Thought Leadership

Last month, Forrester held its annual CX Europe Conference. Customer experience (CX) thought leaders came together to highlight how interplay between executive leadership, customer understanding, design management, culture, and measurement all contribute to the success of high-performing firms.

I observed four key trends at the conference, all of which combine to give us a clear sense of what we can expect from CX in the coming years, and all of which are already helping to differentiate ambitious companies from the rest of the pack.

1. Consistency

Great CX is about a brand delivering on its brand promise consistently over time, across all channels. Successful businesses have a clear brand promise: It is part of their DNA. Employees and customers know what to expect and can see a consistent thread across all channels.

Over-delivery against a brand promise can create value and an opportunity to take a brand into exciting new places. Inconsistent delivery, however, destroys value, and at a far quicker pace.

Consistency counts.

2. Employee engagement

Employee engagement is another key feature that differentiates CX leaders from the rest. A business’ employees are the face of that company and the people a brand employs speak volumes about the value they place on CX.

CX leaders truly care about the emotional well-being of their people, and create an environment where employees can see the contribution they make to customers and its importance.

Crucially, CX leaders also listen to employees in a way other companies don’t. Front-line staff have the ability to understand customer experiences in a way that many decision-makers across the company simply can’t. They are a brand’s natural interface with customers and, if harnessed in the right manner, one of the most effective tools in a CX arsenal. We call this type of listening “Voice of Employee”— the practice of purposefully soliciting feedback from colleagues about the customer experience.

A recent study with CustomerThink confirms that Voice of Employee feedback provides some of the most actionable insights in improving the customer experience. Inviting employees in as co-creators of the customer experience inspires higher levels of creativity and investment in both customer relationships and a brand’s success, driving both improved employee engagement and enhanced customer experiences.

3. Personalisation

In terms of customer insight, many brands have come on leaps and bounds. However, there is still — and probably always will be — more work to be done. Customers’ expectations are constantly evolving and one of the big emerging trends is that they want to be treated as individuals.

To meet this trend, brands are trying to develop more complex customer segmentations, sub-dividing existing segmentations to drill down deeper and deeper into the specific needs of customers. The pinnacle is perhaps those businesses that combine data and analysis to produce “segments of one.” This enables brands to understand expectations of individual customers and where appropriate, deliver a truly bespoke customer experience.

Note that for customers, it is the personalisation of the experience that is important — personalisation is not just about marketing. Also, brands don’t need loads of customer data to deliver a personalised service.

4. Combining qualitative and quantitative data

Quantitative data elicited from ratings-based surveys has been the cornerstone of understanding customers for decades. Although this data is informative, it is limited. It may provide a top-line sense of a problem, but rarely illuminates the solution.

Qualitative data, such as text analytics and free-form customer comments, often unlocks another level of insight, where CX professionals can understand the real reason why an experience was good or bad. The best businesses at the moment are successfully marrying quantitative data with qualitative data and truly enlightening the CX experience.

In most organizations, customer experience initiatives are designed, executed, and owned by marketing or operations. We see more CX-specific leaders and departments coming online as well in an attempt to move more of the organization towards customer centricity.

Regardless of who “owns” customer experience, their view is inherently limited to the types and frequency of interactions they have with your customers. This produces blind spots in the holistic lens of customer experience. This limited view causes over-generalizations based on non-representative samples of Voice of Customer data (VoC), shared mythologies generated by compelling anecdotes, and often misses key attributes in the customer experience. Unless CX “owners” are keenly aware of these blind spots, the particular data they’re privy to can actually create a form of skewed groupthink, obscuring the broader truths that exist in customer-brand interactions.

Enter Voice of Employee.

What Exactly Is Voice of Employee?

We hear a lot about the impact Employee Engagement has on Customer Experience. Most times, Employee Engagement is viewed in a vacuum. Every year or year-and-a-half, the Human Resources department trots out a survey asking employees to rate their satisfaction with various aspects of their jobs: benefits, pay, management, work-life balance, and so on. Rarely, if ever are employees explicitly asked about their perspectives on the customer experience. What are their perceptions of what’s working, and what’s not—and more importantly—why? What would they recommend as solutions? What new ideas do they have to improve how your brand delivers on customer expectations? This is Voice of Employee.

