Integrated CX

Retail customers today expect more than transactions; they demand experiences that seamlessly connect every touchpoint of their journey. Whether browsing on mobile during their commute, researching products online at home, or visiting your physical store, customers want consistency, convenience, and personalization at every step. The brands that master this integrated approach don’t just satisfy customers; they build loyalty that drives sustainable growth.

It used to be that retailers considered the four “P’s” of marketing when pushing their wares to consumers: product, price, promotion and place. Today, however, not many brands can rely on a single “P” to differentiate, but are instead dependent on one big “E:” experience. Building an omnichannel customer experience in retail isn’t just a competitive advantage; it’s essential for survival in today’s market where customers have unlimited options and sky-high expectations.

What Is an Omnichannel Retail Experience?

An omnichannel retail experience integrates all customer touchpoints (online, mobile, in-store, social media, and customer service) into one cohesive, seamless journey. Unlike multichannel approaches that operate touchpoints in silos, omnichannel creates a unified ecosystem where customers can move fluidly between channels without friction or inconsistency.

This means a customer can research a product on your mobile app, add it to their cart, visit your store to try it on, complete the purchase online, and return it at a physical location (all while receiving consistent messaging, pricing, and service quality). The experience feels effortless because behind the scenes, all systems, data, and teams work together to support the customer’s preferred way of shopping.

Why Is Omnichannel Retail Important for the Customer Experience?

Omnichannel retail transforms convenience from a nice-to-have into a foundational expectation. According to recent research, 73% of customers use multiple channels during their shopping journey, and companies with strong omnichannel strategies retain 89% of their customers compared to 33% for those with weak strategies. Additionally, omnichannel shoppers deliver 30% higher lifetime value than single-channel customers.

The approach improves customer experience by meeting customers wherever they are in their buying journey. Instead of forcing customers to adapt to your preferred channels, omnichannel customer experience lets them choose how, when, and where they want to engage. This flexibility creates deeper personalization opportunities, as each interaction across channels provides data that enhances the overall experience.

Customers also value the reduced effort that comes with omnichannel experiences. When inventory, preferences, and purchase history are synchronized across all touchpoints, customers spend less time repeating information and more time enjoying seamless, efficient interactions that respect their time and preferences. Research shows that omnichannel marketing campaigns achieve 287% higher purchase rates than single-channel campaigns.

Who Should Own Omnichannel Customer Experience Within the Business?

Creating effective omnichannel experiences requires cross-functional ownership that breaks down traditional organizational silos. While customer experience (CX) teams often lead the strategic vision and measurement, successful implementation demands collaboration across marketing, product, operations, IT, and customer service departments. Retail customer experience success depends on this unified approach.

The most effective approach establishes a dedicated omnichannel team with representatives from each key function, led by a senior executive who can drive alignment and remove barriers. This team should include CX managers who understand customer journey mapping, marketing leaders who control messaging and brand consistency, operations managers who handle inventory and fulfillment, and IT specialists who ensure technical integration.

Customer Experience and Insights Managers typically own the measurement and optimization of the experience, using feedback tools and analytics to identify improvement opportunities. However, without buy-in and active participation from every department that touches the customer, even the best CX strategy will fail to deliver the seamless experience customers expect.

What Makes an Effective Omnichannel Customer Experience?

Effective omnichannel experiences share five critical elements that work together to create seamless customer journeys. First, channel integration ensures all touchpoints communicate with each other in real-time, sharing customer data, inventory levels, and interaction history to prevent frustrating disconnects. Studies indicate that 74% of consumers research online before visiting physical stores, making this integration essential.

Unified customer data forms the foundation, creating a single source of truth about each customer’s preferences, behaviors, and history that every channel can access and update. This eliminates the need for customers to repeat information and enables personalized experiences regardless of how they choose to engage.

Consistency across all touchpoints—from visual branding to pricing to service quality—builds trust and reinforces brand recognition. Customers should feel they’re interacting with the same company whether they’re on your website, in your store, or speaking with customer service.

Personalization leverages unified data to tailor experiences based on individual customer preferences, purchase history, and behavior patterns. This might include personalized product recommendations, relevant offers, or customized communication preferences. Research demonstrates that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase when they receive personalized choices.

Finally, seamless handoffs between touchpoints ensure customers can start an interaction in one channel and continue it in another without losing context or momentum. Whether moving from online browsing to in-store purchase or from chat support to phone support, the transition should feel natural and effortless.

How to Build an Omnichannel Retail Experience Step by Step

Building a successful omnichannel retail experience requires a systematic approach that prioritizes customer needs while ensuring operational efficiency. The following steps provide a roadmap for creating experiences that truly connect every touchpoint in your customer’s journey.

1. Segment Your Customers and Build Personas

Understanding your customers forms the foundation of every effective omnichannel strategy. Start by analyzing customer data to identify distinct segments based on demographics, shopping behaviors, channel preferences, and purchase patterns. Look beyond basic information to understand motivations, pain points, and decision-making processes.

Create detailed personas for each key segment, including their preferred channels, typical journey paths, and specific needs at different stages. For example, busy professionals might prioritize mobile-first experiences with quick checkout options, while product enthusiasts may prefer detailed online research followed by in-store consultations. These personas will guide channel prioritization, messaging strategies, and experience design decisions.

2. Select and Prioritize Your Channels

Not every channel deserves equal investment. Analyze where your target customers actually spend their time and prefer to engage, then focus resources on optimizing these high-impact touchpoints. Consider both current usage patterns and emerging trends that might affect future preferences.

Prioritize channels based on customer preference, business impact, and your ability to deliver excellent experiences. A boutique retailer might focus on Instagram, email, and in-store experiences, while a large electronics retailer might prioritize mobile apps, physical stores, and customer service chat. The key is doing fewer channels exceptionally well rather than spreading resources too thin across every possible touchpoint.

3. Map and Analyze the Full Customer Journey

Create comprehensive journey maps that trace every interaction customers have with your brand, from initial awareness through post-purchase support. Include all touchpoints—paid advertising, social media, website visits, store interactions, customer service contacts, and follow-up communications.

Identify pain points, friction, and opportunities at each stage. Pay special attention to moments when customers transition between channels, as these handoffs often create the most frustration. Use this analysis to prioritize improvements that will have the biggest impact on customer satisfaction and business results.

4. Unify and Integrate Customer Data Across Channels

Create a single, real-time view of each customer by connecting data from all sources—online behavior, in-store purchases, mobile app usage, customer service interactions, and beyond. This requires integrating your technology stack, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, point-of-sale (POS) systems, inventory management, and customer service platforms.

Invest in customer data platforms (CDPs) or similar technologies that can consolidate information from multiple sources and make it accessible across all channels. Ensure data flows in real-time so that a customer’s online cart is visible to in-store associates, purchase history informs customer service interactions, and preferences gathered in one channel enhance experiences in others.

5. Ensure Consistent Branding and Messaging

Maintain a unified brand voice, visual identity, and messaging strategy across every channel and touchpoint. This consistency builds trust and reinforces brand recognition, making customers feel confident they’re receiving the same quality experience regardless of how they choose to engage.

Develop comprehensive brand guidelines that cover visual elements, tone of voice, key messaging, and service standards. Train all customer-facing teams on these standards and implement approval processes to ensure consistency. Regular audits across all channels help identify and correct inconsistencies before they impact customer perception.

6. Offer Seamless Cross-Channel Experiences

Implement features that make it easy for customers to move between channels without losing momentum. Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) services let customers combine the convenience of online shopping with the immediacy of in-store pickup. Over 80% of retailers plan to implement BOPIS services by 2025, and 67% of customers make additional purchases during pickup visits. Easy returns across any channel reduce friction and build confidence in the purchase decision.

Ensure pricing consistency across all channels to prevent customer confusion and maintain trust. Reserve online, try in store programs let customers secure products online before visiting to make final decisions. These cross-channel capabilities should feel natural and effortless from the customer’s perspective.

7. Provide Real-Time Inventory Visibility and Consistency

Enable customers and staff to see accurate, up-to-date inventory across all channels to prevent disappointment and build confidence in your brand. Nothing frustrates customers more than finding a product online only to discover it’s unavailable for their preferred pickup or delivery method.

