches, popping up as a sidebar or card, depending on the service and device people use. 

Optimized profiles are a key way to increase location visibility and store traffic. Brands can control most of the content that appears in their GBPs, but keeping everything accurate, visually pleasing, and search-optimized is difficult at scale.

4. Review and Reputation Management Across Various Platforms

Reviews are another tool that consumers use to decide where to shop. The trouble for brands is that these reviews pop up everywhere, and no matter how well-run the business is, not every review is positive.

Monitoring reviews across numerous platforms and sites, for dozens or even hundreds of unique stores, is daunting and difficult to scale while maintaining brand consistency. The same goes for responding to reviews and other reputation management activities.

5. Ensuring Consistency in Business Listings Across Online Directories

Local citations are one factor that helps determine placement in local search engine results pages (local SERPs). Search engines identify as many mentions as they can find of a local business across website content, review sites, directory services, mapping services, and more. They’re looking for consistency in certain elements, like name, hours, address, and phone number.

To rank higher, a location needs lots of local citations that are extremely consistent. When a search engine doesn’t find enough citations or finds too many discrepancies, SERP suffers. So consistency in business listings across directories and destinations is crucial.

6. Mobile Optimization

Mobile optimization is vital just about everywhere. Around 65% of internet traffic comes from a mobile device, leaving roughly 35% for full-sized browser windows on laptops and desktops.

The mobile split is certainly higher in the grocery space, where an everyday use case for most consumers is pulling out their phone, opening their preferred navigational app, and searching for what they need.

So, to rank well and provide a good experience for searchers who land on your properties (websites and listings), grocery brands must prioritize responsive design and mobile optimization.

7. Managing Seasonal Campaigns and Promotions

Seasonal sales and promotions are a huge driver for grocery stores—but they can be a logistical nightmare for brands that need to ensure these campaigns are: 

• Accurate at stores of varying sizes and differing inventories 
• Optimized for local search across hundreds of locations
• Kept up to date on any third-party services that list promotional information

Missing the mark in any of these areas means missed traffic and revenue opportunities during key shopping periods.

8. Proving ROI for Local SEO Efforts

It’s just good common sense that improving an individual store’s search visibility in maps and elsewhere will improve foot traffic to that store. But proving exactly how much of a difference it makes is nearly impossible. 

The change happens over time, not instantly, and there are always concurring factors—maybe there was a good sale or big event or snowstorm that coincided with the changes. Without clear insights, it’s hard to prioritize what’s actually driving results (and hard to allocate budget accordingly).

9. Competing with Local Independents

Competing with local independents is a unique challenge for enterprise grocers. Independent grocery stores often dominate search results in their local communities thanks to proximity, preferences, and a loyal customer base. Competing in search against these hyper-local small businesses takes a well-tuned, location-specific SEO strategy.

10. Managing Location-Specific Social Media

Social media may not be a direct ranking factor, but it does a lot in terms of visibility and can create a hometown feel and familiarity for individual physical locations of otherwise impersonal large brands. But keeping up with comments, tags, and location-specific content across multiple platforms adds another layer to the challenge. 

11. Staying Ahead of Algorithm Changes

The big local search algorithms are always evolving, and even a small change to what Google prefers can mean big adjustments to hundreds of profiles. Keeping them all updated and compliant with the latest requirements is a constant uphill battle.

12. Leveraging User-Generated Content

Customer reviews, photos, and questions can boost visibility, but they need to be managed well. Good photos are great, but bad user-generated content (UGC) of an icy parking lot or messy store shelf is less than helpful. 

Then there’s the issue of responding to reviews and other UGC. It’s essential to respond, especially to negative reviews, but poorly moderated or inconsistent responses can do more harm than good.

How Grocery Businesses Can Overcome Local SEO Challenges and Improve Online Visibility

The barriers to successfully executing local SEO are real, but these proven strategies can help grocery store and supermarket businesses overcome those challenges and start achieving more online visibility through local SEO. 

Unify Efforts With Local Listing Management Software

Many of the challenges grocery businesses face boil down to issues of scale. There are so many local listing services to keep track of, and it has to be done for every single location.

Local listing management software is the solution to scalability challenges. It’s also the single most impactful technology businesses can use to improve local SEO. These solutions help multi-location businesses update listings in bulk, monitor and respond to online reviews and comments, and fine-tune business listings based on the needs and priorities of each platform.

Listing management software solves both types of scalability issues, making it much easier to update all platforms and listings for an individual store and make mass updates to all stores in a group or region.

Features of Local Listing Management Software

• Local business listing management: Seamlessly manage and automate business listings on various local directories, review sites, and other online platforms, keeping business information maintained and current.
• Streamlined Google post management: Create these SEO-boosting mini-posts in a central platform, then publish them to one or many GBPs.
• Customer review monitoring and response: Receive notifications when customers post reviews on various sites so you can respond promptly. Some tools include automated or partially automated responses.
• Advanced geotargeting features: Target specific local and hyperlocal areas with SEO and search engine marketing (SEM) efforts, such as location-specific landing pages and highly targeted ads.
• Local search ranking insights: Understand how stores are ranking compared to local competitors over time.
• Reporting and analytics: Access robust information on local SEO performance and ROI to justify efforts and investments and fuel optimization.

Explore InMoment’s local listings management software

Engage With Local Audiences 

No matter how large an enterprise grocer grows, individual stores can still connect with organizations and community members in their immediate local area, building a sense of local camaraderie and even loyalty. Here are a few ideas stores and corporate teams can implement:

• Create a local store presence on social media and post local content.
• Regularly and promptly respond to reviews, using personal/first-person language where appropriate.
• Host local in-store events.
• Partner with and support local mission-driven organizations.

Enhance the Mobile Experience

A seamless mobile experience is critical because searching for grocery stores via a smartphone browser or map app is the default method for many customers. 

Practically speaking, this means prioritizing fast-loading pages, easy navigation, and mobile-friendly design. All three are essential for improving local visibility and conversion rates.

Leverage Schema Markup

Using local business schema markup on individual store pages can help search engines better understand and display essential information like store hours, locations, and services in search results. Providing this data in the right format improves the likelihood of ranking highly in local search and map searches. 

Implement Location-Specific PPC Campaigns

Paid search campaigns targeting local audiences can complement organic efforts by getting local stores in front of local eyes. This approach is especially effective when promoting new stores, seasonal events, or time-sensitive deals.

Encourage and Amplify Customer Photos

UGC can be a powerful tool, especially when you encourage it from your biggest fans. Including customer-generated photos in reviews and social media posts can boost engagement and improve local search rankings. 

Put systems in place that incentivize customers to share positive reviews (and associated photos) with stores, then showcase those photos across numerous platforms.

Utilize Hyper-Local Keywords

Unless you’re managing high-end, unique, or specialty grocery stores, customers in a typical city aren’t going to drive an hour across town (passing 20–30 competitors along the way) to visit a specific grocery store. So it pays to be specific.

Include highly specific keywords focused on neighborhoods, villages, townships, and the like—not just the name of the nearest big city. It’s the difference between “grocery stores in Cincinnati” and “grocery stores in Hyde Park / Eastgate / Westchester.” Both matter, and it’s crucial not to overlook the latter.

Using hyper-local, neighborhood-focused keywords will help your content, listings, and ads better align with the localized search intent of your target audience.

Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search (think questions to phones or smart devices, most of which begin with “Hey Siri,” “OK Google,” or “Alexa”) is becoming a dominant way customers find local businesses. For many consumers, it’s just easier to ask their living room speaker for a recommendation than it is to open up a laptop, find a browser window, open a new tab, type in a URL, and then ask the question.

Sure, these kinds of searches can’t provide visually rich map information (at least not directly), so a follow-up search in Google or Apple Maps is likely. But the first question—“Where should I go for groceries?”—is increasingly happening via voice search.

So what should grocery stores do about it? Optimize their websites and listing pages for voice search. Include easy, helpful answers to natural language queries like “near me” searches, and implement the right tools to help format and technically optimize your online content.

Integrate Geotargeted Offers

Businesses can also use geotargeting to create promotions and offers tailored to specific regions or demographics. This is a great way to drive foot traffic and improve engagement, and it also reinforces local relevance to search engines.

Regularly Audit Online Listings

Last, make sure to perform frequent audits of business listings to ensure consistent and accurate information across platforms. Keeping up with this reduces the risk of ranking penalties due to discrepancies. Many listing management tools automatically perform these audits, and some even auto-fix problems when found.

Simplify Your Local SEO Efforts and Drive Revenue With InMoment

The challenges large grocery chains face in local SEO are significant and surprisingly complex. But by following the right best practices—and implementing the right tech tools—grocery businesses can simplify, streamline, automate, and start excelling at local SEO across their entire fleet of locations.

InMoment is the perfect solution for local listing management across all locations, ideal for enterprise grocery businesses, local multi-location grocers, and everything in between. Our full suite of Integrated CX tools transforms every aspect of your CX approach, enabling your business to form better, more meaningful connections at scale.

Ready to simplify your local SEO management? See InMoment in action.

Losing customers never feels good, especially in a hyper-competitive market. You could replace them, but that’s easier said than done. In fact, it costs five times more to acquire new customers than it does to keep an existing one. But, what if you could predict and reduce customer churn to retain customers at risk of leaving you?

