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.

Top Benefits of B2B CX Programs

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.

Retail Benchmark: What Customers Are Telling You

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.

5 Critical B2B Drivers that Ensure CX Success

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 customer experience 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.

As a “one-two punch” to win competitive battles, the vast majority of B2B companies are pursuing excellence in their solution offerings and the experiences they provide. That second punch of improving the customer experience is a key competitive strategy, but as shown in a recent study with B2B leaders, there is a lot of room for CX programs to more clearly deliver valuable business benefits.

In the same study, 65% of companies with CX initiatives in place said their company “delivers excellent customer experiences,” and 62% reported that their CX program had improved business performance. However, when asked to rate the overall status of their CX initiative, just 24% of respondents reported clear success as either (1) measurable benefits or (2) gaining a competitive edge.

When asked what’s holding the other 76% back, this is what respondents said:

Lack of time, too busy with current departmental jobs » 50%

Half of the business leaders in this study reported that employees simply lacked the time to devote to CX activities because they were busy with their current jobs. This was reflected in numerous interviews, where CX leaders said that unless CX becomes a part of employee jobs, or personnel is hired for this distinct purpose, it’s very difficult to move forward.

Can’t measure ROI due to data/analytics challenges » 40%

The customer experience is notoriously challenging to sum up in simple figures, but areas where it directly ties to the bottom line have been identified. Numerous case studies outline the key pieces of CX-based ROI: Optimizing single transaction amounts in ways that strengthen future revenue streams and increase operational efficiencies. This blog article gives one starting point for building a business case and starting to define value.

CX goals and strategy not defined » 38%

Ultimately, CX program practitioners must define success clearly and uniquely for their own organizations. Simply put, if you don’t define what success looks like and/or can’t measure whether you’ve achieved it, you’re not likely to view your CX program as a winner.

Lack of people with the right skills » 37%

In this blog article’s alter ego, “5 Critical B2B Drivers that Ensure CX Success,” we stop short of showing the 6th critical driver as measured by gap, which is a shame, since it’s actually the #1 overall score for leaders . We’ll share it with you here: Scoring a 4.33 out of 5 on average was the CX practice of “Train employees to deliver great experiences.” If you want people with the right skills, you’ll need to train them.

Lack of cooperation across the organization (silos) » 37%

This suggests that CX leadership must dedicate their energies to uniting the organization to think about the impact of the end-to-end customer experience. 47% of B2B leaders said that a chief customer/experience officer would be beneficial. Other CustomerThink research has found much the same thing: A chief customer officer would facilitate cross-department coordination and get support from the CEO and the Board.

Are You Interrogating Your Customers?

We’re well-intentioned. Really, we are. We Customer Experience professionals are passionate about customers and want to do everything within our power to improve their experiences. But in our rush to connect with our customers, we may actually be driving them away.

Understanding the customer experience your organization is delivering requires a lot of asking. We have a massive array of tools to delve into the state of our customer experience—from third-party perspectives like market research and mystery shop programs to transactional data that tells us how our customers behave.

The Ballooning Survey

One of the most powerful sources of customer intelligence is their direct feedback. And so we monitor social media, conduct exit interviews, and we survey. We love our surveys! So many lovely numbers that we can crunch, slice, dice, quantify, and measure. And as more groups within our companies discover the treasure trove of information within customer feedback, they want in on the fun. So the surveys get longer, and longer.

Our poor customers have become the victims of our exuberance. Slogging through question after question after question after question, most of which they couldn’t care less about. We have crossed the line—from earnest asker to unapologetic interrogator.

Feedback, a Positive Experience?

How do we balance our need to understand with our need to keep the feedback experience a positive one? Following are a few tips that will help you get even better data, while not just “doing no harm,” but actually improving your customers’ experience:

On Their Own Terms

The phrase “Customer Experience Management” is headed the way of the laserdisc. As a customer myself, I have absolutely no interest in having my experience “managed.” Today’s customers want more authentic relationships with brands, and they want to share their stories—but on their own terms.

Social Listening automates the process of finding and gathering feedback on brand- and location-level social sites, and in online review forums. You can view social feedback on its own or alongside other types of customer stories for a more holistic view. Links to social comments allow you to respond directly to customers.

Comment boxes are another incredibly valuable tool. Inside those four walls, customers tend to share details that give you specifics on exactly why they feel the way they do about their experience, and how you can either fix a problem or reinforce what’s working. In verbatim comments, customers also prioritize what’s most important to them, giving you the insights you need to focus on the areas with the most impact.