Implement inventory management systems that sync across all channels in real-time. Train staff to access and communicate inventory information accurately, and ensure your website and mobile app reflect true availability. Consider offering alternatives when preferred items are unavailable, such as suggesting similar products or different fulfillment options.

8. Invest in Omnichannel Customer Support

Deliver knowledgeable, consistent support across all channels (phone, chat, email, social media, and in-store) to resolve issues quickly and maintain satisfaction. Customers shouldn’t have to explain their situation repeatedly when moving between support channels. Omnichannel contact center strategies ensure seamless support experiences.

Implement unified customer service platforms that give agents access to complete customer histories and previous interactions regardless of channel. Train support teams on all products and services, and establish clear escalation procedures. Consider offering self-service options through FAQs, chatbots, and knowledge bases for customers who prefer to resolve issues independently.

9. Leverage Mobile and In-Store Technology

Enhance experiences with mobile apps, QR codes, digital kiosks, and other technologies that bridge the gap between digital and physical shopping. Mobile apps can provide personalized experiences, store locators, inventory checking, and exclusive offers that complement in-store visits.

In-store technology like digital kiosks can provide access to extended inventory, product information, and customer reviews. QR codes can link physical products to online reviews, detailed specifications, or how-to videos. The goal is using technology to enhance rather than complicate the shopping experience.

10. Create a Unified Loyalty Program

Design a rewards system that works seamlessly across all channels, encouraging engagement and repeat business wherever customers shop. Points earned online should be redeemable in-store, and vice versa. Loyalty program benefits should enhance rather than complicate the omnichannel experience.

Ensure loyalty data integrates with your customer data platform to enable personalized offers and communications. Consider tiered programs that reward different types of engagement, from social media sharing to product reviews to referrals. The program should feel valuable and relevant to customers’ actual shopping behaviors.

11. Prioritize Security and Data Privacy

Protect customer data and ensure compliance with privacy regulations as you unify and leverage information across platforms. Customers need to trust that their personal information, purchase history, and preferences are secure regardless of how they choose to engage with your brand.

Implement robust security measures across all systems and touchpoints. Be transparent about data collection and usage, and give customers control over their privacy preferences. Regular security audits and staff training help prevent breaches that could damage customer trust and business reputation.

12. Gather and Act on Customer Feedback

Collect feedback at every touchpoint and use it to continuously improve your omnichannel experience. This includes post-purchase surveys, in-store feedback, social media monitoring, and customer service interaction analysis.

Implement systems that can aggregate feedback from all channels to identify patterns and improvement opportunities. Share insights across teams and establish processes for acting on customer suggestions. Close the loop by communicating improvements back to customers, showing that their feedback creates real change.

13. Automate, Test, and Optimize

Use automation like chatbots, triggered email communications, and personalized recommendations to enhance efficiency while maintaining personal touches. AI-powered solutions are transforming retail operations, with 69% of retailers reporting increased annual revenue from AI adoption. Implement ongoing testing through A/B testing, analytics, and customer journey analysis to refine every aspect of your strategy.

Set up measurement frameworks that track key performance indicators across all channels, including customer satisfaction scores, conversion rates, average order values, and customer lifetime value. Regular optimization based on data and testing ensures your omnichannel experience continues improving over time.

How Can Technology Enhance the Omnichannel Retail Experience?

Technology serves as the backbone that makes seamless omnichannel experiences possible. Integrated customer feedback tools provide real-time insights into satisfaction levels across all touchpoints, enabling quick responses to issues before they escalate. These platforms can automatically collect feedback through email surveys, in-app prompts, and post-interaction questionnaires while providing unified reporting across all channels.

Sentiment analysis technology monitors customer conversations across social media, reviews, and customer service interactions to identify trends and emerging issues. This proactive approach lets retailers address problems before they impact the broader customer base and identify opportunities for experience improvements. Recent industry data shows that 86% of retailers want to use generative AI to enhance customer experiences.

Cross-channel experience management platforms tie together customer data, interaction history, and feedback to create comprehensive views of each customer’s journey. These solutions enable personalized experiences by predicting customer needs, identifying the best channels for engagement, and ensuring consistent treatment regardless of touchpoint.

Advanced analytics and artificial intelligence can predict customer behavior, optimize inventory placement, and personalize marketing messages based on individual preferences and past interactions. The AI in retail market is projected to grow from $9.36 billion in 2024 to $85.07 billion by 2032, demonstrating the technology’s critical role in retail transformation. Machine learning algorithms continuously improve recommendations and experiences as they process more customer data.

Create an Omnichannel Experience for Retail Customers With InMoment

Building a truly seamless omnichannel retail experience requires more than good intentions and disconnected tools—it demands an integrated approach that unifies customer data, feedback, and insights across every touchpoint. The retailers that succeed understand that omnichannel isn’t just about having multiple channels; it’s about creating connected experiences that anticipate customer needs and deliver consistent value wherever customers choose to engage.

InMoment’s integrated CX platform helps retailers achieve this vision by connecting customer feedback, sentiment analysis, and experience management across all channels. Instead of managing separate tools for surveys, reviews, and customer service insights, retailers can access a unified view of customer sentiment and behavior that drives better decisions and more personalized experiences.

Ready to transform your retail customer experience with a truly integrated omnichannel approach? Discover how InMoment can help you build seamless experiences that drive loyalty and growth.

Everything slows down when call volumes rise. Agents struggle to keep up, call queues grow longer, and customers waste little time looking for alternatives to your business.

Unless you’re expecting a seasonal spike, a high inbound call volume is far from good news. It’s usually indicative of operational issues, with negative consequences for agent wellbeing and customer satisfaction.

But the solution isn’t to throw more agents at the problem. It’s to eliminate unnecessary calls altogether. A strategic approach leveraging self-service technology and call analysis is key to lowering call volumes and achieving customer experience (CX) improvements.

What Constitutes a High Call Volume?

While there’s no universal benchmark for high call volume, every call center knows when it’s receiving more inbound calls than its staff can reasonably handle. In general, industry standards tell us that high call volume is 10% higher than the expected level for the team.

It’s also important to note that this surge in calls must persist for more than a week to qualify as high call volume. However, this figure (and the threshold mentioned above) can vary depending on the size and scale of your business.

When the volume of inbound calls continues to overwhelm agents for a sustained period, teams are vulnerable to burnout and struggle to lower wait times for customers. The result is poor agent and customer experiences that hinder business growth.

Why Reducing Support Call Volume Should Be a Priority

Businesses must reduce inbound calls as a strategic imperative to boost operations and provide better customer experiences at a lower cost. Here are three key benefits to consider:

Lower Operational Costs

Each call has a cost, since it requires time, staffing, infrastructure, and training for effective handling. Reducing unnecessary calls through automation or self-service options allows teams to redirect budget toward long-term improvements.

Increased Agent Productivity

Fewer calls mean fewer interruptions, better focus, and more time to solve complex issues. When agents are no longer dealing with repeat questions or avoidable contacts, they have enough breathing room to handle the calls that do come in with greater care and attention. This enhanced productivity leads to faster issue resolution and higher job satisfaction.

Improved Focus on High-Value Interactions

Not all incoming calls are created equal. When you reduce call volume, you give agents the bandwidth to invest their resources and emotional energy into impactful conversations. These interactions could include retaining frustrated customers or guiding someone through a critical decision.

Factors That Contribute to High Call Volumes

High call volumes are the result of customers running into roadblocks as they try to resolve their issues. While you can handle more calls by hiring more agents, you won’t be able to address the root cause of the problem if you neglect the customer’s perspective. The following factors explain why customers usually have no choice but to reach for the phone:

• Ineffective self-service options make it difficult for customers to address their problems themselves. If your interactive voice response (IVR) systems, chatbots, and FAQs aren’t up-to-date and helpful, your agents will be scrambling to resolve calls all day.
  
• Lack of proactive communication keeps customers in the dark and compels them to pick up the phone. A single timely update regarding issues or key changes can save many hours’ worth of call handling.
  
• Complex or confusing processes, such as unclear policies and vague instructions, will leave most customers scratching their heads. They will naturally follow up with your contact center for clarification and guidance.
  