Forrester Research defines Voice of Employee (VoE) as “Any feedback from employees or partners that pertains to their ability to deliver great customer experiences.” Without it, you have a huge blind spot in understanding your customer experience, and in achieving positive relationships and business outcomes. The importance of employee voice in the workplace has become more relevant today than ever in order to increase workplace satisfaction, performance, and overall retention. The key to ensuring that this essential feedback continues is to demonstrate that the organization values the voice of employee by not only collecting the feedback, but showing that it has an impact and influence in the workplace.

A Frontline View

Your employees are the face of your company. They are the primary representatives and executioners of the company’s customer experience. Not only do employees interact with customers, they often have a broader view of the operational performance of your organization. Think of it this way: While a single customer can share his/her perceptions of their experiences at specific touchpoints and throughout their journeys, they provide an important, but limited, sample size of one. A single employee, on the other hand, may interact with hundreds of customers each day and therefore the depth of their feedback around the customer experience is much greater. Also, the breadth of their perspective is greater as they can see all of the elements that contribute to a good or bad experience. The elements that may frustrate an employee, whether it be making a customer wait in line, poor service from customer care or billing, or any myriad of issues, are often the same things that frustrate customers.

And their perspectives contain unique and powerful insights. A recent survey by CustomerThink of CX leaders in business-to-business organizations reported that two-thirds of those leaders feel employees are the top source of actionable insights about the customer experience.

If employees can provide you with such a large percentage of actionable, success-driving insights, asking for their opinion cannot be relegated only to the normal 18-to-24-month Employee Engagement survey cycle. As gold mines of insight-laden information, smart brands should provide a variety of employee feedback forums, and establish voice of employee surveys and programs.

Owning the Experience

Soliciting employees for feedback about the customer experience comes with other benefits. Asking for their best ideas and opinions creates a sense of respect and value from the organization and its leaders. Unlike scheduled employee surveys, the process of gathering Voice of Employee feedback is, in and of itself, an engaging experience. Essentially, VoE tells employees that they matter and that they have ownership in customer experience, significantly increasing the likelihood your CX initiatives will achieve the desired results.

Broadening Your Perspective

The key to broadening your perspective of the customer experience is to listen through multiple channels to multiple stakeholders. After customers, employees are the next stakeholder group you must tap into in order to gain an increasingly broad and deep understanding of how all of the factors in your organization are coming together to deliver on what you’ve promised. Voice of Employee is key to listening and gathering other perspectives to help you make better workplace and business decisions. Just like your customers, your employees are able and willing to help you succeed. If you let them. Gather more VoE insights to improve your workplace with InMoment.

Somewhere, someone is dreaming about being a marketer who drives millions of people toward their brand. As a chief marketing officer, I’d like to say I was that someone, but I wasn’t. In fact, I took only one marketing class during college—and I thought it was a waste of time.

I wanted to preface this article with that bit of information not because I hate marketing. (I love my job, and I love marketing.) I just want to emphasize that—like customer experience (CX)—marketing is constantly evolving. What worked 20 years ago simply would not fly today.

Back when I was in my marketing class (and still today, no doubt), marketers were taught The Four Ps of Marketing: Price, Product, Promotion, and Place. While the four Ps certainly have their merits, they are also one of the main reasons marketing is killing the customer experience.

The majority of marketers receive compensation and bonuses for creating brand awareness and pushing people to buy whatever product or service their organization is selling. Unfortunately, this system promotes brand selfishness and creates a disconnect between customer experience and brand expectations.

In a recent article by Sean Hargrave from MediaPost, he argues that customer experience and brand value are the same thing. Based on my experience and the evolution of marketing and the customer experience I’ve witnessed in my career, I would agree.

The article cites research from brand valuation specialists Markables, who report that the contribution of brand value in a company’s overall valuation has decreased by half from 2005 to 2014, while the value of customer relations has doubled.