With the right strategies and tools, you can prevent customers from taking their business elsewhere. The key is to build trust and loyalty through positive experiences that convert potential losses into growth opportunities.

The Importance of Reducing Customer Churn

A customer-centric approach can’t succeed without addressing customer churn. High churn rates indicate dissatisfaction and missed opportunities to strengthen relationships. Here are a few reasons why reducing churn is essential for business gains:

• It increases revenue stability: Retaining customers ensures a steady revenue stream, helping you minimize acquisition costs.
• It boosts Customer Lifetime Value (CLV): Loyal customers spend more over time, creating a positive impact on your bottom line.
• It encourages product improvement: When you address churn, you can identify specific pain points leading to dissatisfaction. This information guides product development to better fulfill customer needs and goals.
• It gives you a competitive advantage: Your product and business improvements will likely enhance customer satisfaction. As a result, you’ll succeed in retaining and acquiring customers to increase your market share.
• It improves your brand image: Happy customers are more likely to recommend your business, helping support brand reputation management efforts.

What Is Customer Churn?

Customer churn occurs when customers stop using your product or cancel their subscriptions. It’s an important metric to track because it highlights the number of customers leaving you. You can calculate it by dividing the number of customers you lost over a specific period by the number of active customers at the start of that period.

Types of Customer Churn

Several types of churn can affect your bottom line, including:

• Customer churn describes the decline in customer count during a specific period. It doesn’t address a drop in revenue, only focusing on the raw number of customers lost.
  
• Revenue churn represents revenue lost due to customers downgrading their plans or leaving the business altogether. Businesses with tiered pricing models typically focus on this type of churn.

• Early churn occurs when customers leave the business during their initial experience with the product or service. It highlights an issue with product onboarding and time to value since the product fails to demonstrate immediate utility to the customer.
  
• Active churn is when customers voluntarily stop using a service or product. The most straightforward example is when a customer decides to cancel their subscription. This decision could reflect dissatisfaction, finding a better alternative, or changing requirements.
  
• Passive churn is also described as involuntary churn. It occurs when customers don’t explicitly cancel their service. For example, a subscription that ends due to failure to update credit card details. This type of churn indicates issues beyond dissatisfaction, such as inadequate payment processing.

How to Reduce Customer Churn

1. Identify At-Risk Customers
2. Analyze Churn Drivers
3. Collect Regular Feedback
4. Identify Your Target Audience
5. Focus on Proactive Outreach
6. Deliver Excellent Customer Service
7. Understand Your Competition
8. Highlight Your Value
9. Invest in Customer Loyalty
10. Improve Onboarding
11. Educate Your Customers
12. Encourage Long-Term Engagement

Customer churn is a serious challenge, with U.S. businesses losing $136 billion annually due to avoidable churn. Here are 12 impactful ways to reduce churn and prevent it from impacting your revenue streams.

Identify At-Risk Customers

Knowing who is likely to leave helps you optimize your churn reduction efforts. It enables you to pinpoint specific user profiles for re-engagement. Tracking activity levels is a straightforward way to recognize at-risk customers. For example, if they haven’t renewed their subscription or completed a survey in a while, they might be losing interest in your product.

A churn prediction tool like InMoment simplifies this process by leveraging analytics to highlight these at-risk profiles and segments. It also helps you understand why churn occurs, which gives you an opportunity to take preventative action.

Analyze Churn Drivers

Churn occurs for various reasons that can highlight significant areas for improvement. Customers may leave due to product dissatisfaction, poor service quality, high pricing, or simply because a competitor offers more value. 

Leverage churn prediction tools, feedback, and usage data to analyze key factors driving customers away. For example, if customers complain about a lack of features, it signals a need for product improvements. Addressing these drivers allows you to enhance satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. 

To see what this can look like in action, read this customer story to learn how this large Telecommunications organization parted with InMoment to identify the root cause of customer churn and identified $6 million in at-risk revenue!

Collect Regular Feedback

Consistent feedback collection is essential for tracking customer expectations and behavior. Businesses that actively use customer feedback for improvements experience a 10% increase in retention rates.

Use surveys and social media monitoring to capture insights into customer experiences. Leverage analytics to understand their pain points and goals. For example, if feedback reveals confusion during onboarding, you can improve your processes to make them more intuitive.

InMoment’s XI platform enables you to collect and analyze customer insights effectively. It leverages CX integrations to connect and collect feedback from every channel, making it easier to act on. As a result, you build trust, improve retention, and reduce the likelihood of customers leaving.

Fill out the calculator below to reveal how much ROI you can get from utilizing InMoment’s platform: 

Identify Your Target Audience

You can build the best product with high-quality customer support behind it. However, it’ll struggle to keep target customers on board if it doesn’t resonate with them. Therefore, you must recognize the user profiles that can make the most of your product. These customers are less likely to be swayed by lower prices elsewhere because they see genuine value in your business.

Focus on Proactive Outreach

Proactive communication is an important part of re-engaging at-risk customers. It shows your awareness of potential issues, making customers feel valued and heard. Stay ahead of customer needs with regular check-ins and possible solutions.

The best way to recognize issues before they become churn drivers is to monitor customer sentiment online. With InMoment’s social listening tool, you can track brand and product mentions to see what customers have to say. This approach keeps you in the loop regarding customer experiences so that you can make proactive improvements.

Deliver Excellent Customer Service

Feedback collection, analysis, and social listening provide the insights you need to improve customer experiences. In fact, 77% of customers are willing to share personal information as long as they receive better experiences in return. For example, improving your e-commerce website’s user interface after listening to customers will improve your chances of retaining many of them.

Understand Your Competition

If customers are considering leaving you, guess where they might go next? Your competitors! Analyzing the major players in your space will help you stay competitive by identifying their strengths and weaknesses. It will also help you see how you can differentiate your product and service to stand out.

For example, if your competitor is receiving criticism for slow customer support, you can use the opportunity to market your 24/7 multi-channel service. Competitive analysis allows you to address market gaps and remain relevant for existing and potential customers.

Highlight Your Value

We just discussed how competitor analysis provides opportunities to establish yourself as a viable alternative. This is where you must communicate your product’s or service’s long-term value. Leverage marketing channels to highlight impactful ways in which you solve customer pain points. Your online reputation management efforts will also be crucial, as they yield positive reviews that you can use to reinforce value and reduce churn. 

Invest in Customer Loyalty

Strong customer loyalty is key to reducing churn. 64% of loyal customers are more likely to purchase frequently. Besides improving customer experiences, you can encourage loyalty with rewards and incentives. A good loyalty program goes a long way toward strengthening relationships and increasing customer lifetime value. Incentives like discounts and loyalty points encourage customers to stick with your brand over the long term.

Improve Onboarding

The onboarding process sets the tone for the customer journey with your brand. An effective product onboarding experience ensures a short time to value and reduces the chances of early churn.

For example, you can create step-by-step tutorials, welcome emails, or in-app guides tailored to new users. Proactively address common questions and offer easy access to support during onboarding to build trust. This approach sets the groundwork for long-term satisfaction by empowering customers to achieve their goals early on.

Educate Your Customers

Customers who understand how to capture value through your product are more likely to stay long-term. Educating your audience ensures they use it effectively to fulfill their needs. Leverage guides, webinars, video tutorials, and newsletters to inform customers.

Another benefit of educating your customers is brand credibility. Customers and prospects are likely to view you as a trusted authority in your space. As a result, educational initiatives promote trust and long-term loyalty.

Encourage Long-Term Engagement

Engagement is crucial to keeping customers connected to your brand. Regular interactions remind customers of the value you offer and encourage long-term loyalty. Personalized recommendations, gamification, or exclusive community access can help foster long-term relationships. This approach helps reduce churn likelihood by making customers feel invested in your brand.

How Does Improving the Overall Customer Experience Reduce Customer Churn?

The best way to hold on to a customer is to deliver consistent and positive experiences. Excellent customer experience management is key to customer satisfaction and staying ahead of competitors. Here are four key ways in which CX improvements help reduce customer churn:

• It enhances customer loyalty: Loyal customers spend more frequently and are likelier to recommend your brand to others. As a result, they are far less likely to switch to competitors.
• It flags potential pain points early: Analyzing the customer journey helps you spot and address issues that might lead to churn. Proactive communication and problem-solving play a huge role in retaining at-risk customers.
• It strengthens customer relationships: Delivering personalized interactions creates an emotional bond between customers and the brand. This connection encourages long-term relationships.
• It highlights your unique value to customers: Positive customer experiences highlight the unique benefits of your product or service. They help customers recognize your value in their daily lives, reducing their likelihood of seeking alternatives.

How to Reduce Customer Churn Using Customer Journey Analytics

Customer journey analytics helps businesses map and understand the end-to-end customer experience. It pinpoints glaring issues, tracks customer behavior, and highlights where customers might churn.

For example, if analytics reveal a pattern of early churn, you can address the issue with clearer onboarding instructions or proactive support. These insights enable you to personalize interactions and improve weak touchpoints.

You can identify at-risk customers early with customer experience journey mapping and churn prediction. InMoment combines both processes in an intuitive CX platform to enable a better understanding of user journeys. Its advanced text analytics and AI Journey Insights help identify churn drivers and hidden pain points to improve retention rates.