• System outages or technical issues lead even the calmest customers to your frontline agents. Even if your services go down temporarily, it won’t be long before potentially upset customers start reaching out for updates and solutions.
  
• Product or service changes like new features and pricing updates can cause confusion (and inbound calls) if you don’t communicate them clearly.
  
• Lack of channel diversification means customers often can’t find the right answers through chat, email, or self-service options. A phone call to customer support becomes the only path forward.
  
• Seasonal spikes or campaigns are busy periods that bring a wave of new and existing customers with questions and complaints.
  
• Incomplete customer experiences in other channels are the result of an inadequate omnichannel system. Customers often escalate their issues through phone calls when questions are left unanswered on other channels.

10 Strategies to Reduce Call Volume in a Call Center

It’s easy to think that you can address high call volume through staffing changes. However, hiring more people is a temporary fix that fails to address the underlying inefficiencies responsible for recurring calls. Here are ten powerful strategies to implement for contact center optimization and customer retention.

1. Enhance Self-Service Options

Customers don’t want to wait on hold for information they can easily find themselves. But too often, help centers are either poorly organized, outdated, or buried in navigation menus. It’s no wonder, then, that 81% of the customers surveyed for InMoment’s 2025 Conversational Intelligence Report preferred brand interactions over self-service channels.

A well-built self-service experience gives customers fast and frictionless access to answers. For example, maintaining an up-to-date knowledge base ensures customers are in the loop regarding new product updates or better troubleshooting techniques. 

Similarly, tap into your support tickets and call summaries to identify frequently asked questions (FAQs) around your product or service. Organize these FAQs in a user-friendly page, allowing customers to immediately find helpful answers.

Good self-service works because it empowers customers to independently resolve their issues. This ability has a positive impact on agent productivity as well, since they can spend more time and effort addressing complex tickets.

2. Implement Chatbots and Virtual Assistants

Some types of customer issues involve a few simple steps that one can perform without relying on live agents. For example, checking the status of an online product delivery or confirming if a restaurant is open.

Chatbots and virtual assistants offer a scalable way to automate these types of interactions. They’re available 24/7 and offer instant responses to FAQs and other basic customer inquiries, which is key for call center cost reduction and customer satisfaction. According to IBM’s Digital Customer Care in the Age of AI report, businesses can resolve up to 80% of routine questions using chatbots, which helps cut customer support costs by 30%.

As a result, agents are better able to focus on complex tasks requiring human judgment and emotional energy. On the other hand, customers get quick answers, avoiding the need to wait in call queues for a standard question.

3. Improve First Call Resolution (FCR)

When customers have to call back more than once to solve a problem, it creates unnecessary volume and damages trust. The negative impact of repeat calls makes First Call Resolution (FCR) one of the focal call center metrics for customer loyalty.

The first step is to analyze call center performance to identify your agents’ strengths and weaknesses. Use the insights to develop tailored coaching programs that empower each frontline support team member to put their best foot forward. Guide them toward actionable strategies that avoid unnecessary escalations and incomplete responses in favor of swift and comprehensive resolutions.

Besides the right training, agents also require access to tools, data, and documentation for this purpose. An easy-to-navigate knowledge base, along with a unified view of customer data, empowers agents to solve issues with confidence.

The payoff of FCR improvements is clear: fewer repeat customer calls, higher CSAT, and stronger feelings of brand loyalty. It also gives teams more time to handle new inquiries without falling behind or burning out.

4. Conduct a Repeat Call Analysis

Repeat calls from the same customer or regarding the same issue are indicative of flaws in the call resolution process. These calls account for a significant chunk of the total call volume, with a Dialpad case study discovering that 32% of inbound calls are from repeat callers. 

As a result, managing repeat calls is crucial for lowering overall call volume. Repeat call analysis is the first step here, as it helps uncover areas for improvement in the call resolution process.

Start by analyzing your call data to identify repeat callers and recurring complaints within a specific timeframe. Dive into the insights to understand the root cause of these repeat calls. Use post-call surveys to understand specific customer needs and pain points.

Therefore, repeat call analysis helps flag training gaps and system limitations responsible for unnecessary volume. These insights enable teams to improve their scripts and agent coaching, which helps prevent similar follow-ups from piling up in the future.

5. Address Product or Service Friction

If your agents receive repeat calls about the same issue, you might want to take a closer look at your product or service. Maybe a feature isn’t working as intended, or it’s just confusing to use. Either way, every support ticket tied to a recurring issue is a signal that something upstream needs fixing.

Businesses should try to zoom out and identify the root cause of product or service friction, instead of troubleshooting the same problems. Are unclear instructions leading to setup questions? Is a billing process triggering complaints each month? Are customers struggling to complete an online task without support?

A cross-departmental effort involving product and marketing is also valuable here. It enables CX leaders to smoothly identify, fix, and communicate product issues and updates. As a result, customers stay in the loop, making it less likely that they will follow up about the same issue.

6. Monitor and Act on Feedback

Customer feedback is one of the most direct signals for a contact center to reduce inbound volume. When you keep your finger on the pulse of customer sentiment, you quickly spot the pain points leading to unnecessary calls.

Start by capturing feedback through surveys or post-interaction ratings. Layer that data with call summaries to identify trends. Identify the recurring issues that leave customers with no choice but to contact support agents. These issues could range from inadequate self-service to unclear product updates.

Act on the repeat call drivers once you understand them. Update your knowledge base, improve navigation, and implement better call center coaching techniques. Close the feedback loop with customers to ensure satisfaction and prevent further frustration.

7. Proactively Communicate with Customers

Proactive communication keeps customers in the loop, making it less likely that they reach out for clarification. If there’s an expected delay, a system outage, or a billing change, a well-timed message can stop hundreds of calls in their tracks. It also shows customers that your brand is transparent and reliable.

Create automated alerts for common service interruptions and updates. Ensure the messaging is clear, timely, and sent through the right channels. Don’t bury important notices in lengthy newsletters or inaccessible dashboards.

When you keep your customers informed, they are less likely to panic and reach out to the contact center. Proactive communication also supports online reputation management efforts, as customers are more likely to rate and recommend your business.

8. Streamline Onboarding and Product Education

One way to lower the number of repeat calls is to just improve your product onboarding process. The better your customers understand your product, the less likely they are to call the support team for answers.

As a result, it pays off to make product education part of your CX strategy. Offer guided tutorials, interactive walkthroughs, and bite-sized content that answers common questions. Video demos and setup wizards are also helpful resources for reducing confusion for new customers.

9. Use Conversational Intelligence to Spot Patterns

High call volumes provide opportunities to better understand your customers’ struggles and sources of frustration. This is where conversational intelligence comes in.

When you summarize and analyze call transcripts at scale, you can immediately identify common pain points. With the help of artificial intelligence, you can dig into the interactions further to surface agent performance gaps and shifts in customer sentiment. This information provides a valuable starting point for reducing call volume.

InMoment’s conversational intelligence software makes this process faster and smarter. It automatically summarizes call content, categorizes interactions by topic, and uses sentiment analysis to reveal instances of friction. These insights help teams prioritize what to fix, from digital experience issues to agent coaching opportunities.

10. Optimize Website and Mobile App UX

Your website and mobile app are often the first places customers visit when they are learning about your brand. Therefore, if essential information is difficult to find, they are more likely to reach for the phone.

With 56% of customers preferring to visit the website when researching a brand’s offering, optimizing the digital experience should be a strategic priority. Ensure that account information, order status, billing details, and support options are easy to locate and clearly explained. Work with your developers and UX designers to include a well-placed knowledge base or chatbot prompt. Improve your FAQ page to make it readable and easy to understand.

Regular usability testing can help you spot where real users struggle. The feedback helps you create a smoother customer journey that doesn’t rely on frequent calls for support.

Reduce call volumes and improve CX with InMoment

High call volumes are the result of inefficient workflows, poor agent performance, and little to no reliance on self-service technology. While it’s a pressing challenge for businesses looking to lower costs, it can be managed through a customer-centric approach. Enhanced self-service, root cause analysis of customer dissatisfaction, and proactive communication are key strategies for call volume reduction.