Actively Listen

While comment boxes are great, sometimes customers need a little nudge to get going—and keep talking. Active listening tools can transform a comment into a conversation, where you’re subtly letting your customers know that you’re listening. A familiar strength meter lets them know that you’d like to hear a little bit more. Follow-up questions based on their personal stories keep the Q&A focused and relevant to what they want to tell you.

Let Them Know

Customers want to know three things when they take the time to give feedback:

  • That you heard them
  • That you are going to act on what they said
  • That the insights they shared will make a difference.

While few brands take these final steps, they are critical in building a long-term, mutually beneficial relationship between you and your customers. Today’s customers aren’t simply more demanding, they want to know that the time they spend makes a difference. Letting them know that you’ve heard them, and allowing them to peek behind the curtain at how you’re using their feedback to make positive changes, shows that you value them as human beings and as partners in an ongoing relationship.

End the Interrogation

It’s not okay to assault your customers during the feedback experience—even when you really, really, really want to know. It’s not nice, and it’s not necessary. With the right philosophy and tools, you can harness the important moment in your relationships with your customers to bring them closer—and get great data to crunch as well.

Understanding Empathy and Your Brand

While many companies operate under the model of “If we build it, they will come,” the most successful companies know it’s essential to understand and actively engage with a targeted customer base.

At InMoment, we believe that no one owns the customer, but instead that everyone owns the experience. Both the customers and the company equally share in the brand experience, and both carry equal importance in decision making.

To develop strong customer relationships, brands must fully understand how and why their customers choose to interact with their company. In other words, they must learn to empathize.

Understanding Empathy

To begin, let’s explore what empathy actually is. Empathy is frequently confused with sympathy, when in reality, they can have greatly different outcomes when applied.

Both sympathy and empathy involve relating to and having concern for the feelings of other individuals. Sounds good, right? In most circumstances, either sympathy or empathy are appropriate responses. However, when developing a relationship with customers and clients, empathy always wins.

Sympathy is feeling compassion for another person. Sympathizing requires little emotional investment or intellectual effort and can often be misconstrued as pity. Empathy, in contrast, is the act of projecting one’s self into another person’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and circumstance to gain greater understanding—walking a mile in their shoes.

The Benefits of Empathy

So what does empathy have to do with your customer relationships? People want to build loyalty and relationships with brands. By knowing your ideal customer and understanding how to attract them—in other words, empathizing with their experience—you open the door to developing a great relationship.

With this relationship comes success. When you understand your target customer, you can fine-tune your brand experience to better meet their specific needs and wants. In turn, companies experience the following benefits:

  • Understanding what drives loyalty towards their brand
  • Learning how to turn negative feedback into an opportunity
  • Increasing customer referrals and brand advocacy
  • Maximizing the efficacy of InMoment’s customer feedback products

Actively listening and engaging with your customers’ perspectives—whether through one-on-one interviews, in-person observations, or through InMoment’s customer experience software—provides the highest ROI on your market research.

Creating an Empathy Map

What does this look like in practice? How do you actually get to know your customer? Copyblogger recently produced a comprehensive guide to understanding your customers’ worldview. Inspired by the user experience world, Copyblogger outlined the process of creating empathy maps for your ideal customers. These maps address four key areas in which customers interact with brands: thinking, seeing, feeling, and doing.

Copyblogger suggests gathering several key players to map out your brand experience, including stakeholders, customer support leads, vendors, product developers, and marketers. In this exercise, you’ll sit down together to discuss both experience and specific questions (What do our customers say or feel when they use your product? What are customers hearing from other people who use the product?), along with more personal, worldview questions (How do our customers think about their hopes and fears? How do our customers interact with family and loved ones?).

Some of these questions may seem fairly abstract in comparison to typical market research practices. This is what makes the approach such a success. By striving to understand your customers’ thoughts and feelings beyond the confines of your brand experience, you better understand your customer as a person, not just a source of revenue.

Dr. Frank Luntz describes the necessity of this abstraction in his book Words that Work. “The key to successful communication is to take the imaginative leap of stuffing yourself right into your listener’s shoes to know what they are thinking and feeling in the deepest recesses of their mind and heart.” This “imaginative leap” will lead you to uncover the answers to questions that can truly revolutionize your business.