How to Use NPS to Reduce Customer Churn

Net promoter score (NPS) is a valuable metric for understanding customer loyalty and reducing churn. It categorizes customers as promoters, passives, and detractors to highlight the likelihood of customer retention. Promoters are loyal advocates, while detractors are disgruntled customers at risk of churning.

NPS surveys help collect feedback from both types of customers. Following up with detractors and resolving their issues on a priority basis can convert them into loyal customers. Analyzing the change in NPS over a specific period is also helpful in tracking the success of retention strategies.

How InMoment Can Help Reduce Customer Churn

Customer churn results in significant business losses that make it difficult to survive in a competitive market. While you can’t completely eliminate churn, you can reduce it to grow your revenue and market share. InMoment provides industry-recognized churn prediction software that enables early identification of churn drivers and at-risk customers. Schedule a demo of our text analytics solution today to see how it can help boost retention rates!

References 

Forbes. Customer Retention Versus Customer Acquisition (https://www.forbes.com/councils/forbesbusinesscouncil/2022/12/12/customer-retention-versus-customer-acquisition). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Desk365. 101 Customer Service Statistics You Need to Know in 2024 (https://www.desk365.io/blog/customer-service-statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Freshworks. 50 Essential customer service statistics to know for 2024 (https://www.freshworks.com/customer-service/statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Emarsys. 32 Customer Loyalty Statistics Your Business Needs to Know in 2025 (https://emarsys.com/learn/blog/customer-loyalty-statistics). Accessed 12/09/2024.

Your social media channels aren’t just for scrolling through your feeds. With 74% of consumers relying on social media to guide their purchasing decisions, these platforms host valuable customer experience data. Social media intelligence is a powerful tool for leveraging this data to make informed business decisions.

What is Social Media Intelligence?

Social media intelligence is the analysis of data from social media conversations to guide marketing strategy. Your brand can better connect with your audience by tracking trends in online conversations around your product and industry. 

For example, identifying negative sentiment toward your latest feature can help you spot areas for improvement. It’s also possible that your product is fine but your team is marketing it to the wrong demographic. As a result, these insights also enable effective marketing and lead generation.

Here’s a breakdown of the four key components of social media intelligence:

1. Monitoring
2. Data Collection
3. Data Analysis
4. Actionable Insights

Monitoring 

Monitoring your social media channels is the first step in identifying and analyzing audience activity. What are your target customers talking about? What are their opinions on your brand and your competitors? How do they feel about your products and services? You can answer these questions by monitoring brand mentions and keywords on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X (formerly Twitter).

Data Collection 

Collecting data is necessary for generating analytical insights from social media conversations. InMoment’s comprehensive social listening tool can help pull mentions of your brand and competitor, track relevant keywords, and connect data from various channels in one place. The regular, real-time data collection ensures you have a rich dataset for the analytical phase.

Data Analysis 

Analysis is at the core of social media intelligence, enabling you to capture AI-enabled insights into customer behavior. For example, you can leverage sentiment analysis algorithms to understand public opinion around your brand. You can execute similar algorithms on competitor data to identify differences in online perception.

Actionable Insights 

Actionable insights are the fruit of your analytical labor, showing you how to stay competitive and win over more customers. These insights help you take immediate and effective action for feature improvements or a better marketing campaign. The main aim is to invest in activities that increase customer loyalty and engagement.

How Does Social Media Intelligence Differ from Social Media Listening and Social Media Monitoring?

Social media intelligence, social listening, and social monitoring are used interchangeably. However, they serve different purposes for brands looking to understand online conversations.

• Social Media Intelligence is the comprehensive collection and analysis of social media data for actionable insights. It helps brands analyze customer sentiment, trends, and competitors to make data-driven business decisions.
• Social Listening is the analysis of social media conversations around your brand, product, or service. It helps businesses see what customers are talking about to identify opportunities and pain points.
• Social Media Monitoring is the tracking of brand and product mentions through keywords and hashtags. Social media monitoring enables brands to find customer queries and complaints so they can provide immediate responses.

Benefits of Social Media Intelligence

• Stronger Customer Relationships
• Lead Generation
• Staying Competitive
• Proactive Crisis Management

Social media intelligence helps unlock valuable insights into customers, prospects, and competitors. Key benefits include:

Stronger Customer Relationships

You may have the best customer feedback questionnaire for collecting structured CX data. However, the reality is that customers are more likely to be honest and open about their experiences on social media. 

Listening to their online voice ensures you better understand your customers’ expectations. You get to capture honest insights to deliver more value, which in turn helps build stronger relationships and brand loyalty.

Lead Generation

Social media intelligence provides insights that help tailor your marketing efforts to your target audience. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage data analysis to identify demographics expressing interest in its premium suits and dresses. The retailer can invest in targeted ad campaigns to attract these user profiles and convert them into valuable customers. This effective lead generation also helps increase your market share as your campaign draws in more prospects.

Staying Competitive 

Your competitors’ social media activity highlights opportunities to improve your own brand. Tracking competitor mentions keeps you in the loop regarding key developments and issues. You can use this information to improve on their current offerings or fulfill a need they are neglecting. 

For example, let’s say several comments and posts are complaining about the use of leather in your competitors’ handbags. You can leverage this opportunity to promote your vegan fashion items to disgruntled users. The resulting competitive edge will help you win over customers to your side.

Proactive Crisis Management

Social media intelligence provides real-time monitoring of sentiment and conversations around your brand. By identifying negative trends early, you can address issues proactively before they escalate.

For example, if you identify growing frustration about a bug in your app, you can release a prompt update to reassure customers. This practice helps build consumer trust and supports brand reputation management efforts.

How is Artificial Intelligence Used for Social Media?

• Sentiment Analysis
• Content Creation
• Customer Engagement
• Analytics and Reporting

Artificial Intelligence (AI) enables social media intelligence by automating crucial tasks and uncovering CX insights. Primary applications of AI for businesses include:

Content Creation

AI helps businesses streamline various tasks, including content creation and scheduling. Generative AI drastically reduces the time it takes to produce impactful content that engages your target audience. Meanwhile, automation enables quick and effective scheduling of posts for enhanced interactions.

InMoment’s social media management tool tracks trending keywords and topics to generate fresh, engaging content. As a result, it helps you stay relevant to your audience while saving time that you can invest in other operations.

Sentiment Analysis

AI-powered sentiment analysis highlights customer feelings towards your products, services, or brand. It categorizes comments, posts, or social media content as positive, neutral, or negative. This categorization is useful for filtering out user profiles and managing their experiences.

For example, you can quickly identify customers expressing negative sentiments to resolve their issues. Monitoring customer health and journeys regularly helps companies reduce churn by over 34% for at-risk clients. Therefore, sentiment analysis helps boost retention by keeping businesses up-to-date on customer behaviors and reactions.

Customer Engagement

Chatbots and virtual assistants improve engagement by instantly addressing customer queries. With a comprehensive knowledge base, they can even guide customers through complex processes without human intervention. 

AI-powered chatbots learn from customer questions to provide targeted responses and recommendations. InMoment’s Active Listening™ is a conversational AI agent that provides context-aware follow-up questions to engage customers. As a result, it enables detailed feedback collection to help businesses make informed decisions.

Analytics and Reporting

AI simplifies analyzing large volumes of social media data to generate actionable insights. It helps you understand content performance, trends, and demographics to make data-driven decisions.

For example, analytics can show you which type of content receives the most engagement to help you optimize marketing campaigns. Similarly, it can highlight products receiving the most attention to guide inventory decisions. Visualizing these insights and sharing them with stakeholders can help brands track the effectiveness of their social media management.

How are CX Teams Benefiting from Social Media Intelligence?

• Competitor Analysis
• Reputation Management
• Trend Analysis
• Targeted Outreach

CX teams collaborate with multiple departments to improve customer experiences. Their cross-functional nature makes them a great fit for social media intelligence. Key benefits for CX teams include:

Competitor Analysis

Social media intelligence highlights competitors’ strengths and weaknesses. This analysis empowers CX teams to identify gaps in the market and proactively address them. 

For example, CX teams in an organization can discover potential pain points by tracking competitors’ customer feedback. They can use this information to resolve issues before they affect their own customers. Additionally, they can position their brand as a more reliable alternative, helping them acquire new clients.

Reputation Management

Social networks can amplify wins and crises for brands. Therefore, staying on top of conversations and tracking customer sentiment is essential for brand reputation management. 

Analyzing comments, reviews, and brand mentions can help CX teams detect crises early and manage them before it’s too late. It also enables them to highlight their wins and demonstrate their value through testimonials. This approach builds customer trust and enhances the company’s public perception.

Trend Analysis

Social media intelligence tools track trending topics and emerging themes. This analysis provides CX teams with valuable insights into customer interests and behaviors.

For example, a fitness app’s CX team might notice a rising interest in mindfulness and meditation. This trend could guide the development of new app features or content to align with customer demands. As a result, trend analysis allows CX teams to position their company as a relevant business that understands modern customer needs.

Targeted Outreach

CX teams leverage social media intelligence to identify specific demographics for targeted outreach. Positive interactions with these groups can strengthen loyalty and turn satisfied customers into brand advocates. For example, your CX team can identify the top influencers frequently mentioning your brand and contact them for a collaboration.