InMoment helps you take this one step further. Our AI-powered conversational intelligence software gives you real-time visibility into what’s driving calls, where friction exists, and how to fix it. From summarizing interactions to uncovering emotional insights, the tool transforms everyday conversations into clear and actionable opportunities for improvement.

Ready to reduce call volume without compromising the customer experience? Schedule a demo today and see how InMoment helps contact centers work smarter towards customer satisfaction!

Your call center has the power to shape how customers feel about your brand. Every interaction, whether it’s handling customer inquiries, resolving complaints, or acknowledging compliments, is a moment that can build trust or break it. And in a fast-paced environment, it’s not just about speed. It’s about delivering a contact center experience that balances efficiency and empathy.

If you’re seeing low customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), rising call abandonment, or more negative feedback than usual, it’s time to reset. The strategies below offer practical ways to improve customer satisfaction, reduce inefficiencies, and deliver a better customer experience without overloading your support team.

1. Use Conversational Intelligence To Uncover CX Gaps

The surest way to improve customer experience (CX) is to solve real customer problems. Conversational intelligence (CI), powered by artificial intelligence (AI), helps you do just that by analyzing interactions to uncover pain points, friction, and customer frustration.

It also highlights where your team may be missing the mark, giving you the insight you need to coach agents more effectively and improve future conversations. 

2. Train Agents for Empathy and Active Listening

There’s more to delivering good customer service than solving problems quickly. Agents also need to know how to build trust and connect with customers, and that starts with soft skills. 

Focus your training on empathy, active listening, and patience, even during tough conversations. Encourage help agents to acknowledge frustrations or concerns, paraphrase what they hear, and respond with clear, helpful solutions. 

Empathetic communication can turn a difficult moment into a trust-building experience that brings customers back.

3. Personalize the Customer Experience

81% of consumers prefer brands that offer personalized experiences. And 88% say the experience itself matters just as much as the product. In other words, personalization has a direct impact on how people choose where to spend their money.

Ditch rigid, generic scripts in favor of conversations that reflect each customer’s history and preferences. One way to make this easier is by connecting your customer relationship management (CRM) system with your CX software, giving agents instant access to relevant details during every interaction. 

Personalization shows customers they’re seen and valued, which goes a long way toward building trust and improving customer retention. 

4. Reduce Hold Times With Smarter Call Routing

With 70% of Americans choosing a phone call as their go-to for customer support, your call center is often the first and most important touchpoint. 

Long wait times and multiple transfers are quick ways to frustrate callers. Instead, use intelligent routing systems that connect people to the right department based on their needs and your agents’ skills. If there’s a delay, set clear hold-time expectations or offer a callback option. 

Respecting callers’ time helps reduce friction and leaves a stronger impression of your brand.

5. Improve First Contact Resolution (FCR)

Customers don’t want to call back multiple times to solve the same issue. That kind of back-and-forth quickly leads to frustration and can make your call center customer service team seem unprepared. 

Start with thorough training to ensure agents know your products inside and out. Give them access to internal knowledge bases during calls and encourage confident, real-time problem-solving to reduce transfers. 

When agents resolve issues on the first try, it leads to positive experiences, stronger customer satisfaction, and fewer repeat contacts. 

6. Offer and Optimize Self-Service Options

Not everyone likes to speak to a live agent. In fact, 67% of consumers say they prefer self-service over direct interactions. 

Build out helpful resources like knowledge bases, FAQ pages, and online help centers. Make sure they’re easy to navigate, address common pain points, and actually help customers solve problems without needing to call in. 

The easier it is for people to help themselves, the better their overall experience and the lighter the load on your support team.

7. Monitor and Act on Customer Feedback

Customers can be your greatest asset in the effort to improve your organization’s CX, but only if you’re listening. 

Use post-call surveys to gather feedback on what’s working and what needs improvement. Then, take action. Use those insights to adjust policies, refine training, and close the gaps that impact customer experience.

Turning feedback into meaningful change shows customers you’re paying attention—and that builds long-term trust.

8. Automate QA Scoring 

Automating quality assurance (QA) scoring with a tool like InMoment gives you a clearer, more consistent view of customer interactions.

It helps surface inconsistencies, uncover agent training opportunities, and optimize how your team shows up on every call. Automated scoring also allows you to review a much larger volume of conversations and removes human bias from the equation, making your customer insights more reliable.

With the right system in place, you can track sentiment, spot trends, and make smarter CX decisions at scale.

9. Provide Ongoing Coaching and Quality Assurance

Consumer needs, preferences, and pain points are constantly evolving, so your training shouldn’t stop after agent onboarding. 

Use surveys, call recordings, emails, and other touchpoints to identify where agents are thriving and where they’re struggling. Then, tailor your coaching to match your findings. If agents are having trouble with difficult conversations, prioritize soft skills like empathy and de-escalation.

Ongoing coaching can help keep skills sharp, build agent confidence, and help your team deliver stronger experiences across every customer interaction, potentially improving CSAT scores. 

10. Make Your Support Channels Work Together

Customers don’t always start with a phone call. They might reach out to your brand through email, social media, or even SMS before connecting with a live agent.

To give them a better experience, focus on omnichannel consistency. If someone starts a conversation with a chatbot and later calls in to speak with a human, your agents should have access to that earlier conversation for context. This helps you avoid redundant back-and-forth, reduces frustration, and helps your team deliver faster support.

Aligning your channels leads to smoother interactions and smarter CX optimization. 

11. Equip Agents With Integrated Tools

Disconnected systems slow customer service agents down and make it harder to streamline support. When they have to jump between platforms just to answer a question, it creates delays and unnecessary friction.

Integrating your CX software with tools like CRMs and feedback platforms gives agents a holistic view of each customer’s journey and sentiment. That context improves service quality and makes it easier to address customer issues quickly and effectively.

With the right tools in place, reps can spend less time switching tabs and more time solving problems.

12. Set Clear, Customer-Centric KPIs

Key performance indicators (KPIs) help you track whether your CX optimization efforts are working and where to adjust. 

Balance efficiency metrics like average handle time with customer-focused indicators like customer effort score (CES), net promoter score (NPS), CSAT, and first contact resolution. These numbers give you a clearer view of how customers actually feel about their experience.

If the data points to positive progress, keep going. If not, adjust your strategy using insights from conversational intelligence and direct customer feedback. 

13. Communicate Proactively With Customers

When issues come up—like service disruptions or product delays—don’t wait for the complaints to roll in. Proactively reach out to let customers know you’re aware of the problem and working toward a resolution. 

This kind of communication can ease concerns, reduce your call center’s inbound call volume, and help lower wait times for other customer support tickets. More importantly, it builds trust by showing customers you’re in control and paying attention.

14. Celebrate Agent Wins and Promote Engagement

While it’s important to address areas where call center agents may be struggling, focusing only on what’s going wrong can hurt morale and lead to burnout. Recognition matters.

Make space to celebrate wins. Reward agent performance with incentives like gift cards, team shout-outs, or spotlight features for those who go above and beyond. Recognize the reps who consistently exceed customer expectations, and let others see what great service looks like in action.

A culture of appreciation improves the agent experience, supports retention, and motivates the entire team to keep raising the bar.

15. Address Systemic Issues That Drive Negative CX

Not all negative CX stems from call center agents. Broader issues, like faulty products, unclear company policies, shipping delays, or complicated purchasing processes can just as easily erode customer trust. 

Use conversational intelligence software to identify recurring pain points and understand what’s really driving customer dissatisfaction. Then, take direct action to fix the root causes. For example, if shipping delays are a frequent complaint, work with your logistics provider to improve delivery timelines or explore other partners.

Fixing these systemic issues improves future experiences and shows customers that your business listens and follows through.

16. Continuously Iterate Based on Data

As customers’ needs and expectations evolve, your CX optimization efforts should evolve with them. Regularly review customer data from surveys, agent-customer interactions, and KPIs to spot what’s working and where you can improve. 

Small, consistent changes based on real insights can help your customer service team stay responsive and aligned with what your audience values. Ongoing CX reviews and experimentation not only improve satisfaction but also strengthen retention over time. 