Customer experience expectations are increasing by the day. This is a good thing. Instead of brands differentiating themselves through product offerings, brand image is now a mirror image of how your organization treats people. Your brand’s value comes not from what you say you’re going to do but what you actually deliver. With social media platforms and people spending hours upon hours on the Internet each day, customer perception of your brand is everything. Customers will be loyal to brands that value them as people not numbers.

5 Ways to Align Customer & Brand Expectations

Start with a Vision

A mission statement is all well and good, but to be an effective CX vision, it needs to be clear. For marketing, this means listening to employees and customers and closing the experiential gaps that exist between them.

Interweave Methodologies

It’s common for different specialties to have different words for what turn out to be the same thing. For example, marketing approaches campaigns in terms of personas. In CX, they approach things in terms of customer segments. They’re the same. By interweaving methodologies, we can eliminate confusion, communicate, and ultimately create a better experience.

Collaborate

Similar to interweaving methodologies, we need to get rid of silos and create solutions that we’re aligned on within our organizations. Increasingly, I’m seeing the CX function move under the marketing umbrella. In this new leadership role, marketers need to get outside of themselves and take ownership beyond the close of the deal. We need to understand how the brand promise is delivered on the front lines.

Connect Brand and CX Metrics

Brand perception and NPS (Net Promoter Score) are not all that different. Look for opportunities to measure CX in terms of brand promise. Is your brand’s customer feedback aligned with the experience your organization has committed to delivering? If not, why not?

Become a Storyteller

For this point, I’ll quote Joana van den Brink-Quintanilha, senior analyst at Forrester Research, who said, “The power of storytelling is undeniable. A quota-busting salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company’s mission to attract investors and inspire employees. And a great CX pro can weave a story that helps employees understand their role in a customer journey.”

As brands, we have to take an honest look at who we want to be. Are we going to go the route of traditional marketers and place more value on sales over experience, or are we going to ground our business firmly in CX and integrate this longer-term perspective throughout every level of our company?

Recently, Forrester VP, research director and customer experience thought leader Harley Manning looked at the current volatility of the global economy, referenced trends in consumer behavior, and urged a wise course of action for businesses: Keep investing in the customer experience. His article outlines a few well-backed financial points of reasoning and also dishes sound advice.

It makes economic sense—especially in uncertain times—to invest in the customer experience. But if it makes so much sense, then why does Manning worry that businesses will be tempted to do the opposite? Over the past five years, there has been a pronounced surge in companies investing in the customer experience. As top companies have increased their advantages through superior customer treatment and as the financial sense of customer-centricity has been proven, nearly everyone has taken note to at least some degree.

Know Your Existential Imperatives

Here’s where the worry comes in, though: When times turn uncertain and fear creeps in, human beings cling to what feels safe. In business, this usually means those existential imperatives like operational efficiency and reduction of costs. While a focus on these core elements may achieve savings in the short term, this limited view often comes at the expense of one of its most important assets: the customer. But those who really understand the customer experience and why it is a profitable investment will say the true existential imperatives are, in fact, customers, employees, people. And that’s the test. What’s your answer when the chips are down?

Customers have a different perspective. What matters most to them are relationships of trust established over time, regardless of the health of a company’s bottom line. So, when times and economies destabilize, you have to show customers that they matter most to you if you want to matter most to them. Frankly, consumers do not care about a company’s bottom-line. They care about how well brands are delivering on their customer experience promises. More importantly, macro-economic factors that affect business performance often have the same impact on consumers, thus, making them more concerned with the value they receive from brands.

Stay Strong. Stay Savvy.

Thankfully, recent history shows that companies are generally savvy to this reality. Through the Great Recession of 2008–2013, customer experience budgets showed resilience, and overall consumer opinion on the American Customer Satisfaction Index saw a rise that spiked in 2013. If anything, indications are that volatility presents the greatest opportunity for brands to invest in their customers—and see returns on their previous efforts.

InMoment’s Senior Director, Client Services for EMEA Simon Fraser spoke at the Future of Utilities conference in London last week where leaders from the UK and EU gathered to discuss the challenges and opportunities the sector faces today and into the future.