Social Media Intelligence Tools

1. InMoment
2. Mentionlytics
3. Hootsuite
4. Sprout Social
5. Brandwatch
6. Sprinklr

A social media intelligence tool makes it easy to better understand customer expectations. It handles everything from social media monitoring to data analysis. Here are six of the best tools to help you choose the right one for your business needs.

InMoment

InMoment’s XI Platform software offers a comprehensive social media intelligence solution. Unlike other platforms, it lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and X. This level of control is key to building rich customer experience datasets.

The XI Platform also leverages sentiment analysis to provide insights into customer feelings around your brand. This analysis helps you identify disgruntled customers so that you can work on retaining them before it’s too late. In the XI Platform, you can also track trending keywords that can help you identify the biggest impacts on your customer experience. 

The ability to track keywords and brand mentions means you can keep an eye on competitor activity. This competitive analysis empowers your CX teams to learn from their strengths and capitalize on their weaknesses. 

For example, if your competitor is going through a PR crisis due to a recent data breach, you can use this opportunity to gain a competitive edge. Your marketing teams could communicate the superiority of your data protection technology.

Finally, InMoment’s social media intelligence tool enables high-quality lead generation. The insights gained from data analysis can highlight user profiles interested in your brand or offerings. 

By targeting these profiles with effective marketing, you can convert them into valuable customers. Similarly, the tool can help you identify top influencers in your space so that you can work with them to boost your brand reputation.

Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics allows businesses to monitor and analyze conversations on social media. Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, multi-channel monitoring, and competitor comparison reports. These features help companies make data-driven decisions to stay competitive and improve customer experiences.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a social media intelligence platform that combines data collection and analysis. Its Listening Basics feature allows businesses to track keywords and hashtags on social media channels. CX teams using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage the InMoment integration to monitor comments and reviews in one place. The integration helps filter out the best reviews and share them on social media to enhance online reputation.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a versatile platform that helps brands track and analyze social media conversations in real-time. Its standout feature is a trend-identifying tool that generates a word cloud highlighting topics relevant to the brand and industry. This trend analysis is helpful for staying competitive and managing customer interactions.

Brandwatch

Brandwatch uses advanced search options to help CX teams monitor vast amounts of social media conversations. It also enables trend analysis, influencer identification, and crisis management. It offers multilingual support to help businesses with multiple global locations manage their social media presence.

Sprinklr

Sprinklr is a social media management tool that enables businesses to track mentions, trends, and competitor activity. It uses AI algorithms to perform sentiment analysis on user-generated content. This analysis helps brands understand customer emotions and tailor their marketing strategy accordingly.

Get Better Insights to Transform Your Customer Experience with InMoment

Your social media channels are a treasure trove of customer experiences. Unlocking this data can help you win over customers, move past competitors, and boost your bottom line. InMoment’s social media intelligence tool gives you the key to access and analyze this valuable data. Schedule a product tour today to see how it can transform social media management for your brand.

References 

WebFX. 100+ Social Media Statistics You Should Know for 2024 (https://www.webfx.com/social-media/statistics). Accessed 11/26/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/26/2024.

Did you know that only 20% of CX teams report directly to the CEO? The other 80% of CX teams report to 15 different leadership functions, with CTO and Chief Customer Officer being the second and third most common leadership functions. 

These statistics show that there is no standard for where a CX team should live within your organization. To accurately place a CX team, you need to have a firm understanding of what CX teams do, what the customer experience goals of your organization are, and where those two overlap. 

What Is A CX Team?

A CX team is a group of customer experience professionals who work to improve customer experience by sharing customer insights throughout the organization. They analyze customer feedback, customer journeys, and more to get the most up-to-date information about the current customer experience and where it can be improved. 

Who Is On A CX Team?

The number of employees on a CX team and their respective titles will vary depending on the company. For example, a company that just established a CX team will have fewer employees than a company with an enterprise-wide CX team. 

Regardless, the core team members of a CX team are: 

• CX Managers: Oversee strategy and execution.
• Data Analysts: Dive deep into customer data to uncover actionable insights.
• Journey Designers: Map out customer interactions to identify gaps and opportunities.
• VoC Specialists: Ensure customer feedback is heard and acted upon.

What Skills Are Needed on A CX Team?

Members of a CX team need to be versatile employees who can examine different types of data. These employees must be able to research, analyze, and prevent all customer-related findings to organizational stakeholders. A recent study of CX teams said the three most common skills of employees on a CX team are: 

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Project management

What Skills Will Be Needed On A CX Team In the Future?

To keep up with ever-evolving customer expectations, CX teams will need employees who can grow and ensure that an organization can still be successful. The three skills that CX team employees need to have in the future are: 

• Data science or analytics
• Business case development
• Inclusive design/accessibility testing

These skills reflect changes in the customer experience market and what is going to needed of organizations to stay successful.

How to Build a CX Team

Building an effective CX team requires careful planning and alignment with your organization’s goals and customer needs. Follow these steps to ensure you assemble a team that will drive meaningful results: 

1. Secure leadership buy-in
2. Define the team’s purpose and goals
3. Identify the right roles and skills
4. Select the right tools and technology
5. Establish clear processes
6. Foster cross-department collaboration
7. Continuously train and develop the team
8. Measure and Optimize

1. Secure Leadership Buy-In

For a CX team to succeed, you need the full support of senior leadership. The executives must understand the importance of a CX team and be willing to provide the necessary resources. In this step, you will also decide which executive leader the CX team will report to. 

2. Define the Team’s Purpose and Goals

Before you can hire and assign roles to employees, you need to clearly define your CX team’s mission. Determine what customer challenges the team will address, how success will be measured, and how the team aligns with broader business goals. Examples of CX team goals include: 

• Increasing customer retention by improving satisfaction
• Increase customer acquisition by improving the customer journey
• Driving higher Net Promoter Scores (NPS) through targeted strategies

Clearly defined goals will guide the hiring process and set the foundation for CX success. 

3. Identify the Right Roles and Skills

With the purpose of your CX team defined, you can now begin the hiring process. Your CX team should include diverse roles that collectively address all aspects of the customer experience. Common roles on a CX team include:

• CX Manager
• Data Analyst
• Customer Journey Designer
• VoC Specialist 

In addition to technical skills, look for individuals who can perform qualitative and quantitative research, possess great communication skills, and are experienced in project management. 

4. Select the Right Tools and Technology

In order to give your CX team the best chance to succeed, you need to have the right tools at your disposal. These tools might include Voice of the Customer platform, journey mapping software, or data analytics tools. 

InMoment’s customer experience platform is an all-in-one solution that lets you collect and connect customer experience data in every format across every customer interaction. InMoment’s integrated CX approach helps organizations realize ROI in just 12 months, which is more than twice as fast as the industry average.

5. Establish Clear Processes

It is important to develop workflows to guide a CX team’s activities. For example, you will need to define how customer feedback will be collected, analyzed, and shared. You will also need to create a process for collaborating with other departments to address CX challenges across the organization. 

6. Foster Cross-Department Collaboration

CX teams don’t operate in isolation. They must collaborate with other departments, including marketing, sales, product development, and customer service. Encourage open communication and shared accountability by hosting regular meetings to align on customer-centric strategies, using collaborative tools to ensure visibility, and more. 

7. Continuously Train and Develop the Team

The customer experience market is constantly changing. It is important to invest in skill development. This can be done by attending customer experience events, training on new tools and technologies, and getting certifications in CX methodologies.  

8. Measure and Optimize Performance

Being able to measure the performance of a CX team against customer experience KPIs is crucial for the longevity of a CX team. Regularly review these metrics and gather team feedback to refine processes and improve outcomes. 

CX Team Challenges

Although they are important to the success of an organization, even the best CX teams do not come without challenges. These challenges can affect CX teams across all organizations, here are the main ones to be aware of: 

Lack of Executive Support

Over 40% of CX teams in an organization that prioritizes CX say they do not have consistent executive support. This suggests that despite the organization’s overall commitment to enhancing customer experience, there remains a significant gap in the backing and resources that these teams receive from higher management, which can ultimately hinder their effectiveness and the overall success of CX initiatives.

Inconsistent Business Case Development

A recent study found that only 22% of CX decision-makers make a business case for customer experience for every project or initiative and that only a third of them make a business case for major initiatives. 

In order CX teams to become an integral part of the organization, it is important to make business cases for all initiatives on how they will impact the customer experience at your organization. 

Misaligned Priorities

When prioritizing customer experience initiatives, most CX teams primarily concentrate on customer impact. However, almost half of CX teams often overlook three important criteria: return on investment, feasibility, and risk. To gain and maintain the support of key stakeholders within the organization, CX teams need to give more attention to these three factors.

Considering ROI is vital for justifying CX efforts to key stakeholders concerned about any initiative’s financial implications. Assessing feasibility includes evaluating the existing operational capabilities and potential barriers that could hinder the execution of the initiatives. Lastly, risk assessment is an essential component that cannot be neglected. Every initiative carries inherent risks that could impact customer satisfaction, brand reputation, or financial performance.

Lastly, risk assessment is an essential component that cannot be neglected. Every initiative carries inherent risks that could impact customer satisfaction, brand reputation, or financial performance.