Improve Your Call Center’s Customer Experience With InMoment

Excellent customer service experiences can increase customer satisfaction, strengthen loyalty, and reduce churn. To enhance CX, use conversational intelligence to identify experience gaps, offer regular agent training focused on both hard and soft skills, act on customer feedback, ensure consistent support across communication channels, and recognize standout agent performance to keep motivation high.

InMoment’s integrated CX intelligence platform helps improve the call center experience by delivering rich customer insights. It captures customer feedback, surfaces common challenges and CX trends through conversational intelligence, and supports data-driven action plans to strengthen your overall strategy. 

Schedule a demo with InMoment today to see how our platform can power your next stage of CX optimization!

Sometimes, even the most skillful contact center agents have no choice but to escalate a call to their supervisors. However, it’s not an ideal scenario by any means, especially when it happens often. Escalated calls are time-consuming, costly, and stressful. They also lower agent confidence and increase the likelihood of customer churn.

Therefore, reducing call escalations is a mission-critical priority for contact center leaders. The good news is that with the right tools and strategies, you can definitely resolve more issues on first contact to lower costs and improve customer retention.

What is a call escalation in a call center?

Call escalation, also known as supervisor escalation, is the process of transferring a customer issue from the frontline agent to the supervisor. This typically happens when the agent lacks the authority, access, or expertise to resolve the concern on their own. Escalations can be triggered by complex issues, unresolved complaints, or an angry customer who requests to speak to someone in a higher position.

While this process is necessary in some cases, frequent escalations often signal gaps in agent training, knowledge base access, or outdated call center workflows. These gaps can lead to longer wait times, higher average handle time, and lower customer satisfaction.

With the right tools and processes, like intelligent routing and automation, call centers can take a confident step towards reducing unnecessary escalations. It also empowers agents to resolve more issues on first contact by handling routine tasks and surfacing key customer insights.

The different types of call escalation

Not all call escalations are the same. For example, an agent escalating a call because of a product malfunction outside their scope is different from an angry customer requesting to speak to the agent’s supervisor.

Therefore, effective call center management requires a structured approach to de-escalation. This is the idea behind an escalation matrix, a framework that applies the right role, responsibility, and skill set to each escalation type.

Instead of letting agents fret over who to contact, the matrix ensures that each escalation category is handled by the individuals and processes best suited for it.

Speaking of which, here’s a quick look at the three common types of escalation:

1. Technical escalations
   These occur when a customer issue is beyond the frontline agent’s expertise. If an issue involves complex systems or integrations requiring an advanced technical profile, it’s transferred to a higher-level technician or specialized team.
   
2. Procedural escalations
   When agents encounter unclear or inflexible policies, such as refund guidelines, service limits, or contractual terms, they may need to involve a higher authority to make a decision. These types of escalation are common in regulated industries where strict workflows apply.
   
3. Emotional escalations
   Sometimes, the issue is less about complexity and more about emotion. A customer who feels unheard by the agent, for instance, may demand to speak with a supervisor. Without proper de-escalation, these emotionally charged moments can spiral into conflict. Agents trained in active listening and problem-solving are better equipped to handle such interactions calmly.

Common Reasons for Call Escalations in Contact Centers

In many contact centers, escalations stem from breakdowns in training, tools, or communication. Some of the most common causes include:

• Limited agent authority or knowledge for providing support, resolving the ticket, or making decisions. The lack of access to the right information prolongs the escalation process, frustrating both the customer and the agent.
  
• Inadequate training or support resources for frontline agents makes it difficult to handle complex issues with confidence. Without the right knowledge base or support tools, even experienced agents will struggle with first contact resolution (FCR).
  
• Poor call routing or misalignment of skill sets means customer calls often go to agents ill-equipped to resolve them. This wastes time, effort, and results in escalations. Intelligent routing based on issue type and agent skill level is key to reducing this kind of friction.
  
• Complex or unclear company policies like refund rules, hidden fees, or rigid processes can make it difficult for agents to offer solutions without escalating to supervisors.
  
• Emotionally charged interactions without de-escalation tactics result in immediate customer dissatisfaction. Without proper training in active listening and emotional intelligence, agents may unintentionally escalate a situation by failing to meet an increasingly disgruntled customer’s needs.

Benefits of Reducing Call Escalations

Frequent call escalations increase operational costs and discourage customer loyalty. A strategic approach to reducing escalations enables call center leaders to create a more efficient and customer-centric operation. Here are four powerful benefits of improving your escalation management process:

Improved customer experience

When agents resolve customer issues within the first interaction, they significantly reduce wait times and feelings of frustration. The result is a more positive customer experience, greater customer satisfaction, and stronger loyalty.

Increased agent confidence and efficiency

The right training, knowledge base, and decision-making authority allow agents to handle complex issues independently. This builds confidence, boosts morale, and reduces average handle times, enabling more effective problem-solving.

Better use of supervisor time

When fewer calls are escalated, supervisors can shift their focus from constant firefighting to team development and process improvement. As a result, they spend more time on strategy without having to worry about handling multiple customer issues.

Lower operational costs

Each escalation increases handling time and touches multiple resources. Reducing escalations drives down repeat contacts, optimizes staffing, and helps streamline call center workflows. These results are key for lowering operational costs and encouraging better use of existing tools and talent.

Strategies to Reduce Call Escalations in a Call Center

A strategic approach is required for creating a smarter and more responsive contact center to reduce call escalations. From optimizing call routing to equipping frontline agents with better resources, these strategies can help call center management streamline operations, improve the customer experience, and build lasting customer trust.

1. Improve First Contact Resolution (FCR)

One of the most effective ways to reduce escalations is by focusing on First Contact Resolution (FCR). As one of the most crucial call center metrics, FCR measures the percentage of calls an agent resolves during the initial interaction without any follow-ups.

A high FCR suggests that calls are mostly routed to the right agents who have the necessary tools and knowledge to resolve them. This prevents additional strain on supervisors and senior staff.

Improve FCR by implementing skills-based routing to ensure each call reaches the agent best equipped to address it. Use targeted training to improve agent performance and empathy during stressful situations. Re-evaluate your policies to see if anything prevents agents from confidently resolving issues on their own.

2. Use Conversational Intelligence Software

Many call escalations stem from a lack of visibility into what’s really happening during customer interactions. With tools like InMoment’s conversational intelligence software, you can analyze 100% of customer interactions to unlock valuable insights into customer behavior. The tool uses AI-powered capabilities such as call summarization and sentiment analysis to reveal early signs of frustration, spot patterns, and surface root causes behind escalations.

These insights empower agents to proactively address concerns before they intensify. Managers, on the other hand, are able to make data-driven decisions on agent training, call center workflows, and escalation management.

As a result, conversational intelligence helps you reduce supervisor escalations and improve your team’s ability to deliver swift and empathetic support.

3. Empower Agents with Better Training and Knowledge Bases

When agents feel confident, they resolve more customer issues without needing to escalate. The best way to encourage confidence is to provide targeted training to each frontline team member. Focus on aspects like problem-solving, communication skills, and de-escalation techniques. Give them tools to recognize emotional cues and respond with empathy and clarity.

Support this training with an easy-to-navigate knowledge base providing quick access to accurate answers, process updates, and product details. The faster agents can find information, the more efficiently they can resolve complex questions.

With the right resources and training, your agents stay in control and deliver better support, without having to involve supervisors.

4. Implement Call Routing Based on Issue Complexity

Not every customer concern requires the same level of expertise. When your call routing system sends complex issues to agents without the right skills, it increases frustration and triggers unnecessary escalations.

Use intelligent routing to match calls with agents based on issue complexity, topic, or urgency. For example, product specialists are better suited to handle technical support questions, while billing concerns should be routed to agents trained in finance workflows. This alignment helps customers reach the right person faster, reducing average handle time and improving first call resolution.

5. Analyze Escalation Trends to Fix Root Causes

If you look closely at call escalations, you’re likely to see a pattern. Perhaps agents lack the right knowledge in most of the cases. Maybe a lack of empathy tends to be the main culprit. Analyzing escalation trends helps you pinpoint the root causes behind repeat problems and friction in the support experience.