A primary theme of the event is building strong relationships with customers. Fraser addressed the attendees in a presentation titled “Optimise your customer experience: five steps to achieve both relationship and business objectives.”

Q: What challenges does the UK/EU utilities sector face when it comes to customer experience (CX)?

A: The main challenge is that they’re perceived to be lagging behind other industries, having come to CX later than other industries. Over the past decade, the brands in highly competitive consumer sectors like retail and hospitality have pushed each other to offer exceptional customer experiences that were unheard of just a few short years ago. While the utilities sector is now starting to foster its own competitive environment, they don’t have the luxury of competing only against each other; consumer expectations have shifted overall expectations enough that even industries with minimal competitive ties are held to a higher standard.

At this point, even enterprises that have more similarities to the utilities companies—banks and telecoms for example—have a few years’ head start on them. So, in short, the challenge is needing to accelerate their CX maturity and leapfrog some of the early phases that the pioneering industries pushed through. That can be taken as a positive, as well, though. If they can look beyond just the processes and journeys they and their competitors are offering to learn from top consumer companies, they can absolutely make up the ground and start winning on loyalty.

Q: What is behind these challenges?

A: First off, the complexity of a utilities company—the number of moving parts, the infrastructure involved, the elements outside of their control—slows down pace of change, even if the desired changes are already decided. Another challenge for the utilities sector is what I’d call a true “first-world problem”: Customers are conditioned to take their services for granted. Heating, cooling, electricity—those are all things that are expected to simply work, so they are only really thought about when something has gone wrong.

Consequently, customer experience is definitely still largely done in a reactive manner. Additionally, there haven’t been the breakthroughs or novelties to make it top of mind for most consumers—though the Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home technologies are starting to change that a little bit.

Q: What are you seeing in the way of customer experience innovation from this group?

A: While it might not be properly termed “innovation” at this point, what I’m seeing from the utilities sector is the beginnings of bringing all stakeholders together around the customer. Again, with their complex structures, these companies have a silo challenge that fights against a consistent experience. Also, the area where they are starting to modernise is with their online presence. Those companies that have moved meter reading online and are allowing customers greater access into their energy consumption through websites and mobile apps are starting to show customers there is some new quality being added.

Q: What is the most important advice you would give utilities executives in achieving success in their customer experience initiatives?

A: The starting point for making needed changes is simply talking about the customer at the highest levels. Top executive leaders need to be changing the lens by making it a talking point. That is definitely the first thing. Secondly, they need to turn up the volume of those conversations publicly. They must do a better job promoting the changes they’re making. Even when utilities companies have made advances or done things for the communities they support, they have done a poor job of getting press. As they make more changes in their strategies, they will get much more goodwill from them if they can get the word out about their efforts to listen to customers and better serve them.

For example, during some flooding last winter, a number of different companies came together to help communities quickly solve the problems. The narrative, however, wasn’t presented widely or as a customer-centric effort. Rather, it fell into their challenging category of being an expected civic duty.

Our business revolves around listening. Specifically, it revolves around empowering business organizations to listen to their customers on a scale and in a manner that drives improvement. And, as much as large-scale listening methods can start to sound like just “cold technology”—comment boxes, voice transcription, text analytics, mobile alerts, real-time reports, experience data—these methods still boil down to the same “warm listening” that courses through our human senses.

Cues for Communication

As the product team at InMoment works to model our accelerated listening solutions after the social and one-on-one interactions we experience in our private lives, it’s caused me to ponder the fundamental principles of the listening I do daily. I’ve thought about how involved my other senses can be (and should be) in listening. For instance, it’s amazing how important visual cues from the listener are to everyday conversation.

While thinking about this, my mind has returned to a phrase common in—but not exclusive to—my childhood: “Pay attention!” We’ve all had that message sent ringing in our ears at some point, haven’t we? It happens when someone is speaking—a school teacher, perhaps—and our eyes or minds or both have wandered, leaving our ears deaf to their words. As a child, this usually happens simply due to a short attention span, whereas, as adults… well, I guess it’s the same.