By considering ROI, feasibility, and risk alongside customer impact, CX teams can enhance their strategic planning. This comprehensive approach not only helps secure the support of key stakeholders but also ensures that CX initiatives are sustainable and aligned with the broader business objectives.

Where Should CX Teams Report?

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

CX Team Best Practices  

While the focuses and goals of CX teams can change from organization to organization, certain things will set you up for success regardless of your objectives. Here are some best practices to ensure your CX team can succeed in any environment: 

Democratize Data

Democratizing data is an important step for protecting your teams’ time and resources, and it can be performed at any stage of CX maturity! 

Invest the time needed with key stakeholders to explain the importance of customer experience, co-create dashboards, and reduce any ambiguity about CX programs. By spreading the responsibility between team members throughout your business, you will save time both now and down the line with fewer emails, more empowered colleagues, and more visibility of your hard work. 

Leverage Available Resources 

Technology alone won’t help with demonstrating a return on investment. The most effective programs have a strategic partner to help map the initial CX framework, discover those actionable insights and point out the cost savings along the way.

You need a motivated team behind yours to design the roadmap of experience management success. Best practices show that the financial impact of the CX capability is outlined in the onboarding process, tested and controlled along the way, and measured and reported quarterly.

Create CX Champions

Take time upfront to educate teammates on the importance of customer experience and ask for volunteers to champion such initiatives across various departments. The more stakeholders invested in a CX program, the more time practitioners will have to delegate responsibilities across a business.

See which people in your business are organically gravitating toward your CX program and formalize their role as a CX champion. Empower these individuals to access the CX data anytime, anyplace to drive action.

Level-Up Your Dashboards

When you have a customer experience dashboard that is intuitive and easy to understand, stakeholders can easily circulate them within the organization. An effective dashboard is designed to guide the user, not overload the user with data. 

We recommend you follow this design structure where possible:

• Main KPI: Where are we? How has our performance changed over time?
• Main KPI & Main Segment: Who/what should we focus on?
• Sub KPIs: What is contributing to our core metric?
• High-Level Text Analytics: What overall are our customers telling us?
• Verbatim: What are our customers actually saying about their experience?
• Deep Analysis: Splitting KPIs up by pre-pop data.

To learn more about best practices and how to succeed as a CX team, download the checklist below:

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

How to Craft a Max-Impact CX Strategy for a Small CX Team

Having a small CX team doesn’t mean you can’t make a big difference. What it does mean is that you have to use your time wisely! Download this checklist for step-by-step instructions on how to realize four strategies designed specifically for CX teams like yours.

Thank you

Your download will begin shortly. If it doesn’t, click on the download button.

Download Now

Exit this form

Customizing CX Team Organization: Considerations for Success

Regarding 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.

Improve Your CX Team with InMoment

If your customer experience (CX) team is just starting out or expanding an existing team, InMoment is the top choice for a CX partner. With over 50 years of experience across various industries and a best-in-class solution, InMoment will guide your company in the right direction. To discover how InMoment can benefit your organization, schedule a demo today!

References 

Forrester. Predictions 2025: Customer Experience. (https://www.forrester.com/report/predictions-2025-customer-experience/RES181533). Accessed 11/20/2024. 

Forrester. Customer Experience Market Insights, 2024. (https://www.forrester.com/report/customer-experience-market-insights-2024/RES181199). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Forrester. The State Of Customer Experience Teams, 2023. (https://www.forrester.com/report/the-state-of-customer-experience-teams-2023/RES180035). Accessed 11/20/2024.

Did you know that 77% of organizations cannot consistently create a consistent customer experience across channels? This often stems from poor internal communication, outdated technology, or inefficient processes. 

However, to combat this, you need to understand the end-to-end customer experience and be prepared for every path a consumer might take to become a customer or that a current customer might take when using your products or services. 

Whether you are looking to change current processes, improve old ones, or ensure that your team is aligned on the priorities of the customer experience, creating a customer journey map will be useful to your organization. 

What is Customer Journey Mapping?

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the journey a customer has with a company’s brand, products, services, and people. Customer journey maps may also be called customer interaction maps, customer corridors, or service blueprints. 

A customer journey map visualizes all touch points between the customer and the organization, from customer research on the product to first contact with the company to building customer loyalty. 

By constructing theoretical customer decision-making scenarios, companies can more easily understand the factors and product features influencing customers’ purchase decisions. With InMoment’s XI Platform, you can create a customer journey map that tracks the customer journey across different channels and gives you insight on how to optimize it. 

The Benefits of Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping allows companies to see the gaps between the desired customer experience and the one the customer receives. Creating a customer journey map can help organizations improve:

• Internal education and alignment
• Resource allocation
• Product lines
• Processes
• Customer Experience

Improved Internal Education & Alignment

Over 81% of CX practitioners agreed that customer experience journey mapping was successful at internally educating stakeholders about consumer pain points or unmet needs. This can be useful to show employees that one problem or mistake in one phase of the customer journey can hurt the customer’s overall experience. 

Furthermore, customer journey maps educate stakeholders and get them on the same page about what is most important. Almost 80% of employees who created a customer journey map at their organization say it helped generate alignment between internal teams. 

Increased Resource Allocation

Customer journey maps can help you identify problems and present a strong business case for customer experience improvement. 71% of organizations say customer journey mapping has successfully persuaded management to invest in CX efforts and fix existing customer problems. 

Improved Product Lines

Customer experience journey mapping identifies where you may be failing in the customer experience and gives you room to improve. Problems identified through customer journey mapping could be a confusing website navigation bar or a checkout process with too many steps. 

With this information, you can improve your customer experience and eliminate pain points. In fact, over 70% of organizations say that customer journey mapping has helped them improve the user experience (UX) of a product or service or has helped them gain investment to create new features. 

Improved Processes

Most professionals using customer journey maps agree that one of their benefits is identifying the need for internal optimizations. By visualizing the customer’s experience across various touchpoints, journey maps provide a clearer understanding of where internal processes may be causing delays, confusion, or frustration for both customers and employees. 

Whether it’s a lack of cross-departmental communication, inefficient workflows, or outdated technology, journey maps can expose these pain points and allow organizations to align their internal operations more effectively to improve overall efficiency.

Improved Customer Experience

All of these benefits connect to creating a customer experience that consistently meets or exceeds customer expectations. Almost 90% of customer experience professionals who use customer journey mapping report improved performance in customer experience KPIs such as 

higher customer satisfaction, lower customer churn, and improved Net Promoter Score. 

Why Customer Journey Mapping is Important

Creating a customer journey map is important because it helps visualize the customer journey. Improving the entire customer experience can be difficult when only focusing on one stage or aspect. 

Seeing all the touchpoints together, how they relate to each other, and how they help the customer move through the journey helps your organization understand how each piece of the customer experience puzzle fits together. 

5 Types of Customer Journey Maps

There are different types of journey maps for different use cases. Each is tailored to specific goals and stages of the customer experience. Different journey maps provide unique insights, whether you’re looking to understand how customers interact with your brand today, envision an ideal future state, or analyze internal processes that affect customer outcomes. Here are some of the most common types of customer journey maps and when to use them: 

Buyer’s Journey

• Purpose: To map out the process a potential customer goes through before making a purchase decision and becoming a customer. This type of journey map helps you understand what motivates a consumer at each stage, their questions, and the information they seek. 
• When to Use: This journey map is used when developing marketing and sales strategies that aim to guide prospective customers through their decision-making process. It is particularly useful for aligning teams across multiple departments, such as marketing, sales, and customer success. 
• Focus: This journey map focuses on the buyer’s thought process, motivations, pain points, and needs at each stage of the journey. It typically covers awareness, consideration, and decision. 
• Example: A SaaS company creates a buyer’s journey map to understand how potential customers discover their product, research competitors, and make decisions. The map helps the company tailor content to each stage, such as blog posts and webinars for the awareness stage, product comparisons during the consideration stage, and free trials or demos for the decision stage.

Current State

• Purpose: This map reflects the existing customer experience based on how customers interact with your products or services today. It is useful for diagnosing current inefficiencies and identifying areas for improvement. 
• When to Use: When you want to understand what is happening now, spot bottlenecks or optimize current processes. 
• Focus: Real-time customer journey analytics to understand the emotions, pain points, and touchpoints customers are experiencing at every stage. 
• Example: A retail company maps out how a customer currently shops on its e-commerce platform and identifies the complex checkout process as an area of improvement to improve the e-commerce customer experience. 

Future State

• Purpose: The future state journey map outlines the ideal customer experience you want to create. It will look different from a current state journey map because it shows how interactions could be improved. 
• When to use: This journey map is most useful when redesigning or improving current processes. 
• Focus: Future state journey maps focus on optimizing processes, streamlining interactions, and improving customers’ emotional states at each stage. 
• Example: A software company wanting to overhaul their customer support process to improve resolution times can create a future state journey map to show what the ideal process would look like. 

Day-in-the-Life

• Purpose: The day-in-the-life customer journey map takes a broader view of the customer’s life beyond their interactions with your brand. It focuses on the typical day for the customer and how your product or service fits into their life. 
• When to Use: This can help you better understand your customers and identify better ways to serve them. 
• Focus: Day-in-the-life customer journey maps focus on customer activities, goals, frustrations, and needs within their daily routine and how that intersects with your product or service. 
• Example: A fitness app company maps out the day in the life of a busy working parent to see how and when the app could help them achieve their fitness goals in their busy schedule. 