Start by reviewing escalation data across all customer channels, including calls, messaging, and chat. Look for patterns to understand which product areas, topics, or workflows trigger the most supervisor involvement. See if you can identify the agents escalating more frequently due to limited training or knowledge.

Use your findings to revise policies, update workflows, and improve knowledge base content. When you address the real source of customer pain, you transform your call center into a revenue generator for the business.

6. Offer Self-Service and Omnichannel Options

Customers expect to have multiple options for issue resolution, including taking care of it themselves. This expectation is stronger in the age of artificial intelligence, where chatbots and virtual assistants are capable of addressing common queries. 

According to a 2024 Zendesk report, 83% of CX leaders expect to see a five-fold increase in customer self-service interactions. Therefore, businesses must be ready to meet this expectation with self-service tools and a seamless omnichannel support experience.

Ensure your help center, FAQs, and automated chatbots are equipped to handle common queries like policy updates or order status. These tools empower customers to resolve issues without needing to speak with a live agent.

At the same time, make it easy for customers to move between messaging, email, social media, and phone calls without losing context. Consistency across channels improves customer satisfaction and lowers the likelihood of call escalations.

When combined with real-time customer insights, self-service options help reduce call volume, shorten wait times, and allow supervisors to focus on other aspects of the business.

Reduce Call Escalations Efficiently with InMoment

Call escalations pose a significant challenge for call center management. They lower agent confidence, require extra effort from supervisors, and damage brand reputation in the long run. A clear and structured approach involving the right tools, processes, and insights is required for reducing escalations.

InMoment’s conversational intelligence tool helps you implement this approach. By analyzing every interaction in real time, it uncovers friction points, highlights coaching opportunities, and pinpoints exactly why escalations are happening. As a result, you gain a connected view of customer feedback across surveys, support channels, and call transcripts, allowing you to act on rich insights.

Schedule a demo today to see how you can reduce escalations and transform your contact center into a revenue driver!

Contact center quality assurance (QA) has become a critical driver of customer satisfaction. As expectations for personalized, efficient, and empathetic service continue to rise, businesses must ensure that every agent interaction meets a high standard. A well-executed QA program empowers teams to maintain consistency, uncover coaching opportunities, and build long-term trust with customers.

What is quality assurance in a contact center?

Quality assurance in a contact center is the structured process of monitoring, evaluating, and improving customer interactions to ensure agents consistently meet company standards. QA programs typically assess calls, chats, and emails against criteria such as communication clarity, adherence to protocols, professionalism, and issue resolution effectiveness. The goal is to foster consistent, high-quality support that reflects the brand and enhances the customer experience.

What are important call center QA metrics?

Several key QA metrics help contact centers evaluate agent performance and service quality:

• Call Quality Score: A composite score that assesses adherence to internal standards, such as tone, compliance, and problem resolution.
• Script Adherence: Measures whether agents follow the prescribed language and flow, especially in regulated industries.
• Compliance Rate: Evaluates how well agents meet legal or procedural requirements during interactions.
• Customer Satisfaction (CSAT): Based on post-interaction surveys, this metric reflects how customers feel about their experience.
• First Contact Resolution (FCR): Tracks whether the customer’s issue was resolved in the first interaction, reducing repeat calls and frustration.

These metrics give QA managers a clear view of what’s working and where to focus improvement efforts.

How can contact center QA improve customer satisfaction?

A robust QA program doesn’t just monitor performance—it actively enhances the customer experience. Here’s how:

Ensures consistent service across agents

QA establishes clear benchmarks for tone, professionalism, and solution accuracy. By holding all agents to the same standards, businesses ensure customers receive reliable service—regardless of who picks up the phone.

Identifies and corrects performance gaps

By regularly reviewing interactions and scoring them against standardized criteria, QA reveals areas where agents need coaching. These insights help contact centers implement targeted training that leads to faster, more accurate resolutions.

Reinforces empathy and active listening

QA reviews often highlight the importance of soft skills. Coaching agents on empathy, tone, and active listening creates more human-centered interactions that increase trust and loyalty.

Drives First Contact Resolution (FCR)

QA processes surface common causes of inefficiencies and missed resolutions. Addressing these patterns enables teams to reduce escalations, shorten handle time, and improve FCR—all key to customer satisfaction.

What skills are needed for call center quality assurance?

QA professionals play a vital role in maintaining service standards. The most effective QA analysts bring:

• Attention to Detail: Essential for accurately reviewing complex interactions.
• Analytical Thinking: Helps identify patterns and root causes of performance issues.
• Clear Communication: Needed to provide actionable, supportive feedback.
• Knowledge of Brand Standards: Ensures agents represent the company accurately.
• Coaching Mindset: Helps turn evaluations into growth opportunities for agents.

Contact center QA best practices

Implementing QA effectively requires more than monitoring. These best practices help ensure success:

1. Establish clear and measurable QA standards and metrics

Define specific criteria tied to business goals—like tone, issue resolution, and compliance—so every evaluation is consistent and impactful.

2. Evaluate a representative sample of interactions

Randomly reviewing a wide range of calls and chats paints a more accurate picture of performance. Modern QA programs leverage conversational intelligence to analyze 100% of interactions, uncovering trends and ensuring fairness. With full coverage, agents are less likely to feel singled out by isolated negative reviews.

3. Leverage conversational intelligence for scalable QA

Conversational intelligence is the practice of using AI to analyze large volumes of customer conversations. These tools enable automated QA reviews, identifying key phrases, emotional tone, and outcome success. The result? Scalable insights without sacrificing depth.

4. Deliver feedback that’s timely and actionable

Feedback has the most impact when it’s prompt and specific. Use QA results to deliver targeted coaching shortly after an interaction, while the context is fresh and the agent can apply changes right away.

5. Involve agents in the QA process

Transparency builds trust. Invite agents to review their scores, ask questions, and reflect on their own performance. This collaborative approach leads to stronger engagement and faster growth.

6. Calibrate QA scores for consistency

Human reviewers must regularly align their scoring criteria to ensure fairness. However, conversational intelligence-based scoring ensures consistency across all evaluations and only requires periodic audits to maintain accuracy.

7. Connect QA metrics to business outcomes

Tie QA insights directly to KPIs like CSAT, FCR, and retention. When leadership sees a clear link between QA performance and business success, QA becomes a strategic asset.

8. Use QA trends to inform coaching and training

Don’t just evaluate—act. Use recurring QA patterns to tailor team-wide training and personalize coaching plans. This helps improve weak spots before they impact more customer experiences.

Elevate your contact center processes with InMoment

When done right, contact center QA drives more than internal efficiency. It transforms every customer conversation into an opportunity to build trust, deliver value, and deepen relationships. From setting standards to leveraging AI-powered conversation analysis, effective QA is key to sustainable growth.

InMoment’s conversational intelligence tools help enterprise brands evaluate interactions at scale, reduce costs, and improve agent performance. Combined with survey insights and reputation management tools, they form a powerful, integrated CX platform that reveals the full picture of customer experience.

Ready to take your QA strategy to the next level? See how InMoment can help.

Customer surveys are a mainstay in most consumer-facing industries for good reason. They provide powerful insights into customer sentiment, buying behavior, and much more, all for a relatively small investment.

One frequent topic of debate among multi-location businesses is how to set up a customer survey program. Should you use one survey across the entire business, or should you customize surveys to each location? And if you choose to customize, how much is too much?

Do Customer Surveys Need To Be Tailored to Location?

The short version is yes, customer surveys should be tailored to location. This is true for most multi-location businesses and certainly all businesses with consumer-facing units, like restaurant and retail chains. 

Why? The biggest reason is because users’ experiences with your brand aren’t universal; they’re tailored to whichever location or locations the user interacted with. Whether you get a glowing review or a scathing one, most of the time those emotions aren’t directed at your brand in general as much as at the physical location where the customer had the experience. 

By tailoring customer surveys to individual locations, large brands can more easily zoom into challenges at the location level.

Why Customer Surveys Should Be Location-Specific

We’ve already gone on the record here: We believe customer surveys should nearly always be location-specific. Let’s drill deeper into the reasons why.

Regional Preferences and Market Differences

First, customer expectations, purchasing behaviors, and service preferences vary by region. 