The point is, it’s extremely important to those with whom you converse that you show you’re listening, that you pay attention. I’m so impressed with my colleagues for understanding this as they’ve built those cues into our platform, especially through Active Listening™. Tons of credit to our developers and product marketers for investing time into that authentic layer of listening, so that our clients can listen on a large scale to their customers in a way that shows they are, indeed, paying attention, and creating the reciprocal relationship that consumers crave.

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Our newly released 2016 CX Trends Report: Trending Positively Toward Personalization and Transparency goes more in depth on the nature of today’s consumers and the ways in which they expect companies to show they are paying attention.

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In the Moment

In this age of technology, if we remember the fundamentals of listening and paying attention, we can use our mobile devices and cool tech to converse in a way that informs, instructs, and connects—rather than distracts.

A year and a half ago, we gave our company the name “InMoment” to remind us of that very thing. If you are spending time with a friend, put your attention on that friend. If you are sharing the road with other drivers, put your attention on them. If you are helping a customer, put your attention on that customer. Or flip that last one: If you’re the customer asking for help, put some real attention on the employee helping you.

There’s really no end to the people we share moments with, and in every moment the principle remains the same: Pay attention.

A Rare Breed

A good leader can change an organization. A great leader can change history. Because leaders throughout history have had—and continue to have—such great influence over those around them, it’s not all that shocking that the qualities and traits of great leaders have been studied quite vigorously in the past few decades in an attempt to uncover the secrets behind history’s most influential leaders.

In one such study called “Follower-Focused Leadership: Effect of Follower Self-Concepts and Self-Determination on Organizational Citizenship Behavior,” Michelle Vondey investigates transformational leadership, which focuses on empowering individuals to work for the best interests of the organization. In her study, Vondey breaks down transformational leadership into these five characteristics.

The 5 Characteristics of Transformational Leadership

Communicate a Clear Vision

Effective leaders know what they want and understand the necessary steps to achieve their goals. By communicating these goals with every member of the organization, expectations are set and a game plan can be more clearly defined.

Explain How Vision Can Be Achieved

Once the vision for the business is defined, good leaders put together a detailed plan of action and share it with each member of the organization. A step-by-step plan helps everyone involved develop more effective processes and create clear expectations for each department of the organization.

Show Confidence in Both Vision and Followers

You’ve heard it time and time again: Confidence is contagious. And, you know what? It’s true. Good leaders show confidence in their vision and in the people executing it. That confidence leads to more confidence and ultimately results in achieving a collective goal.

Lead by Example

Every leader worth their weight in gold has followers. The thing about followers, though, is that they perform better with examples to follow. Good leaders don’t tell followers that they’re committed to the vision; they show it.

Here’s an example of Walt Disney showing off some of his magical leader abilities:

“Walt Disney used to walk through Disneyland [and] if he happened to see a piece of paper on the ground, he would stoop down to pick it up. He called this ‘Stooping to Excellence.’ He knew that as he walked through the park, all of the employees were watching him. He had to demonstrate excellence. He had to demonstrate that he wasn’t beyond picking up trash off of the ground.”

—Shep Hyken, The Customer Focus

Empower Followers to Work toward Vision Achievement

Achieving a common goal is a noble cause, but it presents challenges of all sorts. To address these challenges, followers must be empowered to do what they need to do to achieve the vision of their leader.

Follow the Leader… to Customer Centricity

The right tools and technology certainly help to improve an organization’s customer experience, but a great leader makes all the difference. According to our recent report, company leaders that set a positive example for their employees are the number one critical driver of customer experience (CX) success. (Read more about the 5 critical drivers of B2B CX success in our blog.)

By leading by example and empowering employees to do their best work—and rewarding them for it—good leaders create an effective, customer-centric business.

5 Sources of Actionable Insight Every B2B Organization Needs to Tap

In a previous blog entry, “Mind Your Q’s: The Two Types of Actionable Information,” we discussed the differences between quantitative and qualitative information. In this entry, we’re going to talk about the top sources of actionable insights that every business-to-business (B2B) organization needs to tap.