A Few Questions from the Imaginative Leap:

  • What drives my customer to spend their money at my business?
  • What pain points does my customer experience in their average day?
  • Can I resolve any of these pain points?
  • What pain points do customers experience with my brand?
  • In what unique way can I improve my customers’ lives?

InMoment’s technology is the perfect complement to these empathy exercises. We develop all of our products to capture the voices, feelings, and stories of your customers and understand them in our platform.

Nan Russell, head of our Global Centre of Excellence, offers her expert advice to set your international customer experience management (CEM) programme on the right path and ensure your brand doesn’t get ‘lost in translation’.

The potential of going global with a brand is often an attractive prospect. Establishing an international customer base, favourable overseas economic conditions, and competitive cost of goods mean many companies seek to expand into new international markets. Their success depends on how well their brand offering is received by customers in each market, and a robust customer feedback programme is an essential foundational element to shape a brand’s development. But international consumer engagement is beset with pitfalls for the ill-prepared, as several well-publicised cases have highlighted.

We’ve all heard of some infamous international brand faux pas. Vauxhall had to relaunch its Nova model as the Corsa in Spain upon discovering the literal translation of ‘Nova’ in Spanish is ‘it won’t go’. Similarly, when fast food giant Kentucky Fried Chicken opened its first restaurant in Beijing, its famous slogan ‘Finger-lickin’ good’ was translated to ‘We’ll eat your fingers off’! In fact, numerous world-famous companies have stumbled when expanding into new markets, risking damage to their brand reputation and sales.

These days, social media quickly amplifies such mistakes around the globe, meaning those responsible for brand reputation have to work even harder to avoid the ‘bad translation’ (and resulting schadenfreude) at every stage of the customer journey. While it is essential for brands to engage customers in the language of the location, achieving this across borders and during every customer interaction poses a number of major challenges.

Don’t just translate the right words; use the right tone

It’s certainly not as easy as simply translating an invitation or survey from one language to another. Brands seeking to communicate their own brand values overseas must also consider local cultural values, rules of conduct, tone, and linguistic nuances such as humour and slang. Does the formal use of honorifics such as ‘sir’ or ‘madam’ set the right tone for your brand in Japan, where their use is often mandatory? Or is your brand casual and breezy, and would your customers be more comfortable with a less formal approach?

Measure on the right scales

The cultural impact on market research scoring patterns is one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale—with 5 being the best score—does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany and Japan and Mexico? German schools use a rating system in which 1 is the best score and 5 would be near failing. Knowing the correct scoring scales to use in each market is crucial.

Use the right interpretation

Market and cultural differences in relative ‘hard’ or ‘easy’ grading complicate the use of American-designed indices, such as the Net Promoter Score. Customers in some markets would be shocked that their scores of an 8 (on a 10-point scale) are not considered Promoters. There is wide variance in how customers in different markets rate great service; it is important not to assign meanings that they did not intend.

Set the right targets

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target. For example, every market is expected to achieve 70% on Overall Satisfaction. But the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’; an Overall Satisfaction score of 65% may be much harder to attain in Germany than a 75% is in Italy.

The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (for example, all markets are expected to improve six percentage points in the next fiscal year), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Provide the right support

As part of that drive for consistent improvement, it is not enough to report scores; it is essential to support in-market teams with action planning tools. Location managers are often fluent in languages other than those spoken by the corporate executives. Reporting and action planning must be delivered in the language of the people driving the business on the ground.

The inexorable rise of mobile technology continues to shape the way we shop, dine out and use our leisure time. According to the latest figures from e-tail industry body IMRG and advisory firm Capgemini, while total online sales rose 18% year-on-year in December to £11.1bn, sales via mobile devices doubled to £3bn. Indeed, mobiles and tablet computers are now used for nearly 6% of all retail sales as Brits embrace shopping anytime, anywhere.

This trend presents both a challenge and an opportunity for brands in the eating and drinking out sector. With consumers increasingly carrying the technology around in their pockets, brands also have the opportunity to communicate with customers more frequently, and savvy brands are using technology to improve their guests’ experience.

Tablets are a driving force behind innovations in the front-end restaurant customer experience, whether in a quick service or a fast casual establishment. As more and more restaurants embrace tablet technology, there are several ways that they are revolutionizing the restaurant experience for brands and consumers.

1. Seamless Dining Experiences

Inspired by the ease of exceptional online buying events, guests value restaurants that provide seamless, hassle-free experiences from the moment they are seated through to the moment they pay. In many cases, restaurants are using tablets to offer table-side payment or other activities that streamline and improve the guest’s dining experience.