There are countless examples of this, but let’s go with regional consumer trends. “Winter clothes” means one thing in Miami, Florida, and something entirely different in New England. The term may even have different connotations in Denver than in Seattle. 

In this scenario, lumping all survey data from different regions and demographics into one giant vat of data obscures what’s really happening. 

When a business doesn’t break up survey results by region, the data may suggest a product has mediocre performance when the reality is it’s massively popular in one region but less so elsewhere. 

Improved Personalization 

Location-specific surveys also allow businesses to customize and personalize at the location level. A brand may want to adjust its offerings, promotions, and messaging to align with regional customer needs or regional sales realities (such as an item that’s only available to U.S. customers or only those on the East Coast).  

National businesses also frequently test new offerings in one or two distinct markets before rolling out nationally. Producing localized surveys allows brands to capture specific feedback on that new item or service without confusing customers who’ve never seen or heard of it.

By producing a more personalized survey, brands can enhance customer engagement and improve customer satisfaction with the survey itself. They can also follow up on localized results by making changes their target audience wants to see.

Actionable Insights and Targeted Improvements

Geographically segmented feedback is a key source of data, too. It enables more informed decision-making based on valuable insights found in region-specific information. 

With this level of granularity, businesses can make strategic choices about how to refine the products, services, and experiences they offer based on the unique needs of different markets. For example, gauging regional performance of a buzzy or viral item can help businesses predict when and where that virality might spread.

Executive leaders, regional managers, and store managers can also benefit in unique ways from location-based survey reporting: With data broken down this way, leaders can quickly see and understand the data that’s most relevant to them.

Enhanced Performance Measurement

Analyzing survey data by location also gives businesses more granular insight into performance at multiple levels, from brand-wide to regional and all the way down to the individual store level. 

This level of analysis gives businesses deeper insight and greater flexibility, enabling them to compare customer satisfaction (CSAT) levels across different regions and customer base segments and identify areas for improvement.

Local Regulations and Compliance

Businesses engaging in different types of surveys in multiple regions have one more reason to customize their customer surveys, and it’s a big one: regulatory compliance. 

Surveys (especially digital surveys) selling to customers in some regions must comply with digital data privacy laws that may limit what kinds of information they can collect. For example, if you sell to customers in California or the European Union, you’re obligated to comply with the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

An otherwise effective survey question might be a regulatory violation in those jurisdictions.

Best Practices for Creating Location-Specific Surveys

We hope by this point you’re convinced that location-specific surveys are the right approach for your business. But for most brands, execution may be a challenge. 

Follow these best practices to get the most possible out of your location-specific surveys. 

Analyze and Identify Regional Cohorts

Proper survey methodology requires asking similar questions across all surveys so that you’re confident your metrics are all equivalent or comparable. Asking completely different sets of questions in different regions won’t allow you to (correctly) use all that data in a comparative way. 

So step one in creating effective location-specific surveys is something called cohort analysis: identifying and then grouping audience members that share a specific trait (in this case, region or location).

Once you’ve made this identification, you can start identifying regional differences in responses that can inform what kinds of adjustments you make to questions.

Adapt Survey Content for Each Cohort

It’s essential to keep questions similar, but regional differences do exist. Often you do need to adjust survey questions to fit specific regional cohorts.

This is a balancing act: you want to keep your survey as stable as possible so that you’re still comparing apples to apples, even when wording changes. But sometimes the wording must change if you want to capture regionally accurate responses.

To ensure relevance, accuracy, and positive customer experiences, consider each of these areas.

• Language & cultural sensitivity: Questions (especially when translated) need to reflect local dialects and cultural norms to avoid misinterpretation and offense.
• Regional preferences & trends: Questions may need to be adjusted to fit the most popular or relevant products or services in an area. 
• Regulatory considerations: Questions must comply with local laws and data protection requirements, even if that means weakening some questions or omitting others entirely.
• Product/service availability: Questions need to make sense based on the services, pricing, or customer experiences available in a region or at a location.

Active listening is another way to navigate adapting survey content. InMoment’s new AI-powered Active Listening Agents enable surveys to start with the same question but then (for open-text questions) dynamically prompt respondents for more contextual feedback based on the initial response. This is a powerful way to glean detail-rich insights while keeping the top-level methodology and structure of your survey intact.

One more tip: To avoid skewed response rates, keep the survey delivery method the same across all locations.

Keep Core Metrics Consistent While Adapting Certain Questions

Even though the wording and content of your survey questions changes in different locations, the core data you’re collecting should stay as consistent as possible. 

Keeping a consistent set of key performance indicators (KPIs) across all locations helps you understand performance across the organization. You just might have to use different approaches to get that information, based on regional differences in customer expectations and behaviors.

Leverage AI and Automation To Streamline Survey Customization

AI-driven survey tools can help brands scale their customer survey processes in powerful ways. For example, some tools can automatically translate customer surveys into one or more additional languages. Some tools can even personalize questions based on regional data and optimize survey distribution for different geographic audiences.

InMoment is a powerful solution for customer feedback, market research, conversational surveys that allow for open-ended question types, and much more. Our fully Integrated CX platform helps you understand audiences, gauge customer experience, and understand sentiment in conversational text.

Schedule a demo

Test Localized Versions Before Full-Scale Implementation

AI and automation are key tactics for scaling your customer survey customization. But no matter how human or how cyborg your customizations are, you still need QA, and it’s still a good idea to test them on a small scale before launching widely.

Pilot testing your brand’s localized surveys can help you identify potentially embarrassing, damaging, or just plain confusing issues related to wording, cultural relevance, or semantic clarity. This approach gives you the chance to solve these problems before they roll out to thousands or millions of inboxes.

Analyze Location-Based Survey Data To Refine Strategies Over Time

It will take time and iteration to perfect your customer feedback surveys, and it’s okay if your first crack at survey design isn’t perfect. You’ll still benefit by using the survey responses you’ve collected to keep refining your approach to numerous aspects of your business. For example, you can use survey results to adjust your marketing strategies and how you approach customer support and customer experience. 

You can even use the customer data you’ve collected to identify weak or unclear points in your customer satisfaction surveys, which you can keep refining over time.

Deliver Personalized Surveys and Uncover Meaningful Customer Insights With InMoment

Personalized, location-specific surveys can reveal granular insights that are both powerful and actionable. But it can be a significant technical and logistical challenge to execute the shift from uniform, undifferentiated questionnaires to truly customized location-based surveys.

InMoment is a different kind of survey software, a fully Integrated CX approach that helps brands ask the right questions of the right types of customers. With InMoment, brands can collect and connect feedback across the entire customer journey, then use Conversational Intelligence to understand and extract insights from that feedback.

See what InMoment can do for your brand: Schedule a demo

In any call center or contact center, performance is the engine that powers the entire operation. High-performing call centers do a great job at keeping customers satisfied, and they’re highly efficient, reducing operational costs.

But high performance doesn’t happen by chance. Analyzing call center performance is the path to improvement—but you’ve got to do it right.

Performance tracking is a powerful tool that helps you improve both ends of the call. Your agents become more productive by learning what’s going well and where they could improve, and your customers enjoy a better, more satisfactory experience.

Why Analyzing Call Center Performance Is Important 

Not yet convinced that analyzing call center performance is worth the effort? Here are a few advantages you can gain by taking a closer look under the hood.

Improving Customer Satisfaction

Performance analysis helps you identify what’s working in your contact center and what isn’t. When you find the pain points in customer interactions, you know where to focus on your quest to deliver better service, faster resolutions, and improved customer experiences. Improving customer satisfaction is the secret sauce behind a successful business: call center performance can have a massive impact on how customers feel about your brand.

Enhancing Agent Productivity 

Call center analytics give you a clearer picture of how well your agents are performing in terms of productivity and customer satisfaction. You can use this information to refine things like training programs and workload distribution. As you identify processes and tactics from high-performing agents, you can implement those in team workflows and onboarding materials.

Once you know how well your agents are performing, you can double down on the good and problem-solve the rest. The result is better training, a more evenly distributed workload, and efficiency gains everywhere you look.