Five sources stood out from our recent report done in partnership with CustomerThink. Unsurprisingly, the best sources of actionable insights come from both qualitative and quantitative customer feedback.

5 Sources of Actionable Insight
1. Employees	66%
2. Survey Comments	57%
3. Interviews (In-Person, Phone)	56%
4. Customer Emails & Other Non-Survey Text	54%
5. Structured Feedback	47%

Quantitative Customer Feedback

Employees

Sixty-six percent of respondents chose “Employees” as the top source for actionable insights. These results suggest that the ready availability of employee-based insights may trump direct customer feedback in driving change.

Structured Feedback

Traditional, structured surveys are “traditional” for a reason. They are a proven method for gathering actionable customer feedback.

Qualitative Customer Feedback

Survey Comments

Open-ended customer comments are one of the highest rated sources of actionable insights because they provide customers with the freedom to share their brand experience—free of constraints.

Interviews (In-Person, Phone)

Having a true conversation with a customer (you know, the kind where one human converses with another) is a great way to uncover actionable insights. Technology is advancing at a breakneck pace, but nothing beats human interaction.

Customer Emails & Other Non-Survey Text

Sometimes the most actionable customer information doesn’t come from a survey. It comes in the form of an email or some other non-survey text. Through the power of text analytics, valuable insights can be gleaned from practically any customer communication.

Make the Most of Your Customer Feedback

Although the voice of your customers is always valuable, not all sources of feedback are created equal. Tap into these top-rated sources of structured and unstructured customer information and make the most of your feedback.

Although collecting a sufficient amount of customer feedback poses its own challenge, actually mining actionable insights out of that customer information creates the largest obstacle for organizations to overcome.

To be actionable, customer information needs to be either qualitative or quantitative—or both. According to our recent report with CustomerThink, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience,” businesses reported that qualitative and quantitative information were equally effective at motivating their organizations to act on customer feedback.

To better understand how these types of information are valuable to your organization’s customer experience, let’s take a look at how they’re defined.

Qualitative Information

Qualitative
Unstructured data; relating to, measuring, or measured by the quality of something rather than its quantity (e.g. customer comments, email, audio recordings, stories, etc.)

Qualitative information plays a crucial role in your organization’s ability to understand the significance of a particular customer touchpoint. For many brands, qualitative insights are broken down into three parts: doing, thinking, and feeling. In the context of the customer journey, “doing” represents the journey, “thinking” questions strategy, and “feeling” covers the range of emotions and responses associated with your brand’s customer experience (e.g. frustration, satisfaction, confusion).

Quantitative Information

Quantitative 
Hard data; relating to, measuring, or measured by the quantity of something rather than its quality (e.g. customer satisfaction/loyalty ratings, retention statistics, etc.)

Quantitative information provides statistical significance for each touchpoint of the customer journey. This information varies from your organization’s voice of the customer (VoC) data to web traffic reports. Quantitative information can be used to help brands focus on specific parts of the customer journey as well as highlight correlations between aspects of the customer experience such as “engagement” and “type of interaction.”

By surveying business leaders from various industries, we learned that the majority of organizations put equal value in both qualitative and quantitative customer information.

• Qualitative Information (26%)
• Quantitative Information (23%)
• Equally Effective (51%)

Respondents said that quantitative data was valuable in “proving the case” that their organization needed to make operational changes to its customer experience program. This type of data is particularly useful for promoting change within companies that make business decisions based on facts.

Qualitative information, on the other hand, was viewed by respondents as more effective at provoking emotional commitments from each member of the organization and promoting a better, more customer-centric experience.

Learn how your organization can make better use of its qualitative and quantitative customer information by reading the report we completed in partnership with CustomerThink.

In a B2B landscape where 9 out of 10 managers rate “fostering long-term relationships” as one of their top three priorities for their CX initiatives, it’s no wonder the best benefits support the long view. Our recent study conducted with CustomerThink, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience” highlights the forward-looking benefits brands are seeing the most.