2. Cut the Queues

Fast food restaurants are using tablets to speed up the food ordering process and cut down on waiting time for customers. Orders can be taken from queuing customers on a wireless tablet to be ready for quick collection and payment at the counter, thus creating a positive brand experience.

3. Enhanced Interaction

Opportunities for enhanced interaction are prime targets for restaurants interested in improving customer experiences with tablet technology. Restaurants on the leading edge of tablet deployments have installed tablets at tables, allowing guests to interact with menus, place orders, pay bills and perform a range of other self-serve functions. Similarly, restaurants are exploring the use of promotional content or pay-as-you-go games that provide entertainment or customer engagement opportunities while guests wait for their food to arrive. These kinds of activities drive bottom-line improvements by leveraging customer experiences to increase loyalty.

4. “On the Fly” Data Insights

Tablets offer a non-threatening and engaging resource that restaurants can use to capture customer insights. While many guests are hesitant to provide personal information when they pay their bills or at the request of their servers, they are less resistant to providing data on their own terms, especially if the submission of data is tied to a discount or contest. Multi-site restaurants can leverage tablets to capture data insights at the local level, helping them tailor the customer experience to the desires and preferences of local consumers.

5. Guest Reviews

A great time to capture guest reviews is before they leave the restaurant, while details of the experience are top of mind. Willingness to provide feedback is also much greater with this immediacy, since even the most satisfied guests often don’t feel compelled to rate their experience later. In the restaurant industry, reviews are a key element in customer acquisition, and table-side tablets offer a ready-made resource for encouraging guests to share feedback about service, cuisine or other aspects of their experience. Reviews captured via tablets can then be used to build brand reputation and modify the customer experience based on guests’ suggestions.

6. Multichannel Feedback

Consumers use many different touch points to connect with the restaurant brands that are important to them. Surveys and other tools delivered on tablet devices create feedback that can be shared across all available channels, increasing the impact of brand advocacy and positive mentions. In particular, restaurants need to prioritize the use of tablets to capture feedback that can be distributed via social channels.

7. Enhanced Employee Engagement

One of the largest challenges with customer feedback is how to use the results when they arrive. Tablets can help to reshape this challenge by bringing results to life in a meaningful way to customer facing staff. Data visualization capabilities on tablets are extensive, but again the challenge is more than simply presenting guest feedback in a “pretty” way; it’s presenting it in a meaningful way that motivates staff and will drive guest experience improvement.

The real innovation in the use of tablet technology is that it enables restaurant brands to forge meaningful, direct connections among guests, restaurant managers and their staff. The deployment of table-side tablets gives guests more immediate options, inviting them to participate in activities that strengthen their relationship with the brand.

Just as importantly, tablets can significantly improve a restaurant’s ability to capture feedback and provide local guest insights—important factors in the brand’s ability to create and deliver enhanced customer experiences.

Omnichannel has become more than just a buzzword—it’s a reality for aggressive retailers interested in creating brand differentiation through a seamless shopping experience across all channels and touchpoints. As retailers all over the world sort through the organizational, operational, and technological challenges associated with the omnichannel experience, consumers add their own layer of complexity to the mix à la brand engagement and loyalty.

Today’s shopper wants the full “shoppertainment” experience: an in-store experience that provides them not only with the products they are searching for, but also an environment that is visually stimulating with a first-class customer service experience. Here are four ways retailers are creating the exciting and engaging in-store experience consumers are looking for:

1. Creating an Entertainment Destination

Retailers are starting to make space in their stores for new experiences that entertain and draw customers in. Many are creating relevant digital content that drives sales, presenting it on large screens and interactive in-store displays. A good example of this is Burberry’s London store, which transforms into an entertainment destination every season, presenting their latest collection through catwalks showcased on big screens and enabling customers to order products using an iPad.

2. Learning & Community Events

Increasingly, retailers are leveraging their stores to conduct educational and community-style events that allow customers to engage with the brand as well as other customers. A good example of this is Home Depot, which holds in-store workshops that teach weekend do-it-yourselfers how to complete home renovation projects on their own.

3. Offering New Services

Lifestyle cafes, spas, and salons are just some of the in-store services now used by retailers to drive increased foot traffic and keep customers in their stores longer. Leading grocery retailer, Tesco, has become the number one grocery brand in Korea by offering a virtual store in the subway system that allows commuters to order their groceries from a wall while waiting for their train.