Service Blueprint

• Purpose: The service blueprint journey map extends beyond the customer journey and includes business processes and systems that enable the customer experience that aren’t usually showcased in other journey maps. It visualizes the connections between the front-stage (customer-facing) and back-stage (internal processes).
• When to Use: This can be used to improve internal processes that impact the customer experience or to optimize service delivery systems. 
• Focus: Service blueprints showcase the customer journey and the underlying business activities with equal importance. 
• Example: A provider working to improve customer experience in healthcare maps out the patient’s journey, internal systems, staff interactions, and other elements needed to deliver a quality healthcare customer experience. 

How to Create A Customer Journey Map

Creating a customer journey map is an important process that should not be taken lightly. When building your customer journey map, it is important to follow the right steps to produce the most accurate and effective map for your organization. 

When you partner with InMoment, you get access to customer experience consulting with practitioners with over 50 years of combined experience that can help you build the best customer experience journey map for your organization. 

However, if you are not using those services, here is an overview of how to create a customer journey map from scratch: 

Step 1: Outline Your Objectives

Why do you want to create a customer experience journey map? Are you trying to improve a specific touchpoint, understand customer pain points, or increase the lead-to-customer conversion rate? Creating a customer journey map is a detailed process that often involves collaboration from multiple departments, so outlining what you hope to learn as a result of the customer journey map will make sure the efforts are well spent. 

Step 2: Create Customer Personas 

Next, you will want to develop detailed customer personas that represent different segments of your customer base. You might have already created these as part of your customer experience strategy. These personas should include important customer information such as demographics, needs, behaviors, goals, and challenges. 

Step 3: Map Out the Stages of the Customer Journey

This is one of the most important steps in creating an effective customer journey map. You will outline the stages and touchpoints customers will experience in this stage. Typical stages of the customer journey include awareness, consideration, and purchase. Some business models might include retention and advocacy after the purchase stage. 

Touchpoints refer to the places where your customers interact with your business. These could include the website, customer support portal, social media, and more. Outlining the high-level view of the customer journey will make it easier to examine specific sections of your … 

Step 4: Identify Customer Goals and Actions

You need to identify what the customer is trying to achieve at each stage of the customer journey. For example, in the awareness stage, they may be trying to gather information and create a shortlist. In the consideration stage, they want to see what product or service makes the most sense. 

Once you have identified these goals, outline the steps the customer will take to meet those goals, such as conducting online searches, reading customer reviews, or contacting your team directly. When you have the goals and actions outlined, you can position your organization to be prepared to meet customer needs. 

Step 5: Understand Customer Sentiment

While customer sentiment is usually a metric reserved for consumers who have already become customers, it can be useful in creating a customer journey map. Customer sentiment is how a customer feels about a brand’s products or services. It can be useful in customer journey mapping to see how customers feel about your brand at every stage of their journey. 

For example, suppose you discover that consumers didn’t like the email they received after downloading a document from your website. In that case, you can remove or change the email to prevent further customers from abandoning their journey. 

InMoment’s XI Platform makes sentiment analysis easy with best-in-class natural language processing (NLP) that categorizes, sorts and tracks customer sentiment. 

Step 6:  Visualize the Journey Map

Once you have completed all these steps, you can visualize the customer journey map. Create a visual representation of the journey using a customer journey map template. Your journey map should clearly show the stages, touchpoints, goals, emotions, and pain points a customer might experience. 

Step 7: Gather Internal Feedback 

After putting it all together in a visual form, share the journey map with internal teams not involved in the customer journey mapping process. You can even share it with existing loyal customers. Sharing the customer journey map in these groups will help you verify its accuracy and identify anything that needs to be fixed. 

Step 8: Track Customer Journeys

Once your map is complete, tracking real customer journeys is essential to see how they align with your assumptions. Use analytics tools, customer feedback, and data from CRM systems to monitor how customers interact with your brand across touchpoints. 

By tracking these journeys, you can identify patterns, measure the success of any implemented changes, and spot potential gaps in the customer experience that may not have been visible in the initial mapping process.  

Step 9: Use the Customer Journey Map to Drive Action

A customer journey map is only as good as the insights that come from it. Use your customer experience journey mapping to help inform your strategies and initiatives across departments. 

For example, you may notice that customers are more likely to convert when they receive a discount on their first purchase or that a specific landing page in a campaign has a bounce rate. These metrics can help you drive transformative action within your organization. 

Step 10: Share Wins

​​Once you start seeing the impact of your customer journey improvements, it’s important to celebrate and share these successes. Sharing results reinforces the value of journey mapping and motivates continued investment in customer experience initiatives. Document these improvements so they can serve as benchmarks for future efforts and inspire a customer-centric culture within your organization.

Challenges of Customer Journey Mapping

Some challenges associated with customer journey maps may deter some businesses from using them. However, these challenges can be avoided with the right customer journey mapping platform and a team invested in customer experience success. Regardless, here are some challenges of customer journey mapping to be aware of: 

Delayed ROI 

Although the use of customer journey mapping is growing, few organizations have had them in use for extended periods. Only 34% of organizations have three or more years of experience developing customer experience journey maps, and 83% struggle to identify and prioritize customer experience efforts. 

Effort of Integration

In a recent study, organizations that use customer journey mapping solutions said that the number one thing their provider needs to improve is the ease with which data sources are integrated. This means that these organizations may be spending too much time setting up their customer journey mapping platform or not setting it up completely and are missing out on important data that could be used to provide business insights. 

Quality of Integration 

Similarly, the organizations referenced above said the second most important thing for providers to fix is the quality of integrations with voice of the customer platforms, content management repositories, or other existing systems. 

Journey Measurement 

Another common challenge among organizations that utilize customer journey maps is the ability to measure the different phases of the customer journey and analyze their impact on business performance.

Journey Validation and Testing

When organizations create and use customer journey maps, they want to be able to validate and test them. Customer journey map testing and validation refers to the process of evaluating and verifying the accuracy and effectiveness of a customer journey map by actively testing real-world scenarios and gathering feedback. 

The goal is to ensure that the journey map reflects actual customer behaviors, experiences, and pain points and that the proposed changes or optimizations will deliver the intended improvements. However, this was ranked in the top five biggest areas of improvement for customer journey mapping solutions. 

Customer Journey Map Best Practices

As you go through the process of creating a customer experience journey map, you want to focus on how you are doing it as much as why you are doing it. When you build a journey map correctly, it can immediately be useful to you and your organization. If not, it will take time to fix, which will delay the benefits you will realize from using it. Here are some best practices to keep in mind when creating a customer journey map: 

1. Use Quantitative and Qualitative Data 

It can be easy to build a customer journey map based on the trackable actions a customer takes throughout their customer journey. However, this does not show what they felt at each stage or how they felt about certain touch points. You must combine insights from qualitative systems such as CRM systems, web analytics, and customer feedback tools and quantitative data such as surveys, interviews, and focus groups to correctly map the customer journey. 

InMoment helps you combine structured and unstructured data for the most accurate customer understanding by building an omnichannel customer experience that combines data from multiple sources and can help you build the most accurate journey map available. 

2. Align with Business Goals

In order to get executive support, you will need to connect your customer journey map to business goals. For example, it might be a marketing goal to increase conversion rates, but if you can say something like “increasing conversion rates by half of a percent will result in a 20% increase in revenue,” you will be more likely to secure executive support. 

3. Involve Frontline Employees

When creating customer journey maps, they are usually a cross-departmental effort across marketing, sales, customer support, etc. However, the frontline employees are often left out of it even though they deal with the customer more frequently than any other department. Consider sending out an employee survey or meeting with employees to understand their view of the customer journey and the customer experience. 

4. Leverage AI Customer Journey Insights 

AI customer journey insights can be used to reveal hidden pain points, optimize touchpoints, and improve the customer journey flow. These insights allow your business to proactively respond to customer needs and streamline processes. 

InMoment’s Strategic Insights team will use AI Journey Insights to identify the significant touchpoints in your customer feedback data. Our team helps you contextualize these findings by categorizing insights based on where they fit in the customer journey, understanding the underlying sentiment, and how insights can be implemented. 

Customer Journey Map Examples

When creating a customer journey map, it may benefit your team to look at customer journey mapping examples. These examples can provide valuable insights into how different organizations across different industries have mapped their unique customer journeys. 

Visualizing these examples can help your team understand how to structure the journey map, integrate data, and highlight customer pain points. Furthermore, studying a range of examples allows you to adapt best practices and innovative techniques to fit your specific customer base, whether focusing on B2B or B2C journeys. This exploration not only aids in the visual aspect but also helps pinpoint gaps in your current mapping approach that might otherwise go unnoticed.

Customer Journey Map Template 

Get a free customer journey map template and begin outlining experiences and important touchpoints.

Customer Experience Journey Mapping with InMoment

InMoment’s customer experience platform gives you all the tools you need to create and use an effective customer journey map to improve your organization’s CX and financial performance. Check out InMoment’s XI Platform to see how you can uncover customer insights in every form of customer feedback to create a more efficient customer journey!