Reducing Operational Costs

Higher customer satisfaction and better agent productivity both lead to fewer and shorter calls: Happy customers don’t call in with problems as frequently and productive agents can process more calls per shift—so you trim operational costs without lifting a finger!

Call performance data can also reveal inefficiencies in call management, wait times, and workflows to further help you balance available resources (agents) with demand.

Data-Informed Decision-Making

When you work with real data, you can do more than just put out fires—you can make smarter decisions before problems even start. Performance analytics give you a clear picture of the state of operations, including where you need to adjust to keep your call center running at its best.

Data-driven decision-making helps you fine-tune agent workflows and adjust staffing levels based on actual customer needs instead of just gut feelings. For example, if you’re struggling with long wait times, then you either need your agents to process calls more quickly or you need more agents. 

But which is it? Data can show you in real terms how well your agents are doing in terms of call length and first-call resolution (especially compared to historical data), giving you the insight you need to know where to start.

The result? A call center that stays one step ahead, ready to adjust to evolving trends without missing a beat.

What Tool Is Best for Analyzing Call Performance?

There is a wide range of tools and approaches out there for analyzing call performance, but how do you decide which approach is the best?

We believe the answer is obvious: You can’t truly analyze call performance unless you can analyze the content of those calls. That requires conversational intelligence software. 

Conversational intelligence software reads and interprets text-based conversational interactions using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP). The goal is to better understand the conversation’s intent, participants’ sentiments, and much more. When we say “text-based,” we’re talking about audio calls in your contact center, which are automatically transcribed and processed as text (how cool is that?!).

With conversational intelligence, you can harness the power of speech analytics to group call data by feature, outcome, customer sentiment, and more. You can use this data to measure customer interactions at scale, unlocking actionable insights from call data that go far beyond mere call performance.

How Do You Analyze Call Center Performance? 7 Key Steps

Gaining a clear picture of your call center’s performance is essential in today’s customer-first environment. But you don’t get valuable insights from guessing. You need the right approach to turn data into action.

Use these seven steps to analyze call center performance the right way so you can take performance (and results) to a new level. 

1. Define Key Performance Indicators (KPIs)

The first step is defining key performance indicators (KPIs). Specifically, which KPIs are the right targets for your call center and what it’s trying to achieve.

This is key because to learn the right information, businesses have to measure the right metrics. Just because you can measure it doesn’t mean it’s the right metric for what you need to learn.

For example, some call centers may be focused on a certain performance metric like speed or efficiency, while others might be prioritizing positive customer service outcomes in response to a string of unpleasant online reviews. The first center may closely monitor handle time, while the second may focus on customer satisfaction scores instead.

And of course your call center may prioritize something completely different. So start by defining exactly what it is you need to target, then identify the KPIs that correspond to the aspect of performance you want to improve.

Common KPIs for call centers may include:

• Average handle time: Average duration of call handling, working a case from first contact to resolution or conclusion
• First call resolution: Percentage of calls solved at the first point of contact
• Customer satisfaction scores: Measurement of customer sentiment after an interaction with the call center
• Total call volume: The number of calls an agent or team completes during a defined time period.

2. Use a Conversational Intelligence Tool

Some KPIs, like average handle time and first call resolution, are easy to measure with numbers alone. But numbers aren’t enough to paint a full picture. High first-call resolution scores are great, but not if the resolution left most customers angry.

Conversational intelligence tools are a smart way to engage in sentiment analysis to understand customer attitudes without manually reading and categorizing thousands of entries. Results simply feed to your call center dashboard, letting you quickly visualize them and form a plan for improvement. 

3. Gather Data

Once you know which metrics to track, the next step is collecting the right data. This includes both structured data (like call volume, average handle time, and first call resolution rates) and unstructured data from customer feedback and conversation transcripts.

Structured data is straightforward, feeding directly into databases and dashboards in real-time. The real challenge is capturing that unstructured data, which requires tools like conversational intelligence software to process insights from customer interactions.

This data could include:

• Customer call recordings (or transcriptions of those recordings)
• Customer feedback (surveys)
• Written customer interactions (email, chat, helpdesk)

4. Analyze Data

Interpreting call center metrics starts with identifying patterns: what issues surface the most frequently? Are certain customer issues leading to negative customer sentiment? Do some call center agents consistently lag behind average response times, and does the qualitative call center data suggest how that can be addressed?

Essentially, you’re looking for trends to show you what’s working well, where processes break down, and what adjustments you can make to improve both customer satisfaction and call center productivity.

5. Implement a QA Scoring Rubric 

As you dig deeper into the data you’ve collected, it’s a good idea to implement a quality assurance (QA) scoring rubric for even more insights. But how do you do that?

Partnering with a conversational intelligence provider like InMoment allows contact centers to automatically QA 100% of calls rather than the typical 5% most businesses settle for. InMoment rolls performance metrics into a customized QA scoring rubric that aligns with your company’s specific service standards and operational goals, helping you track the individual call center agents’ performance over time.

Our QA Scoring Rubric includes specific QA categories. Our out-of-the-box methodology focuses on:

• Connection to the customer
• Asking probing questions
• Reducing customer effort

Each of these categories has an associated score, which is customized based on relative importance to your business. From there, you can slice and dice the data however you want: individual agents, entire teams, or segments like team level, region, business unit, and more. 

6. Identify Areas for Improvement

Performance data can reveal inefficiencies, agent training gaps, or consistent customer frustrations that need attention. If agents repeatedly struggle with certain issues, it’s a sign they need better training or clearer guidance. If the same customer complaints keep coming up, there may be a bigger problem with your product or service that needs fixing.

The goal is to make interactions easier for both customers and agents. By tackling these pain points, you can make customers happier, reduce call volumes, and cut down on operational costs.

7. Implement Changes and Monitor Results

Once you’ve identified areas for improvement, it’s time to take action. Some fixes will be quick and obvious, but others may require testing different solutions to see what works best.

For example, you might identify a gap in your agent training. Do you send an email? Create a course or module? Post to your knowledge base? 

Treat every change as an opportunity to learn. Roll out updates, track their impact, and keep an eye on performance data to see if they’re moving the needle. If something doesn’t deliver the results you expected, adjust and try again. 

Think of call center performance as an ongoing process of adapting strategies to help both customers and agents have the best possible experience.

Key Call Center Metrics To Measure

As you set up your call center analytics, keep an eye on these mission-critical metrics:

Customer Experience Metrics

First up are the metrics about customer behavior and how they feel after interacting with your call center. These include:

• Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)
• Net Promoter Score (NPS)
• First Call Resolution (FCR)
• Customer Effort Score

Each of these metrics measures the quality of customer interactions, putting qualitative and emotional data into measurable formats.

Agent Performance Metrics

Next are the metrics that show how well your agents are doing. These include:

• Average Handle Time (AHT)
• Call Resolution Rate
• Adherence to Schedule
• Call Duration

You can measure these at both the individual and team levels, either for individual coaching or general improvement purposes.

With InMoment, you can connect agent performance metrics to service standards and QA Scoring. We can also identify the topic, tone, and overall success of a call on a hyper-granular level:

In our default configuration, the portion in the box in the above graphic is what rolls up into the agent’s QA Score.

Operational Efficiency Metrics

Last, consider the metrics that show how efficiently your call center is operating, including:

• Call Abandonment Rate
• Service Level
• Cost Per Call

These metrics likely won’t tell much of a story on day one, and they won’t immediately reveal root causes. But monitoring trends over time can give you and your call center managers clarity about which direction the ship is headed. 

Unlock Call Performance Insights and Improve CX with InMoment

Analyzing call performance is the key to improving CX and operational performance simultaneously, but doing effective analysis work requires the right tools and systems.

InMoment is the AI-driven Experience Improvement platform that turns all of your unstructured CX data into valuable, actionable insights. Our Conversational Intelligence tools can interpret, summarize, and extract data from every source of conversational data, unlocking a level of insight that didn’t seem possible before.

And InMoment doesn’t stop there: Our platform is a fully Integrated CX Intelligence platform built for the enterprise, with a suite of tools and capabilities designed to help you thrive.

Explore how InMoment can unlock call performance insights and help you improve CX with conversation analytics software: Learn More Now

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.