4. Creating a Personalized Experience

Fashion retailers have a great opportunity to elevate the in-store shopping experience by implementing kiosks that allow customers to get recommendations on clothing suitable to their particular figure, and magic mirrors that allow shoppers to try on one garment and see how it would look on them in other styles and colors. In some cases, retailers are enabling customers to share the outfits they’re trying on via their social networks for instant feedback from friends and family. General Pants Co. in Australia introduced this late last fall in their stores, along with a program that allows customers to select the music they hear during their shopping experience and the ability to see trends featuring the brand’s latest clothing and accessories.

Through imaginative uses of current technology, there are endless ways you can create unique in-store customer experiences that engage and entertain. What is your retail brand doing to go beyond the omnichannel experience?

Consistent delivery of a great customer experience in a multi-market, multi-cultural environment is a multi-faceted challenge. The specifics that define a great customer experience vary by country; but universally, when customers are delighted, they increasingly return, become brand loyalists and tell their friends, colleagues and families.

With over 11 years’ experience working with leading global brands, Empathica (a Mindshare Technologies Company) has identified the core elements of successful international Customer Experience Management (CEM) programmes that drive business improvement and customer loyalty. Here I share some of the key lessons we’ve learned to help you to prepare a successful CEM programme to deliver great cross border customer experiences:

1. Recognise that global brands are delivered locally

Even if the brand is global in its appeal, customers experience that brand differently from country to country. Service expectations between cultures and markets are different; behaviour standards that may make sense in head office may be ineffective (or even insulting) in other markets around the world. For example, mandating an American-style hearty hello to dining guests as they enter a restaurant might feel forced and inappropriate in other, more restrained countries.
It is crucial to listen to the local markets and their expectations, because even the best locally-adapted product can be damaged if delivered in context of a poor overall experience.  And that impacts the global brand.

2. Build the optimal programme under the opportunities and challenges of each market

To manage a business globally, being able to compare performance across locations and countries is crucial. But some businesses make a mistake in trying to make all things the same. In global CEM, there are multiple layers of challenges – from differences in technological capabilities and readiness to adopt customer experience strategies to cultural restrictions.

At Empathica, we assess market readiness carefully in designing a global programme.  What is crucial to the programme design is to understand what drives successful adoption within the particular brand and build on the type of introduction that works in that business.

3. Design the programme to be culturally relevant across all markets

CEM programmes need to be as sensitive to local markets as the service delivery is. For example, the method of invitation and the incentive for participation offered are crucial components in engaging each market. One way to maximise the programme’s consistency is to strive for functional equivalency – keep to a core design that ‘flexes’ to respond to local market requirements.

In order to manage business globally, comparisons across markets have to be meaningful. Research-driven global insights and measurement of global progress require a consistent framework to assess change. In order to provide that consistent core, we design multi-market programmes to be ‘functionally equivalent’ because sometimes the best of intentions can go awry. Consistent research methodology would require that all markets use the same incentive for participation. But what might encourage customer engagement in one market might drive discomfort in another. To maintain cultural relevance, you may need to adjust the programme design when necessary. In those cases, offering a similar, but not necessarily identical, incentive can help the programme thrive.

4. Translations are just the beginning of localisation

It is essential to engage your customers in the language of the location – don’t just translate the right words, use the right tone. And it’s not just the words and tone that you need to consider.  The cultural impact on scoring patterns is a much researched topic and one of subtle complexity. On a 5-point scale – with 5 being the best score, does a 4 mean the same thing in Germany, Japan and Mexico? Unlike in the UK, German schools use a rating system in which a 1 is best score, but a score of 5 would be near failing. It’s just as easy to invert the scale in the markets like Germany for whom a 1 is the highest performance. It’s knowing where changes like that need to happen that is crucial to the programme’s success.

5. Remember it’s not about the number

Once you’re using the right scales, how do you drive improvement? Many businesses want to set a single, global target; but the reality is that goal may be simply out of reach for markets that are ‘hard raters’. The meaningful comparison typically is not the score but the improvement ratio. By targeting a level of improvement (e.g. all markets are expected to improve 6 percentage points in the next year or to outperform the local competitive set), each market can identify ways to drive their improvement within the relevant context.