Take a look at the top hits to see what’s really resulting from B2B customer experience efforts:

Improved Customer Satisfaction

The top benefit attributed to CX initiatives was fairly predictable, but it’s still encouraging with 73% of the pool stating they have seen this benefit. For your program, this one should be a staple. If you’re not improving customer satisfaction with your CX program, there’s a good chance your program is broken—unless your customer satisfaction is already maxed out (not likely, but possible).

Improved Employee Engagement

This second-rated benefit is a bit more surprising and equally encouraging. We’ve written before about this oft-overlooked flip side of Voice of Customer (VoC) and CX efforts. If you’re looking for ways to get the most from your CX initiative, we recommend joining 64% of fellow B2B brands in finding ways to put customers’ positive comments into employees’ hands.

Improved Customer Retention

This is quite possibly the clearest, traditional ROI-type benefit that CX initiatives are called upon to deliver. It’s also a byproduct of the benefits mentioned above. Naturally, improved customer satisfaction and employee engagement should lead to improved customer retention, which is where the loyalty and advocacy gains come in. It’s a shame to see even a 12% gap between this benefit and “improved customer satisfaction,” since the two go hand in hand.

Achieved Competitive Differentiation

A hard thing to track scientifically, this big-picture benefit is a very tangible element at play. More than just creating a good experience for your customers, to achieve competitive differentiation, it’s crucial to create the right experience. Creating a unique experience is key to a seamless brand experience, and it looks like 61% of B2B brands are on that path.

Other benefits are out there, some discussed in our report, some still waiting to be discovered and taken mainstream by intrepid practitioners. One thing is clear, though: Those who apply their VoC actively and purposefully will reap business benefits. Even the lowest-ranking benefit in our report was claimed by 35% of businesses and is of great worth: reducing operational costs.

Customer experience (CX) programs take more than good fortune to succeed. In fact, luck usually doesn’t factor in at all. In CustomerThink’s recent report, “Gaining a Competitive Edge by Optimizing B2B Customer Experience,” researchers found that certain CX practices give B2B organizations a significant competitive advantage.

We’ve curated the top five practices based on the differentiation between CX leaders and laggards.* Read on for a description of how these practices have allowed brands to set themselves apart from the competition.

5 Critical Drivers of CX Success	Leaders	Laggards	Gap
1. Company leaders set a positive example	4.14	2.86	1.28
2. Identify high-impact “moments of truth”	4.05	2.97	1.08
3. Include people and systems in CX design	4.17	3.14	1.03
4. Share feedback with frontline employees	4.26	3.27	0.99
5. Empower employees with tools and information	4.04	3.11	0.93

* Rating Scale: 1 = Not at all effective, 3 = Somewhat effective, and 5 = Highly effective

Lead by Example

Unsurprisingly, good leadership is the number one critical driver of CX success. Customer experience starts at the top of your organization and trickles down to the location level. Every member of your organization must be committed to providing each customer with a positive and memorable experience.

Identify the “Moments of Truth”

By creating unique identifiers—or “moments of truth”—for each customer, your brand can produce a seamless and consistently great experience across every customer touchpoint. These identifiers enable brands from every industry to sidestep the pains of manually tying together customer interactions with disparate databases.

Design with the Customer in Mind

The wants, needs, and expectations of the customer should influence every decision your brand makes. Smart brands factor the customer into every company equation. Intelligent organizations align company culture with company goals.

Share Customer Feedback

With so much riding on every customer interaction, your brand can’t afford to leave its frontline employees hanging out to dry. Collaboration and data sharing across all departments and levels of management are a necessity for taking effective action on customer insights and creating a consistent experience across every customer touchpoint.

Give Employees the Tools They Need

Data silos are the enemy of CX success. Without actionable customer information, your employees won’t be able to create the effective Voice of the Customer (VoC) program your brand desires. One way brands are focusing less on data collection and analysis and devoting more time and resources to brand strategy is through the adoption of an automated VoC program. In addition to saving your brand valuable time, a VoC program also enables you to act on customer insights in real time and better meet customer expectations.

Set your brand apart from the competition by making these five CX initiatives the cornerstones of your organization’s VoC program.