References 

​​Khoros. Must-know customer service statistics of 2024. (https://khoros.com/blog/must-know-customer-service-statistics). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Nielsen Norman Group. Journey-Mapping Impact: Research Findings. (https://www.nngroup.com/articles/journey-mapping-impact/). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Hanover Research. How To Use Customer Journey Mapping and Improve Customer Experience. (https://www.hanoverresearch.com/insights-blog/corporate/customer-journey-mapping/). Accessed 10/8/2024. 

Gartner. Gartner Says Most Customer Experience Programs are not Delivering on the Promise of Improving Differentiation and Helping Brands Better Compete. (https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/gartner-says-most-customer-experience-programs-are-not-deliverin). Accessed 10/23/2024. 

Forrester. Key Trends In Customer Journey Mapping Platforms. (https://www.forrester.com/report/key-trends-in-customer-journey-mapping-platforms/RES179422). Accessed 10/10/2024.

With 64% of Internet users discovering brands via social media, getting your marketing on point is essential. From simple reviews to detailed threads, there is a lot of online activity from individuals worldwide. Some of this activity could be relevant to your brand and industry. It could be an Instagram Story featuring your product or a post complaining about your recent update. Tracking these conversations with a social listening tool helps improve marketing efforts.

What to Look For in A Social Listening Tool? 

1. Sentiment Analysis
2. Competitor Analysis
3. Multi-Platform Coverage
4. Keyword and Hashtag Tracking
5. Analytics and Reporting
6. Content Creation and Scheduling
7. CRM Integration

A social listening tool lets you tap into online conversations around your business. You can think of it as your eyes and ears on social media with the information it provides. From brand mentions to product discussions, you gain insight into customer sentiment to help make informed decisions.

The right social media listening tool will help you analyze customer behavior and competitors to stay ahead of the pack. Key features to look for include:

Sentiment Analysis

Identifying and monitoring the sentiment behind social media activity helps understand customer satisfaction. A good social listening tool leverages sentiment analysis to categorize your mentions as positive, neutral, or negative. This classification of public opinion gives you insight into your brand reputation.

Sentiment analysis also helps with effective customer service. For example, if you’re a pet food retailer, this analysis can highlight complaints about food quality. You can filter out all the negative mentions, allowing you to respond to them right away. This is crucial since responding to customer feedback within 24-48 hours boosts retention by 8.5%.

Therefore, sentiment analysis helps you understand your customers better to improve your chances of retaining them.

Competitor Analysis

You can’t have an edge over your competitors without identifying and analyzing them. What are their most popular offerings? What is the current public opinion around them? Is there an opportunity for you to differentiate or capitalize? A robust social listening tool should help you answer these questions.

Analyzing your competitors’ social media activity helps you keep up and move ahead. It enables you to identify their strengths and weaknesses. You can also find strategic opportunities to promote your brand.

For example, if you learn that your pet food competitor is receiving online criticism for late product deliveries, you can use that to your advantage. You can leverage social media campaigns and reviews to highlight how you never compromise on delivery times. This will help you emerge as a viable alternative to your competitors.

Multi-Platform Coverage

Online conversations happen across multiple platforms. From long threads on X (formerly Twitter) to an Instagram influencer’s comments, online interactions are multi-platform. As a result, social listening tools must cover multiple social media platforms to ensure you don’t miss out on valuable data.

Keyword and Hashtag Tracking

Keywords and hashtags enable you to track mentions of your brand and offerings on social media. They help cut through the noise and hone in on relevant conversations in your niche. 

Searching #petfood or #petcare on Instagram, for example, will help you uncover trending topics if your business is in that space. It can also help discover recurring complaints about products in your niche, enabling proactive issue resolution.

Analytics and Reporting

Effective social listening tools should offer analytics and reporting features that transform raw data into actionable insights. Analytics can show engagement trends and campaign performance. It also provides insight into how sentiment shifts over time so that brands can inform strategy.

Reporting tools allow you to present these insights to stakeholders in a clear manner. This guides businesses toward strategic decisions based on measurable data.

CRM Integration

Integrating social listening data with customer relationship management (CRM) software helps you build rich customer profiles. 

For example, a fashion retailer can leverage social media activity to identify its most valuable customers. These customers engage heavily with the brand’s social media content and recommend it to their networks. On the flip side, identifying disgruntled customers can help you focus on retaining them.

Best Social Listening Tool for Improving Customer Experience

A good social listening tool can help you make the most of your social media presence. Let’s look at some of the best tools in the market to help you enhance your social media management efforts.

InMoment

InMoment is your one-stop shop for tracking relevant conversations around your brand and analyzing them for informed decisions. It enables you to stay ahead of potential issues and proactively manage customer experiences.

With sentiment analysis and keyword tracking, InMoment helps you improve customer experience through a rich understanding of user personas. It helps you learn which features resonate the most or where you might need improvements. 

The software’s advanced monitoring tools also give you an edge by providing competitor insights that you can leverage. For example, if a competitor experiences a data breach, your CX and marketing teams can reinforce your brand’s commitment to security. This helps you appear as a trusted alternative to prospects.

Speaking of prospects, InMoment’s ability to track industry-relevant mentions is valuable for lead generation. Unlike other platforms, its XI Spotlight Tool lets you control how frequently you want to pull and analyze data from platforms like Instagram, X, and Facebook. This regular, real-time data analysis gives you the most accurate decision-making insights.

Social Listening Tools for Brand Awareness

1. Hootsuite
2. Meltwater
3. Sprout Social
4. Brandwatch
5. Mentionlytics
6. AgoraPulse
7. Keyhole
8. Brand24
9. Buffer
10. YouScan
11. Digimind
12. BuzzSumo
13. TweetDeck

Hootsuite features social listening tools that use keywords and hashtags to track brand mentions. Its dashboard provides a centralized platform where you can easily monitor and respond to relevant social media activity. 

Key features include Streams and Insights, which support keyword monitoring and competitor analysis. Brands using Hootsuite to manage social media can leverage its integration with InMoment to cultivate a positive online reputation,

2. Meltwater

Meltwater is social listening software designed to help businesses manage their online presence. It aggregates data from various sources, like social media, blogs, and forums. As a result, brands can monitor public sentiment and benchmark themselves against competitors. 

Key features include real-time sentiment analysis, historical data tracking, and influencer identification. Real-time alerts help businesses respond quickly to important events or potential crises. Additionally, Meltwater’s reporting tools help stakeholders visualize social media engagement.

3. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a flexible tool that offers a wide range of features for social listening, analytics, and customer care. The platform allows users to track customer conversations on specific topics by creating custom queries. This makes it easier to stay informed about brand-related discussions.

A standout feature is the trend-identifying tool, which generates a word cloud to highlight frequently used terms in online conversations. This offers a quick snapshot of prominent topics to guide brands toward informed decisions.

4. Brandwatch

Brandwatch leverages social listening to gather relevant online interactions in one place. It pulls brand mentions from over 100 million sources to help businesses analyze historical and real-time conversations. 

Key features include a digital library for storing visual content and Focus Panels for digging deeper into demographics and behavior. It also offers multilingual support, which is ideal for businesses operating in multiple countries.

5. Mentionlytics

Mentionlytics leverages AI to provide real-time tracking of brand mentions, keywords, and hashtags across major social media platforms. Its robust reporting helps users make informed decisions for proactive engagement strategies. The tool also includes sentiment analysis in over 100 languages and competitor analysis to help brands keep up.

6. AgoraPulse

Agorapulse centralizes all social media conversations to ensure you don’t miss out on key insights. Its Professional plan offers advanced brand monitoring, analytics reporting, and publishing capabilities across platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram. It also helps with content organization by letting you label key posts and customer feedback for easy access.

7. Keyhole

Keyhole is a social listening tool that tracks brand mentions across platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, X, and LinkedIn. Its Team plan provides in-depth TikTok analytics, including competitor insights and data-driven recommendations. These recommendations cover optimal hashtags, video effects, and posting times for engagement. Keyhole’s tool is valuable for managing brand interactions on TikTok, where viral content can make a huge impact.

8. Brand24

Brand24’s tools measure brand awareness and reach, tracking conversations from 25 million online sources to provide insights into consumer sentiment. This information helps you identify what resonates with customers and any potential risks to your reputation.

9. Buffer

Buffer’s platform includes scheduling and publishing features for effective campaign planning. It integrates well with social media platforms like Facebook, X, Instagram, and TikTok.

Additionally, Buffer’s analytics tools help monitor team performance by measuring engagement and audience behavior. However, the analytical and reporting features are available only on paid plans.

10. YouScan

YouScan is a social listening tool that leverages AI-powered image recognition to offer visual insights into consumer profiles. The platform’s capabilities allow for an in-depth understanding of brand sentiment and upcoming trends. This helps you tailor marketing strategies effectively. It also detects potential reputation threats in real-time to enable proactive management.

11. Digimind

Digimind provides competitive intelligence by turning social and online data into actionable insights. Its brand reputation dashboard helps in planning and analyzing marketing strategies effectively. As a result of its extensive data collection features, Digimind is a good fit for professionals who are well-versed in data analytics.

12. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo is a comprehensive tool for content discovery and research. It helps users track trending topics and popular content across social media. With its monitoring features, brands can set up alerts for specific businesses, topics, and keywords to stay in the loop.

13. TweetDeck

TweetDeck is a free tool for tracking tweets around specific topics or breaking news. It also allows users to filter tweets from curated lists, which helps with monitoring relevant X (formerly Twitter) accounts. Its specific nature makes it ideal for individuals seeking a free method of narrowing down relevant X conversations. However, businesses might find it too limited for their purposes.

How Do Social Listening Tools Work?

Social listening tools provide access to online conversations around your business. These conversations could include comments, video reviews, or threads. Any piece of content mentioning your brand or product can offer key insights to you.

The software achieves this by searching for specific keywords, phrases, and hashtags on social media platforms. This results in a vast amount of data that is then analyzed for patterns, sentiment, and engagement metrics. 

Centralizing these insights in a dashboard allows brands to assess public opinion in real time. This method of feedback collection informs marketing strategies by identifying emerging trends and discussions. 

How to Use Social Listening Tools

You can leverage social listening tools to enhance brand reputation and deliver positive experiences. Popular applications of this technology include:

• Brand Awareness: You learn how often and where your brand is mentioned to understand its reach and popularity. This information helps you optimize your marketing efforts to ensure you hit the right notes with the right people.
• Customer Experience: The ability to track feedback and customer sentiment enables prompt issue resolution. As a result, you can enhance customer loyalty by adopting a proactive approach to customer service.
• Competitor Analysis: Analyze competitor mentions to learn from their strengths and weaknesses. You can also identify opportunities for positioning yourself as a better alternative, which helps generate leads.
• Product Development: Identify product-related feedback to gain insights into what customers want or areas needing improvement. It also helps identify popular feature requests that you might not have noticed through traditional feedback collection.
• Crisis Management: Negative reviews spread like wildfire on the Internet. With a social listening tool, you can detect potential issues early and respond right away to minimize the negative impact.

How to Create A Social Listening Strategy

1. Identify your goals
2. Select relevant keywords
3. Benchmark social media performance
4. Analyze data
5. Take action 

The right social listening strategy for your business depends on your goals and needs. The following steps provide a general blueprint for tracking and acting on online sentiment.

Identify Your Goals

Start by identifying your main goals. For example, if you want to improve customer service, you would want to track keywords related to service quality or product satisfaction. For competitor analysis, focus on tracking mentions of competitors’ products or issues.

Select Relevant Keywords

Speaking of keywords, it’s essential to choose the right ones to collect relevant data. Keywords can include your brand name, products, or industry terms. For competitor analysis, it would be helpful to search terms related to the competitor and their service.

Benchmark Social Media Performance

Once you have established your goals and keywords, you can start making the most of your social media presence. Establish benchmarks to gauge the success of your social listening efforts. Common metrics include sentiment scores, the volume of brand mentions, and the share of voice (SOV) compared to competitors. 

Analyze Data

Consistent analysis is key to spotting trends and improving key metrics. If certain features are frequently mentioned, look for patterns in sentiment to understand if you need to make changes. A social listening platform like InMoment’s XI Spotlight Tool can help by analyzing large volumes of data to unearth actionable insights for you.

Take Action 

Finally, with the insights in place, you can start taking the right actions to boost customer satisfaction. For example, if your analysis reveals a preference for certain features or products, it would be smart to prioritize them for now. Follow up with customers after implementing the changes to create a feedback loop for consistently excellent service.

What Can Social Listening Enable CX Leaders and Marketing Managers to Do?

Social listening empowers CX leaders and marketing managers to process customer sentiment for business gains. By monitoring real-time conversations, they can quickly identify and address customer concerns. This provides valuable data for enhancing the overall customer experience.

Social listening also enables them to track brand mentions. Did a social media influencer recently mention their brand? What are people saying about their products? Is there an opportunity to collaborate with popular individuals for brand promotion? Social listening answers these questions by highlighting trends and content that resonates so you can adjust strategies accordingly.

With insights from social listening, CX leaders can benchmark against competitors. They have access to relevant data that helps refine products and create targeted campaigns. As a result, they are better able to create campaigns that resonate with their audience and encourage stronger customer engagement.

Can Social Listening Help You Find Leads?

Yes, absolutely! Social listening can be an impactful lead-generation tool if you use the right software and techniques.

Monitoring keywords relevant to your products, services, or industry helps you identify user profiles that would be a good fit for your business. For example, if a user mentions in a post that they’re looking for software similar to yours, your team has an opportunity to reach out. By offering recommendations or support, you can position yourself as a business they can trust.

Social listening also lets you track competitor mentions. This analysis gives you a chance to attract customers who may be dissatisfied with other brands. Creating content around a specific feature in your software that a user can’t find anywhere else will boost your likelihood of converting them.

You can implement this strategic approach with a social listening platform like InMoment. Unlike other tools, InMoment’s XI Spotlight lets you control how frequently you pull data and analyzes it for you. It performs the analytical heavy lifting so that you can focus on effective actions for acquiring more customers.

How to Measure Social Listening

• Mentions
• Sentiment Analysis
• Engagement Metrics
• Share of Voice
• Geographic Insights
• Trend Analysis
• Business Metrics

You can measure the effectiveness of social listening efforts by tracking various metrics that reflect audience interaction and sentiment. Key metrics to track include:

Mentions

Track how often your brand, product, or related industry topics are mentioned on social media. This metric helps assess brand awareness and reach. InMoment’s social listening tools can streamline this process by monitoring relevant keywords and terms.

Sentiment Analysis

Analyze the tone of these mentions to understand how audiences feel about your brand. You can categorize mentions as positive, negative, or neutral. This information is key for brand reputation management efforts as it highlights the dominant public feeling towards you.

Engagement Metrics

Monitor the number of likes, shares, and comments to assess engagement levels with your brand. Likes reflect the lowest level of engagement and suggest overall approval of your content. Comments provide more context and highlight individuals taking a deeper interest in your brand. It also helps identify specific demographics that interact the most with your brand.

Share of Voice

Measure your brand’s presence relative to competitors. This metric helps you understand your position in the market and how often you’re mentioned compared to others. 

By tracking engagement metrics, InMoment’s competitive analysis tools can highlight if your target audience engages with you more than your competition. You can use this information to identify areas for improvement in your marketing campaigns.

Geographic Insights

Identify regional variations in brand perception. Measuring this metric provides insight into location-specific strategies and regional customer sentiment. For example, it helps you focus on regions exhibiting greater overall dissatisfaction.

Trend Analysis

Analyze shifts in customer sentiment or recurring themes over time. This metric helps you spot emerging trends and anticipate changing customer preferences. 

For example, if a relevant issue becomes a hot topic of discussion online, you can leverage it to generate interest in your brand. InMoment’s social media monitoring tools help you stay on top of trends by tracking relevant keywords and hashtags.

Business Metrics

Assess the business impact of social listening efforts. Tracking metrics like customer growth, regional sales, and conversion rate helps you confirm the value of your social media strategy. It also highlights room for improvement, enabling you to tweak processes and adapt.

Frequently Asked Questions

Social listening provides real-time data on your brand, customers, and competitors. It’s a powerful tool for gaining industry insights to consistently improve your business. If you are curious to learn more, here are answers to some of the most common questions:

What is Social Listening?

Social listening is the process of tracking relevant keywords, topics, and conversations across your social media channels. It helps you monitor brand mentions and customer sentiment to determine public opinion around your business. You can leverage this technique to keep tabs on customer behavior, analyze competitors, and generate leads.

What’s the Difference Between Social Listening and Social Monitoring?

Social media monitoring is a reactive strategy that looks at comments and conversations directly related to your brand. It provides an opportunity to respond to feedback on your specific business or product to retain and satisfy customers.

Social listening is a proactive approach that takes monitoring a step further. It tracks all the conversations relevant to your industry, including those around your competitors, to understand customer sentiment and expectations. It helps you keep up with potential issues and trends to provide better overall customer experiences.

For example, monitoring tells you that a customer is complaining about your product quality on a Facebook post. Listening tells you why this particular complaint is popular nowadays and how you can address it better than your competition.

How Can Social Media Listening Increase Customer Advocacy?

Social media listening increases customer advocacy by showing customers that you care. It provides a proactive approach to resolving issues and fulfilling expectations. For example, listening enables you to add trendy features or address potential issues before they arise. 

These actions enhance satisfaction and convert customers into loyal advocates for your brand. You can monitor their advocacy by tracking the volume of mentions you get from them on social media channels.

Learn More About InMoment’s Social Listening Tool

Social media listening enables you to stay in touch with customer sentiment. It unlocks opportunities for improvement and moving ahead of your competition. With InMoment’s social listening tool, you can track every piece of relevant content online to stay on top of trends, potential risks, and customer preferences. Take a product tour today to see if it’s the right fit for your brand monitoring needs!

References 

Smart Insights. Global social media statistics research summary May 2024 (https://www.smartinsights.com/social-media-marketing/social-media-strategy/new-global-social-media-research). Accessed 11/06/2024.

InMoment. InMoment Market Pulse (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/weareinmoment_b2b-customersuccess-ai-activity-7251989745914818560-haGe?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop). Accessed 11/06/2024.