Siri

Chances are, you have already heard about Apple’s infamous iPhone personality. Through extensive marketing campaigns, Apple unveiled Siri, a feature that allows users to interact with their phone by speaking to it. Yes, that’s right, by speaking to your phone.

Say you wanted to know what the weather was going to look like, all you would have to do is say to your phone, “Weather.” Your phone then proceeds to reply with the weather forecast in your area. Want to check how busy your day is? Just ask, “What’s my day look like?” Your phone will then report your day. Is Siri the beginning of pocket artificial intelligence? It (she?) very well may be.

Why am I talking about Siri? Because Siri demonstrates the real-life application of some very cool speech-to-text technology. Speech-to-text is the ability of a computer to transcribe spoken language into usable text. This type of technological ability is very new but maturing rapidly.

Watson

Yet another famous piece of artificial intelligence that you’ve likely heard of, Watson is an IBM supercomputer that gained wide acclaim by appearing on Jeopardy! and defeating two of the game show’s top champions, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

Over three days of trivia, Watson racked up $77,147, whereas Ken and Brad took in $24,000 and $21,600 respectively. As the Jeopardy! clues were being displayed visually to the other two contestants, Watson was receiving them through a direct text feed. Once the text was input, Watson didn’t just recognize the words, he (it?) understood how they related to each other. With that understanding, he analyzed 200 million pages of information to find the correct answer—all in the time it takes to sneeze.

Is Watson the first step toward machines taking over the world? Quite the opposite, actually. The IBM technology that fuels Watson has the potential to be one of this generation’s greatest allies. It’s already being used to improve the medical diagnosis process by combining symptoms, family history, current medications, doctor’s notes, and other information to suggest a diagnosis.

Speech-to-Text

If you want the analytical powers of a supercomputer like Watson (and, trust me, you do), you need text. In a world that still communicates verbally first and written second, we need more than a computer with Watson’s brain; we need one with Siri’s ears.

That’s the role of Speech-to-Text. Combine an advanced speech-to-text engine with an analytical supercomputer and you have the key to immense possibilities. In an article written by Jon Gertner and published in Fast Company, the author builds on the words of IBM’s chief of research, John Kelly, to point out this very thing:

“IBM executives have come to believe that Watson represents the first machine of the third computer age, a category now referred to within the company as cognitive computing. As Kelly describes it, the first generation of computers were tabulating machines that added up figures. ‘The second generation,’ he says, ‘were the programmable systems—the mainframe, the first IBM 360, PCs, all the computers we have today.’ Now, Kelly believes, we’ve arrived at the cognitive moment—a moment of true artificial intelligence. These computers, such as Watson, can recognize important content within language, both written and spoken. They do not ask us to communicate with them in their coded language; they speak ours.”

InMoment

We live and breathe the voice of the customer (VoC) trade every day. We collect millions of surveys every month from the individual customers of our clients. We have held the benefits of speech-to-text and IBM Watson technology in our hands. And they are stunning.

Using these universal-grade systems, our ability to analyze customer surveys and reviews for real-time, actionable insights has leapt forward to include all unstructured, unsolicited feedback across multiple written and spoken world languages.

Let me walk you through just one scenario: a phone survey. Last year, we collected 113,000 phone surveys for one of our clients. To put that in perspective, it would take that client 1,000 hours a year to listen to every survey—that’s one full-time employee listening to surveys non-stop for six months, and that doesn’t even take into account the time involved with organizing, analyzing, and reporting the results!

Is this how you plan on hearing your customers? Is it even worth it to listen to your customers anyway?

Yes. It is. The reality is, you can’t afford not to. When business analysts are telling you to care about every single one of your customers, they are not just speaking ethically, they are speaking financially. The quality and quantity of research on the matter has now made it undeniable.

Using Forrester’s customer experience index (CXi), for instance, statistics bear out the fact that U.S. businesses maintaining above-average CXi scores make millions, if not billions, more each year than businesses maintaining below-average CXi scores. The key to a high CXi? Listening and responding to customer feedback (Forrester, “The Business Impact Of Customer Experience, 2012,” referenced here). Recent studies have also shown that customer retention efforts are more profitable than those to acquire new customers (Bain & Company, “The Economics of Loyalty”).

At InMoment, we provide the tools to capture and use the voice of the customer in real time. This includes both speech-to-text and IBM analytics, two of the most powerful technologies the business world has ever seen.

Your customers expect to be heard individually and addressed personally. The Speech-to-Text and IBM content analytics we use at InMoment make that possible.

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