* CustomerThink asked respondents to rate their organization’s effectiveness with each CX practice. These initiatives were determined through prior research, industry expert interviews, and sponsor input. “Leaders” are defined as those with measurable benefits or a competitive advantage. “Laggards” are defined as everyone else.

Benchmark studies are interesting animals. The primary take-away most brands look for are the ranking to find out where they sit on the competitive battlefield, and especially how they’re faring in the blood feuds against their chief nemeses.

InMoment recently completed its 2015 Retail Benchmark Study, which contained a high-level view of the competitive landscape (those brands that are winning and those that are losing in the customer experience space). We also discovered a few additional findings that take us deeper into the minds and hearts of the buying public in this continually evolving Age of the Customer.

First, a little bit about our methodology: InMoment maintains a healthy panel of North American consumers. For this study, we received feedback from more than 20,000 of them about how they felt about the top 100 retail brands. We weighted the sample to reflect the most current census distributions. We also measured the data against our proprietary InMoment Index of Customer Experience (InCX), a new metric that combines Overall Satisfaction, Likely to Revisit and Likely to Recommend rankings. For this study, we asked consumers about their in-store experiences only.

Following are the top five insights uncovered by our study:

#1: Putting Their Money Where Their Mouths Are

This is the inaugural benchmark study for our new InCX Index, and it synched up nicely with our original hypothesis: Brands that scored in the top box for Overall Satisfaction and Likely to Recommend also scored the highest percentage—72—in Likely to Revisit. On the other hand, the brands that ranked in the bottom tier in OSAT and Likely to Recommend registered just 10 percent on the Likely to Revisit question. To sum it up: If customers are happy enough to recommend you to their friends, you can bet they’ll be back.

#2: Following the Crowd

Brands within the same segments tend to have similar strengths and weaknesses. For example, most Big Box stores excel at having products on hand, but not so great at staff availability. Shoe retailers score high on the quality of their products and services but can’t seem to stay well stocked.

#3: Friendliness Doesn’t Matter, Except When It Does

Friendliness is almost universally accepted as a critical metric for all consumer brands. However, our study found that high marks in Staff Friendliness did not tend to impact customer’s overall satisfaction, their willingness to recommend, or their likelihood to return. On the other hand, retailers that scored low on this metric got pummeled. Why? Because the customer experience bar has risen. Consumers view Friendliness as a hygiene factor. You won’t get extra points for doing it well, but your brand will suffer if you can’t get this very basic element right.

#4: Venus vs. Mars

When it comes to retail, gender—apparently—does matter. For example, men have much stronger opinions about store atmosphere than women, voicing both approval and disapproval much more frequently and strongly than women. When it comes to Big Box stores, women care a lot about products being in stock, while men care most about store layout. As much as we would like data to support our assumptions that there are no differences in the attitudes of male and female consumers, we find common themes within genders—males and females do seem to be from different planets when it comes to what makes them want to refer and revisit.

#5: Value Ain’t What It Used to Be

When we used to ask customers about value, the most common understanding of that word had to do with perceived fairness in what they received for what they paid. Over the years, “value” has come to mean much more than a simple exchange of goods or services and money. Our Retail Benchmark study found that brands with the highest ratings in variety and selection also performed better overall. On the other end of the spectrum, not having staff available erodes value perception.

Wrapping It Up

While brands tease out individual elements of the Customer Experience into discrete parts with names like Staff Interaction, Product in Stock, and Store Atmosphere, consumers do not. Each element—as well as every interaction customers have with retail brands (from the direct market messages we send to the visual impact of a store to the greetings they receive to the ease of paying—is a piece of the experience mosaic.

Depending on which segment you’re in, and which customer demographic you want to please, these pieces may be weighted differently. The key is in understanding your customers, what they expect, what they love, and what you give them that no other brand can. Simply scoring high on the individual parts of the Customer Experience helps, but unless brands are willing to understand that their relationships with consumers are much larger than the sum of their parts, they will remain in the middle of the pack.

The great brands of today and into the future will understand how they’re doing against their direct competitors, but they’ll spend most of their time understanding how and why their customers feel the way they do.